6 minute read
Generations of Freedom
In Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement and Violence in Natchez, 17791865, Nik Ribianszky turns crumbling legal documents into a detailed analysis of the movement of certain people of color in antebellum Natchez, Mississippi, from the status of enslaved person to freed person, and all too often, back into slavery again.
Enslavement was a legal status in Natchez during the Spanish, English, French and American eras. It was easy to obtain the legal status of “slave” prior to the Civil War; one merely had to be born to an enslaved woman. The father’s status was irrelevant. If the mother was a slave, so was the child. If the mother was free, then so were her children.
Natchez was home to perhaps the most famous “free man of color” in America, the diarist William Johnson. Johnson’s mother was enslaved, and Johnson was enslaved until he was eight years old. His father was his mother’s owner and set them free after she had given birth to two of his children. As a free black man, Johnson was a member of a small yet distinct group of African Americans in pre-Civil War Natchez who were not enslaved. A person could move from the legal status of “slave” into the legal status of “free person of color” only through the legal system. There were various routes to freedom built into the legal system. The state legislature could pass a special law freeing an individual slave and sometimes did so at the request of the slaveowner. Without an act of the legislature, an enslaved person needed the legal judgment of a court to be declared free.
Ribianszky details how a set of attorneys in Natchez specialized in freedom suits, often prevailing and obtaining court judgments declaring a person to be free. Other court decrees of freedom included probate orders. Will contests decided by probate courts issued decrees freeing families according to their deceased owner’s will while other probate decisions set aside manumissions by will in some cases. Other freedom suits were based upon petitioners’ claims for a decree that they had been born free or manumitted elsewhere. Some suits claimed that the plaintiffs were white people and, therefore, not liable to slavery at all. Ribianszky apparently read all of the extant court files of freedom suits in Natchez from 1779-1865. She found detailed records of forty-eight different freedom suits seeking freedom for a total of 80 people. In many of these lawsuits, the petitioners claimed to be descended from a free mother. In proving their claims, petitioners obtained written depositions from witnesses. Ribianszky offers profuse thanks and praise to Natchez Historical Foundation personnel for their work in preserving the legal archives upon which her book is based. She describes the centuries-old files she reviewed as having been lingering in cardboard boxes in basements around Natchez before the Natchez Historical Foundation took custody of them, organized them, and made them available to researchers. Ribianszky argues that the first person in a family to move from slavery to freedom established the “foundational’ generation. Although this generation necessarily had a court decree establishing their right to freedom, this freedom proved tenuous to maintain for emancipated men and woman; and it was often harder to maintain for their descendants. Ribianszky researched court records for suits involving free people of color and found a depressing litany of ways in which they were cheated out of property, money and even their hard-won freedom. She refers to children of the foundational generation as the “conditional generation” because their status as free was so tenuous.
Ribianszky found that eighty-five percent of the free people of color in Natchez were
By Nik Ribianszky
of mixed black and white ancestry. She makes the reasonable assumption that almost any sexual relationship between an enslaved woman and her owner or a member of his household was a form of violence and coercion. Her research shows that children of white men made up the vast majority of successful freedom suit petitioners in Natchez.
While Ribianszky’s research pool of eighty court cases at first seems too thin to support her broad conclusions, closer thought reveals that she analyzed virtually every court case resulting in freedom for a former slave in Natchez. Her statistical analysis of these court cases is a useful tool for understanding the interchange between the worlds of the free and the enslaved in the river country before the end of slavery. She combines this rigorous academic research with straight-forward, unsentimental, yet gripping tales of humanity from right here in Natchez, Mississippi. Seemingly miraculous occurrences brought freedom to some people. In one case, an African American born to free parents in Maryland was kidnapped and sold into slavery and wound up in Natchez. His freedom suit had stalled for lack of witnesses to support his claim until by happenstance someone he knew from Maryland walked down the street in Natchez, recognized him, and gave testimony in support of the man’s legal claim to freedom.
Other tales related by Ribianszky are heartbreaking stories of people cheated of their freedom and condemned to slave labor in the cotton fields when they lost a freedom suit. Ribianszky’s research demonstrates how violence shaped the lives of free people of color. Sexual violence back then was endemic against women of color, free and enslaved. Free men of color likewise received lesser forms of protection by law. William Johnson was murdered by another freedman. Ribiankszky details a number of cases of men forcibly kidnapped and forced into slavery.
As white people grew fearful of rumored slave uprisings, freedom suits became harder to win; and legal avenues to freedom in Mississippi virtually disappeared after the 1840s. This is one surprising reason that so many freedmen and women were slave owners themselves. Ribianszky’s research
revealed that in many of the slave-holding households of freed slaves, the slaves they owned were actually their own family members. With legal manumission difficult or impossible to obtain in later years, free people of color who could afford to “buy” their relatives did so, in order to protect their family members.
Generations of Freedom is an important scholarly work and should also be of interest to the general reader from the Bluffs & Bayous area. In many ways, our area was the epicenter of American slavery and cotton culture; and Generations of Freedom is a must-read for those who wish to understand our region. Ribianszky will be speaking at the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration at nine a.m. on February 26, 2022.
For more information on the Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration (NLCC), please visit our website https://www.colin.edu/community/ natchez-literary-and-cinema-celebration/.
Paul D. Sullivan is an Assistant District Attorney and co-founder of Mississippi School of Folk Art in Natchez. Generations of Freedom, Gender, Movement and Violence in Natchez, 17791865 was published in 2021 by the University of Georgia Press.
ANITA MURRAY, BRENT SMITH AND DANA TANNER
