My research and the new book is about the depth and complexity of genealogy in early America. It was a meaningful practice that connected people and families, but it was also a way of using ancestry for a range of legal purposes. Including slavery. You’ll see these connections made explicit as you read Lineage, though most of what’s on the cover is not as forthright. But this key document makes it plain: “Born free.”
Moving counter-clockwise from the top left (and from the first item I highlighted, the Fraktur birth certificate), the second item on the cover actually appears twice. It’s from the remarkable work of the Library of Virginia’s “Virginia Untold” resource, but also the Library’s commitment to digitize important local archival materials. You can see the “Free Negro” registers described in a one of the library’s blog posts, the work in progress to transcribe them via From the Page, the full list of registers, and the Chesterfield Free Negro Register, 1804-1830 from which this image comes.
As scholars have described, and as I discuss in Lineage, Virginia’s laws keeping people of color and their children enslaved changed over time though not dramatically. The laws adapted almost entirely to benefit those who would enslave them including by making it more difficult –albeit not impossible– for people of conscience to manumit those they were enslaving. Policing race, that is determining a person’s racial category by virtue of their ancestry, only became more intense and aligned with ongoing efforts to connect people of color and Black people with slavery. That meant more policing of the small communities and families who were free. In the fall of 1793 the Virginia Assembly passed a lot requiring that “any free negro or mulatto…shall be registered and numbered in a book.” It requires specific information about a person’s status, including by whom and when they were manumitted “or that such negro or mulatto was born free.”
The excerpt of the book cover is from the status of four individuals in the Chesterfield register. The register is intrusive and particular, inquiring about people’s age, complexion, height and “apparent marks or scars.” It aimed to keep people under surveillance because of their race. On the page that I drew from several other things are notable. One is that only 6 of the 18 people listed had been “emancipated” while 12 were “Born free.” That meant an ancestry of freedom, a legacy from their mothers. And we can also see if only superficially from the same last names, that some folks shared family connections. Scholars and community historians who have worked on Virginia’s free people of color tell us how important close communities were across the state. And we know the importance of family to those community ties.