free blacks
Liberated before abolition
Free blacks were African Americans who were not enslaved, whether born free or having obtained freedom through manumission, self-purchase, or escape.
The term appears primarily in historical contexts discussing the antebellum United States, where free blacks occupied a precarious social position—legally free but subject to severe restrictions on movement, employment, and civil rights.
A Virginia planter manumitted his slaves, creating a small community of free blacks.
- emancipationRelease from legal bondage
- manumissionFormal freeing of enslaved
- abolitionFormal discontinuation of practice
- slaveryOwnership of people
- slave codesLaws controlling enslaved people
antebellum · liberty · fugitive · runaway · Underground Railroad · North · colored troops · citizenship · suffrage · civil rights · plantation · bondage · chains · shackles · Reconstruction · Jim Crow · segregation · Dred Scott
- Abolitionabolitionists, Frederick Douglass, abolitionist movement, Underground Railroad, Emancipation Proclamation
- demographicspopulation density, population growth, age distribution, population, gender ratio
- Delaware HistoryDover, Wilmington, New Castle, Delaware River, Delaware Bay
- HaitiHaiti, Port-au-Prince, Hispaniola, Haitian Revolution, vodou
- Maryland HistoryAnnapolis, Baltimore, Chesapeake Bay, Fort McHenry, Harriet Tubman
- Afro-CubanAfro-Cuban, Yoruba, Santeria, orishas, rumba
free blacksslaves
Persons owned by others
bondsmen · chattel slaves · bondspeople · field slaves · house slaves
free, blacks, black, freed, freeing, freely, freedom, freeborn, freeman