Family Bonds
Free Blacks and Re-enslavement Law in Antebellum Virginia
Ted Maris-Wolf
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 04/2015
Pages: 336
Subject: Social Science, History
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9781469620084
DESCRIPTION
Between 1854 and 1864, more than a hundred free African Americans
in Virginia proposed to enslave themselves and, in some cases,
their children. Ted Maris-Wolf explains this phenomenon as a
response to state legislation that forced free African Americans to
make a terrible choice: leave enslaved loved ones behind for
freedom elsewhere or seek a way to remain in their communities,
even by renouncing legal freedom. Maris-Wolf paints an intimate
portrait of these people whose lives, liberty, and use of Virginia
law offer new understandings of race and place in the upper South.
Maris-Wolf shows how free African Americans quietly challenged
prevailing notions of racial restriction and exclusion, weaving
themselves into the social and economic fabric of their
neighborhoods and claiming, through unconventional or
counterintuitive means, certain basic rights of residency and
family. Employing records from nearly every Virginia county, he
pieces together the remarkable lives of Watkins Love, Jane Payne,
and other African Americans who made themselves essential parts of
their communities and, in some cases, gave up their legal freedom
in order to maintain family and community ties.
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