Journal of Southern History

In Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. expands on his book North Carolina's Free People of [End Page 772] Color, 1715–1885 (Baton Rouge, 2020) to provide a needed overview of the "collective lives of free people of color" in the South (p. 11). He rejects older scholarship by Ira Berlin and others who asserted that free persons of color were "'slaves without masters'" who existed between "'abject slavery'" and "'full freedom'" (p. 11). Instead, Milteer contends that free people of color "experienced a freedom that was contested yet worth defending" (p. 12). "Intersecting social hierarchies" of "wealth, gender, occupation, reputation, and religion" resulted in diverse behaviors among free persons of color and a "complex assortment of relations" with white southerners (pp. 2, 4).

Seven chapters and a conclusion span from the colonial era to Reconstruction. In chapters 1 and 2, the author compares the lives of free people of color in the colonial South with their counterparts in other empires, noting discrimination along with diversity, complexity, and flexibility. During the American Revolution, "unsettled social landscapes" led to either opportunity or oppression (p. 52). In chapters 3 and 4, Milteer examines the next forty-some years, as white people "struggled to determine the proper place for free people of color" (p. 69). Despite "unprecedented attacks," free persons of color and their allies tempered the success of those who sought to make race the sole criterion to determine status (p. 71). Cross-racial bonds of kinship, community, worship, and business held, and free people of color "found ways to convey their societal importance" (p. 116). They founded separate organizations when "working with whites as equals was not possible or desirable" (p. 122). Chapters 5 and 6 begin with the Nat Turner rebellion, which allowed progressively more radical proslavery whites to push free people of color into an "increasingly inferior legal status" (p. 184). Yet the rebellion did not result in a "revolutionary change in the ways average white southerners thought about" free persons of color (p. 138). In the decades leading up to the Civil War, free people of color could still "find justice in a system not designed for their benefit" as they actively defended their rights (p. 180). In chapter 7's examination of the Civil War, Milteer shows that free persons of color pursued divergent paths based on their complex and layered identities.

Utilizing county court minutes, apprenticeship bonds, state legislative records, wills, newspapers, and pension files, Milteer focuses on the realities of day-to-day life instead of the contents of legal codes or extremist rhetoric. He cites Melvin Patrick Ely's Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (New York, 2005) as an important precursor to his work. Milteer characterizes white southern behavior toward free people of color as "fluid," contradictory, and far from monolithic (p. 5). Free persons of color were vital to society and the economy, and radicals sought—unsuccessfully—to push them to the margins.

Milteer concludes that many "find understanding the South before 1865 much easier if we can simplify the social hierarchy," but he argues that doing so offers a skewed picture of reality (p. 254). The author skillfully reveals the sometimes-intersecting values of whites and free people of color, as well as "inconsistencies between the law and everyday behavior," and then provides a framework for understanding them (p. 255). [End Page 773]