Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery

Before the abolition of slavery, African-descended people living in the Americas led a complicated existence, constantly navigating and negotiating the boundaries of racial difference in their daily lives--behavior often viewed as challenging the foundations of white authority. In Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery John Garrison Marks examines how these individuals built lives of freedom for themselves and their families in two of the Atlantic World's most important urban centers: Cartagena, along the Caribbean coast of modern-day Colombia, and Charleston, in the low country of North America's Atlantic coast. Marks reveals how skills, knowledge, reputation, and personal relationships helped free black people improve their fortunes and achieve social distinction in ways that undermined whites' claims to racial superiority. Built upon research conducted on three continents, this book takes a comparative approach to understanding the contours of black freedom in the Americas. It reveals in new detail the creative and persistent attempts of free people of African descent to improve their lives and that of their families. Marks examines how various paths to freedom, responses to the Haitian Revolution, opportunities to engage in skilled labor, the existence of social institutions, and the role of the church all helped shape the lived experience of free people of color in these two port cities of the Atlantic World. As free black people worked to improve their individual circumstances, staking claims to rights, privileges, and distinctions not typically afforded to people of African descent, they engaged with white elites and state authorities in ways that challenged prevailing racial attitudes. While whites across the Americas shared common doubts about the ability of black people to survive in freedom or contribute meaningfully to society, free black people in Cartagena, Charleston, and beyond conducted themselves in ways that exposed cracks in the foundations of American racial hierarchies. Their actions represented early contributions to the long fight for recognition, civil rights, and racial justice that continues today.