Free African Americans of NC and VA - Genealogy.com
These genealogies, comprising the colonial history of the majority of the free African American families of Virginia and North Carolina, reveal a facet of American colonial history previously overlooked by historians:
- Most families were the descendants of white servant women who had children by slaves or free African Americans.
- Families like Gowen , Cumbo , and Driggers who were free in the mid-seventeenth century had several hundred members before the end of the colonial period. They were descended from slaves who were freed before the 1723 Virginia Law which required legislative approval for manumissions.
- Very few families descended from white slave owners who had children by their slaves, perhaps as low as 1% of the total.
- Many free African American families in colonial North Carolina and Virginia were landowners.
- The light-skinned descendants of these families formed the tri-racial isolate communities of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Louisiana.
Virginia
Most of the free African Americans of Virginia and North Carolina originated in Virginia where they became free in the seventeenth and eighteenth century before chattel slavery and racism fully developed in the United States.
When they arrived in Virginia, Africans joined a society which was divided between master and white servant -- a society with such contempt for white servants that masters were not punished for beating them to death [McIlwaine, Minutes of the Council, 22-24]. They joined the same households with white servants ó working, eating, sleeping, getting drunk, and running away together [Northampton Orders 1664-74, fol.25, p.31 - fol.31; McIlwaine, Minutes of the Council, 466-7; Hening, Statutes at Large, II:117].
Some of these first African slaves became free:
- John Geaween ( Gowen ) "a negro servant" was free in March 1641 according to the Virginia Council and General Court Records [VMHandB XI:281].
- Francis Payne of Northampton County paid for his freedom about 1650 by purchasing three white servants for his master's use [DW 1645-51, 14].
- Emanuell Cambow (Cumbo), Negro, was granted 50 acres in James City County on 18 April 1667 [Patent Book 6:39].
- John Harris "negro" was free in 1668 when he purchased 50 acres in York County [Deeds 1664-72, 327].
Many were free on the Eastern Shore. There were at least 40 taxable African Americans in Northampton County in the 1670s who were free or later became free, representing one third of the taxable African Americans in the county.
Despite the efforts of the legislature, white servant women continued to bear children by African American fathers through the late seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth century. From these genealogies, it appears that they were the primary source of the increase in the free African American population for this period. At least sixty-five of the families in this history appear to be descendants of white women. Many of these white servant women may have been the common-law wives of slaves since they had several mixed race children. (Note 3) Thirty-six families appear to be descended from freed slaves. (Note 4) It is likely that the majority of the remaining families were also descendants of white women since they first appear in court records in the mid-eighteenth century when slaves could not be freed without legislative approval, and there is no record of legislative approval for their emancipations.