The population of free blacks swelled after the Revolutionary War, when the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence, the egalitarian message of evangelical Protestantism, and a depression in the tobacco economy of the Upper South led to a brief flurry of emancipation––the act of freeing from slavery. The soaring numbers of free blacks worried white Southerners, who, because of the cotton boom, wanted more slaves, not more blacks who were free.

In the 1820s and 1830s, state legislatures stemmed the growth of the free black population and shrank the liberty of those blacks who had gained their freedom. New laws denied masters the right to free their slaves. Other laws subjected free blacks to special taxes, prohibited them from interstate travel, denied them the right to have schools and to participate in politics, and required them to carry “freedom papers” to prove they were not slaves. Increasingly, whites subjected free blacks to the same laws as slaves. Free blacks could not testify under oath in a court of law or serve on juries. Free blacks were forbidden to strike whites, even to defend themselves. “Free negroes belong to a degraded caste of society,” a South Carolina judge said in 1848. “They are in no respect on a perfect equality with the white man. . . . They ought, by law, to be compelled to demean themselves as inferiors.”

Laws confined most free African Americans to poverty and dependence. Typically, free blacks were rural, uneducated, unskilled agricultural laborers and domestic servants who had to scramble to survive. Opportunities of any kind—for work, education, or community—were slim. Planters believed that free blacks set a bad example for slaves, subverting the racial subordination that was the essence of slavery.

Whites feared that free blacks might lead slaves in rebellion. In 1822, whites in Charleston accused Denmark Vesey, a free black carpenter, of conspiring with plantation slaves to slaughter Charleston’s white inhabitants. The authorities rounded up scores of suspects, who, prodded by torture and the threat of death, implicated others in a “plot to riot in blood, outrage, and rapine.” Although the city fathers never found any weapons and Vesey and most of the accused steadfastly denied the charges of conspiracy, officials hanged thirty-five black men, including Vesey, and banished another thirty-seven blacks from the state.