Output details

Family or freedom: free people of color in the antebellum South

Family or Freedom results from some eight years of research into the changing role of free people of colour across the whole of the antebellum American South. The project was awarded a Leverhulme grant to undertake archival investigation into state laws about free blacks (including moves to expel or enslave them),and free people of color’s responses to these threats, especially their legal requests for ‘voluntary’ enslavement. Historians have never before systematically explored this phenomenon. Reviewers describe Family or Freedom as ‘a new and dramatic portrait of the antebellum South’ and ‘a marker for the future of slavery studies’.