As Dr. Gates points out.................when u dig deeper, history if full of odd, interesting details................attention to detail is one of the most imp. things i learned in the Marine Corps, and something this great scholar has as well.................

Free Blacks Lived in the North, Right?

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. | Originally posted on The Root

I hope it’s clear by now I love facts, especially those that surprise — even shock — us out of our assumptions. Don’t get me wrong. All of us, including scholars in various fields, have so much information to assimilate on a daily basis that it is difficult to avoid shorthand in conversation. The problem arises when we simplify and thereby distort. This is especially true when it comes to the history of slavery.

Most of us know that before the American Civil War there were so-called slave states and free states. Knowing this, our minds fill in the map with logic. If such a line as “Mason-Dixon” existed (actually, there were a series of lines drawn by “compromising” Congresses throughout the first half of the 19th century), slaves must have resided below it and free black people above it, with every man, woman and child in chains trying to escape to the North just as soon as they could — following the proverbial North Star to a new life of unbounded opportunity — while those already up there remained vigilant against being kidnapped back into slavery down in the South.

Then a book comes along — a once-in-a-generation masterpiece of research and analysis — that shakes up our constellation of inherited “facts” to the point that we no longer feel comfortable assuming anything about what was so in the black past, and why it occurred. That’s exactly what the great historian Ira Berlin did in his book, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (initially published in 1974, and reissued by the New Press in 2007), a book I read as a graduate student, then returned to recently, to help me understand a puzzling fact in my own family tree.

Genealogists for our Finding Your Roots PBS series told me that I had descended from three sets of fourth great-grandparents who had been freed well before the Civil War. (Unless, like comedian Wanda Sykes, you descend from a mulatto child born to a white mother, all of your African-American ancestors were once slaves; the only question is when they became free, which for 90 percent of us was either during the Civil War or with the ratification of the 13th Amendment following the war.) Two sets of my own ancestors (the Cliffords and the Redmans) were free people by the time of the American Revolution, and the other set, the Bruces, were freed in the will of their master in 1823.

As if this weren’t surprising enough, it was another fact that drove me to re-read Ira Berlin’s book about freed slaves. All of these people, and their descendants, continued to live in slave-holding Virginia, even during the Civil War. (Their part of Virginia would join the Union as the state of West Virginia in the middle of the war, but they had no way of knowing this when they decided to remain there, rather than flee.) Why didn’t my great-great-great-great-grandparents run away to safety in the North, rather than remain in the Potomac Valley region of slave-holding western Virginia, about 30 miles, as a matter of fact, from where I was born? Free Negroes headed north just as soon as they could, right? Didn’t my ancestors’ decision to stay put in the Confederacy run counter to what we all understood about the history of slavery?

I turned to Ira Berlin’s book for answers, and I was astonished to learn that my ancestors’ presence in the South and their decision to stay put during the war were not as uncommon as I had imagined. And perhaps most remarkable of all is the fact that professor Berlin explained the mystery of my ancestors’ (and many others’) seemingly counterintuitive decisions using numbers in plain sight, including those in the 1860 U.S. Census.

In that raging year of Lincoln’s election and Southern secession, there were a total of 488,070 free blacks living in the United States, about 10 percent of the entire black population. Of those, 226,152 lived in the North and 261,918 in the South, in 15 states (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas) plus the District of Columbia. Let me break that down further: A few months before the Confederacy was born, there were 35,766 more free black people living in the slave-owning South than in the North, and removing D.C. from the equation wouldn’t have shifted the result. And they stayed there during the Civil War.

Don’t believe it? You can now fact-check the numbers yourself on the U.S. Census Bureau website. Amazing, right? Even if, as Berlin illustrates in a companion table, 100 percent of the African Americans living in the North were free in 1860 (compared to only 6.2 percent in the South), it still is a puzzle to figure out why the majority lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. And here’s the kicker: At no time before the Civil War (at least not after the first U.S. Census was taken in 1790 and future states were added) did free blacks in the North ever outnumber those in the South!

To me, learning about this aspect of African-American history was as astonishing as any of the “amazing” facts on Joel A. Rogers’ original list of 100. (Rogers didn’t include this one on his list, but he did claim that some of these Southern Free Negroes fought for the Confederacy, a claim that we shall examine in another column.) Despite countless stories I’d read and heard about the Underground Railroad, with abolitionists on one side and fire-eaters on the other, there was, I now knew, a more complex landscape underfoot. Black history is full of surprises and contradictions, and this is one of the most surprising and seemingly contradictory ones that I have encountered.

First things first: How did more free blacks end up living in the South? Weren’t their lives a living hell? In this week’s column, I plan to address those questions. Next week, I’ll tackle why so many, like several generations of my own ancestors, stayed.

Luckily, Ira Berlin has the answers, and if you seek them, too, I urge you to read his book, since there’s no way I can possibly capture its many dimensions — or its brilliance — in this column. There’s a reason Slaves Without Masters won the National History Society’s Best Book Prize, and Berlin is the Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland in College Park (fitting also because Maryland was the state with the largest population of free blacks in 1860 — 83,942 — and the highest proportion of free versus enslaved blacks, with 49.1 percent free).