During its first half century as a territory and state (1810-1860), Mississippi was an agrarian-frontier society. Its population was made up of four groups: Native Americans, White people, enslaved people, and free Black people. All four groups were present in Mississippi from its territorial beginnings.1 Show
Black people in Mississippi, and elsewhere in the South, became free in several ways. Prior to 1825, it was common and legal for enslaved people to become free either by purchasing their freedom or by slaveholders freeing them. Beginning in the mid-1820s, both forms of emancipation became increasingly less common and even illegal. The primary pathways to free status were blocked. In the decades after the 1820s, the legal avenues to freedom and emancipation were limited only to children born to free mothers and parents and to those approved by the Mississippi legislature through petitions for emancipation. With the passage of an 1822 law, the legislature became directly involved in slave emancipation for the purpose of limiting the state’s free black population. The 1822 law gave the legislature authority to approve or reject all slave emancipations in the state. Largely as a result, emancipations sharply declined and Mississippi’s free Black population remained small, never exceeding 1,400.2 About 1810, the decade before Mississippi became a state, free Black people numbered fewer than 300. Following statehood in 1817, the size of the free Black population, while nearly doubling, remained comparatively small, totaling only 458 in 1820. By 1830 the state’s free Black community had grown modestly to 519. During the 1830s and by 1840, Mississippi’s free Black populace stood at roughly 1,400, an increase of more than 150 percent over the previous decade. The growth of the 1830s was followed by a decline of almost a third in the 1840s, reducing the state’s 1850 free Black population to fewer than a thousand. In the 1850s, the decade immediately preceding the Civil War, Mississippi’s free Black community shrank until only 773 remained in the months before secession. Mississippi lawsThe consistently small number of free Black people in Mississippi between 1810 and 1860 was a direct result of a network of controls, backed by laws and race prejudice. Most apparent were those controls that discouraged and prevented them from moving into Mississippi. If and when they did arrive – and there were never many – their lives were governed by an ever-widening range of laws specific to free Black people. Laws in Mississippi as early as 1820 presumed every “negro,” or person of color, to be a slave. To prove otherwise, free Black individuals were required to secure certification for their free status. Mississippi’s laws required every person of free status to appear before the local court to give evidence of his or her freedom. When the court was provided satisfactory proof, the applicants received certificates of free status, or freedom papers, as the certificates became commonly known. The certificate indicated the bearer’s name, color, physical stature, and any distinguishing features, such as scars. Every three years the certificate had to be renewed at a fee of $1, the equivalent of $25 today. In 1831 the fee was increased to $3.3 Free Black people in Mississippi placed themselves at great risk if they failed to have in their possession a certificate of registration. They ran the risk of seizure and even jail. If blacks were unable to establish their free status within a specified period of time, they could, as allowed by law, be sold into slavery at public auction. For free people, the certificates of registration were their single most important source of documentation. Excerpt from Charles Griffin’s free papersNote: This excerpt is from the original records on microfilm at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Because of extensive use by researchers, the microfilm is heavily scratched, making it impossible to get a copy with all words legible for reproduction in Mississippi History Now. From the Deed Record, Volume S, Year 1830 |