This essay investigates Ira Berlin's thesis (1974, 1976) that free Negroes in the antebellum United States formed a caste distinct from free whites and black slaves, and that this caste contained three distinct regional subcastes, in the North, the Upper South, and the Lower South. The investigation, using more recent and more detailed historiography, will consider whether Berlin's categories remain viable, whether they need to be replaced in toto, or whether they need merely further elaboration, and, if so, what sorts of elaboration will be needed.
The general perspective arrived at here is that Berlin's categories need detailed elaboration within each of his three major regions. Freed African-Americans formed local communities and unique personal identities that cannot be forced into Berlin's neat categories, which remain useful in showing how regional differences shaped the different outlooks of freed "Negroes," but are limited insofar as they impose a fixed identity on such persons. Examination of specific communities within his three regions shows that there was no one, or even three, fixed communal or individual identities among African-American freemen during the antebellum period.
Persons of African descent first arrived in the British, Dutch, Spanish, and French colonies as slaves, after the settlers discovered that the native Americans simply could not successfully be enslaved and forced to work. With perhaps rare individual exceptions, mostly of persons with mixed ancestry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, all persons of African descent continued to arrive in the British colonies as slaves until the slave trade was ended after the American Revolutionary War.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, African-Americans gradually started becoming free, sometimes simply by saving enough money to purchase their freedom as a strictly economic transaction, but sometimes because the conscie...