VI. The Legal Status of the Free Negro.
What, then, was the legal status of the free negro? He was only a quasi-free man. He could sue and be sued. He could make a contract and inherit property. He enjoyed legal marriage. He could buy and sell. He could not be a witness against a white man. He could not vote after 1834. He was ineligible for office. He was a sort of inmate on parole. His conduct was frequently guaranteed by bond. He enjoyed certain privileges and immunities, which the state might take away from him if it saw fit. He was not a citizen in the sense in which the term is used in the Constitution of the United States, and, therefore, was not entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the several states. Judge Green, speaking of the free negro’s rights in the case of the State v. Claiborne, said: “The laws have never allowed the enjoyment of equal rights, or the immunities of the free white citizen.”[75]
He had no place in society, socially or economically. He could not associate with the whites. He could keep the company of slaves only by permission. His own class was so small that his opportunities were very limited there. Poverty, ignorance, oppression, discrimination, and hostility of both slave and white man made his position in actual life much worse than his legal status. In the industrial world there was no place for him. The labor was done by slaves. There was no factory work for him. He could farm if he could rent or buy land. He was usually not wanted in the community.
The black man, in the United States, said Judge Catron, is degraded by his color, and sinks into vice and worthlessness from want of motive to virtuous and elevated conduct. The black man in these states may have the power of volition. He may go and come when it pleases him, without a domestic master to control the actions of his person; but to be politically free, to be the peer and equal to the white man, to enjoy the offices, trusts, and privileges our institutions confer on the white men, is hopeless now and ever. The slave who receives the protection and care of a tolerable master holds a condition here superior to the negro who is freed from domestic slavery. He is a reproach and a by-word with the slave himself, who taunts his fellow slave by telling him “he is as worthless as a free negro.” The consequence is inevitable. The free black man lives amongst us without motive and without hope. He seeks no avocation; is surrounded with necessities, is sunk in degradation; crime can sink him no deeper, and he commits it, of course. This is not only true of the free negro residing in the slaveholding states of the Union. In non-slaveholding states of this Union the people are less accustomed to the squalid and disgusting wretchedness of the negro, have less sympathy for him, earn their means of subsistence with their own hands, and are more economical in parting with them than he for whom the slave labors, for which he is entitled the proceeds and of which the free negro is generally the participant, and but too often in the character of the receiver of stolen goods. Nothing can be more untrue than that the free negro is more respectable as a member of society in the non-slaveholding states than in the slaveholding states. In each he is a degraded outcast, and his fancied freedom a delusion. With us the slave ranks him in character and comfort, nor is there a fair motive to absolve him from his duties incident to domestic slavery if he is to continue amongst us. Generally, and almost universally, society suffers and the negro suffers by manumission.[76]