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This chapter examines lawsuits over property. Free blacks went to court with full knowledge of their rights to property, and they expected the courts to deal with them fairly and protect those rights, just as they would with white southerners. They sued whites and other people of color in disputes over real and personal property. They also appealed to the courts to protect the dignity of their labor and sued to protect labor contracts or recover back wages. Like many antebellum Americans, free people of color viewed their labor as a form of property; it too represented a path to economic independence. Property ownership, however, sometimes rendered free people of color vulnerable to the greed of unscrupulous individuals. Free blacks’ precarious position in a social order dedicated to white supremacy sometimes meant they were the victims of fraud—or worse. When cheated, they appealed to the courts to intervene. This chapter focuses its attention primarily on the property disputes of free people of color, as the southern legal apparatus did not acknowledge or protect the slaves’ economy, but on occasion even those held as property went to court and sued.

Focusing on the 1730s through the 1750s, chapter 2 considers the relationship between notions of hereditary blood status and the legal redefinition of whiteness and British racial identity in Jamaica. It shows how demographic crises and ongoing conflicts with the Maroons prompted Jamaican colonial authorities to turn to free blacks, Jews, and persons of mixed ancestry for compulsory assistance. While free blacks and men of mixed ancestry were required to offer military service, and Jews were burdened with extraordinary taxation, a select handful of men and women of mixed ancestry aided the colonial regime by assisting in the legal “whitening” of Jamaica.

Charleston was a coastal port city on the Atlantic Ocean, and, along with its physical geography, that led to heightened social interaction between slaves, free blacks, and European immigrants. Charleston’s slave population increased between 1820 and 1861, reaching more than seventeen thousand. Slaves lived in residences throughout the city and often in separate living quarters. The free black population also experienced significant population increases during the first half of the nineteenth century. German and Irish immigration also had implications for the social relations of Charleston during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. German and Irish immigrants arrived in large numbers during the 1850s, and they encountered a thriving free black population in Charleston, slightly larger than their own, and thousands of slaves. Moreover, some Germans and Irish who had arrived in the 1830 and early 1840s had socialized to certain white southern norms, including slaveholding. Many immigrants experienced death by migration, because their immune systems did not protect them as well from specific diseases. Health conditions in Charleston endangered immigrants who lived in low-lying, unsanitary places throughout the city. Yellow fever proved particularly deadly to German and Irish immigrants, and more than one thousand died during epidemics between 1849 and 1858.

German and Irish immigrants interacted with slaves and free blacks in Charleston on a daily basis and in a variety of social and economic contexts. The brutality of urban slavery was unmistakable as public punishment of slaves and free blacks by city authorities, mainly at the work house, was a common occurrence. German petty entrepreneurs were middlemen minorities that served as a buffer between African Americans and native-born whites. Germans owned and operated successful groceries and wholesale firms, and they often purchased property in the form of two-or three-story houses with stores on the ground level. Germans owned slaves at a rate consistent with their population numbers in 1850. Irish immigrants who could afford slaves purchased them with regularity. German men with few marital prospects among the native-born white population kept enslaved women as concubines. German and Irish petty shopkeepers undermined the slave system when they sold liquor to slaves and traded with slaves for property requisitioned from their masters. White Southerners disapproved of German and Irish shopkeepers who challenged their authority, and they reorganized the police force to better enforce the slave code.

When using the courts to protect their family, people of color relied on and deployed a well-used model for litigation and claims-making—a model set by fellow black litigants. This model included several tactics for appealing to the bar: they exploited the language of property and law, rhetoric that was recognizable to their audiences and thus usable and effective. They found ways to make others accountable to them: with their stories and reputations and through their networks. They bound people in relationships of obligation to them—bonds that sometimes upended the southern racial hierarchy. They used property ownership and its associated presumptions about independence and reliability to make their claims and to legitimize and safeguard their families. In so doing, they served as their own advocates, registered their voices in an official, public forum, and laid claim to civic inclusion. This chapter examines how well the model worked. It follows the formation of one family from Iberville Parish, the Belly family, and their efforts to form a family before the law and through property ownership.