On "myne Owne Ground"
Breen, T.H. and Stephen Innes. "myne Owne Ground": Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. pp. 142. Paperback.
This is a short, fascinating work about the status of free black people in eastern Virginia. Breen and Innes begin with a study of Anthony Johnson, a black man who arrived to Virginia in 1621 as a slave, was freed sometime between 1635 (?) and came to own large sums of property and many slaves while holding a high status within Northampton County. From Johnson’s life, Breen and Innes then dive deeper into questions of what did it mean to be a free black person in colonial Virginia?
They find that, although they were treated as a different group than Englishmen, free black people had many of the same rights and obligations as their fellow white subjects. While there was some prejudice against black subjects, discrimination against them could hardly be described as hegemonic until the eighteenth century. Instead, many lived prosperous lives and were committed members of their communities. Even black women held much of the same status as white woman, something that would have been seen as outright possible less than a century later. The same is true of enslaved black people, who were often treated the same way as indentured servants—they were recognized for the work they did, not the precise status that they held.
However, Bacon’s Rebellion changed the rules of the game and, in its aftermath, black people were first culturally stripped of their status, then after the 1705 Slave Codes, they lost nearly all of their former legal rights. Free black people, who just 50 years earlier would have been recognized as equals or near-equals, became pariahs in their community and, with little to live on, often were forced into theft or other crimes in order to support their lives. While they were never expelled from the colony, they were often imprisoned (and is it possible that some were re-enslaved?).
Breen and Innes’s work here is compelling and shows us that anti-black racism was not something that has always existed or that needed to be fundamental to the United States. Instead, it was produced for a specific end (as discussed in Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom).