Black Freedom

Abstract

Slaves were themselves instrumental in securing a number of important freedoms within all slave societies. Indeed, as we have seen, the urge to freedom lay at the heart of much of the slave resistance so widespread in the Americas. The results of their efforts, however, were out of all proportion to the costs. There were, it is true, free blacks — notably the maroons — and individual runaways, who lived as best they could in a politically and geographically hostile environment. There were also numbers of slaves who were freed by their owners and who lived as free people in towns or on their own plots of land in the country where they survived as free though generally impoverished labourers and peasants. But such people were as physically isolated as they were socially untypical. They were, in effect, isolated free faces in a sea of slaves and though slave holders pointed to the slaves they had freed as an indication of their own altruism and as an indication of the rewards of faithful service, the existence of free blacks in slave societies was neither statistically significant nor was it an antidote to the all-pervading influence of slavery itself. For all the personal and collective urge for freedom among the slaves, the most effective effort to end the slave trade and slavery came from the non-slave forces, which were, more often than not, metropolitan.