Between Slavery and Freedom: Free People of Color in America From Settlement to the Civil War

Between Slavery and Freedom: Free People of Color in America From Settlement to the Civil War explores one of the central ironies of racial dynamics in this nation’s history from the colonial era to the end of the Civil War. The existence of a class of free people of African descent contradicted the notion that only people of unmixed European ancestry were “free” and that all black people were – and indeed should be – held in bondage. The hold of these men and women on freedom, sometimes fi...