Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery

This historical study examines how free people of color in Charleston and Cartagena challenged the foundations of racial hierarchies in the Americas.

Prior to the abolition of slavery, thousands of African-descended people in the Americas lived in freedom. Their efforts to navigate daily life and negotiate the boundaries of racial difference challenged the foundations of white authority—and linked the Americas together. In Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery, John Garrison Marks examines how these individuals built lives for themselves and their families in two of the Atlantic World’s most important urban centers: Cartagena, along the Caribbean coast of modern-day Colombia, and Charleston, in the lowcountry of North America’s Atlantic coast.

Built on research conducted on three continents, this book takes a comparative approach to the contours of black freedom in the Americas. It examines how various paths to freedom, responses to the Haitian Revolution, engagement in skilled labor, involvement with social institutions, and the role of the church all helped shape the experiences of free people of color in the Atlantic World.

As free people of color claimed rights, privileges, and distinctions not typically afforded to those of African descent, they engaged with white elites and state authorities in ways undermined whites’ claims of racial superiority.