Three out of five SLAVES were counted for apportionment.
Free blacks in the north were counted normally.
Important distinction
This led me to Google "free blacks in the south" to see what popped up. I found a few historyish web sites that made various claims (free black property owners in some northern cities could vote, free blacks in the South lived in fear, but a few became plantation owners) without showing their evidence. But then I stumbled upon this February 17, 1860 editorial in The New York Times (interesting to note just how old the New York Times is). As an expression of a thoroughly middleground viewpoint between slaveholders and abolitionists, it fascinates.
Here, the beginning:
The Southern mind, in a good many States, is just now agitated by the question, What had better be done with free negroes? Arkansas, with a magnificent disregard for vested rights, as well as for the claims of humanity, has solved the question by driving them out pell-mell. Tennessee was about to follow her example, when she was prevented by the energetic remonstrance of Judge CATRON, of the Supreme Court of the United States.
One wonders what "vested rights" refers to: the basic human right of a free man to live where he lives, one assumes. Justice John Catron, by the way, was apparently a Tenneseean, a slaveholder, and a Unionist, who though he sided with the majority on the Dred Scott decision, seemed perfectly capable of telling a slave from a free man.
Maryland is now laboring in the throes of anxious cogitation over the same vexed question. The Commission appointed by the House of Delegates to consider the condition of the free colored population in that State has just presented its report. It sets down the number of ownerless blacks at 90,000, and states that it is steadily on the increase; that their freedom confers no right on them, except that of not working if they do not like it, and charges them with preferring crowding into the cities, and picking up a precarious livelihood by small jobs, in preference to engaging in the hard but useful labor of the farms in the country. The report ends with the usual call for legislation, to make this black population more useful to the whites, and to prevent emancipation in future.
That the legislature of my Home State would so act, offends even as it does not surprise. And by my research, the Assembly did pass "an act to add a new article to the Code of Public Laws for St. Mary's, Calvert, Howard, Kent, Baltimore, Worcester, Somerset, Talbot, Queen Anne's, Prince George's, and Charles Counties entitled, an act to appoint a board of Commissioners for the better control and management of the free colored population of said Counties". I've been unable to find the details of this legislation, but note the logic. A certain group of the population, deemed sub-optimal for the community at large, must be regulated by the state. I know I've seen this reasoning somewhere else...somewhere...
Back to the New York Times:
The morals of the free negroes, by all accounts, are bad; and the influence of their example upon their brethren in bonds is, no doubt, anything but beneficial, and the whites are, of course, bound to mend matters, if they can.
Believe it or not, this is not the worst part of the article. It's not the best, either. It's a point of concession before moving on to the real argument, that this is the product of their lack of opportunity:
We have not yet had the pleasure of seeing many white men, of any race in the world, who labor hard from mere love of labor, We of course are familiar with the fact that hundreds of thousands, in fact, millions of them, toil with terrific energy from morning till night, but it is not because toil is sweet. They are stimulated to exertion by the desire of wealth, and the comfort, power and consideration that it brings; or by the love of fame, which is another name for general admiration; or the love of authority; or by affection for children, by the hope of seeing them honored, useful, and happy. If all these incentives to exertion were at once removed; if the severest labor could bring none of us white men more than a livelihood; if every position of honor, profit, or emolument, were closed on us; and if nothing we could do or say could possibly prevent us from being treated as pariahs by a large portion of the community in which we lived -- shunned in society and in business, and in every walk of life, as if our touch were pollution -- the number of those amongst us who would be found "scorning delight, and living laborious days," would be exceedingly small.
A very Lincolnesque point: that every human, of whatever origin, has the right to earn. If you close off the possibility of a man enjoying the fruits of his labor, do not be surprised if he does not work.
In his book White Guilt, Shelby Steele remarks something similar:
In slavery blacks were not free, but they were also not entirely responsible for their lives. Slavery was a form of incarceration that dehumanized its victims as much by denying them responsibility for their lives -- by providing them with a subsistence existence -- as by denying the freedom. Freedom is crucial to a decent life, but only in being responsible for one's life can one take agency over it. And agency -- the sovereignty and will that we have over our individual lives -- is what makes us fully human. To its credit, segregation gave us agency over our lives by allowing us to be fully responsible for ourselves. But it also cruelly denied us the freedom to use our agency for much more than subsistence. So segregation was another dose of the absurd: you can have responsibility but not much possibility; you can have sovereignty over your own life, but not enough freedom for it to matter much.
Back to the NY Times:
In fact the language of Southern gentlemen about free negroes bears the closest resemblance to that of a French gentilhomme of the last century about peasants and manans, or of an Irish Protestant Squire a hundred years ago about his Catholic countrymen. The free negro trouble is an old story. The wails of the whites over their idleness and rascality are but a wearisome repetition of the jeremiads of privileged classes, in all ages, over the shortcomings of unfortunate inferiors to whom they denied every ordinary incentive to industry and exertion. Men to whom society steadily refuses all honors and rewards would be more than human if they displayed the energy and ability of those for whom fame, rank, power and respect are alone reserved.
What's interesting here is the extent to which I fully applaud this sentiment. Yet if the Chairman of the NAACP makes the same argument today, I would shun and mock it. And why? Because the circumstances differ. It's not 1860 anymore. It's not even 1960.
The editorial does not recommend granting free blacks legal equality, out of fear that race relations would steadily deteriorate. This reasoning appeared everywhere the prospect of equality did, through the Civil Rights Era. If the blacks were free, they would avenge themselves upon us, and a race war would result. The experience of Haiti was never far from the minds of the antebellum South.
Instead, the Grey Lady Recommends the following:
If they are wise, they will seek to do what the Committee of the House of Delegates so severely denounces the Colonization Society for not doing: send as many as possible out of the country. The demand for black labor in all the free islands of the West Indies is enormous, and the transport of 90,000 vagabonds to that distance is not an enterprise from which a State like Maryland need sink in despair when her interest and safety calls for it. At all events, it is the only mode of escape from her present difficulty, which consorts either with justice, honor or sound policy. If her free negroes were once in Jamaica or Barbados, they would have all the inducements which the rest of us enjoy to become industrious and provident. And even if Freedom and Equality did not arouse their nobler nature into activity, their vices and shortcomings would, at least, not endanger the peace and happiness of a flourishing community of another race.
I warned you.
In one respect, it makes complete sense for a people suffering discrimination and poverty to light out for better climes. In fact, it would appear that modern-day African-Americans are doing just that: leaving northern cities, like New York, for better opportunities in the South (Mmmmmmm....fresh irony). But in a free society, such a choice must belong to the individual. To demand the state to intervene in such a manner, well, it sounds like the progressive-but-not-radical New York Times, doesn't it?
It's worth reading the whole thing, and it's also worth reading White Guilt. Shelby Steele makes some serious points that Americans of all races ought to address.
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