Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana

In Becoming Free, Becoming Black coauthors de la Fuente and Gross intervene fruitfully in long and sometimes contentious debates among twentieth- and twenty-first-century historians about whether legal and cultural traditions of European colonizing powers or the demographic and economic characteristics of their colonies were most influential in determining the perceived severity of enslavement and the possibility of enjoying freedom before and after abolition. In their explicit counter to earlier comparative approaches, de la Fuente and Gross state, "It was not society's recognition of slaves' humanity, nor its racial fluidity, that marked the differences. . . . It was how successfully the elites of that society drew connections between blackness and enslavement, on the one hand, and whiteness, freedom, and citizenship on the other" (5).Building on the work of Rebecca Scott and many others, the authors return to an emphasis on the importance of law and culture in their comparisons of Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana using "the tools and approaches of cultural-legal history close to the ground" (8–9). They seek to "move old comparative debates into new territory . . . to recover slaves' lives and actions, and to be attentive to change across time" (xi). They have succeeded admirably in doing so.A major argument of the book is that "the law of freedom" rather than "the law of slavery" was "the most crucial for the creation of racial regimes in law" (4). Thus, each of the five chapters discusses an aspect of freedom in the three sites—the "process of legal race making" in the early European settlement period, manumission and freedom suits before and during the Age of Revolution, and the efforts to constrain Black freedom, interracial relationships, and free Black communities in the mid-nineteenth century (16).The process of defining race in law began in Cuba in the sixteenth century, in Virginia in the seventeenth century, and finally in Louisiana in the eighteenth century. The last is included as a hybrid case that developed under French, Spanish, and, finally, US rule from 1700 to the mid-1800s. At the time of colonization in the Americas, Spanish law already allowed manumission and self-purchase of freedom but also tied Blackness to slavery and debased status in statute and practice. Rather than seeing these possibilities for freedom as evidence of a "softer" and more fluid Iberian slave system, de la Fuente and Gross argue that "the practical effect of Iberian legal and social precedents was to arrive even more quickly at hardened racial distinction in the law" (16). At the same time, the authors show how enslaved people used legal rights such as self-purchase to press for a set price, payments in installments, and the right to the portion of their freedom that they had already purchased. All three practices became customary rights over time and helped create a growing free population of color from the mid-1500s onward, despite the early imposition of racial difference.For the authors, the equation of slavery and Blackness was most "unsettled and open to interpretation" in Virginia, at least for the early colonial period in the 1600s (16). Here the authors follow the outline of Edmund Morgan's argument about increasing legal restrictions against Africans and their descendants growing from elite fears of alliances between Blacks and poor whites, though they see this explanation as incomplete. The authors agree with Morgan that elite Virginians expanded rights for free whites and "limited legal opportunities for freedom, and even changed the meaning of freedom along racial lines" (59). Yet they contend that the shift was more gradual and that "the interaction of demographics and economics, on the one hand, and politics and law, on the other" best explains the constraints placed on Black freedom by the eighteenth century (59). As enslavers' ability to manumit declined, the authors show how freedom suits increasingly sought to claim "a free female ancestor" often Indigenous or white, because the law now determined enslavement at birth by a mother's status (63).De la Fuente and Gross contend that the Age of Revolution from 1763 to 1820 was the "era of greatest commonality across all three" sites (129). French settlers in Louisiana in the early eighteenth century had adopted restrictions on manumission and interracial marriage developed in the French Caribbean colonies, unlike either early Virginia or Cuba. Revolutionary-era elites in all three sites adopted "legal reforms . . . to protect their slave systems" by briefly allowing more paths to freedom (129). Some enslaved men who fought for various powers during the wars of the revolutionary era attained freedom, though the authors don't discuss this. Overall manumissions increased and in all three areas the free population of color grew. A key distinction across these sites was whether Black freedom remained an accepted legal and social reality into the 1800s.By the mid-nineteenth century, Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia were all "mature slave societies" (219). After 1840, in the face of slave rebellion and abolitionism, elites in all three sites attempted to constrain Black freedom and even expel free people of color. The authors argue that elites in Cuba were least successful in these endeavors in part because Black freedom had been accepted in law and practice for centuries. The new slave code of 1842 enshrined in law the previously customary practice of coartación (self-purchase by installments), perhaps the clearest example of claims by the enslaved shaping law. Free Cubans of color continued to participate in civic life and marry across racial boundaries. The size of their communities made wholesale expulsion impossible. On the other hand, by the mid-nineteenth century in Virginia and Louisiana race had become an "impassable barrier," limiting rights and citizenship to whites (224). But as de la Fuente and Gross demonstrate so convincingly, enslaved and free people of color in all three sites "ferociously contested" efforts to restrict Black freedom and sometimes succeeded in claiming it (224).Becoming Free, Becoming Black will reframe debates on comparative slavery and freedom as well as scholarship on Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. The book may be most useful to scholars and graduate students, as the historical context of each region and time period is only briefly sketched out. At the same time, the book is a fine example of the insights possible through deep archival research and the benefits of collaborative scholarship in addressing complex historical questions.