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“Endangering The Stability Of Slavery”: Black Freedom In The Upper South, 1820-1850, Ashley K. Schmidt
“Endangering The Stability Of Slavery”: Black Freedom In The Upper South, 1820-1850, Ashley K. Schmidt
Masters Theses, 2010-2019
In the Upper South, free blacks stood out as a living breathing contradiction to the institution of race-based slavery. State legislatures continuously debated and discussed the issue, and created a plethora of laws to restrict the freedoms given to African Americans. However, through a comparison of two piedmont locales, Bedford County, Virginia, and Washington County, Virginia, this thesis reveals the flexibility of execution of state laws on the ground. The work argues that state laws did not necessarily dictate black experiences in freedom. Instead, free black experience can be shown through the ways that whites enforced the laws, a process …