Diving Into. . .

File Box: 1, File No. 1.1:
Franklin, John Hope. The Free Negro In North Carolina: 1790-1860. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1943.

Introduction:

Available at Amazon.com

In May of 2008 I applied for an National Endowment of the Humanities Independent Scholar Fellowship to research and write a prequel to this monumentous book, entitled: Migration and Settlement Patterns of Free Negroes in Colonial America, Part I: The Southern Colonies, 1728-1790. The problem, I was told, was that the scope was too large and that I concentrated on too many primary sources...I needed more secondary sources. They had me completely baffled on the sources issue; but, after a short period of grieving, I regrouped and continued the research from a different angle.

The years selected began with the year the Dividing Line between Virginia and North Carolina were established and the territory was opened for settlement and ended where John Hope Franklin began, but with emphasis on other aspects not covered by the author. It was to encompass sixty-two years and five states.

Presently, the historical narrative I am working on covers three generations of a family's life in Coastal North Carolina between the years 1854 to 1954. While the focus has tightened, the span of years has extended.

Selected Text:
The photocopies in this packet are from four chapters, as follows:
Chapter II: Growth of the Free Negro Population,
Chapter IV: The Free Negro in the Economic Life of North Carolina,
Chapter V: Social Life of the Free Negro, and
Chapter VII: Conclusions.

It's always interesting to review previously selected books. What caught my attention four years earlier differs from today's emphasis. Then the focus was migration patterns. Now I'm more concerned with specific points, i.e. education, apprenticeship, religion, the Free Negro Code, housing, diet and health issues.

Several quotes from the Conclusions sum up these concerns:

It was one thing to inherit or acquire freedom and quite another thing to maintain it. . . . Free Negroes in North Carolina were, moreover, a rural people. . . however, their living in the rural areas had the effect of making their presence less objectionable, since they were seldom in large numbers. . . . Had it not been for the system of apprenticing free Negro children to white masters for the purpose of training them to make a living, the economic influence of the free Negro would have been even less than it was. . . . As farmers, farm laborers, and common laborers, they were able to eke out a living if they could find an opportunity to ply their trade. . . . What literacy there was among the free Negroes came largely from the apprenticeship system. There were also religious sects, such as the Quakers, Methodists, and Presbyterians, who were engaged in the task of training free Negroes, but they touched only a very limited number (excerpted from pages 222-224).

One note of interest: At the end of the book is a section of Appendices. Appendix I is a table entitled, Free Negro Apprentices in 1860. Craven County, where our Carters and Georges lived, there were only 16 apprentices in the county.

New sources of interest: The John H. Bryan Papers: 1773-1860. Interesting observations of the free Negroes of New Bern, in the Archives of the North Carolina Historical Commission. And The John H. Bryan Papers: 1798-1860, in the Manuscript Collection in Duke University Library.

Diving Into Secondary Sources

Craven County in 1853
Sitting and staring at page after page of digital newspaper entries of a search of  <1853 "New Bern> which results in only two sources: The Fayetteville Observer and the New York Times, is getting me nowhere fast. Not much of interest appears in pages for the amount of time spent.

Pack Memorial Library, in
Modern Asheville,
by Troy Winterrowd

When we first moved to Asheville, NC in February 2007 I began an intensive dive into every known book and document available for Craven County and Eastern North Carolina at Pack Memorial Library. It was a sort of frenzied find-all-you-can-as-quick-as-you-can adventure in research. Sometimes the genealogist instinct tells us to absorb it all now because tomorrow is not promised. After several years of scouring the North Carolina Collection, my favorite local history librarian asked me if I hadn't read every book by now. Almost, I replied, almost. And so it was...

I started out taking handwritten notes in Composition notebooks and photocopying pages of books...making notations of ones for future purchase. Then, after the last Bush Tax Rebate, I purchased my first laptop computer and entered notes in MSWord 2007. (I haven't held that much money in my hand at one time since then when I handed it over to the salesman at BestBuy.)


The notebooks and photocopies were then filed away in clear, plastic file boxes, and labeled. The first of three boxes holds the following files: NC-Free Negroes, NC-Trades, Church History, Timber, NC-Civil War and NC-Physiocs. (Perhaps now might be a good time to print out those Word docs as well...)

Somewhere in all these records

must be the available data for 1853 Craven County.

I'll start here with a Bibliography of my sources and then report here on any information which might be of help in recreating the time period of the Carters' trek from North Harlowe to the Craven County Courthouse in New Bern in December 1853 and the life of an apprentice which followed.

Bibliography:

Box No. 1

File No. 1: NC-Free Negroes

1. Franklin, John Hope. The Free Negro in North Carolina: 1790-1860. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1943.
2. Watson, Alan D. African Americans in Early North Carolina: A Documentary History. Raleigh: Office of Archives and History, North Carolina Dept. of Cultural Resources, 2005.
3. Farlow, Gale. "Black Craftsmen in North Carolina," in North Carolina Genealogical Society Journal, Feb. 1985: Bound Volume 11.
4. Taylor, Rosser Howard. "The Free Negro in North Carolina," in The James Sprunt Historical Publications, Vol. 17, No. 1. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1920.
5. Woodson, Carter G. Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830. Washington, D.C.: The Assoc. for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1924.
6. Mabry, William Alexander. "Negro Suffrage and Fusion Rule in North Carolina," in The North Carolina Historical Review, Volume XII, Number 2, April 1935.
7. Browning, James Blackwell. "The Free Negro in Ante-Bellum North Carolina," in The North Carolina Historical Review, Volume XV, Number 1, January 1938.
8. Franklin, John Hope. "The Free Negro in the Economic Life of Ante-Bellum North Carolina, Part 1," in The North Carolina Historical Review, Volume XIX, Number 3, July 1942.
9. Nelson, B.H. "Some Aspects of Negro Life in North Carolina During the Civil War," in The North Carolina Historical Review, Volume XXV, Number 2, April 1948.
10. The Proposed Suffrage Amendment: The Platform and Resolutions of the People's Party. [Available online, 2 Jan 2008] http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/populist/populist.html

Isaac Carter: Determining the Identity of Same Name Rev War Soldiers, Part 1

Have you ever come upon some information that was published in a book by credentialed individuals and assumed that because they said it was so, it must be?

I’m sure that at one time or another, we’ve all done that. But can authors make errors? Certainly. There are some cases where the only people who might be able to spot such a mistake are those who have first-hand knowledge of a family’s history because it is their own. When presented with what appears to be a find, they accept it as a clue and take it to the next level. 

It’s a bit like being a detective. 

This latter group of researchers is familiar with the names associated with their family. When a clue is revealed, they possess the instinct to know if the information is sound, or if there might be some room for interpretation. Such was the case of Isaac Carter’s Revolutionary War record. (March 2008)

My husband’s CARTER ancestry takes us back to colonial North Carolina, to New Bern in Craven County. His 3^rd great-grandfather Isaac Carter, Sr. was born a Free Person of Color about 1760 and married Sarah Perkins, on February 3, 1786. She was the daughter of George Perkins and sister of Isaac Perkins. You can see them enumerated here on the 1790 Census.

Isaac Carter's family of five (5) were living adjacent to his brother-in-law Isaac Perkins (2) and two up from his father-in-law, George Perkins (4). Note that the only record was the total number of All Other Free Persons of Color living in the household.

Following the 2007 George Family Reunion in North Harlowe, NC, my husband and I paid a visit to the Kellenberger Room at New Bern-Craven County Public Library. After giving some background information to Local History Librarian, Victor Jones, Jr., he immediately pulled Paul Heinegg’s award-winning book, Free African Americans of North Carolina and Virginia, 3rd Edition, 1997. 

"Isaac Carter, called a "Mulatto" in his Revolutionary War pension application, enlisted in the 8th North Carolina Regiment on 1 September 1777, was taken prisoner, and was discharged on 20 February 1780 [Crow, Black Experience in Revolutionary North Carolina, 98]. He was head of a Craven County household of 5 "other free" in 1790 [NC:131]." <<http://www.freeafricanamericans.com/revolution.htm>>

There it was. Our Isaac Carter recorded in the 1790 Census had served in the Revolutionary War. But that was too easy. I decided to stay on the trail and examined the next clue.

I went to my home library's North Carolina Room and checked the original citation in Jeffrey Crow’s book, but it didn’t record any more information than the transcription that Heinegg had cited. 

Believing that there had to be more information somewhere to identify this Isaac Carter as ours, I started looking at sources detailing the 8^th North Carolina Regiment . . .