Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770-1900

摘要

In eastern North Carolina enslaved (and sometimes free) black artisans worked side by side with white craftsmen when erecting buildings, sharingtasks both sequentially and simultaneously. Thanks to Catherine Bishir's new book, Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770-1900, we know that daybooks from 1772 recorded single-named slaves and double-named whites laboring together at New Bern's Tryon Palace, the colonial capitol. Integrated teams continued to work throughout the early republic's boom years, surprising Yankee travelers just as segregated crews in the North surprised southerners. Since enslaved craftsmen could sometimes hire themselves out and buy their freedom with their wages, Bishir shows us that New Bern's free artisan community grew as the economy expanded. Black artisans and perhaps even a few slaves living away from their owners could, with varying degrees of success, form stable families, manage their work, share church and lodge activities in white as well as black institutions, live in integrated neighborhoods, tend to their children's education, and participate in civic celebrations. All the while they learned to balance well-earned dignity with the racial deference whites still expected. After 1776 free black male North Carolinian taxpayers could vote. In New Bern they did so regularly-that is, until 1835, when a state constitutional amendment ended the practice. But these accomplished people knew that the right should be theirs, as the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights had suggested. New Bern's artisans of colorwould never forget the full citizenship that they had enjoyed nor lessen their hunger to regain it.