Slaveholding colonies (containing some slaves), slave colonies (at least 20 percent slaves), and states evolved in America. The proportion of free blacks was small.

In 1750 free black people comprised less than 2 percent of all blacks. They were mainly artisans, farmers, farmhands, and domestic workers. Slaves could attain freedom by birth to a free-black mother, self-purchase, manumission, or escape. Those methods and gradual abolition of northern slavery increased the free black population from 60,000 or 2 percent of blacks (1790) to 500,000 or 9 percent (1860). More than half lived in the South. Maryland (83,942), Virginia (58,042), Pennsylvania (56,949), and New York (49 005) reported the largest numbers.

They struggled. Segregated in the North and considered “slaves without masters” in the South, they developed families and communities. Black churches, schools, charities, and social networks enabled them to affirm and help themselves. Intragroup differences in color, literacy, and economic status, however, strained racial solidarity. For example, elite light-skin free blacks tended to be educated and owned much property, including slaves. The vast majority of free blacks remained illiterate and poor. Manumitted, owning little, and usually living near slave kin, they closed ranks with their enslaved brethren in an ongoing freedom struggle.