Freedom Has a Face : Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson's Virginia

Kirt von Daacke

ISBN 10: 081395360X / ISBN 13: 9780813953601

Published by University Of Virginia Press Apr 2025, 2025

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # 9780813953601

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Freedom Has a Face : Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson's Virginia
• Publisher: University Of Virginia Press Apr 2025
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 081395360X
• ISBN 13: 9780813953601
• Binding: Taschenbuch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 228W x 153H x 19D millimeters 228 millimeters width by 153 millimeters height by 19 millimeters depth
• Weight: 434 grams

About this title

Synopsis

In his examination of a wide array of court papers from Albemarle County, a rural Virginia slaveholding community, Kirt von Daacke argues against the commonly held belief that southern whites saw free blacks only as a menace. Von Daacke reveals instead a more easygoing interracial social order in Albemarle County that existed for more than two generations after the Revolution - stretching to the mid-nineteenth century and beyond - despite fears engendered by Gabriel's Rebellion and the Haitian Revolution.

Freedom Has a Face tells the stories of free blacks who worked hard to carve out comfortable spaces for existence. They were denied full freedom, but they were neither slaves without masters nor anomalies in a society that had room only for black slaves and free white citizens. A typical rural Piedmont county, Albemarle was not a racial utopia. Rather, it was a tight-knit community in which face-to-face interactions determined social status and reputation. A steep social hierarchy allowed substantial inequalities to persist, but it was nonetheless an intimately interracial society. Free African Americans who maintained personal connections with white neighbors and who participated openly in local society were perceived as far more than stereotypical dangerous blacks.

Based on his work building a cross-referenced database containing individual records for nearly five thousand documents, von Daacke reveals a detailed picture of daily life in Albemarle County. With this reinsertion of individual free blacks into the neighborhood, community, and county, he exposes a different, more complicated image of the lives of free people of color.

About the Author

Kirt von Daacke is Associate Professor of History and Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia.