Free Men in an Age of Servitude: Three Generations of a Black Family. This item is unavailable.Free Men in an Age of Servitude: Three Generations of a Black Family

Explores the hardships of free Blacks in the 18th- and 19th-century US. A slave-born professional soldier, his entrepreneur son, and his legislator grandson, bought into the western middle-class equation that hard work and personal rectitude would bring success and respect. It didn't for them. Also demonstrates a methodology of investigating people who left no personal papers. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Tracing the lives of a black grandfather, his son, and grandson, this essay in biography sketches the contours of Florida society from the 1780s to the 1880s. Born a slave in Santo Domingo about 1743, Antonio Proctor became a free black landowner recognized for his military prowess. His son George, born in 1806, became a carpenter and housebuilder who bought his wife from slavery on credit and watched his debt-laden world collapse in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837. Born in 1844, George's son John rode the Reconstruction black majority to the Florida assembly and senate. Each Proctor rose and fell in his turn, forced by the strictures of time and place to serve white patrons. Warner uses these relationships to limn the lines of power in a race-based society. Drawing on oral history and courthouse records, he offers tantalizing images of the meaning of race in Florida from the time of frontier settlements through Reconstruction. Recommended for African American and local history collections.
- Thomas J. Davis, Univ. at Buffalo, N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.