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This article shows how and why some free black families ended up living among the enslaved in the late antebellum era. Enslavers brought free people of colour into forms of informal quasi-slavery that differed little from enslavement despite their free legal status. Despite a lack of evidence, piecing together free blacks’ experiences through surviving sources reveals much about the porous boundary between slavery and freedom where enslavers manipulated marginality for financial gain. There was no sharp delineation between slavery and freedom but instead a continuum of oppression characterized by varying degrees of persecution and fragile freedoms.

My husband was a slave of de Sloans and didn't get to see me as often as he wanted to, and of course, as de housemaid then, dere was times I couldn't meet him, clandestine like he want me. Us had some grief over dat, but he got a pass twice a week from his marster, Marse Tommie Sloan, to come to see me…Sam was a field hand and drive de wagon way to Charleston once a year wid cotton, and always bring back something pretty for me.George P. Rawick, The American Slave : A Composite Autobiography, Vol. 2, Part 1 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972), 300.Historians have found it difficult to assess the extent and nature of slave cross-plantation marriages (that is, where husband and wife lived on different slaveholdings). This is largely because white sources give no basis for estimating their scale or character. Estate papers and business records often list slaves belonging to a particular owner, but such lists give no indication of spouses and other relatives of those slaves who might belong to neighbours. Similarly, except for scattered comments on visiting privileges given to certain slaves, or references to the possible advantages and inconveniences of allowing slaves to marry off the plantation, owners took little interest in the vigour of such unions.