As the doors closed around them in the early 18th century, many of Virginia’s free people of color moved west and south. In the border areas of Virginia, the colony’s restrictive racial laws were only casually enforced, and south of the North Carolina border they did not exist at all. The extensive research of Paul […]
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Those Dreadful Borderers
By Carla Rabinowitz on October 11, 2015 in Early Virginia, Free People of Color, North Carolina, Quakers
“Carolina,” wrote Virginia Governor Thomas Culpeper in the 1680’s, “(I meane the North part of it) alwayes was and is the sinke of America, the Refuge of our Renagadoes.” The Rev. John Urmstone, minister of a local parish from 1710 to 1721, described the area as “an obscure corner of the world inhabited by the […]
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