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Crafting freedom: Race and social mobility among free artisans of color in Cartagena and Charleston

ABSTRACT Throughout the urban Atlantic World, skilled work proved central to the ability of free people of color to achieve economic and social mobility during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Through their labor in a wide variety of artisan occupations, free people of color gained the opportunity to publicly demonstrate their skills, industriousness, and public worth. As such, free people of color used their role as artisans to gain distinct economic advantages, to cultivate relationships with prominent whites and fellow artisans of color, and to obtain a measure of social distinction. Through their labor, artisans of African descent improved their reputations and increased their bargaining power with white authorities, gaining the opportunity to claim distinctions and privileges that improved their daily lives – ones often closed to other African-descended people. Yet this effort to achieve social and economic advancement often hindered a broader racial identification, as artisans of color attempted to draw class, color, and status distinctions between themselves and the city’s popular classes of African descent. While free artisans of color sometimes succeeded in improving their place within the social order of Atlantic World societies, that success often required them to accommodate the broader logic of American racial hierarchies.