Free Negro in the context of "Quadroon"

Puerto Ricans (Spanish: Puertorriqueños, [pweɾtoriˈkeɲos]), commonly known as Boricuas, but also occasionally referred to as Borinqueños, Borincanos, or Puertorros, are an ethnic group based in the Caribbean archipelago and island of Puerto Rico, and a nation identified with the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico through ancestry, culture, or history. Puerto Ricans are predominately a tri-racial, Spanish-speaking, Christian society, descending in varying degrees from Indigenous Taíno natives, Spanish and other European colonists, and West and Central African slaves, freedmen, and free Blacks. As citizens of a U.S. territory, Puerto Ricans have automatic birthright American citizenship, and are considerably influenced by American culture. The population of Puerto Ricans is between 9 and 10 million worldwide, with the overwhelming majority residing in Puerto Rico and the mainland United States.

Partus sequitur ventrem (lit. 'that which is born follows the womb'; also partus) was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that children of enslaved mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels), as well as the common law of personal property; analogous legislation existed in other civilizations including Medieval Egypt in Africa and Korea in Asia.

The doctrine's most significant effect was placing into chattel slavery all children born to enslaved women. Partus sequitur ventrem soon spread from the colony of Virginia to all of the Thirteen Colonies. As a function of the political economy of chattel slavery in Colonial America, the legalism of partus sequitur ventrem exempted the biological father from relationship toward children he fathered with enslaved women, and gave all rights in the children to the slave-owner. The denial of paternity to enslaved children secured the slaveholder's right to profit from exploiting the labour of children engendered, bred, and born into slavery. The doctrine also meant that multiracial children with white mothers were born free. Early generations of Free Negros in the American South were formed from unions between free working-class, usually mixed race women, and black men.

The Three-fifths Compromise, also known as the Constitutional Compromise of 1787, was an agreement reached during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention over the inclusion of slaves in counting a state's total population. This count would determine the number of seats in the House of Representatives, the number of electoral votes each state would be allocated, and how much money the states would pay in taxes. Slave states wanted their entire population to be counted to determine the number of Representatives those states could elect and send to Congress. Free states wanted to exclude the counting of slave populations in slave states, since those slaves had no voting rights. A compromise was struck to resolve this impasse. The compromise counted three-fifths of each state's slave population toward that state's total population for the purpose of apportioning the House of Representatives, effectively giving the Southern states more power in the House relative to the Northern states. It also gave slaveholders similarly enlarged powers in Southern legislatures; this was an issue in the secession of West Virginia from Virginia in 1863. Free black people and indentured servants were not subject to the compromise, and each was counted as one full person for representation.

The Three-fifths Compromise is in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution. It provides:

The Black Codes, also called the Black Laws, were racially segregationist and discriminatory U.S. state laws that limited the freedom of black Americans but not of white Americans. The first Black Codes applied to "free Negroes", i.e., black people who lived in states where slavery had been abolished or who lived in a slave state but were not enslaved. After chattel slavery was abolished throughout the United States in 1865, former slave states in the U.S. South enacted Black Codes to restrict all black citizens, especially the emancipated freedmen who no longer were subject to control by slaveholders.

Since the colonial period, colonies and states had passed laws that discriminated against free blacks. In the South, these were generally included in "slave codes"; the goal was to suppress the influence of free blacks (particularly after slave rebellions) because of their potential influence on slaves. Free men of color were denied the vote in the North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1835. Laws prohibited activities such as bearing arms, gathering in groups for worship, and learning to read and write.

The Black Seminoles, or Afro-Seminoles, are an ethnic group of mixed Native American and African origin associated with the Seminole people in Florida and Oklahoma. They are mostly blood descendants of the Seminole people, free Africans, and escaped former slaves, who allied with Seminole groups in Spanish Florida. Their history includes a continuous struggle against invasion and enslavement while preserving their distinct culture and reconnecting with their relatives throughout the African diaspora. Many have Seminole lineage, but due to the stigma of having mixed origin, they have all been categorized as slaves or Freedmen in the past.

Historically, the Black Seminoles lived mostly in distinct bands near the Native American Seminoles. Some were held as slaves, particularly of Seminole leaders, but the Black Seminole had more freedom than did slaves held by whites in the South and by other Native American tribes, including the right to bear arms. Today, Black Seminole descendants live primarily in rural communities around the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. Its two Freedmen's bands, the Caesar Bruner Band and the Dosar Barkus Band, are represented on the General Council of the Nation. Other centers are in Florida, Texas, the Bahamas, and northern Mexico. Their culture is a blending of African, Gullah, Seminole, Mexican, Caribbean, and European traditions.

African-American history started with the forced transportation of Sub-Saharan Africans to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. The European colonization of the Americas, and the resulting Atlantic slave trade, encompassed a large-scale transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Of the roughly 10–12 million Africans who were sold in the Atlantic slave trade, either to Europe or the Americas, approximately 388,000 were sent to North America. After arriving in various European colonies in North America, the enslaved Africans were sold to European colonists, primarily to work on cash crop plantations. A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English Virginia Colony in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of Sub-Saharan African descent, both free and enslaved.

During the American Revolutionary War, in which the Thirteen Colonies gained independence and began to form the United States, Black soldiers fought on both the British and the American sides. After the conflict ended, the Northern United States gradually abolished slavery. However, the population of the American South, which had an economy dependent on plantations operation by slave labor, increased their usage of slaves to pick cotton, which became the basis of the industrial revolution underway in England and New England. Slavery moved westward from the Southern states during the westward expansion of the United States. During this period, numerous enslaved African Americans escaped into free states and Canada via the Underground Railroad. Disputes over slavery between the Northern and Southern states led to the American Civil War, in which 178,000 African Americans served on the Union side. During the war, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which ended slavery as soon as the Union armies arrived. After the war ended the Thirteenth Amendment, abolished slavery in the U.S., except as punishment for a crime.

The history of slavery in Delaware began when it was Delaware Colony and continued until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865. The Delaware River was an important waterway used for bringing slaves inland to Pennsylvania. In 1776, Delaware prohibited the importation of slaves, and on December 7, 1787, prohibited both imports and exports of slaves from the state. Delaware never abolished slavery and in the order of admission to the Union, it was the first of the 15 slave states. However, it did not secede from the Union during the American Civil War. There were 1,798 enslaved people living in Delaware at the time of the 1860 U.S. census.

A state with a mix of enslaved people and a large population of free people of color that lay in close proximity to the slave jails of traders in Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C., legally free blacks were sometimes kidnapped into slavery, and "freedmen found it wise to deposit apprentice and freedom papers with the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in Philadelphia." For example, the Johnson–Cannon gang, whose tavern and slave pen stood on the border between Maryland and Delaware, were notorious slave stealers and murderers in the early 19th century. The state also hosted stations of the Underground Railroad to assist with escapes from slavery such as the Appoquinimink Friends Meetings House. Thomas Garrett of Wilmington, Delaware, a businessman of the Quaker faith, reportedly assisted in the escapes of between 2,000 and 3,000 slaves.