Handwritten petitions tucked away in the Mobile County probate office tell an unsettling story from the eve of the Civil War: several free Black residents of Mobile, facing escalating hostility from state and local governments, asked judges for permission to voluntarily become enslaved.
Among them was Sally Johnson, one of more than 800 free Black residents living in Mobile by 1860. On Jan. 4, 1861, the illiterate Johnson signed her petition with an “X,” asking Mobile County Probate Judge John A. Hitchcock to let her become the legal property of Dr. Thomas S. Easton, a University of Pennsylvania-trained physician who agreed to serve as her master. Johnson’s petition describes her as 65 years old and in poor health, facing pressure to leave the city and state because she was not enslaved.
At least nine similar petitions remain on file at the probate office, and archivists believe that number likely represents only a fraction of those filed between 1860 and 1862, a period when Southern states were tightening restrictions on free Black residents ahead of secession. Part-time probate archivist Collétte King, who has reviewed the documents, said Johnson’s case in particular struck her as heartbreaking: an elderly woman with no family, caught between conflicting pressures with seemingly nowhere else to turn.
Historians say the petitions reflect a broader climate of fear and legal pressure rather than free choice in any conventional sense. Lonnie Burnett, a Civil War historian at the University of Mobile, said many petitioners likely felt they had no real alternative. Alabama lawmakers debated proposals in this period to expel free Black residents from the state entirely, according to Michael W. Fitzgerald, a historian who has written about Mobile’s Reconstruction era. Fitzgerald said white leaders increasingly viewed free Black Alabamians as a destabilizing and even threatening presence, a view reflected in a decade’s worth of state laws designed to restrict their movement and independence.
Though free Black residents made up only a small fraction of Alabama’s Black population overall, roughly half of them lived in Mobile, giving the port city’s white leadership particular reason for concern, according to historians. Legislative records from the late 1850s show lawmakers passing a series of measures targeting both free and enslaved Black Alabamians, including requirements that slave owners live on-site with those they held in bondage.
The Mobile County probate records offer a rare, direct window into how some free Black residents navigated an increasingly hostile legal landscape in the months before the Civil War began, choosing what they may have seen as the least dangerous of a set of terrible options.