FREEMAN, CYRUS (1801-1877), born in bondage in Carolina (q.v.); author of the "Narrative of the Life of Cyrus Freeman, Written by Himself" (1829), the testimony the Commonwealth read; afterward lecturer, printer, and member of the Carolina provincial convention of 1868. Few lives of his century contain so much of the freedmen's whole cause in one man's person, and none is better documented, the man having written the first part of the record himself and printed a good share of the rest.
He was born on a rice plantation of the lowcountry, of a mother whose name is all of her that the record keeps. He learned his letters in secret, under a provincial code that made the teaching of them penal in the teacher and the taught alike; and in his twenty-fifth year, being then hired out to the wharves of Charleston (q.v.), he went north by stages along the coast and crossed the Chesapeake (q.v.) hidden in the well of an oyster-boat, coming into Boston (q.v.) in the autumn of 1826 with nothing he could call his own but the name Freeman, which he had taken to himself upon the water — there being, he said afterward, no other property a man in his circumstances might come by so honestly.
The Narrative, written in his third year of freedom and printed at Boston in 1829 for the emancipation societies, is a short book and an exact one. It names parishes, prices, dates, and instruments; it names the price given for each of his two sisters and the parishes into which they were sold, and states that he never afterward learned anything of either beyond the prices; and it offers, in the place where a reader might expect an appeal, an account-book. That exactness was its power, and the Commonwealth answered it as it has answered no other single testimony: eleven editions were called for by 1836; London and Edinburgh printed it from 1830; senators quoted it, some with the covers open in their hands, through the debates that ended in the Act of General Emancipation (q.v.); and by the year of the Freedmen's Charter (q.v.) above three hundred thousand copies had been sold, the shilling edition of 1849 reaching kitchens the octavo had never entered. Through the seven years from 1829 he carried the same testimony by voice across the Home and Western Provinces, before audiences that did not always receive him gently and never sent him away unheard; and when the ship carrying the text of the Act came into Boston, he heard it read aloud upon the wharf where he had landed penniless ten years before, and called that morning, afterward, the only holiday he ever took. Of the clause refusing compensation he said only that the Commonwealth had at last agreed with him about who was owed.
During the War of the Severance (q.v.) he served in the manner most his own: he followed the freedmen companies of the Carolina campaigns as a teacher of letters, and men whom the plantation codes had forbidden to read learned their alphabet, within sound of the guns, from a man those codes had forbidden to teach. In 1844 he came with the founding families to the new town of New Carthage (q.v.) and set up, in the town's first year, its first printing-office. From it he issued, from 1846, the New Carthage Courant, the town's first newspaper and afterward the first to print the verses of Dinah Canaan (q.v.); from it came the spelling-books of the town's schools and the first catalogues of the Freedmen's College (q.v.); and from it came thirty years of the public print of a town founded by people to whom print had been forbidden altogether. The present writer swept the floor of that office as a boy, for the privilege of reading its exchanges, and has not thought it necessary to write this article as though he had not.
He lived to see the Charter of 1858 declare, and the provincial constitution of 1868 briefly secure, the standing his Narrative had demanded before most of its beneficiaries were born. In the convention of 1868 he sat for New Carthage and served on the committee that drafted the franchise articles; the rolls compiled under that constitution enrolled some nine of every ten adult freedmen of the lowcountry, figures examined under CAROLINA; and the convention's journal remembers him chiefly for the brevity of his one recorded speech, which was that he had been fifty years about this business and saw no reason to lengthen the proceedings now.
He died at New Carthage in the spring of 1877. Carolina's first registration statute — the earliest of the provisions since known as the revisions — had been adopted the year before, and its working was already to be read in the rolls of the lowcountry counties. He had seen the whole of the making: the escape, the testimony, the Act, the Charter, the constitution. He lived one year into the unmaking; and this article, which he would not have thanked its writer for rounding off, ends where he did. (J. E. C.)