Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South

First published to great acclaim in 1974, established Berlin in his field and went on to win the National History Society's Best First Book Prize. It tells the moving story of the quarter of a million free black men and women who lived in the South before the Civil War, portraying "with careful scholarship, acute analysis, and admirable historical imagination" ( ) their struggle for community, economic independence, and education within an oppressive society.