Free people of color--people of African descent who lived in colonial and antebellum America and were born free or escaped the bonds of slavery before it was abolished in 1865--made significant contributions to the economies and cultures of the communities in which they lived but held an anomalous status in the racial hierarchy of the day.  Inhabiting this place in between made their ambiguous and incongruent status one of the most talked about “problems” of the first half of the nineteenth century, yet their story has been largely overshadowed by the harsh story of slavery.