A must read for all Americans
Dr. Franklin did some excellent research on the Free People of Color in North Carolina. He combed through many archival records and primary sources. Court records and land deeds reveal a good deal about this growing community, though not as large as Maryland's Free People of Color, still a judicious account. With the NC House Records available and many news paper archives online as well as the Family Search on the LDS website and Ancestry.com, a new generation of researchers can continue his work. William Cawthorne, one of the Secretaries at the 1868 Constitution, and later a NC House Representative from Warren County from 1868 to 1872, needs illumination. Mr. Cawthorne used his abilities to read and write to work for public schooling in Warrenton under the Freedmen's Bureau. He had served on a jury and became a landowner. This unsung hero went on a speaking tour in 1874 with the topic being the Union. He wanted Grant for a third term but history went with Hayes. In later years Cawthorne was a prohibitionist in the temperance movement and he raised a large family. I would pair this book with WEB Dubois' Black Reconstruction. It was an era of hope, though eclipsed by Jim Crow, that never died out with the Civil War Amendments remaining and adding power to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and creation of the public school system. NC too had one of the few Reconstruction Constitutions to survive Jim Crow, in part because the 1868 Convention was a mixture of white and black representatives. Dr. Franklin does well in his history of the Free People of Color and the debt all North Carolinians owe to them.
