Definition
A racial designation used in American law, particularly throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to identify persons of Black African descent. Courts and legislatures employed the phrase "colored man" (and equivalent terms such as "colored person") as legal classifications to determine the application of racially discriminatory statutes, including those governing slavery, civil rights, suffrage, testimony, marriage, education, and public accommodations.
The phrase carried no single, technically precise legal definition. Its meaning in any given jurisdiction depended on statute, judicial interpretation, and local custom. In some states, a person was legally "colored" if they had any discernible African ancestry; in others, fraction rules (one-fourth, one-eighth, one-sixteenth African ancestry) defined the classification by degree. The result was inconsistent and contested application across the corpus of American law.
The term is now obsolete as a legal classification. It persists in historical legal sources as evidence of the racially stratified legal order that preceded the Reconstruction Amendments, the Civil Rights Acts, and the modern constitutional prohibition on racial classification under the Equal Protection Clause.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Colored" as applied to persons is now widely regarded as offensive and archaic in American English. Its use in contemporary contexts is generally understood as a racial slur or as a marker of historical and institutional racism.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 defined "colored" in this sense as "having a dark complexion; of the negro race; descended, at least in part, from negroes."
The gap between common and legal meaning here is not definitional but functional. In ordinary nineteenth-century usage, "colored man" was a social descriptor. In law, it was an operative classification with direct legal consequences — determining whether a person could testify, vote, marry across racial lines, or claim the protection of civil statutes. The legal meaning transformed a social label into a juridical status.
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Common Confusion
"Colored man" and "free negro" were related but legally distinct classifications in antebellum law. A "free negro" specifically designated a person of African descent who was not enslaved — a category with its own body of restrictive legislation in both Northern and Southern states. "Colored man" was a broader racial designation that could apply regardless of free or enslaved status. Researchers should not assume that statutes governing "free negroes" and those governing "colored persons" were coextensive; they often were not.
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Why It Matters in Research
This term is essential navigational knowledge for any researcher working in nineteenth-century American legal sources. Several traps apply:
First, the term's legal definition was never standardized. Bouvier's itself acknowledged no judicially cognizable technical meaning, citing a Texas case for the proposition that courts had no fixed rule to apply. A statute using "colored man" in Georgia, Louisiana, or Ohio may have swept in different populations depending on local case law interpreting racial fraction statutes. Researchers must check the jurisdiction's own interpretive history.
Second, the term appears across an enormous range of legal contexts — slavery law, Reconstruction-era civil rights legislation, Jim Crow statutes, rules of evidence (particularly testimony competency rules, which in many states barred "colored persons" from testifying against white persons), marriage law, and property law. A single-source search on this term will underrepresent the breadth of its legal reach.
Third, the phrase shifted over time. Antebellum sources use it alongside "negro," "mulatto," "quadroon," and "octoroon" — terms that often had distinct legal meanings within the same jurisdiction. Post-Civil War sources and Reconstruction-era legislation often substituted "colored person" or "person of color" without necessarily changing the underlying racial logic. Researchers should treat these as a family of related terms requiring parallel searches.
Fourth, the abolition of formal racial classification as an operative legal category was gradual and uneven. Some race-coded statutory language persisted formally into the mid-twentieth century and was only invalidated or repealed under post-Brown constitutional litigation. A researcher tracking civil rights litigation will encounter these terms well past the Reconstruction period.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary entry is brief and notably candid: it defines "colored man" as "generally" referring to "one of the negro race" while explicitly conceding that the phrase carries "no legal technical signification which the courts are bound judicially to know." The citation to a Texas case (31 Tex. 74) reinforces that even courts resisted fixing a binding definition, leaving the term's operative meaning to context and local construction.
What Bouvier's does not address — and what researchers must supplement from other sources — is the extensive statutory apparatus built on this and equivalent terms across American jurisdictions. Bouvier's entry understates how heavily the phrase was loaded with legal consequence even in the absence of a single technical definition. The definitional ambiguity Bouvier's identifies was not an academic matter; it was litigated, sometimes at great personal cost to the individuals classified.
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Jurisdictional Note
Racial fraction statutes defining who legally qualified as "colored" varied substantially by state. Louisiana developed an especially elaborate system distinguishing gradations of mixed-race ancestry. Southern states generally applied hypodescent rules (any African ancestry made a person legally "colored"), while some Northern states applied fraction thresholds. No federal statutory definition of "colored man" controlled state classifications during the period of heaviest use.
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