Margaret Motes has combed through a microfilm copy of the 1850 census manuscript for the state of South Carolina in order to unearth every reference to a free black or mulatto that can be found there. The end result of her efforts is this book, an alphabetically arranged listing of 8,160 free blacks and mulattos between the ages of one month and 112 years of age. The data for free persons of color in South Carolina in 1850, which spans twenty-nine different counties, records the following for each individual named in the census: name, age, sex, occupation, color, place of birth, household and dwelling number, and county.