Freeman is one who has inherited the full privileges and immunities of citizenship; freedman, one who has been delivered from the restraints of bondage, but who, usually, is not placed in a position of full social or even political equality with him who was born free. In old Rome, indeed, the equivalent for freeman (liber homo) comprehended all classes of those who were not slaves; but the distinction here pointed out was preserved by the application of the term ingenuus to him who was born free, and of libertinus to him who, being born in servitude, was emancipated. As the organisation of Roman society survived the convulsions of the middle ages to a far greater extent in the towns than in the landward districts, where the institutions of Fendalism (q.v.) almost entirely superseded it, it is in the borough and other municipal corporations that we still find freemen, or persons inheriting or acquiring by adoption, purchase, or apprenticeship the rights of citizenship. In Anglo-Saxon England the freemen were divided into Ceorls (q.v.) and Eorls (see EARLS). See BOROUGH, BURGESS, CITY, SLAVERY. In the United States the term freedmen was used of the coloured people emancipated by the civil war. The duty of caring for those helpless people, finding them work, organising education, and preparing them for the privileges of freedom was thrown on the war department; and in 1865 an act of congress created in that department the bureau commonly known as the 'Freedmen's Bureau,' whose duties practically ceased in 1870. The founding of several seminaries for coloured persons, such as Howard University and Fisk University, was a permanent result of its work.
FREEMAN'S ROLL.—By the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 it was provided that every person who, if the act had not passed, would, as a burgess or freeman, have enjoyed, or might have acquired, the right of voting in the election of members of parliament was to be entitled to enjoy or acquire such right as heretofore. And it was further enacted that the town-clerk of each borough should make out a list, to be called the Freeman's Roll, of all persons admitted burgesses or freemen, for the purpose of such reserved rights as aforesaid, as distinguished from the burgesses newly created by the act, and entitled to the rights which it newly conferred; these last were to be entered on another roll, to be called the Burgess Roll. See BURGESS.