Some time ago, I heard an African-American author talk on NPR about what inspired him to write his book: During the 1800s, some slave owners in the U.S. were black. Afterward a historian said she’d never heard of any such phenomenon and dismissed the idea as ridiculous. Who’s right?
—Raina S., via e-mail
At one time or another, free black slaveholders could be found in every slave state. Bizarre though this sounds, most had an excuse. Let me explain the concept of benevolent slavery.
Free blacks were fairly common in the antebellum south, constituting 8 percent of southern blacks in 1840. Slaves who’d been permitted to earn money in their spare time sometimes made enough to buy their freedom. Another route was being bought and freed by free relatives or friends.
But some who bought slaves in this way didn’t formally free them for years, partly because freedmen paid higher taxes than slaves or whites. Courts since colonial times had recognized the right of free blacks to own slaves. This gave rise to an odd arrangement in which people lived as free but were legally someone else’s property.
Between 1800 and 1830 slave states began restricting manumission, seeing free blacks as potential fomenters of slave rebellion. Now you could buy your friends, but you couldn’t free them unless they left the state—which for the freed slave could mean leaving behind family still in bondage. So more free blacks took to owning slaves benevolently.
Being a nominal slave was risky—among other things, you could be seized as payment for your nominal owner’s debts. But at least one state, South Carolina, granted nominal slaves certain rights, including the right to buy slaves of their own.
Nobody’s sure how many such arrangements existed. A widely cited but imperfect source is the 1830 federal census. One count, taking the data at face value, found 3,777 free black heads of household who had slaves living with them. If that’s accurate, about 2 percent of southern free blacks owned slaves.
But this number could be off in either direction. It didn’t distinguish between slaves the householder owned, live-in slaves he hired, and slaves who merely lodged with him. In a few cases the census listed known white slaveholders as black.
Black overseers were sometimes counted as slave owners instead of absentee white planters. On the other hand, nominal slaves were often recorded as free. Some well-off urban blacks owned house slaves, and occasionally craftsmen owned skilled slaves to work under or alongside them.
A confounding factor is that some free blacks owned slaves both benevolently and commercially. One scholar claims the majority of slave transactions by blacks in Charleston, S.C., were commercial—but again, South Carolina was unusual, for reasons I’ll return to. An analysis of Petersburg, Va., suggests only about 10 percent of black slaveholders owned slaves commercially, which was probably typical.
We do, however, need to acknowledge a less common form of black slaveholding. Whites in Louisiana and South Carolina fostered a class of rich people of mixed race—typically they were known as “mulattoes,” although gradations such as “quadroon” and “octoroon” were sometimes used—as a buffer between themselves and slaves. Often the descendants and heirs of well-off whites, these citizens were encouraged to own slaves, tended to side with whites in racial disputes, and generally identified more with their white forbears than black. Nationwide maybe 10 percent of the mixed-race population (about 1 percent of all those identified as African-American) fell into this category.
Some of these people owned lots of slaves. How common was this? In 1830, 80 percent of blacks who owned ten or more slaves lived in Louisiana or South Carolina. I won’t say it wasn’t weird, but there were only 214 such owners nationwide out of 320,000 free blacks.
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quote: The Invention of the Color Line: 1691 Essays on the Color Line and the One-Drop Rule by Frank W Sweet January 1, 2005
I
n 1653 Virginia, one of Anthony Johnson’s involuntary African laborers, a man named John Casor, claimed his freedom because his term of indenture had allegedly expired seven years before. He fled his master’s plantation and took refuge with a nearby farmer, Captain Gouldsmith. Johnson insisted that his runaway laborer was not indentured, but was a lifelong slave and demanded the African’s return. Not wanting to become embroiled in a legal fight with a powerful plantation owner, Gouldsmith turned the worker over to another wealthy planter, Robert Parker. Parker took the worker’s side in the dispute, kept him on his own plantation’s workforce, and argued on his behalf in court. The case dragged on for two years, with Johnson at one point agreeing to manumit Casor, but then reneging on the settlement. On March 8, 1655, the Northampton County Court ruled that Casor had been a slave all along, ordered that the worker be returned immediately to Anthony Johnson, and ordered Robert Parker to pay damages for sheltering the runaway for two years, as well as court costs. A few years later, Parker abandoned his career as a Virginia planter and returned to England. Twenty years later, Casor was still owned by Mary Johnson—Anthony Johnson’s widow. What is important about this tale is that Anthony Johnson was also African. His plantation, from whence Casor fled, was named “Angola,” and it exploited European forced laborers as well as Africans.1
Egmond Codfried wrote:
quote:Over the weekend I read some references to Appiah (1992), Malik and Nederveen Pieterse by R. Reedijk (2000) which state that only around 1770 the Black was found to be inferior based on his looks. That only at the beginning of the nineteenth century race was seen in connection to colour.
In my own research: Late eighteen century, pre-revolutionary France, needed 'scientific evidence' to discredit the Blue Blood (=Black Blood) myth, symbolised by a Moor, a Classical African. So all the hatred went just against this symbol of despotic oppression: the Moor.
quote:Blacks and Indians came to own, and abuse, whites in Virginia in such large numbers that in 1670 the House of Burgesses (legislature) proclaimed that " . . . noe negro or Indian though baptyised and enjoyned their own ffreedome shall be capable of any purchase of christians, but yet not debarred from buying any of their own nation." [Original spelling.][73]
quote:"There were many free blacks in the American colonies. They were enfranchised and as early as 1641, Mathias De Sousa, were elected to legislatures. These free blacks owned slaves - some for philanthropic reasons, as Carter G. Woodson suggests. However as John Hope Franklin wrote, "...free Negroes had a real [and documented - my/Alive's words, not theirs -] economic interest in the institution of slavery and held slaves in order to improve their economic status."
The census of 1830 lists 965 free black slave owners in Louisiana, owning 4,206 slaves. The state of South Carolina, lists 464 free blacks owning 2,715 slaves."[35]
quote:In 1860 there were at least six Negroes in Louisiana who owned 65 or more slaves The largest number, 152 slaves, were owned by the widow C. Richards and her son P.C. Richards, who owned a large sugar cane plantation. Another Negro slave magnate in Louisiana, with over 100 slaves, was Antoine Dubuclet, a sugar planter whose estate was valued at (in 1860 dollars) $264,000 (3). That year, the mean wealth of southern white men was $3,978 (4).
quote:Originally posted by alTakruri: And who was this and in which American nation and when?
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: And another thing. I'm sure alot of you are unaware that the first black African in America was a free immigrant while the first slave was a white European!
^^???
We had an old thread on indentured servitude in the first "North American colonies" but I don't know what happened to it.
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