According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860 there were nearly 4.5 million Negroes in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states. Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. The country's leading African American historian, Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, records that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.
To return to the census figures quoted above, this 28 percent is certainly impressive when compared to less than 1.4 percent of all American whites and less than 4.8 percent of southern whites. The statistics show that, when free, blacks disproportionately became slave masters.
The majority of slaveholders, white and black, owned only one to five slaves. More often than not, and contrary to a century and a half of bullwhips-on-tortured-backs propaganda, black and white masters worked and ate alongside their charges; be it in house, field or workshop. The few individuals who owned 50 or more slaves were confined to the top one percent, and have been defined as slave magnates.
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).
In Charleston, South Carolina in 1860 125 free Negroes owned slaves; six of them owning 10 or more. Of the $1.5 million in taxable property owned by free Negroes in Charleston, more than $300,000 represented slave holdings (5). In North Carolina 69 free Negroes were slave owners (6).
In 1860 William Ellison was South Carolina's largest Negro slaveowner. In Black Masters. A Free Family of Color in the Old South, authors Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roak write a sympathetic account of Ellison's life. From Ellison's birth as a slave to his death at 71, the authors attempt to provide justification, based on their own speculation, as to why a former slave would become a magnate slave master.
At birth he was given the name April. A common practice among slaves of the period was to name a child after the day or month of his or her birth. Between 1800 and 1802 April was purchased by a white slave-owner named William Ellison. Apprenticed at 12, he was taught the trades of carpentry, blacksmithing and machining, as well as how to read, write, cipher and do basic bookkeeping.
On June 8, 1816, William Ellison appeared before a magistrate (with five local freeholders as supporting witnesses) to gain permission to free April, now 26 years of age. In 1800 the South Carolina legislature had set out in detail the procedures for manumission. To end the practice of freeing unruly slaves of "bad or depraved" character and those who "from age or infirmity" were incapacitated, the state required that an owner testify under oath to the good character of the slave he sought to free. Also required was evidence of the slave's "ability to gain a livelihood in an honest way."
Although lawmakers of the time could not envision the incredibly vast public welfare structures of a later age, these stipulations became law in order to prevent slaveholders from freeing individuals who would become a burden on the general public.
Interestingly, considering today's accounts of life under slavery, authors Johnson and Roak report instances where free Negroes petitioned to be allowed to become slaves; this because they were unable to support themselves.
Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (University Press of Virginia-1995) was written by Ervin L. Jordan Jr., an African-American and assistant professor and associate curator of the Special Collections Department, University of Virginia library. He wrote: "One of the more curious aspects of the free black existence in Virginia was their ownership of slaves. Black slave masters owned members of their family and freed them in their wills. Free blacks were encouraged to sell themselves into slavery and had the right to choose their owner through a lengthy court procedure."
In 1816, shortly after his manumission, April moved to Stateburg. Initially he hired slave workers from local owners. When in 1817 he built a gin for Judge Thomas Watries, he credited the judge nine dollars "for hire of carpenter George for 12 days." By 1820 he had purchased two adult males to work in his shop (7). In fewer than four years after being freed, April demonstrated that he had no problem perpetuating an institution he had been released from. He also achieved greater monetary success than most white people of the period.
On June 20, 1820, April appeared in the Sumter District courthouse in Sumterville. Described in court papers submitted by his attorney as a "freed yellow man of about 29 years of age," he requested a name change because it "would yet greatly advance his interest as a tradesman." A new name would also "save him and his children from degradation and contempt which the minds of some do and will attach to the name April." Because "of the kindness" of his former master and as a "Mark of gratitude and respect for him" April asked that his name be changed to William Ellison. His request was granted.
In time the black Ellison family joined the predominantly white Episcopalian church. On August 6, 1824 he was allowed to put a family bench on the first floor, among those of the wealthy white families. Other blacks, free and slave, and poor whites sat in the balcony. Another wealthy Negro family would later join the first floor worshippers.
Between 1822 and the mid-1840s, Ellison gradually built a small empire, acquiring slaves in increasing numbers. He became one of South Carolina's major cotton gin manufacturers, selling his machines as far away as Mississippi. From February 1817 until the War Between the States commenced, his business advertisements appeared regularly in newspapers across the state. These included the Camden Gazette, the Sumter Southern Whig and the Black River Watchman.
Ellison was so successful, due to his utilization of cheap slave labor, that many white competitors went out of business. Such situations discredit impressions that whites dealt only with other whites. Where money was involved, it was apparent that neither Ellison's race or former status were considerations.
And they fought the north to preserve slavery. Even female free blacks owned slaves.
4 comments:
"Free blacks were fairly common in the antebellum south, constituting 8 percent of southern blacks in 1840. Most had gained their freedom through manumission (especially common just after the Revolutionary War) or been born free to a free mother. 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. This was benevolent slavery.
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, chosen because it supposedly represents the high point of black slave ownership. 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...
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 forebears 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? Let's define "lots" as ten or more in a household, bearing in mind that sometimes those with many slaves were still benevolent owners. (One man benevolently owned 18 relatives on the eve of emancipation.) 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."
— Cecil Adams
Faith,
Since I had never heard of Cecil Adams, I looked him up. Here's what I found at his page:
"Who is this man called Cecil Adams?
Who is Cecil Adams?
Cecil Adams is the world's most intelligent human being. We know this because: (1) he knows everything, and (2) he is never wrong.
How do we know that Cecil knows everything and is never wrong?
Because he said so, and he would never lie to us.
No, really.
Listen, read the columns. Soon you will agree this is no ordinary man.
What do you mean, "columns"? You're telling me the world's smartest human being works for the newspapers?
We all gotta eat. Yes, Cecil works for the newspapers. His syndicated weekly column, the Straight Dope, presently appears in more than 30 newspapers throughout the United States and Canada. Ballantine has published five collections of his work, a Straight Dope TV show aired on the Arts & Entertainment cable network, and we'll be starting on the biopic as soon as we can line up Sly Stallone.
You're making this up.
All right, the Sly Stallone part we made up. But the other stuff is real.
So this guy - who uses no references in his statistical claims - already knows everything and is the most intelligent human.
I have no idea where the statistics he quotes came from, other than the oblique reference to the 1830 census, which he says is flawed...
So what is your point by quoting him?
Don't know if it's relevant. But similar instition occured in Hatie. Industrial sugar production-rather than cotten- was the primary export of the colony, which coincidentally had the highest mortality and shipment rate on the continent. Several owners married female slaves, and they became land owners on plantations along with future children.
@Stan: is Cecil Adams engaged in claims unique to the AtheoLeft or is that sort of behavior typical for a merely corrupt human?
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