NIGGERS FOR SLAVERY
Esclavage: Les Noirs aussi ! (Black people practiced slavery and fought to defend their right to it)
Nicolas Augustin Metoyer of Louisiana owned 13 slaves in 1830. He and his 12 family members collectively owned 215 slaves. Henry Louis Gates
The free colored population of Louisiana … own slaves, and they are dearly attached to their native land … and they are ready to shed their blood for her defense. They have no sympathy for abolitionism; no love for the North, but they have plenty for Louisiana … They will fight for her in 1861 as they fought [to defend New Orleans from the British] in 1814-1815. »
A free black in Trimble County, Kentucky, » … sold his own son and daughter South, one for $1,000, the other for $1,200. » … A Maryland father sold his slave children in order to purchase his wife. A Columbus, Georgia, black woman — Dilsey Pope — owned her husband. « He offended her in some way and she sold him … » Fanny Canady of Louisville, Kentucky, owned her husband Jim — a drunken cobbler — whom she threatened to « sell down the river. » At New Bern, North Carolina, a free black wife and son purchased their slave husband-father. When the newly bought father criticized his son, the son sold him to a slave trader. The son boasted afterward that « the old man had gone to the corn fields about New Orleans where they might learn him some manners. »
Some of them were promised their freedom if they fought. Others went out of loyalty for their masters, and stayed with them in times of trouble. (…) Black men did fight on both sides, » he continued. There’s been a whole lot of credible work done about the side of the Union, but they have not given any scholarly research to the Confederate side. James Eaton (Florida A&M University)
Historians have estimated the total number of black men who served in the Confederate Army either as laborers or soldiers range anywhere from 60,000 to 90,000. Over 13,000 of these, « saw the elephant » also known as meeting the enemy in combat. These Black Confederates included both slave and free. James Davis
Retour sur les propriétaires d’esclaves noirs américains !
Qui, non contents d’acheter et de vendre
des esclaves noirs pouvaient à l’occasion, si l’on en croit Henry Louis
Gates, vendre les membres de leur propre famille !
Et, grande première dans l’histoire de
l’intégration des noirs dans l’armée en Amérique, étaient prêts à
s’engager dans l’armée sudiste pour en défendre le droit …
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
The Root
March 4, 2013
100 Amazing Facts About the Negro: Yes — but why they did and how many they owned will surprise you.
Editor’s note: For those who are
wondering about the retro title of this black history series, please
take a moment to learn about historian Joel A. Rogers, author of the
1934 book 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof, to whom
these « amazing facts » are an homage.
(The Root) — 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro No. 21: Did black people own slaves? If so, why?
One of the most vexing questions in
African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves
owned slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect,
is yes, of course; some free black people in this country bought and
sold other black people, and did so at least since 1654, continuing to
do so right through the Civil War. For me, the really fascinating
questions about black slave-owning are how many black « masters » were
involved, how many slaves did they own and why did they own slaves?
The answers to these questions are
complex, and historians have been arguing for some time over whether
free blacks purchased family members as slaves in order to protect them —
motivated, on the one hand, by benevolence and philanthropy, as
historian Carter G. Woodson put it, or whether, on the other hand, they
purchased other black people « as an act of exploitation, » primarily to
exploit their free labor for profit, just as white slave owners did.
The evidence shows that, unfortunately, both things are true. The great
African-American historian, John Hope Franklin, states this clearly:
« The majority of Negro owners of slaves had some personal interest in
their property. » But, he admits, « There were instances, however, in
which free Negroes had a real economic interest in the institution of
slavery and held slaves in order to improve their economic status. »
In a fascinating essay reviewing this
controversy, R. Halliburton shows that free black people have owned
slaves « in each of the thirteen original states and later in every
state that countenanced slavery, » at least since Anthony Johnson and
his wife Mary went to court in Virginia in 1654 to obtain the services
of their indentured servant, a black man, John Castor, for life.
And for a time, free black people could
even « own » the services of white indentured servants in Virginia as
well. Free blacks owned slaves in Boston by 1724 and in Connecticut by
1783; by 1790, 48 black people in Maryland owned 143 slaves. One
particularly notorious black Maryland farmer named Nat Butler
« regularly purchased and sold Negroes for the Southern trade, »
Halliburton wrote.
Perhaps the most insidious or desperate
attempt to defend the right of black people to own slaves was the
statement made on the eve of the Civil War by a group of free people of
color in New Orleans, offering their services to the Confederacy, in
part because they were fearful for their own enslavement: « The free
colored population [native] of Louisiana … own slaves, and they are
dearly attached to their native land … and they are ready to shed their
blood for her defense. They have no sympathy for abolitionism; no love
for the North, but they have plenty for Louisiana … They will fight for
her in 1861 as they fought [to defend New Orleans from the British] in
1814-1815. »
These guys were, to put it bluntly,
opportunists par excellence: As Noah Andre Trudeau and James G.
Hollandsworth Jr. explain, once the war broke out, some of these same
black men formed 14 companies of a militia composed of 440 men and were
organized by the governor in May 1861 into « the Native Guards,
Louisiana, » swearing to fight to defend the Confederacy. Although given
no combat role, the Guards — reaching a peak of 1,000 volunteers —
became the first Civil War unit to appoint black officers.
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When New Orleans fell in late April 1862
to the Union, about 10 percent of these men, not missing a beat, now
formed the Native Guard/Corps d’Afrique to defend the Union. Joel A.
Rogers noted this phenomenon in his 100 Amazing Facts: « The Negro
slave-holders, like the white ones, fought to keep their chattels in the
Civil War. » Rogers also notes that some black men, including those in
New Orleans at the outbreak of the War, « fought to perpetuate
slavery. »
How Many Slaves Did Blacks Own?
So what do the actual numbers of black
slave owners and their slaves tell us? In 1830, the year most carefully
studied by Carter G. Woodson, about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black
population was free. Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves,
out of a total of 2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so
the numbers of slaves owned by black people over all was quite small by
comparison with the number owned by white people. In his essay, » ‘The
Known World’ of Free Black Slaveholders, » Thomas J. Pressly, using
Woodson’s statistics, calculated that 54 (or about 1 percent) of these
black slave owners in 1830 owned between 20 and 84 slaves; 172 (about 4
percent) owned between 10 to 19 slaves; and 3,550 (about 94 percent)
each owned between 1 and 9 slaves. Crucially, 42 percent owned just one
slave.
Pressly also shows that the percentage of
free black slave owners as the total number of free black heads of
families was quite high in several states, namely 43 percent in South
Carolina, 40 percent in Louisiana, 26 percent in Mississippi, 25 percent
in Alabama and 20 percent in Georgia. So why did these free black
people own these slaves?
It is reasonable to assume that the 42
percent of the free black slave owners who owned just one slave probably
owned a family member to protect that person, as did many of the other
black slave owners who owned only slightly larger numbers of slaves. As
Woodson put it in 1924′s Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United
States in 1830, « The census records show that the majority of the Negro
owners of slaves were such from the point of view of philanthropy. In
many instances the husband purchased the wife or vice versa … Slaves of
Negroes were in some cases the children of a free father who had
purchased his wife. If he did not thereafter emancipate the mother, as
so many such husbands failed to do, his own children were born his
slaves and were thus reported to the numerators. »
Moreover, Woodson explains, « Benevolent
Negroes often purchased slaves to make their lot easier by granting them
their freedom for a nominal sum, or by permitting them to work it out
on liberal terms. » In other words, these black slave-owners, the clear
majority, cleverly used the system of slavery to protect their loved
ones. That’s the good news.
But not all did, and that is the bad
news. Halliburton concludes, after examining the evidence, that « it
would be a serious mistake to automatically assume that free blacks
owned their spouse or children only for benevolent purposes. » Woodson
himself notes that a « small number of slaves, however, does not always
signify benevolence on the part of the owner. » And John Hope Franklin
notes that in North Carolina, « Without doubt, there were those who
possessed slaves for the purpose of advancing their [own] well-being …
these Negro slaveholders were more interested in making their farms or
carpenter-shops ‘pay’ than they were in treating their slaves
humanely. » For these black slaveholders, he concludes, « there was some
effort to conform to the pattern established by the dominant
slaveholding group within the State in the effort to elevate themselves
to a position of respect and privilege. » In other words, most black
slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but far too
many turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for
profit.
Who Were These Black Slave Owners?
If we were compiling a « Rogues Gallery of Black History, » the following free black slaveholders would be in it:
John Carruthers Stanly — born a slave in
Craven County, N.C., the son of an Igbo mother and her master, John
Wright Stanly — became an extraordinarily successful barber and
speculator in real estate in New Bern. As Loren Schweninger points out
in Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915, by the early 1820s,
Stanly owned three plantations and 163 slaves, and even hired three
white overseers to manage his property! He fathered six children with a
slave woman named Kitty, and he eventually freed them. Stanly lost his
estate when a loan for $14,962 he had co-signed with his white half
brother, John, came due. After his brother’s stroke, the loan was
Stanly’s sole responsibility, and he was unable to pay it.
William Ellison’s fascinating story is
told by Michael Johnson and James L. Roark in their book, Black Masters:
A Free Family of Color in the Old South. At his death on the eve of the
Civil War, Ellison was wealthier than nine out of 10 white people in
South Carolina. He was born in 1790 as a slave on a plantation in the
Fairfield District of the state, far up country from Charleston. In
1816, at the age of 26, he bought his own freedom, and soon bought his
wife and their child. In 1822, he opened his own cotton gin, and soon
became quite wealthy. By his death in 1860, he owned 900 acres of land
and 63 slaves. Not one of his slaves was allowed to purchase his or her
own freedom.
Louisiana, as we have seen, was its own
bizarre world of color, class, caste and slavery. By 1830, in Louisiana,
several black people there owned a large number of slaves, including
the following: In Pointe Coupee Parish alone, Sophie Delhonde owned 38
slaves; Lefroix Decuire owned 59 slaves; Antoine Decuire owned 70
slaves; Leandre Severin owned 60 slaves; and Victor Duperon owned 10. In
St. John the Baptist Parish, Victoire Deslondes owned 52 slaves; in
Plaquemine Brule, Martin Donatto owned 75 slaves; in Bayou Teche, Jean
B. Muillion owned 52 slaves; Martin Lenormand in St. Martin Parish owned
44 slaves; Verret Polen in West Baton Rouge Parish owned 69 slaves;
Francis Jerod in Washita Parish owned 33 slaves; and Cecee McCarty in
the Upper Suburbs of New Orleans owned 32 slaves. Incredibly, the 13
members of the Metoyer family in Natchitoches Parish — including Nicolas
Augustin Metoyer, pictured — collectively owned 215 slaves.
Antoine Dubuclet and his wife Claire
Pollard owned more than 70 slaves in Iberville Parish when they married.
According to Thomas Clarkin, by 1864, in the midst of the Civil War,
they owned 100 slaves, worth $94,700. During Reconstruction, he became
the state’s first black treasurer, serving between 1868 and 1878.
Andrew Durnford was a sugar planter and a
physician who owned the St. Rosalie plantation, 33 miles south of New
Orleans. In the late 1820s, David O. Whitten tells us, he paid $7,000
for seven male slaves, five females and two children. He traveled all
the way to Virginia in the 1830s and purchased 24 more. Eventually, he
would own 77 slaves. When a fellow Creole slave owner liberated 85 of
his slaves and shipped them off to Liberia, Durnford commented that he
couldn’t do that, because « self interest is too strongly rooted in the
bosom of all that breathes the American atmosphere. »
It would be a mistake to think that large
black slaveholders were only men. In 1830, in Louisiana, the
aforementioned Madame Antoine Dublucet owned 44 slaves, and Madame
Ciprien Ricard owned 35 slaves, Louise Divivier owned 17 slaves,
Genevieve Rigobert owned 16 slaves and Rose Lanoix and Caroline Miller
both owned 13 slaves, while over in Georgia, Betsey Perry owned 25
slaves. According to Johnson and Roark, the wealthiest black person in
Charleston, S.C., in 1860 was Maria Weston, who owned 14 slaves and
property valued at more than $40,000, at a time when the average white
man earned about $100 a year. (The city’s largest black slaveholders,
though, were Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry, both of whom owned 84
slaves.)
In Savannah, Ga., between 1823 and 1828,
according to Betty Wood’s Gender, Race, and Rank in a Revolutionary Age,
Hannah Leion owned nine slaves, while the largest slaveholder in 1860
was Ciprien Ricard, who had a sugarcane plantation in Louisiana and
owned 152 slaves with her son, Pierre — many more that the 35 she owned
in 1830. According to economic historian Stanley Engerman, « In
Charleston, South Carolina about 42 percent of free blacks owned slaves
in 1850, and about 64 percent of these slaveholders were women. » Greed,
in other words, was gender-blind.
Why They Owned Slaves
These men and women, from William Stanly
to Madame Ciprien Ricard, were among the largest free Negro
slaveholders, and their motivations were neither benevolent nor
philanthropic. One would be hard-pressed to account for their ownership
of such large numbers of slaves except as avaricious, rapacious,
acquisitive and predatory.
But lest we romanticize all of those
small black slave owners who ostensibly purchased family members only
for humanitarian reasons, even in these cases the evidence can be
problematic. Halliburton, citing examples from an essay in the North
American Review by Calvin Wilson in 1905, presents some hair-raising
challenges to the idea that black people who owned their own family
members always treated them well:
A free black in Trimble County, Kentucky,
» … sold his own son and daughter South, one for $1,000, the other for
$1,200. » … A Maryland father sold his slave children in order to
purchase his wife. A Columbus, Georgia, black woman — Dilsey Pope —
owned her husband. « He offended her in some way and she sold him … »
Fanny Canady of Louisville, Kentucky, owned her husband Jim — a drunken
cobbler — whom she threatened to « sell down the river. » At New Bern,
North Carolina, a free black wife and son purchased their slave
husband-father. When the newly bought father criticized his son, the son
sold him to a slave trader. The son boasted afterward that « the old
man had gone to the corn fields about New Orleans where they might learn
him some manners. »
Carter Woodson, too, tells us that some
of the husbands who purchased their spouses « were not anxious to
liberate their wives immediately. They considered it advisable to put
them on probation for a few years, and if they did not find them
satisfactory they would sell their wives as other slave holders disposed
of Negroes. » He then relates the example of a black man, a shoemaker
in Charleston, S.C., who purchased his wife for $700. But « on finding
her hard to please, he sold her a few months thereafter for $750,
gaining $50 by the transaction. »
Most of us will find the news that some
black people bought and sold other black people for profit quite
distressing, as well we should. But given the long history of class
divisions in the black community, which Martin R. Delany as early as the
1850s described as « a nation within a nation, » and given the role of
African elites in the long history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade,
perhaps we should not be surprised that we can find examples throughout
black history of just about every sort of human behavior, from the most
noble to the most heinous, that we find in any other people’s history.
The good news, scholars agree, is that by
1860 the number of free blacks owning slaves had markedly decreased
from 1830. In fact, Loren Schweninger concludes that by the eve of the
Civil War, « the phenomenon of free blacks owning slaves had nearly
disappeared » in the Upper South, even if it had not in places such as
Louisiana in the Lower South. Nevertheless, it is a very sad aspect of
African-American history that slavery sometimes could be a colorblind
affair, and that the evil business of owning another human being could
manifest itself in both males and females, and in black as well as
white.
As always, you can find more « Amazing Facts About the Negro » on The Root, and check back each week as we count to 100.
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