I am writing a book and uncovered new information that put a twist in my subject matter. Are there any serious historians and genealogy people out there that can contribute reference information to this hidden secret in American History.
My thought, although some information says they were “friends” and the purpose was to buy their freedom, is a free black was motivated and fueled by the cheap labor cost of owning slaves.
Also, did anyone ever notice the price paid for a slave? Let’s get this topic open and I will share my final thought with you soon.
Black slave owners were looking for cheap labor. This is not a historic secret to anyone who has any interest in American history.
The vast majority of them lived in Lousiana with antecedents dating to when it was a French colony where slaves were less likely to be held as slaves based solely on color. On those occasions when freed slaves or their children earned enough money to buy their own land and begin their own businesses, then they bought slaves the way their neighbors did.
I have heard that there were a few blacks who owned slaves in Virginia, as well, although that history is a bit murkier. Based on the length of time that slaves were held in the American colonies, it is probable that there were similar situations in the Carolinas and, perhaps, Georgia, although I have not encountered any similar information regarding Alabama or Mississippi.
Oh yeah, it’s a “hidden secret of American history” alright.
I just turned around and pulled from the shelf one of the half-dozen or so American history textbooks that i have next to me. The book is James Roark et al., The American Promise: A History of the United States, 3rd ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005).
If a subject makes it into the pages of undergrad textbooks, i think it’s a bit of a stretch to call it hidden.
Hell, Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the Journal of Negro History and the first really prominent black professional historian in the United States, wrote an article in 1924 entitled “Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830,” Journal of Negro History, 9:1 (Jan. 1924), pp. 41-85.
Woodson’s work on black slaveowners has itself been the subject of numerous reviews and comments in the literature, most recently a few years back in the same journal (now renamed to reflect modern sensibilities) by Thomas Pressly, " ‘The Known World’ of Free Black Slaveholders: A Research Note on the Scholarship of Carter G. Woodson," Journal of African American History, 91:1 (Winter, 2006), pp. 81-87.
Not only have black slaveholders received considerable coverage in the academic literature, both in journal articles and scholarly monographs, but the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction went to Edward P. Jones for his novel, The Known World, a book whose central theme was the ownership of slaves by a black family in Virginia.
Free black slaveowners in the United States could be found as far north as New York, as far south as Florida and as far west as Missouri.
A bonus fact is that in the major cities, the free black slaveowners were mostly female.
Also, as others have pointed out, none of this information has be hidden or secret; although, I believe in the past few decades it has been de-emphasized.
I had the privilege of creating the Wikipedia article on Hiram Young, the man who sold many of the Forty-Niners their wagons. Young was a black freedman, lived in Missouri, and used several slaves in his wagon business.
Notably, he paid them wages of $5 a week, which wasn’t bad by the standards of the time. I expect that most black slave-owners had economic motives, and no doubt some were as cruel as any white master, but I think overall their treatment of their slaves was probably better than that of other slave owners.
Not all slaves were out picking cotton in the boiling sun and doing backbreaking work all day. Some of them were just basically domestic servants that never got paid. Sometimes they got beaten, but regular house servants (black or white) also got beaten back then all the time. I doubt there were many black plantation owners making their fellow blacks do brutal, dehumanizing work all day long, but I wouldn’t doubt that many of them in cities employed black household slaves.
It should also be pointed out that modern concepts like “blackness” were pretty much unknown in the past. Nor was slave-trading an unknown practice in African cultures themselves.
I’d be curious to see actual evidence as I’ve only got a guess on this topic, but I’d wager that many freed slaves would’ve thought of themselves as belonging to this tribe or that tribe, and not owing some sort of pan-racial debt to other Africans simply because of the color of their skin.
Certainly the concepts of “blackness”, and race more generally, are relatively recent inventions, but they were definitely firmly in place in the antebellum slave states of the United States, which seems to be the time and place this thread is about.
And my impression at least is that black slaves or black freedmen in the antebellum U.S. would not have identified with their ancestral tribes, as Akan or Yoruba or whatever. They would have been considered to be “Negroes” by the dominant culture, and I think they probably would have had little other basis for ethnic self-identification–antebellum African-Americans would have had religious identities, certainly (as Christians), and perhaps skin color (in the sense of being lighter or darker), but probably not any identifiable ethnic identity from the other side of the Atlantic.
By the early Nineteenth Century, at the latest, the concept of blackness was very well established in American society.
Before the Revolution, it’s true, those who wrote of slavery seldom emphasized the racial aspect. There were also white indentured servants, and slavery for various groups seemed like part of the natural order.
After the Revolution, white servitude was abolished and slavery came under increasing attack. Racism emerged as a defense–slaves were slaves because they were black.
Of course, the loophole in this argument was that not all blacks were slaves. In reaction, manumission was made more difficult, and free blacks were circumscribed in many ways, such as denial of voting rights except in New England.
As noted free blacks were never prohibited from owning property, so black slave ownership persisted. Likewise some slaves were so attenuated in blood as to be almost white in appearance. But these were small exceptions in a sea of white masters and black slaves, and from 1800 forward the racial aspect was never out of sight.
No way. That would have been true for slaves born in Africa who endured the Middle Passage, but not for those born in America who had no tribal identification. The only possible exception would have been in the SC and Georgia sea islands, where the slave population was more ethnically homogeneous and interacted less with whites, and distinct elements of West African language and culture persisted.
I read somewhere (I think it was D’Souza’s book on racism) that black slaveowners were known to be much more cruel to their slaves than white slaveowners. Some would even buy members of their own family and, instead of free them, put them to work.
Late Edit:
I particularly like this little tidbit of info:
Some well-off urban blacks owned house slaves, and occasionally craftsmen owned skilled slaves to work under or alongside them. *
Now think about it, you’re a free black …um, I dunno, blacksmith You need some assistants – you can hire another free black, pay him wages, and he can pay income tax. All for the privelage of being a free, but somewhat hated, minority. Or you keep him a slave, and assuming you’re honest, funnel him some cash and treat as if he were free. As a slave, he doesn’t pay income tax, because technically, he hasn’t any. Brilliant. You know, except for the whole sold off to pay his debts. Bet that would be an awesome story.
Actually, the reason that some black slaveowners bought and did not free their family members was that, in some Southern states, the law made it very difficult. Philip Schwarz notes that Virginia passed a law in 1806 requiring that newly-freed blacks leave the state within a year of their emancipation. While we might say, “Hey, why would a free black want to stay in Virginia anyway?”, the fact is that this was the world they knew, and leaving would uproot them from all of their family and friiendship ties. For this reason, some free blacks purchased members of their own families and kept them as slave in order to keep the family together.
Schwarz offers the example of Samuel Smith, a free black who owned six slaves, all of whom were members of his own family. Schwarz discusses Smith’s will, which made very clear that he wanted to emancipate the family, but that he was also taking measures to protect them from being enslaved by anyone else. As Schwarz says, many of these “fraternal” slaveowners “were doing all they could to safeguard their loved ones in Virginia.”
Schwarz also notes that, despite making up a tiny percentage of Virginia’s slave owners, black slaveholders made up a much higher percentage of emancipators. Black slaveowners were far more likely than white slaveowners, in numerical terms, to emancipate their slaves. And in some cases, like the Smith case above, they would have freed them if they could have, but were prevented by concerns about the possibility of them becoming re-enslaved if they stayed in Viriginia.
Schwarz gives another such example, discussing Lewis Turner’s desire to free a woman he had purchased. He made provision in his will to free her, but knew that if she wanted to stay with her friends and family in Virginia, the only way this would be allowed was if she were still a slave. He therefore also made provision in his will that, if the Virginia legislature would not let her remain in Virginia as a free woman, his estate would loan her to his nephew, who would look out for her welfare.
This is not to say that all black slaveholders, or even most, held slaves for familial reasons. Historans agree that, for many, slaveowning was an economic decision, as it was for many whites. Quite a few black slaveholders bought into the ideology of slavery as a social and economic system, and felt little or no compunction about engaging in it. Larry Koger’s excellent work on free black slaveowners in South Carolina makes this point very well.
It is here, also, that issues of “blackness” become important. Quite a large percentage of “black” slaveowners in same parts of the South were, in fact, mulattoes. Many of these people had gained their freedom, and the money to become slaveowners, from their white fathers/masters, who had emancipated them and given them financial help. Koger and others argue that some of these mixed-race freedmen explicitly identified with the white culture of their fathers, and saw themselves as white rather than black, despite the South’s one-drop rule for determining who was black. The mulattoes were never looked upon as white by white Southerners, but they did not see themselves as the same as the blacks slaves either.
As for the claim that black slaveowners were, on the whole, much more cruel that white slaveowners, i’ve never seen any evidence of this. If D’Souza made such a claim, all it shows is that, as a historian, he’s a great polemicist. But that’s pretty common knowledge anyway.
Philip J. Schwarz, “Emancipators, Protectors, and Anomalies: Free Black Slaveowners in Virginia,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 95, No. 3 (Jul., 1987), pp. 317-338.
Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995)
Except that, for the most part, none of these people would have been paying income tax anyway. The federal income tax hadn’t been instituted, and most states got their income from property taxes and similar mechanisms, rather than income taxes.
In fact, in some states slaveowners paid taxes on the value of their slaves, suggesting that owning slaves would not necessarily be a very good scheme for tax evasion.
You need some assistants – you can hire another free black, pay him wages, and he can pay income tax. All for the privelage of being a free, but somewhat hated, minority. Or you keep him a slave, and assuming you’re honest, funnel him some cash and treat as if he were free. As a slave, he doesn’t pay income tax, because technically, he hasn’t any. Brilliant. You know, except for the whole sold off to pay his debts. Bet that would be an awesome story.