# Black Slave Owners in America **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 26, 2010, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478 "2010-01-26T05:04:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Gary\_Baldy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e9c0ed/32.png) [@Gary\_Baldy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gary_Baldy)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2010, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/21 "2010-01-28T00:36:37Z")
> [@Arkcon](#): > > 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. Since someone already explained that income tax didn’t exist at the time and slaves were taxed by the states, I’m going to add something else. This is not to defend slavery in anyway, but the same scenario existed with white or Native American slave owners. It was cheaper to own a slave or two than to hire a man on. This was actually one of the reasons that racism became ingrain in the South because poor whites had a hard time getting decent paying jobs, when they could find a job. ---
**Author:** ![Danimal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/bb73d2/32.png) [@Danimal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Danimal)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2010, 1:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/22 "2010-01-28T01:05:45Z")
> [@yorick73](#): > > 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. I don’t get it. How is buying a member of your own family and working him/her as a slave any crueler than what white slave-owners did? Indeed, how is it different at all from what white slave-owners did when they impregnated female slaves and then worked or sold their own children as slaves, which happened quite often? Certainly there are any number of instances today of black people being extremely cruel to other black people. I see no reason why it would have been different when free black people were allowed to own enslaved black people. But I see no evidence at all that black slave-owners’\* treatment of slaves was _worse_ than the whites’, and plenty of cases where the black masters’ behavior was slightly to extremely kinder. \*I’m only talking about American black slave-owners. The African slave-masters could indeed be even worse than the whites in some cases, at least in Dahomey and Cameroon. Dahomey and Cameroon kings would use slaves as human sacrifices by the hundreds. ---
**Author:** ![Belowjob2.0](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Belowjob2.0](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Belowjob2.0)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2010, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/23 "2010-01-29T01:52:17Z")
> [@](#): > > 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. Important point. In many cases, the “black” slave owners were a separate class of mixed race people. In Louisiana, at least, they were able to marry the lightest skinned members of their families into the white upper classes, and they never intermarried with the black peasantry. > [@](#): > > 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. D’Souza’s not what you’d call a reliable source. If he tells you the sky is blue, get independent confirmation. ---
**Author:** ![lee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lee/32/7455_2.png) [@lee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lee)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2010, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/24 "2010-01-29T02:41:47Z")
> [@Argent\_Towers](#): > > 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.\ Black slaves in America did a wide variety of jobs, not just domestic or unskilled agricultural jobs. Some were skilled artisans. On a documentary about a house Thomas Jefferson had designed (not Monticello), I saw a report of a black slave who was a master carpenter. On this they read a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote asking that the slave’s planes, which had been borrowed by someone, be returned to the slave. It was clear from the letter that the planes belonged to the slave, and not to Jefferson. I do not recall his name, but the work he did was as fine as any I have seen. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2010, 4:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/25 "2010-01-29T04:25:55Z")
It’s been three days, **TheHonorableEric** -why don’t you hop back in here and finally give us _your_ insights on this subject? ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2010, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/26 "2010-01-29T05:04:07Z")
> [@lee](#): > > I do not recall his name, but the work he did was as fine as any I have seen. Jefferson had a bunch of carpenters. Here’s a database of Jefferson’s slaves, if you’re curious. [http://www.sylvest-sarah.com/slaves.php](http://www.sylvest-sarah.com/slaves.php) ---
**Author:** ![lee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lee/32/7455_2.png) [@lee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lee)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2010, 5:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/27 "2010-01-29T05:23:02Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > Jefferson had a bunch of carpenters. Here’s a database of Jefferson’s slaves, if you’re curious. > > [http://www.sylvest-sarah.com/slaves.php](http://www.sylvest-sarah.com/slaves.php) [John Hemings](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hemings) is the slave mentioned in the documentary. Master carpenter does not give a good picture of his skill, master joiner does a bit better. ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2010, 6:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/28 "2010-01-29T06:14:22Z")
> [@TheHonorableEric](#): > > 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. This is impossibly broad. Slaves sold for fortunes in some places and in others it was cheaper to work them to death and buy new ones than to feed them well (and they did). Many large planters bought them ‘Costco’ style almost- many at a time with a bulk purchase discount, others bought them at auction. Any number of things could make slave prices fluctuate wildly: when Jefferson’s slaves were auctioned at Monticello they brought about three times their appraised value largely because of who they belonged to, while a few years later after Nat Turner’s revolt the bottom fell out of the market in some places. The best research you can do is in last will/testaments and estate inventories of the place whatever you’re researching takes place. I have an inventory of an ancestor’s estate where his slaves ranged in value from $250 for a 64 year old man to $3,800 for a carpenter. There’s no real way to adjust currency for inflation from 1861 to the present, but probably the best thing you can compare the price of a slave in the U.S. in the late antebellum south to in today’s money would be the price of an automobile. You get a clunker today for a few hundred dollars, a reliable transport expect to pay a few thousand, for something nice $20,000+, and from there you can go up as high as you want to go. The most expensive were skilled craftsmen; the master of Horace King- a bridge builder/architect/woodcarver- was offered $80,000 for him and turned it down, though he later sold King his own freedom for a small fraction of that. Or there were outliers of course: [Millie and Christine McCoy](http://image1.findagrave.com/photos250/photos/2008/329/11437680_122767313743.jpg) were purchased for $1,000 cash plus 25% of their income (which amounted to easily 50 times that). (Their purchaser was a very benevolent man for a slaveowning sideshow entrepreneur who gave them their freedom, fought a long international lawsuit when they were kidnapped, and used part of their earnings to purchase their relatives; they remained on friendly terms with him until his death.) In South America and the Caribbean, completely different subject altogether as far as pricing. In 17th century Virginia and Massachusetts and New York, different subject altogether as well- many slaves were purchased for land and crop shares. Most slaves in the U.S. were bought on credit, sometimes with the terms specified at sale that “payment is to be made within 6 months of this date”. (Obviously you couldn’t just walk in off the street and buy a very expensive slave on your word that you’d pay for him in 6 months; you had to have letters of credit or be well known and established in the area.) The most important thing to know about them is that they were the most expensive property anybody could own in most places where slavery was practiced. The $250 old man (64 was _very_ old for a slave) gains some perspective when you realize that the same inventory appraised cows at $5 per head for beef/$10 per head for dairy, or that land in that county sold for as little as $2 per acre if uncleared and rarely for more than $10 per acre even if it was (unless it was on a river or in town obviously), so even that old slave was worth more than a herd of cattle or a good horse or a small farm. The $3,800 slave was worth more than most of the people in the area (that was in 1861 Alabama) were worth and would in fact have bought you a very nice farm with house and outbuildings. Even in 1864, when the South’s defeat was written on the wall, they had value. George Washington Carver, then an infant, and his mother were kidnapped that year by thieves and illegally sold in Kentucky; his master traded a racehorse to get him back (and again he was an infant) and his mother was never found. (He was raised along with his siblings by his master and his master’s wife.) So again, very variable answers. As for black slaveowners: as Cecil points out, most black slaveowners owned relatives and the reason they didn’t have their liberty ranged from the difficulty of a free black person remaining in a southern state to the simple reason that they had a mortgage on them. Of those who did own actual plantations and field/house slaves, in the first place while they existed they were about as common as illegal immigrants who own successful businesses (again, they exist, they just aren’t that common), and as for their cruelty or kindness- blacks are humans and some humans are cruel and some are kind, so just as some white slave owners were inhumanly evil (Delphine Lalaurie psychotically so) and some were humane (George Wythe and several others, including Ulysses S. Grant and Dolly Madison’s father, freed their slaves in spite of what it did to their finances) why would blacks be any different? Black overseers and foremen on the Haitian plantations (or St. Domingue) were said to be the cruelest as well, which is hardly surprising since that’s how they _got to be_ the foremen or overseers. New Orleans had the largest free black population in the Deep South while the biggest cluster of free blacks was on the MidAtlantic- Delaware, Maryland, D.C. and Virginia, so I would imagine but haven’t researched that NOLA and the MidAtlanic would have been the highest concentration of black slave owners. NOLA was a unique place in that there you found a lot of things you just didn’t find in other black communities, such as wealthy blacks (mostly mulattoes who inherited from their white relatives and Haitian refugees) and tribal affiliations and blended cultures and the like, but NOLA is unique in most things. A far larger group than black slaveowners were American Indian slave owners, especially the _metis_ chiefs who were both Euro and Amerindian in their parentage and usually kept a foot in both worlds. There to, some were complete bastards (William McIntosh), others were permissive and humane (Alexander McGillivray), most were in between. There were also instances of tribes who owned slaves communally, while many tribes purchased slaves and later adopted them into the tribe. The Black Seminoles are considered by some to be the [only successful slave revolt](http://www.johnhorse.com/) in U.S. history. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2010, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/29 "2010-01-29T07:37:49Z")
> [@Sampiro](#): > > The most expensive were skilled craftsmen; the master of Horace King- a bridge builder/architect/woodcarver- was offered $80,000 for him and turned it down, though he later sold King his own freedom for a small fraction of that. $80,000? That’s incredible. ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2010, 9:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/30 "2010-01-29T09:16:47Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > $80,000? That’s incredible. He was worth more than that. [Horace King](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_King_%28architect%29) built bridges across the Chattahoochee, the Coosa, the Tombigbee, and many other rivers, designed the hanging staircases in the Alabama capitol and the staircases and fireplaces and scrollwork of various mansions, and many other projects that probably earned his master more than $80k. Long after he gained his freedom and after the Civil War he designed and erected [a monument over his former master’s grave](http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Godwin&GSfn=John+&GSbyrel=in&GSdyrel=in&GSst=3&GScnty=82&GScntry=4&GSob=n&GRid=7061860&) at his own expense; ironically King himself was buried in an [unmarked grave](http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=king&GSfn=horace&GSbyrel=in&GSdyrel=in&GSst=12&GScntry=4&GSob=n&GRid=7061934&) in Georgia until the state paid for a marker a few years ago, and he’s buried in a Confederate cemetery. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2010, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/31 "2010-01-29T18:24:16Z")
I don’t deny that King was remarkable (and profitable for his master), but still, do you have a cite for the $80,000 figure? I mean, $80,000 would be multiple millions today. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2010, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/32 "2010-01-29T19:55:08Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > I don’t deny that King was remarkable (and profitable for his master), but still, do you have a cite for the $80,000 figure? I mean, $80,000 would be multiple millions today. Yeah, i’ve gotta say **Sampiro** , that does seem like an incredibly high figure. I admit that slavery and slave economics isn’t my area of study, but i’ve done a reasonable amount of reading on the antebellum South, and i’ve never seen a figure anything like that. $80,000 in 1850 money would be worth, according to the [purchasing power calculator](http://www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/), the following amounts in 2008: $2,275,328.93 using the Consumer Price Index $1,683,379.61 using the GDP deflator $16,591,515.15 using the unskilled wage $34,520,057.51 using the nominal GDP per capita $451,932,811.24 using the relative share of GDP While i can believe that the owner of King might refuse $80,000 if he really wanted to keep King, and/or felt some loyalty or personal gratitude to him, i find it hard to believe that anyone would have offered this much in the first place. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2010, 8:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/33 "2010-01-29T20:16:54Z")
According to [this Georgia Department of Transportation entry](http://www.dot.state.ga.us/travelingingeorgia/coveredbridges/Pages/HoraceKing.aspx), the figure was around $6,000: > [@](#): > > During the mid 1840’s, Robert T. Jemison, a well known west Alabama lawyer and planter, began to call upon Godwin to contract for bridges. > > The stigma of slavery appears in no way to have interfered in the relations between King, Godwin and Jemison. Jemison may have been one of the many who offered as much as $6,000 for the purchase of Horace King. That seems much more in line with the sort of prices paid for high-demand slaves. For example, in his amazing book _Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), Walter Johnson notes that some women could fetch very high prices in the right markets, usually because they were sexually desirable rather than due to any work-related abilities they might have: > [@](#): > > The “New Orleans Slave Sale Sample” shows prices paid for women that occasionally reached three hundred percent of the median prices paid in a given year—prices above $1500 in the first decade of the [nineteenth] century and ranging from $2000 to $5233 afterwards. Contemplating prices like that, William Wells Brown wrote in his novel _Clotel_, “We need not add that had those young girls been sold for mere house servants or field hands, they would not have brought half the sum they did.” > > p. 113 I asked my wife, who is a nineteenth century US historian who deals with issues of sexuality and prostitution, about slave prices, and her answer reflects Johnson’s argument: that when extraordinarily high prices were paid for slaves, it was often for “fancy” women, with the motivation for the purpose being largely sexual. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2010, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/34 "2010-01-29T23:10:14Z")
Never mind. I hadn’t finished the thread when I posted. Nothing to see here…move along. ---
**Author:** ![Tapioca\_Dextrin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Tapioca\_Dextrin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tapioca_Dextrin)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2010, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/35 "2010-01-29T23:43:52Z")
> [@mhendo](#): > > While i can believe that the owner of King might refuse $80,000 if he really wanted to keep King, and/or felt some loyalty or personal gratitude to him, i find it hard to believe that anyone would have offered this much in the first place. Since the guy was one of America’s leading architects, why not ask how much [I M Pei](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._M._Pei) charges for a commission? I’m guessing several million just for the design work. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2010, 11:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/36 "2010-01-29T23:54:55Z")
> [@Tapioca\_Dextrin](#): > > Since the guy was one of America’s leading architects, why not ask how much [I M Pei](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._M._Pei) charges for a commission? I’m guessing several million just for the design work. Awful, awful comparison. Completely ahistorical, and fails to take into account the very different circumstances, types of projects, etc., etc. ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2010, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/37 "2010-01-30T02:22:20Z")
> [@mhendo](#): > > I asked my wife, who is a nineteenth century US historian who deals with issues of sexuality and prostitution, about slave prices, and her answer reflects Johnson’s argument: that when extraordinarily high prices were paid for slaves, it was often for “fancy” women, with the motivation for the purpose being largely sexual. I cannot provide the site- I remember it was on a historical marker at one of his bridges and I may be misremembering it, or it may be that I am conflating that with the price of one of his building projects. It could also have been that his owner claimed he had turned down that much- a figure that grew with the retelling. At the same point $6,000 would seem unreasonably low considering that the man was essentially less a slave than a consulting/contracting firm with contracts that took him all over the south and probably could earn that much on a single big job. His owner could easily have been employed anywhere in the nation- and remember that this is the era when railroad building and shipbuilding are already making men multimillionaires and the field is only at the beginning of its moneymaking and there were lots of other big schemes afoot. (Cornelius Vanderbilt, for example, was willing to spend almost all of his millions if he could build and secure a canal across Nicaragua [connecting the river system to Lake Nicaragua and ultimately to the Pacific] and did dump hundreds of thousands into the endeavor before pulling out. Paying $6,000 for a man of King’s skills and considering the contracts it would have assured would have seemed far too cheap unless it was early in his career, an amount that could have been recouped easily with one major job. Not to gild the lily, but at the height of the Civil War when Davis’s “Kill any black man found in Federal uniform” order was in effect King, a devout Unionist, was contracted by the Confederate government to engineer obstacles for the Chattahoochee and other rivers to keep river ports safe from attack- that’s how in demand his services were. Considering that an unskilled field hand could bring well over $1,000, a skilled groomsman twice that and a skilled artisan twice that again, and that King was so brilliant slave-state governments knowingly hired him to design and supervise major projects, $6,000 (somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 in USD depending on what scale you use) would seem awfully low. As for slaves who brought exorbitant amounts, beautiful women could certainly bring thousands and thousands of dollars, but the really exorbitant amounts ($10,000+ let’s say- far more than most people were worth) usually had asterixes by them. The case of [Blind Tom Bethune](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Tom_Wiggins) for example- a not only blind but severely retarded (or autistic) musical savant- was allegedly the object of a $20,000 offer made by entertainment entrepreneur (and slave owning former slave) Tabbs Gross ([Cite](http://www.twainquotes.com/archangels.html)), who filed an interesting and much publicized lawsuit against Bethune’s owner after the war and liberation. (In that suit he asserted that he had made the downpayment, that he was not attempting to buy Bethune as a slave but buy exclusive managerial rights but this is mostly likely because to have purchased him as a slave would have been unenforceable after the war.) ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2010, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/38 "2010-01-30T02:40:59Z")
Another reason $6,000 would seem too low: while most of the free population of the south was poor white farmers whose gross (not net) worth would probably have been less than $1,500, the south was a plutocracy and the rich were VERY rich. Natchez had more millionaires than any other city in the nation; Natchez/Charleston/New Orleans had as many millionaires as the rest of the nation combined, and in the late antebellum era they were on building sprees and determined to outdo each other. The onion dome like structure on [Longwood](http://www.sfgate.com/blogs/images/sfgate/sfmoms/2009/07/09/IMG_0160624x416.JPG) outside of Natchez cost about $15,000 by itself ([interior](http://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/2007/LongwoodUnfinished2.jpg)- it was never finished due to the war) and the house itself cost $55,000 in 1861- a HUGE amount for a house at the time. Joseph Davis (Jefferson’s older brother and foster father) spent about $20,000 on his mansion- Hurricane- about 20 miles south of Natchez in the 1840s (it had an air conditioning system and plumbing), and [Nottoway Plantation’s mansion](http://www.khurak.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/nottoway-plantation.jpg) cost about $80,000 in the late 1850s, and there were finer houses still and more on the drawing board that never went up due to the war. Considering King’s reputation as a builder (again, [the floating staircase](http://www.terragalleria.com/images/us-se/usal38184.jpeg) he designed and built in the Alabama capitol- it rises three stories) he would have been a major coup to have, one who could design you the showplace of showplaces in a land of nouveau riche landbarons trying to outdo each other, and who would gladly have paid $6,000 for him at the drop of a hat just to say they owned Horace King. $80K may be too much, but $6K is definitely too little considering that they could have leased his talents for several thousand per year probably. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2010, 3:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/39 "2010-01-30T03:01:59Z")
> [@Sampiro](#): > > Another reason $6,000 would seem too low… Maybe, maybe not. But until we actually find some evidence that someone did, in fact, offer the huge amounts you suggested earlier, a speculation about what might “seem too low” is really nothing more than mere speculation. Appealing to the number of millionaires in Natchez does not, by itself, provide compelling evidence. In the absence of direct evidence regarding an offer, you would at the very least need to show that investing $80,000 in a slave, even one as talented as King, would have been likely to reap an appropriate level of profit. After all, as we have already seen in this thread, the slave-owners were very conscious of the economic value of their property, and would be unlikely to lay out that sort of cash unless they felt pretty certain of a return. Numerous sources that i’ve found about King suggest that his own master, Godwin, had financial difficulties of his own. If Godwin was being hounded by his creditors, even while he and King were engaged in some important and ostensibly lucrative building contracts, it suggests that King’s economic value as a bridge designer and builder was not as lucrative enough to make him worth $80,000. ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2010, 3:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478/40 "2010-01-30T03:17:20Z")
> [@mhendo](#): > > Numerous sources that i’ve found about King suggest that his own master, Godwin, had financial difficulties of his own. If Godwin was being hounded by his creditors, even while he and King were engaged in some important and ostensibly lucrative building contracts, it suggests that King’s economic value as a bridge designer and builder was not as lucrative enough to make him worth $80,000. A part of it was the fact he was an ethical man. He was fully entitled to the entire income from King’s services, and yet he split it with him AND allowed King to buy his freedom (which in the U.S., unlike in Cuba and other Spanish countries, he was under absolutely no obligation to do any more than you’re legally obligated to sell me your car even if I offer you twice what it’s worth). There’s also the fact that his holdings were in Georgia rather than the Delta and were pretty much all agricultural rather than diversified (which was really stupid considering that he had the opportunity to get major great real estate cheap or as compensation when Columbus was being built almost from the ground up with King’s help). And there’s no shortage at any time in our own century or any other of men who’ve had great incomes and yet had constant money troubles. Marc Antony, Mozart, Ed McMahon, John Connelly- all earned many millions of dollars (or the equivalent in Marc Antony/Mozart’s timeplaces) and were constantly fleeing from creditors; Mark Twain earned more money than any U.S. writer in history til his time and pissed it away on moneypit investments while turning down a $25,000 investment in AT&T that would have made him a multimillionaire. Making a lot of money doesn’t seem to be as much of a trick as _managing_ it well, and keep in mind that King’s owner wasn’t a genius himself necessarily: he just happened to have a very valuable asset. It’d be not unlike if you or me suddenly inherited a lucrative construction company and, knowing nothing about construction but also being for whatever reason unable or unwilling to sell it, have to run it- there’s a good chance we’d screw it up bigtime. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/black-slave-owners-in-america/526478.md?page=3)