Did this actually happen regarding family naming conventions following the US Civil War?

Factual Questions
1

An African-American acquaintance posted an assertion of Facebook that doesn’t make much sense to me. However, I am not well-versed in the subject nor do I wish to engage in an argument.

So, this person says that, following the Civil War and the resultant emancipation of enslaved people, some white former slave owners changed their family names to differentiate from the name their now-freed slaves used? For example, say the Smith family owned a dozen slaves. After emancipation, the former slaves adopted the Smith name as their own family name. Aghast at this, the former owners changed the spelling of “Smith” to “Smyth” so as not to be associated with their former slaves.

This just doesn’t make sense to me. While Black people were emancipated after the war, white people still held all the social and political power, especially in the South. It seems to me that if a former slave-owner wanted to be disassociated from their former slaves, he/she would insist that the Black people use some other name, not that the white folks would tweak the spelling of their long-held surnames.

So, how did family names change when slavery ended?

2

I had always heard it the other way around. Blacks would change their surname to something different, in order to proclaim their independence from the former master. Hence the proliferation of Washingtons and Jeffersons in the African American community.

3

That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

“The slave master who owned us put his last name on us to denote that we were his property. So when you see a negro today who’s named Johnson, if you go back in his history you will find that his grandfather, or one of his forefathers, was owned by a white man who was named Johnson. My father didn’t know his last name. My father got his last name from his grandfather, and his grandfather got it from his grandfather, who got it from the slave master. The real names of our people were destroyed during slavery.”

Malcolm X

Cite.

4

“In the 1930s, ex-slave Martin Jackson explained why he chose his last name after Emancipation:
‘The master’s name was usually adopted by a slave after he was set free. This was done more because it was the logical thing to do and the easiest way to be identified than it was through affection for the master. Also, the government seemed to be in a almighty hurry to have us get names. We had to register as someone, so we could be citizens. Well, I got to thinking about all us slaves that was going to take the name Fitzpatrick. I made up my mind I’d find me a different one. One of my grandfathers in Africa was called Jeaceo, and so I decided to be Jackson.’”

5

This part at least is not too dissimilar from other 19th & early 20th Century ethnic immigrants to the USA who adopted Anglicized versions akin to their grandparent’s or parent’s names in the Old Country.

For sure the “why” was very different. The “what” not so much.

6

While we didn’t have actual hereditary aristocrats in America, they certainly thought of themselves as such. I’d be surprised if the ‘O’Haras of Tara’ changed their names as described.

7

Yes, this absolutely happened and was fairly common. But it doesn’t address the OP’s question if the reverse ever happened.

Sure, it’s unlikely the large dynasty families would change their names. But most slaveholders were not aristocrats with Gone with the Wind-size plantations. It is more believable that a family of comparatively low status might change their name to avoid association with a former enslaved person.

However, I can’t find any evidence of it happening. This might be only because of difficulty in googling the question, since name changes by formerly enslaved people dominate the results.

8

Regarding the original assertion, I’m assuming the person posting was making the claim that people who put Y’s in their kids names like Eryc for Eric were inspired by racism?

9

From watching Finding Your Roots, which has a lot of cases of tracing Black American roots back to slavery, it seems that enslaved people didn’t have family names (while they were enslaved), at least not that were recorded. Married couples might be split up, or children sold off, and having a family name would make that more difficult. So I don’t think what Malcolm X said, quoted above, was right. The formerly-enslaved Mr. Jackson’s account makes more sense.

Also, during Reconstruction, the power of former masters and white people in general was rather curtailed, wasn’t it? I doubt in that environment they would have been able to influence the names used by the formerly enslaved. They could have changed their own names, but (again based on Finding Your Roots) they don’t seem to have done so very often.

I think the Smith/Smyth example was just a fairly randomly chosen case, not any kind of pattern that they had detected.

10

How could someone of low status afford to buy slaves? I thought slaves were used by wealthy planters.

11

Could be. But certainly not always.

In large amounts, but it wasn’t unusual for a small farmer to have a slave or two. Or a middle class tow dweller to have a house slave or two.

Sure, the vast majority were cotton plantations.

12

This might be helpful.

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/ushistory1os2xmaster/chapter/wealth-and-culture-in-the-south/

At the top of southern white society stood the planter elite, which comprised two groups. In the Upper South, an aristocratic gentry, generation upon generation of whom had grown up with slavery, held a privileged place. In the Deep South, an elite group of slaveholders gained new wealth from cotton.

Below the wealthy planters were the yeoman farmers, or small landowners. Below yeomen were poor, landless whites, who made up the majority of whites in the South. These landless white men dreamed of owning land and slaves and served as slave overseers, drivers, and traders in the southern economy. In fact, owning land and slaves provided one of the only opportunities for upward social and economic mobility. In the South, living the American dream meant possessing slaves, producing cotton, and owning land.

Bolting mine. That is the group of people who owned slaves but only had them on small farms, sometimes with just one slave to help with daily tasks.

13

Thanks.

14

I’m reminded of an American soldier in World War II, with the surname “Hitler”. A reporter once asked him if he’d ever considered changing his name. “Hell no! Let that son of a bitch change his name!”

And while slaves didn’t generally have surnames, per se, their master’s surname would have served much the same purpose. If you had reason to refer to a specific slave named “Jim”, you’d have to specify if you meant Smith’s Jim or Johnson’s Jim.

(IIRC, one of Mark Twain’s books had some commentary on this, how a dog might be referred to as “Jim Smith”, the same as any other member of the family, but a slave was always “Smith’s Jim”.)

15

I know this “Smith/Smyth” was just an example to illustrate the point. However it may be worth pointing out that in the 19th century, spelling of names was not always fixed. A person could be recorded as “Smith” on one official document and “Smyth” on another, with the family eventually settling on one or another spelling (or different branches of the family settling on different spellings). It may appear in hindsight as though the family has deliberately changed its name, where in fact there was no such intent.

16

IIRC, for example, Dred Scott was a slave owned by a middle class white person.

Dred Scott was born a slave in Virginia around 1799.[18] Little is known of his early years.[19] His owner, Peter Blow, moved to Alabama in 1818, taking his six slaves along to work a farm near Huntsville. In 1830, Blow gave up farming and settled in St. Louis, Missouri, where he sold Scott to U.S. Army surgeon Dr. John Emerson.[20] After purchasing Scott, Emerson took him to Fort Armstrong in Illinois. A free state, Illinois had been free as a territory under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and had prohibited slavery in its constitution in 1819 when it was admitted as a state. In 1846, Dred Scott returned to St. Louis and tried to purchase his freedom from Mrs. Emerson, who refused. The Scotts then decided to pursue their freedom through the courts.

So he was originally owned with 6 other slaves, then sold to a doctor where there is no other indication a more slaves in the household other than Dred’s wife. Her tale is even more convoluted:

Born into slavery in Virginia, Harriet Robinson lived briefly in the free state of Pennsylvania before being taken to the Northwest Territory by Indian agent and slaveholder Lawrence Taliaferro. In 1836 or 1837, Harriet married Etheldred, an enslaved man who had been brought to Fort Snelling in present-day Minnesota by Dr. John Emerson, a military surgeon. Their civil wedding ceremony was officiated by justice of the peace Taliaferro, who never actually sold Harriet to Dr. Emerson, since slavery was illegal there. In 1838, Harriet Scott gave birth to their first child on the steamboat Gipsey as it traveled north on the Mississippi River, in free territory, back to Fort Snelling. In 1840, the Scott family moved to St. Louis in the slave state of Missouri with Irene Emerson, who eventually hired them out to her brother-in-law, Captain Henry Bainbridge, at Jefferson Barracks. After Dr. Emerson’s death in 1843, Dred accompanied Captain Bainbridge to Louisiana and Texas, leaving Harriet and their two daughters behind in St. Louis. Harriet was hired out to Adeline Russell, wife of grocery wholesaler Samuel Russell, most likely working as a laundress.

So from that it seems pretty common that there was a class of slaves above field worker, who were relied upon as household servants, or even - like Scott - actually manage a business for their owner. That Scott could even offer to buy his own freedom - or his wife’s - suggests a form of lifestyle as a slave far above the common (mis)conception of slaves as simply plantation fieldhands and uneducated physical labourers. That he could arrange the lawsuits to try to win his freedom buttresses this view. History is always far more complex than we think.

(Speaking of Huckleberry Finn, as I understood the character Jim was also the single slave owned by Miss Watson, who freed him in her will.)

17

As I understand it, he was very much the exception, and not the rule, in that regard. In most slave states, a slave “buying his freedom” was not a thing that was legally recognized: A master could free his slaves, and he could tell a slave that he’d free him if the slave was extra-profitable for him, but if the slave was extra-profitable, the owner could still go back on that legally-meaningless statement. And of course most slaves weren’t doing white-collar work in the first place: Most of them were uneducated fieldhands and manual laborers (in fact, in some states, educating a slave was explicitly illegal).

18
19

True. I’m not sure how strongly that education ban was enforced at some times and places, but the 1618 Project notes that fear of slave rebellion (and so, letting them know much) was a constant in the South. It didn’t help sooth that fear that just offshore was Haiti, where slaves did successfully rebel against the French owners, and then fought off attempts to retake the colony.

Technically, slaves had no rights and owned nothing - unlike say, Roman slaves who were more like indentured servants who had no “expiry date” for their servitude. That the owner let Scott accumulate money suggests that some slaves were almost treated as humans by their owners (weird as this wording sounds). Wikipedia says Scott’s previous owner assisted him in launching his lawsuits, and the fact his current owner did not immediately sell him down the river to extreme physical labour suggests a certain level of almost humanity.

But in the end, the legal status of slaves before the Civil War, thanks to the Scott decision, was that they - all African slaves’ descendants - were never intended to be US citizens and therefore could not be.

20

Nitpick alert: 1619 Project.

Searching across Roman rule for 1000 years can yield pretty much any result, but according to the British Museum site:

Under Roman law, enslaved people had no personal rights and were regarded as the property of their masters. They could be bought, sold, and mistreated at will and were unable to own property, enter into a contract, or legally marry.

Mostly, though, I just came in to say that the OP needs to demand a cite from whomever originally made the assertion, because it’s one that I’ve never heard of and can’t find any evidence for, like everyone else here. You were right to ask about it.