Well, OK. If illegal actions by non-officials are out then I suppose extralegal actions by officials in the south would be next. I would bet money that southern law officers could have found some reason to at least harass and probably jail any dark complexioned foreigner who travelled around with white slaves irrespective of the legal status of slaves.
The complexion of the slaves wouldn’t matter; slaves had as little as 1/16 African blood. Numerous slaves passed for white, the children of Sally Hemmings being famous examples. No, the “white” color of many slaves did not seem to bother Southerns.
And the complexion of the slave owner would not have mattered either; after all, free blacks owned slaves too.
Why do I get the feeling that astro lays awake late at night, fantasizing about this?
As soon as I reread my own post, I was quite humiliated. I did not come close to expressing what I meant.
In some territories and states in the North, slavery existed for a longer period of time than it did in the South – a greater number of years. If I am mistaken, I will eat my straw bonnet. I believe that New York had slaves for about two hundred years. I haven’t checked my home state of Tennessee, but I don’t think that we match that. I would guess that Virginia exceeds New York.
For what it’s worth, I don’t mind boundary hopping to embrace Maryland as part of the Old South. That is culturally accurate.
I simply don’t believe this. Yes, a whte owner could have slaves who were light complexioned but a dark complexioned owner would be in deep trouble for the same thing. Did any free black own white slaves?
My point is that the caste system in the antebellum south made India look egalitarian. A white planter could pretty much do as he pleased. Blacks or anyone with a dark complexion had better “know their place.” And I don’t believe that owning white slaves was “their place.” Keeping the lid on was vital to the patricians, particularly in view of theslave revolts, and I think that having someone with a dark skin parading around with a bunch of white women as slaves would have been pretty provokative.
To expand on Zoe’s point:
The exact date of the first slaves in the Massachusetts Bay Colony is not known, but is believed to be in the period 1624-1629. Slavery was abolished in Massachusetts by a 1783 judicial decision. Total, 154-159 years.
The first slaves were brought to New York in 1626, when it was called New Amsterdam under Dutch rule. New York adopted a gradual plan for the abolition of slavery in 1799, with the last slaves freed in 1827. Total, 201 years.
Slaves were imported to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. The last Southern colony to acquire slavery was Georgia in 1749, where slaves were freed in 1864 by the occupation of Union troops. The last territory admitted to the Union as a slave state was Missouri in 1820. Slavery was not abolished in any Southern state before 1863, and in most slave states not until 1865. So, Virginia had slavery for 246 years, Georgia for 115 years, and Missouri for 45 years.
Thanks, Walloon, that’s an interesting .pdf article. (Once my Adobe Acrobat was stirred into sluggish life by that link, it prompted me to download updates, which then prompted me to reboot.)
The author did a good job of bringing out the mirror-image fascination for antebellum white Americans of Africans owning white slaves. How their own sense of guilt for enslaving Africans produced a fascination with the tables being turned.
If he also had a working Green Lantern power ring, sure.
'Course, GLs can’t own slaves.
Tennessee was admitted into the Union in 1796, as a spinoff from North Carolina. On Feb 22, 1865, Tennessee adopted a new constitution that abolished slavery.
Slavery thus existed in Tennessee for 69 years.
Borrowing from Walloon, we have:
Virginia, 246 years
New York, 201 years
Massachusetts, 154-159 years
Georgie, 115 years
Tennessee, 69 years
Missouri, 45 years
Part of it depends on how you define “white” and how you define “black”, too. A lot of “black” slaveholders were themselves pretty light skinned.
I know that but I have a lot of trouble believing that the white, southern power structure wouldn’t take some action if a dark skinned man kept a bunch of white skinned women openly as slaves in a society that was, as my cite shows, more or less always on edge over race and slavery.
Exapno
According to this site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/tguide/1pindex.html :
No the clearest of cites that whites could not be slaves, but certainly suggesting that whites couldn’t be slaves as defined by the legal code/common law.
I am currently hunting for a cite on when indentured servitude became illegal (for whites, it having long since been transformed into slavery for non-whites)
They probably would. Free blacks were in a really precarious situation in the pre-Civil War South, because they were sort of in an in between place. They weren’t slaves, and some of them were even very successful, but they also weren’t white people.
Here’s a registry of free blacks in Augusta County, VA (the first two links) I’m just pointing it out, because you can see how many of them are described as “mulatto” or “yellow”.
From here : http://www.nbufront.org/html/FRONTalView/BookExcerpts/char1.html
So apparently through late colonial times whites could legally be slaves - although the site also notes that whites were still persons with some rights rather than chattel. I am still looking to see if I can find evidence of a legal change in the enslavability of whites, rather than a cultural and economic shift.
From a couple of other sites:
It seems that at the same time (1670) that Indian indentured servitude was extended to 30 years and Black indentured servitude converted to slavery it was made illegal for an Indian or a Negro to own a Christian.
Still nothing banning white slavery or indentured servitude yet.
By the same argument they would take some action if a dark skinned man tried to stay in the president suite at their best hotel, no?
I think any foreign royalty would be rich royalty first and whatever their race was second. Aristocracy has a way of trascending racial barriers, doesn’t it? I have trouble imagining an Arabian prince getting harassed, much less lynched, for pretty much anything he did in any part of the western world in the past 200 years. If admitted to the country legally and peacefully, they are foreign dignitaries, nobody will mess with them. Any cites on whether any foreign non-white royalty ever visited the American south and how they were treated?
No. Not even in the same ball park as keeping white women. Hell, years later the black heavyweight boxing champion got into all sorts of legal problems for consorting with a white woman who wasn’t in any way a slave.
[quoteI think any foreign royalty would be rich royalty first and whatever their race was second. Aristocracy has a way of trascending racial barriers, doesn’t it? I have trouble imagining an Arabian prince getting harassed, much less lynched, for pretty much anything he did in any part of the western world in the past 200 years. If admitted to the country legally and peacefully, they are foreign dignitaries, nobody will mess with them. Any cites on whether any foreign non-white royalty ever visited the American south and how they were treated?[/QUOTE]
Possibly true. I have the whole history of legal, illegan and extra legal efforts to “keep them in their place.” Do you have any cites of an Arabian prince with white women in a harem being teated royally in the south, or the north for that matter?
Can anyone come up with a cite for how black slaves of a visiting white person were handled? That is, if a Frenchman from Haiti arrived in New Orleans in 1840, would he have been able to bring his slaves with him, or would that have constituted importing slaves?
I have to believe that visiting foreigners…diplomats, businessmen, etc, not immigrants, could bring along their household slaves, much like Thomas Jefferson bringing Sally Hemmings with him to Paris. But I’m no historian and I don’t know where to start looking for such evidence.