Did Black People Own Slaves?
100 Amazing Facts About the Negro: Yes — but why they did and how many they owned will surprise you.
By: Henry Louis Gates Jr. | Posted: March 4, 2013 at 12:03 AM

Nicolas Augustin Metoyer of Louisiana owned 13 slaves in 1830. He and his 12 family members collectively owned 215 slaves.
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.

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.

1. You can’t dwell on what went wrong forever. Eventually you have to accept the past, the mistakes that came with it, and do what’s needed to make things right. Even if that means letting go of something that was once special to you. Just because it didn’t work out one time doesn’t mean things have to go bad forever.

2. Stop giving everything you have to offer to people who have nothing to offer in return. It’s important to be equally yoked and have balance. If you’re big on communication, you need somebody who knows how to express themselves. If they aren’t willing and capable to exceed or match the effort you put in, then you’re wasting your time with them.

3. If there are no risks, then there will be no rewards. Pleasure is only pleasure because you understand pain. Take chances on love. The only lessons that hurt forever are the ones we refuse to learn from. If you want the reward of a “happily ever after” then you haveto risk being emotionally uncomfortable now. Have the hope and faith to allow something to be new for you again. Believe in the strength of your heart.

4. You can’t control everything and you don’t have to. When you allow things to happen naturally, they tend to happen better and to last longer. Stop thinking that being in controlwill protect you from getting hurt because it won’t; all it will do is limit your happiness and confuse you emotionally. If you feel the need to control it then that means you don’t trust it, and if you don’t trust it then that means you aren’t ready to have it.

5. Believe that “better” is possible for you. Not everybody wants to play games and tell lies. There are some people out there, just like you, who genuinely want a lasting healthy relationship. Don’t limit your future based on your past. You went through all that you went through to learn from it, not to hide from it. Don’t let life steal your hope for love. Pain is only temporary but pessimism can’t make it seem permanent.

6. Be willing to give somebody a fair chance. Yes, hurt people can hurt people but not everybody is hurt. Some people are healed and capable of showing you different, but only if you let them. You can’t start everybody off in the negative and get mad when you get no positive results. Be strong enough to handle things person by person; you can’t put everybody in a box just because you’ve dated with a closed mind.

7. Let go of the people who aren’t putting forth the effort needed to keep you in their lives. If they’re sleeping on the job, then let them miss out. Nobody should need an incentive to value treasure so if you’re a good catch, then be just that, but don’t waste your time trying to prove it to people that aren’t worthy. Understand that just because you think you want somebody doesn’t mean that person deserves to have you.

8. Not settling works both ways. Don’t settle for a relationship with just anybody and don’t settle for not trying at all just because things didn’t work out before. If you know you have a good heart, if you know you have a lot to offer, and if real love means something to you, then don’t give up on what you deserve.

You can’t help who you love but you can help who you play the fool for, so be smarter not bitter. The only thing to fear is being forced to realize that you’re miserable by choice because you’re too scared to go after what really makes you happy.

9. Be patient enough to make it right. Be committed enough to make it strong. Be honest enough to keep it pure. Trust in your ability to make the right decision for your heart. Stop thinking about how the past hurt you and start being thankful for what it taught you. The only people that ever love and lose are the ones who didn’t love and learn. There’s a lesson in every bit of pain, and if you’re patient, honest, and committed to not only learning the lesson but also applying what you’ve learned, happiness and love are inevitable for you.

10. Don’t expect things to be perfect and don’texpect anything to be easy. Even a good relationship will face bad times, but if the two are smart they’ll work with love instead of fighting with pride.

If you want real love, you have to be built for any weather. The love has to be unconditional and your effort has to be unwavering.

If you’re not willing to give it your all, you’ll lose it all, but there’s a lesson to learn in the things we “lose”: Sometimes it takes losing a good thing to find a great one. If you really believe love is meant for you to have, then you’ll do what you have to do to get it, and once you have it, you’ll do what’s required to keep it. If not, then it’s just not for you.

BY @Ibreakdrules.

Jamaican-based lottery swindlers target Florida seniors
By David Adams | Reuters – 5 hrs ago
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Reuters/Reuters – A senior citizen at West Palm Beach Century Village uses binoculars to watch U.S. President Barack Obama during a campaign event in Florida July 19, 2012. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
MIAMI (Reuters) – Florida’s senior citizens are falling victim to a Jamaica-based lottery scam that is spreading across the United States, often involving former drug traffickers drawn by the ease of the lucrative crime, U.S. law enforcement officials say.
U.S. postal inspectors and other officials say seniors are being conned out of thousands of dollars in savings by scam artists in Jamaica who promise them huge lottery winnings, sometimes using aggressive and threatening tactics to bully their victims.
“It’s despicable that these crooks are preying on our most vulnerable seniors who sometimes have difficulty remembering important details,” Florida Senator Bill Nelson, who chairs the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging, told a joint press conference on Friday with federal law enforcement officials.
The scam and other similar lottery schemes may be fleecing Americans out of $1 billion annually, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
Complaints about the Jamaica-based scam sky-rocketed from 1,867 to 29,000 between 2007 and 2012, according to the FTC. The likely number of victims could be far higher as many scams go unreported by victims because of embarrassment or fear of retaliation, the FTC said.
The Jamaica-based criminals operate with virtual impunity due to the difficulty of tracing the fraud, but U.S. law enforcement is cracking down.
“We are absolutely targeting these crimes,” said Alysa Erichs, an investigator with the Department of Homeland Security, saying that a task force is working with Jamaican authorities to track down the lotto fraudsters for extradition.
Nelson and the Senate Aging panel’s top Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, have scheduled a congressional hearing on March 13 to investigate the impact of the scam.
Florida in particular is being targeted by the fraudsters largely due to its large senior population, agents say.
“It’s a population that comes here to retire … The older they get the more vulnerable they are,” said Nelson.
Scam artists using Jamaica’s 876 area code are also calling elderly residents in other states besides Florida, with complaints received in at least 21 states.
The lotto scam has grown so alarmingly that the nation’s biggest senior advocacy group, the AARP, earlier this week sent mailers to 25 million members with advice on how to avoid it.
“Our message it very simple; if it sounds too good to be true, it not true,” said Victoria Funes, AARP’s Florida state director.
One south Florida woman, Mary Kubulak, 78, lost $370,000 after she repeatedly sent cash wire transfers to Jamaica over a six month period in 2011 in response to a call she received saying she had won the lottery, said David Treece, her Miami financial adviser.
“She was living alone and she was really convinced she had won this money,” said Treece.
Known as ‘advance fee fraud’ the calls typically come from phone numbers with the 876 area code for Jamaica, and offer the victim a “service” by allowing them to pay supposed fees up front to handle paperwork such as taxes and legal fees.
It is illegal to play foreign lotteries from the United States, U.S. officials warn.
The scammers string their victims along, often inflating potential winnings and asking for more money to bypass bureaucratic delays. In some cases, victims receive threatening phone calls from the criminals claiming to know where they live, what car they drive and personal details about family and friends.
“They send people here to further harass seniors,” said Tony Gomez, acting head of the Postal Inspection Service in Miami. “These are people who used to dabble in the drug trade and they are using some of those same aggressive tactics.”
Sometimes, after a victim has woken up to the fraud, the criminals will hit them up for more money posing as law enforcement offering to help them recover their money.
Agents investigating the fraud say criminals pay for access to “lead lists” of potential victims names, addresses and phone numbers. “It’s a carpet bombing approach. They hit thousands of people at a time,” said Gomez, often using sophisticated ‘boiler room’ phone bank tactics. The lists are compiled from legitimate telemarketing records that fall into the wrong hands.
(Editing by Tom Brown; editing by Carol Bishopric)