Black Slave Owners
(Quotes from "The Black and White of Racism" by Waylon Allen)

 

"Of course, while Anthony Johnson was one of the first African slaveholders, there were many more who owned slaves up to the time of the Civil War.

 

 Many free Negros owned black slaves, in fact, in numbers disproportionate to their representation in society at large.

 

In 1830, a fourth of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves; eight owning 30 or more.

 

According to federal census reports, on June 1, 1860 there were nearly 4.5 million Negros in the United States, with fewer than four million of them living in the southern slaveholding states.

 

Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans, Duke University professor John Hope Franklin, of African heritage,  recorded that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negros owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negros in that city.

 

In 1860 there were at least six Negroes in Louisiana who owned 65 or more slaves. The largest number, 152 slaves, were owned by the widow C. Richards and her son P.C. Richards, who owned a large sugar cane plantation.

 

Another Negro slave magnate in Louisiana with over 100 slaves was Antoine Dubuclet, a sugar planter whose estate was values at (in 1860 dollars) $264,000.

 

In Charleston, South Carolina in 1860 125 free Negros owned slaves, six of them owning 10 or more. Of the $1.5 million in taxable property owned by free Negroes in Charleston, more than $300,000 represented slave holdings. In North Carolina 69 free Negros were slave owners'.'(11)

 

I came across this brief biography item in an old history textbook while researching. It gives a close up look at a successful “Black” slaveholder in the period:

 

"John Carruthers Stanley of New Bern (North Carolina) was the largest black slaveholder in the entire South. Stanly was a barber who received his freedom in 1795. Within a decade, he was able to obtain the freedom of his slave wife and children. He then turned his attention to business interests that included a barbershop, farms, town property, and slaves. Most of the slaves Stanly owned were field hands, unskilled laborers, and children. In 1830, at the height of his success, Stanly owned around 160 slaves.

 

Stanly later lost most of his fortune. But while he was alive, he held the respect of the white community. Stanly even owned a pew in the white First Presbyterian Church of New Bern. Even though he himself had been a slave, Stanly’s treatment of his slaves differed little from that of white masters. Such were the ironies of what the South called its ‘peculiar institution’.' " (12)

 

Click Below
To Read Additional Excerpts

From the Book

 

Slavery in Early America:
The Untold Facts

 

White Slaves

 

The Founding Father of Slavery
in Colonial America

 

Black Slave Owners

 

Abolition

And the Cost of Human Lives

in the Civil War

 

 

REFERENCE

(11) Johnson, Michael. "Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South. s.l. : WW Horton & Company, 1984.

(12) Crow, John L. Bell and Jeffrey J. "North Carolina, The History of an American State. s.l. : Clairmont Press, 1993.

 

(The copyrighted text of this excerpt from “The Black and White of Racism” by Waylon Allen (Pages 25 and 26). This quote may be reprinted with an acknowledgement that the material is quoted from the book, The Black and White of Racism, by Waylon Allen)