Hello Dan,

21 May 18 14:51 at you wrote to BOB ACKLEY:

 DC> The confederacy was rooted in white supremacy and the desire to
 DC> continue owning human beings as property.

It wasn't just whites interested in keeping slavery.  Blacks did some rather 
terrible things that lead up to even more insidious things concerning slavery, 
even selling their own children.  Many of them didn't want slavery to end and 
contributed to the Confederacy.

From:
https://www.theroot.com/did-black-people-own-...

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Did Black People Own Slaves?

Henry Louis Gates Jr.
3/04/13 12:03am  Filed to: HISTORY

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

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.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the 
director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American 
Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root.

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Later,
Sean

... An honest politician is one who, when bought, stays bought.
--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5-b20170303
 * Origin: Outpost BBS * Limestone, TN, USA (1:18/200)