John Carruthers Stanly
John Carruthers Stanly, born a slave in 1774, was the son of an African Ibo woman and the white prominent merchant-shipper John Wright Stanly. He was apprenticed to Alexander and Lydia Stewart, close friends and neighbors of his father. They saw to it that John received an education and learned the trade of barbering. At an early age, they helped him establish his own barbershop in New Bern. Many of the town’s farmers and planters frequented his barbershop for a shave or a trim. As a result, Stanly developed a successful business. By the time he reached the age of twenty-one, literate and economically able to provide for himself, his owners petitioned the Craven County court in 1795 for his emancipation. However, he was not completely satisfied with the ruling of the court and in 1798, through a special act, the state legislature confirmed the emancipation of John Carruthers Stanly, which entitled him to all rights and privileges of a free person.
Between 1800 and 1801, Stanly purchased his slave wife, Kitty, and two mulatto slave children. By March 1805, they were emancipated by the Craven County Superior Court. A few days later, Kitty and Stanly were legally married in New Bern and posted a legal marriage bond in Raleigh. Stanly’s wife was the daughter of Richard and Mary Green and the paternal granddaughter of Amelia Green. Two years later, in 1807, Stanly was successful in getting the court to emancipate his wife’s brother.
After securing his own and his family’s freedom, Stanly began to focus more on business matters. He obtained other slaves to work for him. Two of them, Boston and Brister, were taught the barbering trade. Once they became skillful barbers, Stanly let them run the operation while he used the money they helped him earn to invest in additional town property, farmland, and more slaves.
Through his business acumen, Stanley eventually became a very wealthy plantation owner and the largest slaveholder in all of Craven County. He profited from investments in real estate, rental properties, the slave operated barbershop, and plantations from which he sold commodities such as cotton and turpentine.
Stanly’s plantations and rental properties were operated by skilled slaves along with help from some hired free blacks. To improve his rental properties in New Bern, he used skilled slaves and free blacks to build cabins and other residences and to repair and renovate these properties. During the depression of the early 1820s it was slave labor that kept Stanly economically stable.
The 1830 census reveals that Stanly owned, 163 slaves. He has been described as a harsh, profit-minded task master whose treatment of his slaves was no different than the treatment slaves received from white owners. Stanly’s goal, shared by white southern planters, was on expanding his operations and increasing his profits.
Not only that, but freedmen created corporations, and the corporations bought slaves, often the families of the stock owners.
Attempts were made to deny the corporations the right to purchase slaves, land or to operate the land in competition with white farmers. The corporations won in court.
Laws in Virginia (and other states) were passed to force freedmen to displace from the state, as freedmen were considered a disruptive influence on the bondsman. Slaves owned by a corporation were not subject to the restrictions on freedmen.
The Jews spent 440 years in Egyptian Slavery while African Blacks spent about 200-years as American slaves.
The descendants of Jewish slaves from Egypt who believe Cleopatra was one of their own, should be entitled to reparations from the American Blacks .