Posted on 05/14/2015 12:24:55 AM PDT by Dallas59
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at theroot.com ...
The engraving in the article is all wrong ..
If that is suppose to be Anthony Johnson (1600-1670) what’s he doing with clothes from 1850-1870) ???
I saw two TV shows to this effect, maybe both on PBS.
One of them had a black journalist trying to deal with how the slave trade worked in Africa. The bottom line was that there was NO WAY the whites were going to go up the river to catch blacks - instead they simply paid the local blacks to do that. It was almost exclusively blacks capturing blacks for the slave trade.
The second dealt with this. Not only did blacks own slaves, some were VICIOUS owners, much worse than most whites. Slavery was far from monolithic and while any type of slavery is clearly immoral, there were places where life was tolerable as a slave, and there were places where life was pure hell, and those places had plenty of black slave masters.
In Africa, he had to hire bearers to help in his trip to the interior. They wanted money and weapons.
As soon as they were paid, they bought slaves, who by Burton's account, were so badly treated it was appalling.
One bearer bought a slave woman and on the return trip, she couldn't keep up.
None of the other bearers could afford to buy her and he wouldn't leave his valuable ‘property’ behind.
So... the bearer cut off her feet so she wouldn't be taken by anyone else and she couldn't leave on her own. Then the bearer left her to die, so he could continue the trip out.
THAT'S how African people treated other African people as late as the 1890’s.
For later
That’s still whitey’s fault.
“I think it would be interesting if we could link slave ownership to Jessie Jackson or al Sharpton.”..........
Pretty easy. If Jackson and Sharpton didn’t have blacks as slaves already, they would be out of jobs. Just think, no rallies to attend, no more visits to see odumbo. What in the world would those scam artists have to do?
Dinesh Dsouza’s last movie actually went into some detail about the black slave ownership across the south. One of them he focused on was a slave breeder which was not very acceptable at the time.
I remind my children that while slavery was wrong, it was a normal part of almost every society around the world in some form at the time. Slavery in America came well before the founding fathers and many of the founders wanted it abolished. America wasn’t alone by any stretch. There were also state laws that made it difficult and costly to free slaves even if one wanted to. We used the constitution as a wedge to undermine slavery and finally, 300,000 white men died in battle to free the slaves.
In addition, there were about 4000 lynching’s in the US from the 1800’s through 1968 and about 1/3 of those victims were white people helping blacks!
When liberals talk about how evil America is, I would love to know what country on this planet has an unblemished past!
There’s a similar history about an ex-slave from the New Bern, NC area that my ancestors are from.
He was a local plantation owner who became quite well respected by the white folks from what little I have read....interesting history.
I knew blacks owned slaves, and yes, whites were slaves to. Slaves is from the same root as Slavics, the eastern European people.
Yup.
It is generally believed that many of the slaves owned by free blacks were family members bought out of slavery.
They were often not freed simply because in the later decades of slavery it became more and more difficult to legally free slaves. Newly freed slaves often had to leave the state, for instance.
But there certainly were instances of free blacks buying and working slaves in exactly the same way white owners did.
Same is true of Indians, BTW.
Funny. 300,000 white men died to free the slaves, led by a commanding General who was forced by law to free his slaves, long after the opposing General surrendered (who incidentally personally opposed slavery)? You’ve been duped. General Grant was a slave owner well after he “freed” all the southern slaves. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation deliberately freed ONLY southern slaves.
The civil war was not about slavery. It was about economic advantage. “Slavery” was an excuse used by some to get low information citizens to support a disastrous war.
Black slave holder bump
Not quite right.
About 1/3 of all victims of lynchings were white, but the vast majority of those were killed for more or less the same reason blacks were. Most of them were probably guilty of horrible crimes and would have been executed if they had been tried.
Not a fan of lynching, but the majority of those murdered in this way probably did deserve to the executed, though they certainly should have had a fair trial first.
One of them he focused on was a slave breeder which was not very acceptable at the time.
Slave breeding, as such, was not a viable business proposition. Too long a lead time. It was, however, a highly profitable side business to the labor you got out of black females. Northern slave states, especially Virginia, made a great deal of money out of selling south their excess slaves. VA could to some extent be called a slave-breeding state for much of the 19th century.
They pretended otherwise, because as you mention it wasn't considered quite the thing.
I think the relevant issue is not that Anglo-American civilization had slaves for a long time. It's that we finally ended it, at enormous cost to ourselves, and then fanned out around the world and forced other societies to also end it, at least in theory.
ISIS is I believe the only "nation" in which slavery is presently legal.
Henry Louis Gates has recently been producing a lot of stuff about slavery that does not fit the narrative.
He does seem to be an honest historian.
Good for him!
A white historian producing similar stuff would be denounced as racist.
The comments are also interesting.
Some try to equate indentured servitude with slavery. While they were similar in many ways, at their root they were utterly different. Indenture was by its nature temporary, and indentured servants were never considered chattel. Indenture was in many ways the same as the common practice at the time of apprenticeship.
The worst part about American slavery relative to slavery in other societies was not that it existed, but that it became race based. In all earlier slave societies, there was no such link.
Romans, for instance, had slaves of all colors and thought nothing of it. Cicero, in one famous case, bitched to a friend in a letter about what crappy slaves those from what is now England made.
In pre-Christian Ireland,”slave girl” was a unit of currency used to calculate fines and such.
Read the diary of William Johnson, a freed Black businessman in Natchez. He owned slaves. My GGG Grandfather was one of his clients.
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/identity/text4/williamjohnsondiary.pdf
Let the blacks that got part of the $55 TRILLION robbed from the ussa economy pay that back...... THE PEOPLE are the agrieved party in this BS discussion about slavery... It’s been long over EXCEPT for the Dem/Libtard plantation free sheet programs.......that blacks willing take instead of bootstrapping... the Obamas are doing a great disservice to the blacks who listen to them and the al sharptons and rev wrights..... every immigrant group has bootstrapped themselves EXCEPT THE BLACKS..... if they dont like it LEAVE... we will pay for your ticket out...
No, the lynchings were of criminals.
"Deacon Jim" Miller (far left in photo) may have murdered Pat Garrett in a paid hit, he was later lynched in Oklahoma for a different murder.
Yes, that's somewhat similar to the ban on free Blacks in Illinois and other states without slavery that some people just love to talk about. That Illinois provision wasn't really enforced very strictly, though.
My guess is that there was some leeway in the slave states as well. If you were a free person of color and owned slaves, you demonstrated that you'd bought into the system and supported it and maybe you were less likely to be chased out.
Another effect of the law, though, is that free Blacks were very few in the Deep South and out of such a small population, it's possible that a not inconsiderable proportion may have owned a slave or two themselves.
It's also possible that the slaves that were "owned" were relatives of the Black owner that hadn't yet been emancipated. As always, more research is needed.
Of course Afflack is a leftist so he has no sense of shame anyway.
Grant had only one slave whom he manumitted at a time that he could ill-afford it.
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