I’ve posted this before but..
My son lived in S Virginia for his first job for a few years, Danville. Most people don’t know they were briefly the States (south’s?) capital for a few months. After Richmond fell.
Anyway a lot of the states records were taken there and are in a museum now. I saw them.
One of the thick ledgers was a slave owners data book. It listed all Slave owners in Virginia and even classified them by gender, age, wealth and yes …RACE.
You guessed it! A few hundred were black. Now those black slave owners in All states total must have descendants/relatives numbering in the 100s of thousands, which makes the whole idea of reparations sort of confusing.
One other thing, about your indentured servants comment. I’m originally from Ky and around Lexington there are many of these old horse farms with equally old stone fences. Common lore has it they were built by slaves which is almost universally a lie. They were nearly all built by indentured Irish. They even look almost exactly like the images of the ancient ones in Ireland.
There actually were thousands of black slave owners. I’ve read there were more than 3,000 in New Orleans. In Charleston, and maybe other places, there were owners of large plantations who were black and rich enough to have the preferred seats in the churches. And don’t forget about the Indians. They were slave owners too.
That black slave owners book must be interesting in terms of sex and age of the owners. Women were not bidding on slaves, it was men. Women became slave owners when their husbands died.
There’s a story about one woman in New Orleans who was a slave owner. She was black and her husband was a slave. For some reason she was unhappy with him and she sold him. Whether that story is true, who knows.