And the same could apply to the black slaveholders mentioned in the article. New Orleans is the only data given, so assuming it was representative of the entire South, that 28% comes to 104% of free black families owning slaves. Hmm. It would be nice to know for sure how the data breaks down.
My husband tells me there were several black slaveholders in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
The bulk of the “black” slaveowners in the south were Creoles in Louisiana. The French (and Spanish) were much more likely to acknowledge their mixed-race children, educating them and allowing them to inherit. Over the course of a several generations, the amount of black blood in an individual might be small—quadroons, octaroons, etc—but they’d still be considered “black” under the binary laws of the day.