Posted on 06/20/2021 12:51:55 PM PDT by DeweyCA
Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry were wealthy landowners in South Carolina’s Colleton District in the 1830s, in what is now Charleston County. The couple owned 84 slaves each for a total of 168, at a time when most of their peers owned a handful. Their slaves worked their plantation and made them rich. Angel and Horry also traded slaves for profit, showing no regard for dissolving slave families. They were no kinder or crueler to their slaves than anyone else. They were considered “slave magnates” because of the number of slaves they owned. They were referred to as the “economic elite.” They were also black.
Black people owned black people in all 13 original colonies and in every state that allowed slavery. Frequently, freed black people would go on to own more slaves than their white neighbors. In 1830, nearly a fourth of the free black slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves, and several owned more than 30, far surpassing their white slave-owning neighbors.
Yes, black people, frequently former slaves themselves, owned slaves. While it can be said that many black people owned family members to protect them and keep them close, black slave owners also bought and sold slaves for profit. Renowned African-American historian and Duke University Professor, John Hope Franklin, wrote “The majority of Negro owners of slaves had some personal interest in their property. 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.” Franklin also wrote that roughly 3,000 free black people in New Orleans alone owned slaves.
... it’s now about equity. YOU need to pay for what other white, and black, people stopped doing over 155 years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Pretty sure it was the Mandans or Hihdatsas, not the Crow.
They covered the white slavery issue up by proclaiming indentured servitude.
BUT, there was two forms of indentured servitude. Voluntary and involuntary. Voluntary usually meant they could buy their way out after a certain time-3 to 7 years. After the contract was fulfilled, they usually could get out of it.
Involuntary, on the other hand, was pure slavery and most were treated as less than slaves because “slaves” were property, and property was generally valued. Involuntary indentured servants were cost free and deemed as worthless to many.
They were white slaves. Plain and simple. Very few escaped and died as a result.
Ironic that the sex slavery trade is quite substantial throughout the world and especially in America of all colors and sexes. Let's not forget most items that we hold today was manufactured by Chicom slave labor.
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Black slave owners.
I would never want to be a slave, but if I had to choose, I would rather be a slave in America than in Africa. Slaves who escaped from Africa to America were the lucky ones. American slaves lived better than poor free Americans (e.g., Abe Lincoln). They were guaranteed food, nice shelter, medical care, etc.
Then the retort is that the Africans must have been some weak people who couldn't fight of a handful of scurvy-ravaged white teenagers and 20 year-olds with nets and muskets, all in a land with malaria and wild animals they've never seen before.
“Slavery was on the way out too because of industrialization, and was naturally ending”
B.S. 1850 census 3,204,313 slaves in the United States.
1860 census 4,441,830 slaves in the United States.
In 1860 those slaves produced over 5 million bales of cotton. As long as that kind of production could be had by slave labor, it was going to continue to grow.
As far as industrialization, not in the South. There was, as of 1860, only one industrial operation in the South that could produce a steam locomotive. The last shoe factory in the shouth closed in 1858. According to the 1860 census, The value of textiles produced in the South was 10 million dollars, in the North 181 million dollars.
The South produced 37,000 tons of iron in 1860. The North produced 951,000 tons of iron. In the South there were 18,000 manufacturing operations, in the North 110,000.
In the South 110,000 industrial workers, in the North 1.3 million industrial workers.
As long as money could be made using slaves to produce cotton, the institution of slavery was not going to be supplanted by industrialization for many decades after 1860
The largest slave owner in Clarendon County, SC was a black man.
It was these guys - Hihdatsas which I thought were a Crow tribe.
It seems that only the American blacks are ignorant of this.
Before Lincoln was president, I believe either before or while running for a seat in congress, he among others supported the notion of recolonizing the negro back to Africa and or the Caribbean believing they would not assimilate into society.
Furthermore, Lincoln is known as the great emancipator. Well, a letter from then president Lincoln to newspaper editor Horace Greeley stated that if I could preserve the union and not free slaves...I would do it. If I could free some and not others to preserve the union...I would. (paraphrase). It is all in the national archives.
My point...slavery has been hammered over and over as being the cause of the civil war. Although abolition of slavery was indeed on many minds, it was not the sole reason for the civil war.
The South was primarily an agrarian society. The North industrialized and financial began taxing and regulating the South even to the point of placing embargos on European goods because the South began working around a controlling federal behemoth.
Slavery was (is) evil. It is part of our history. That said, at one point there were more white slaves (indentured servants) than black. Irish, Chinese slaves were here as well. So the whole notion it was just blacks enslaved was a construct of the progressives.
I studied the Metoyer family from Louisiana. As my tag line might suggest, I am a descendent of slave owners. I have used the Metoyer story repeatedly to educate others. It’s not all my fault. https://www.lib.lsu.edu/sites/all/files/sc/fpoc/history.html
“To be fair, there were also lots of stories of “beloved slaves”,... .”
I am old enough to remember the relationship between Trudy, daughter of a family slave who was part of my grandmother Nanny’s ‘trouseau’ and my grandmother Nanny, and their 80 years of love and devotion for each other. They died within 2 weeks of each other. It was beautiful.
I hadn’t heard that there were that many black slave-owners.
Anyway, the grandmother heard me say something about "Mrs. Simmons", a white lady up the hill who babysat us when mom went shopping on Wednesdays. She knew Mrs. Simmons and drove me up to her. I think what happened was that Mrs. Simmons and this old black lady somehow knew each other and knew that she would take care of me. I don't remember the age of the black lady, but I did know that Mrs. Simmons was born around 1880 or so. Mrs. Simmons got me back to my house.
There was a lot of racial discrimination and hatred during Jim Crow. However, there was also a lot of love between people.
Black slave owners have not been studied as a part of American history, rather as a datum to American history, and yet slavery as a perpetual institution is legalized based on a case brought before the House of Burgess by an African, who had been indentured in Jamestown, Virginia 1621 and was known as Antonio the Negro according to the earliest records.
Four hundred years ago, in 1607, Jamestown, VA, the first permanent settlement by Europeans in North America was founded. In 1610, John Rolfe introduced a strain of tobacco which quickly became the colony’s economic foundation.
By 1619, more labor was needed to support the tobacco trade and “indentured servants” were brought to the colony including about 20 Africans. As of 1650, there were about 300 “Africans” living in Virginia, about 1% of an estimated 30,000 population. They were still not slaves, and they joined approximately 4000 white indentured “servants” working out their loans for passage money to Virginia. They were granted 50 acres each when freed from their indentures, so they could raise their own tobacco.
Anthony Johnson (b. c. 1600 – d. 1670) was a black Angolan who achieved freedom in the early 17th-century Colony of Virginia after serving his term of indenture. He became one of the first property owners and slaveholders of African birth there.
He later became a successful tobacco farmer in Maryland. He attained great wealth after having been an indentured servant and has been referred to as “’the black patriarch’ of the first community of Negro property owners in America”.
Johnson was sold to a white planter named Bennet as an indentured servant to work on his Virginia tobacco farm.
He was the first black indentured servant, the first free black, and the first to establish the first black community, first black landowner, first black slave owner, and the first person based on his court case to establish slavery legally in North America. One could argue that he was the founder of slavery in Virginia.
In 1651 Anthony Johnson was given 250 acres as “head rights” for purchasing five incoming white redemptioners.
By July 1651 Johnson had five indentured servants of his own.
(four white and one black)
In 1654, he brought a case before Virginia courts in which he contested a suit launched by one of his indentured servants, a Negro who adopted the name of John Casor.
Johnson won the suit and retained Casor as his servant for life, who thus became the first official and true slave in America.
This officially made Johnson the first legal slave owner in the British colonies that would eventually become the United States.
Virginia made this practice legal for everyone in 1661, by making it state law for any free white, black, or Indian, to be able to own slaves, along with indentured servants.
While Johnson is generally considered by most historians to be the first legal slave owner in the British colonies that would become the United States, there was one person who preceded him in 1640 who owned a slave in all but name.
The virtual slave was John Punch, ordered to be an indentured servant for life, though by law was still considered an indentured servant with all the rights that went with that.
In Punch’s case, he was made a lifelong indentured servant owing to the fact that he tried to leave before his contract was up. When he was captured and brought back, the judge in the matter decided a suitable punishment was to have Punch’s contract continue for the rest of his life.
In 1652 John Johnson, Anthony Johnson’s eldest son, purchased eleven incoming white males and females, and received 550 acres adjacent to his father.
There were a number of additional Virginia land patents representing grants to free blacks of from fifty to 550 acres for purchasing white redemptioners.
Like many wealthy landowners of the pre-Civil War South, Sherrod Bryant owned slaves. They probably worked much of Bryant’s 700 acres in Middle Tennessee, an area larger than that of Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage plantation.
The slaves under Bryant helped raise hogs for their owner, who had a large family and was always looking to buy more property. Unlike many slave owners, however, Sherrod Bryant was black.
Most indentured servants in the British colonies in America were actually Irish, English, German, and Scottish, rather than African.
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.
“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.”
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.
John H. Russell lists specific dates and pages of filed court case records in the early-mid 1600s documenting governing laws for black indentured servants, White indentured servants, free black servants, free black children of indentured servants, free black servants turned black slave owners, and so forth.
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.”
https://archive.org/stream/journalofnegrohi00wood#page/n5/mode/2up
You really have no understanding of how the typical African slave trade worked. Captives were taken either during tribal warfare or by small expeditions seeking captives to trade. These captives at some point traded to Muslim traders who had defacto control over the inland trading routes. Major routes led to Egypt, the Arabian peninsula, Madagascar (forwarding to Asia) and to the West African Gold Coast serving the New world. Whole nations and empires were built on the slave trade. Most of the benefactors were black, the controllers Islamic. The preceeding does contain some generalizations due to the variety and extensive news of the trade.
so many of these types of stories. I have thought of writing a book about beautiful stories. Had I written one 20 years ago, it might have been perceived with some appreciation and insight. Not now. We are so racially divided. Not of our making, mind you, but Obama etal have ruined any harmony we had.
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