Did Black People Own Slaves? 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro: Yes -- but why they did and how many they owned will surprise you. One of the most vexing questions in African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves owned slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect, is yes, of course; some free black people in this country bought and sold other black people, and did so at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the Civil War. For me, the really fascinating questions about black slave-owning are how many black "masters" were involved, how many slaves did they own and why did they own slaves? The answers to these questions are complex, and historians have been arguing for some time over whether free blacks purchased family members as slaves in order to protect them -- motivated, on the one hand, by benevolence and philanthropy, as historian Carter G. Woodson put it, or whether, on the other hand, they purchased other black people "as an act of exploitation," primarily to exploit their free labor for profit, just as white slave owners did. The evidence shows that, unfortunately, both things are true. The great African-American historian, John Hope Franklin, states this clearly: "The majority of Negro owners of slaves had some personal interest in their property." But, he admits, "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." 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. And for a time, free black people could even "own" the services of white indentured servants in Virginia as well. Free blacks owned slaves in Boston by 1724 and in Connecticut by 1783; by 1790, 48 black people in Maryland owned 143 slaves. One particularly notorious black Maryland farmer named Nat Butler "regularly purchased and sold Negroes for the Southern trade," Halliburton wrote More...
In 1924 the Research Department of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History completed a study of the free Negro slave owners found in the 1830 U. S. Federal Census. The study found that there were 3,777 Negro slave owners in the United States. Ownership may have meant the purchase of a spouse, an individual's children, or other relatives who were not emancipated. Ownership was also an investment: purchased children and adults may or may not have been given the opportunity to work off their purchase price in exchange for their freedom. A History of World Societies documents a total of 6,000 Negro slave owners in the U.S. for the year 1840 [p. 846]. The 1850 and 1860 Slave Schedules do not identify slave owners by race; the individual names of slave owners must be searched in the U.S. Federal Census to identify the individual's race. For more see the Research Department's article, "Free Negro owners of slaves in the United States in 1830," The Journal of Negro History, vol. 9, no. 1 (Jan., 1924), pp. 41-85; A History of World Societies, by J. P. McKay, et al. [2006]; and A History of Blacks in Kentucky, by M. B. Lucas. http://www.uky.edu/Libraries/NKAA/record.php?note_id=2080
