People think they know everything about slavery in the United States, but they don't. They think the majority of African slaves came to the American colonies, but they didn't. They talk about 400 years of slavery, but it wasn't. They claim all Southerners owned slaves, but they didn't (20% did). Some argue it was all a long time ago, but it wasn't.
Slavery was common throughout Africa, with entire tribes becoming enslaved after losing battles. Tribal chieftains often sold their defeated foes to European slave-traders. To this day, slavery still exists across Africa and in many countries.
12.5 million slaves were shipped from Africa, but only a little more than 300,000 slaves came to the United States. The majority of enslaved Africans went to Brazil, followed by the Caribbean. To put this in perspective, those 300,000 slaves in America made up only 2%-3% of the 12.5 million slaves sent across North, Central and South America.
The first legal slave owner in American history was a tobacco farmer named Anthony Johnson. Anthony Johnson was a black man who owned a 250-acre farm in Virginia during the 1650s, with five indentured servants under contract to him. One of them, a black man named John Casor, claimed that his term of service had expired years earlier and Johnson was holding him illegally. In 1654, a civil court found that Johnson in fact owned Casor's services for life, an outcome historian R Halliburton Jr. calls "the first known legal sanctions of slavery."
William Ellison was a very wealthy black plantation owner and cotton gin manufacturer who lived in South Carolina. According to the 1860 census, he owned 63 black slaves, making him the largest of the 171 black slaveholders in South Carolina. Ellison was known to have made a large proportion of his money as a "slave breeder." Breeding slaves was illegal in many Southern states, but Ellison secretly sold almost all females born, keeping a select few for future breeding. He kept many of the young males, as they were considered useful on his plantation. Ellison was known to be a harsh master, and his slaves were almost starved and extremely poorly clothed. He kept a windowless building on his property for the specific purpose of chaining and whipping his misbehaving slaves.
There were approximately 319,599 free blacks in the United States in 1830. A significant number of these people were the owners of slaves. The census of 1830 lists 12,760 slaves owned by black people.
Dilsey Pope was born a free black woman, and when she was older, she bought the man she loved in order to marry him. Many state laws at the time would not allow slaves to be emancipated, so it was common for family or spouses to technically own their family. Dilsy owned her own house and land, and she also hired her husband out as labor. What makes this particular situation unique is that, when Dilsey and her husband had a fight, Dilsey sold him to her white neighbor out of spite.
Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry were wealthy black landowners who each owned 84 slaves, or 168 together. They were located in Colleton District (now Charleston County) in South Carolina in 1830. Because most slave owners only had a handful of slaves, Angel and Horry were considered economic elite and were called slave magnates. Slaves were simply labor to Angel and Horry, and they considered them property, hunting down runaway slaves and punishing misbehaving ones.
C. Richards and her son P.C.Richards together owned more slaves than all other black slave owners in Louisiana in 1860, topping off at 152 slaves.
Marie Metoyer was a black woman originally from the Kingdom of Kongo and after moving to Louisiana and living there for many years, started a plantation that initially dealt in tobacco. Under Marie's leadership, the Metoyer family prospered, and the plantation grew. Eventually, they owned more slaves than any other family in their county, with the number being reported at 287 by 1830. There isn't much evidence of harsh treatment to their own slaves, but the Metoyers were notorious for buying extra slaves to do the hardest tasks on the plantation and then returning them after the work was finished. This prevented them from having their own slaves do the dirty work or "wear out" as Ms. Metoyer told her friends.
American Indians owned over 5,000 black slaves. Cherokees had around 600 at the start of the 19th century and around 1,500 at the time of westward removal in 1838-9. Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, held around 3,500 slaves, across the three nations, as the 19th century began.
Slavery was eliminated in America via the efforts of people of various ethnicities, mostly Caucasians, but also others who took up the banner of the abolitionist movement. The names of the white leaders of that movement tend to be better known than those of the black leaders, among whom were David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Dred Scott, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Nat Turner. When Congress passed (and the states ratified) the 13th Amendment in 1865, it was the culmination of many years of work by that multi-racial movement, though mostly credited to Republican president Abraham Lincoln, who led the way to abolishing slavery.
Slavery existed in the United States for 246 years. Blacks have been free for a little over 150 years, which means that most Americans are only two to four generations away from slavery. This is not that long ago.
Recall that there were about 300,000 slaves brought from Africa to the United States and 12.2 million were sold into Central and South America. While 12.5 million a huge number of people, would it surprise you to learn that today there are far more slaves in the world? In fact, 40 million people are in some form of slavery today.
40,000,000 today!
The elephant that sits at the center of our history is coming into focus. American slavery happened – it wasn't as widespread as many believe and it wasn't just white people that owned slaves –but we are still living with its consequences. Are we finally ready to face it, learn about it, and acknowledge its significance in our nation's history?
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Shared by the source at Western Defense Studies Institute. It is submitted without specific attribution as it appears to be a compendium of other articles that have appeared in various journals over the past several years. One scholar of slavery at the University of Texas at Austin is Daina Ramey Berry. H/T McIntosh Enterprises.
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