Black-owned businesses in the South, 1790-1880

By: Loren Schweninger

Schweninger, L. "Black Owned Businesses in the South, 1790-1880," Business History Review
63 (Spring 1989):22-60.

Made available courtesy of Harvard Business School: http://www.hbs.edu/bhr/current.html

***Note: Figures may be missing from this format of the document

This essay analyzes the changing configuration of black-owned businesses in the South over
nearly a century. It divides region into two sections-the Lower South and the Upper South-and
examines changes that occurred prior to 1840, during the late antebellum era, and as a result of
the Civil War. It uses a "wealth model" to define various business groups, and then creates
business occupational categories based on the listings in various sources, including the U.S.
censuses for 1850, 1860, and 1870. The article compares and contrasts the wealth holdings
among various groups of blacks in business, and it analyzes, within a comparative framework,
slave entrepreneurship, rural vs. urban business activity, color-black or mulatto-as a variable in
business ownership, and slave ownership among blacks engaged in business before than a
generation after his death in the mid-1840s, Craven County residents still recalled the remarkable
business career of John Carruthers Stanly, an emancipated slave who became one of the most
prosperous businessmen in North Carolina. Born shortly before the American Revolution, the
son of John Wright Stanly, a white merchant-shipper, and an African-born Ibo woman, Stanly
had received an education and opened a barbershop while still in bondage. By the time he was
emancipated by his owners, Alexander and Lydia Carruthers Stewart (friends of John W Stanly)
at twenty-one, he had already acquired a reputation as an astute businessman. During the early
1800s, he turned his barbershop over to two trusted slaves and began speculating in real estate
and slaves. By the late 1820s, he had acquired three cotton and turpentine plantations, several
rental houses in New Bern, and approximately 163 slaves. His total assets exceeded $68,000.
Eventually, as a result of a banking erisis and several bad loans, he lost most of his substantial
wealth, but at the height of his business career in 1828 Stanly was one of the wealthiest men in
Craven County.(1)

John Stanly's career, of course, was highly unusual. The vast majority of blacks in the early
nineteenth-century South struggled merely to survive, much less to gain their freedom and
establish business enterprises. Most were relegated to a life of perpetual bondage; the few who
did gain the status of freedmen often discovered that in freedom they were little better off
economically than they had been as slaves. In some cases they fared worse, since at least in
bondage they had been provided with the necessities. Yet, beginning in the late eighteenth
century and continuing during the first eight decades of the nineteenth, an increasing number of
blacks in the South were able to establish various types of business enterprises. They did so as
slaves and, following emancipation, as freedmen.

For many years historians and other writers have shown an interest in the changing profile of
black-owned businesses in the South. Early in the twentieth century, both W E. B. Du Bois and
Booker T. Washington published works on blacks in business, Du Bois through his Atlanta
University studies, and Washington using a ghostwriter) in his 1907 anecdotal volume, The
Negro in Business. During the 1920s, Carter G. Woodson and his students produced a substantial
literature on the emerging business ethos among Negroes and the rise in black property
ownership during the nineteenth century. Later, other scholars discussed this period in a
prefatory manner while focusing on such topics as Negro banking, insurance, and manufacturing.
Most recently, historians have investigated the careers of South Carolina cotton gin manufacturer
William Ellison, Louisiana sugar planter Andrew Durnford, and Missouri barber and real estate
speculator James Thomas, three of the most successful black businessmen in the South during
the middle period.(2)

But we still lack a clear picture of black business activity during the nineteenth century-of the
subregional differences between the Upper South stretching from Delaware to Missouri) and the
Lower South (from South Carolina to Texas) and of the changes that occurred over time. What
were the most popular business enterprises among blacks? How and why did these change
throughout the nineteenth century? in different regions of the South? What proportion of these
businesses were owned and operated by various groups of blacksmen and women, blacks and
mulattoes, urban dwellers and residents of rural areas-and how did these ratios change over time?
How successful were Negroes in business? How much wealth and property did they accumulate?
And what does this tell us about the values and attitudes of blacks and how these attitudes
changed from one generation to the next?

To begin to answer such questions, this article seeks to analyze the changing configuration of
black-owned businesses in the fifteen slaveholding (and former slaveholding) states and the
District of Columbia over nearly a century. Such a broad spatial and temporal view requires a
few prefatory comments about structure and organization. The essay begins with a discussion of
business activity among slaves. Although scholars have only begun to examine this subject, and
some of the conclusions are therefore tentative, its importance warrants inclusion. The article
then moves to an examination of businesses owned by free blacks in the Lower South from 1790
to 1840 and compares those findings with data from the Upper South during the same period. As
will be shown in the pages that follow, the free black population emerged quite differently in the
two regions, and consequently their business activities were markedly different. The analysis
then shifts to the significant transition period during the mid-nineteenth century-1841 to 1880-
again comparing and contrasting businesses in the Lower and Upper South. The article concludes
with a brief discussion of clientele and the significance of business ownership for black
Americans.

Slave Entrepreneurs
It might seem incongruous to discuss slaves engaging in business activities, since they
themselves were considered a species of property," but several aspects of the South's "peculiar
institution" gave bonds-people opportunities to participate in various business activities. One was
what contemporaries called the domestic," or Internal" slave economy(3) The exact nature of the
trade that existed between blacks on a given plantation or on different plantations, or between
slaves and their masters, or with other whites and free blacks, awaits full scholarly treatment, but
the broad outlines of these economic activities are readily apparent. In rural areas, the internal
slave economy generally took the form of raising vegetables, staple crops, or livestock, and of
trading such products with the master or a nearby merchant. This type of trade had a long
tradition, dating back to the early colonial period.(4) In the early years, cash rarely changed
hands. Though the "regional currencies," such as yards of cloth, cowrie shells, or iron bars, that
were used in the African slave trade were largely absent, the bartering among plantation slaves
probably resembled the trade among West African peoples-the Fulani, Mandinka, Wolof, Fanti,
Ibo, Yoruba, Bakongo, Nsundi, and others-that had been carried on for centuries. (5)

During the nineteenth century, however, the American domestic slave economy moved away
from its West African roots.(6) Some slaves continued to trade for certain items with little
inclination toward getting ahead or acquiring property, but others sold goods and services with
the intent of adding to their property holdings. One group of South Carolina planters explained in
1816 that in their district "negroes have every other Saturday [off), keep horses, raise hogs,
cultivate for themselves every thing for home consumption & for market that their masters do,"
including cotton. On Julien S. Devereux's Monte Verdi estate in Rusk County, Texas, a dozen
field hands used their evenings and weekends to plant their own cotton. "I send you $300 in
gold," a local merchant wrote Devereux in 1853, with the request to have the same distributed
amongst those Negroes of your[s] who owned the Cotton which I bought from them.'17 Blacks
not only raised and sold staple crops such as cotton, tobacco, rice, and sugar, but they also
bought and sold livestock, cloth, clothing, tools, furniture, beehives, dogs, wagons, and firearms.
They sometimes sold their commodities to "slave factors" who in turn sold them to whites or
other slaves.(8)

Away from the plantation, in towns and cities, slaves discovered other ways to engage in various
business activities. Two labor devices of the slave system that allowed them to do so were hiring
and self-hiring arrangements. With the steadily rising prices for slaves and increased demands
for temporary workers, antebellum slaveowners could hire out their blacks for profits ranging
from 10 to 20 percent of the slave's price per year.(9) Contracts concerning clothing, food,
medical attention, and treatment varied, but slaves hired in such a manner could often expect to
earn "wages" for themselves. Once the principle of slave wages had been established, some of
the most highly skilled and talented blacks could seek to hire their own time, negotiating
contracts, making their own living arrangements, and paying their masters a specified amount,
usually on a semi-annual or annual basis.(10)

Even under the best circumstances it was difficult for hired or self-hired slaves to engage in
business, but a few slaves actually established business enterprises. Virginia's Robert Gordon
sold slack from his white father's coal yard before purchasing his freedom in 1846 and moving to
Ohio. (11) Kentucky's Frank McWorter set up a crude saltpeter manufactory (the principal
ingredient in gunpowder) in Pulaski County.(12) MiSSissippi's Benjamin Montgomery, a
favorite slave of cotton planter Joseph Davis (brother of the future president of the Confederacy),
operated a retail dry goods store at Davis Bend, thirty miles south of Vicksburg, selling items to
his fellow slaves in exchange for wood, vegetables, chickens, and eggs. (13) Future Alabama
Congressman Benjamin Turner acquired a livery stable and considerable other property in Selma
while still in bondage. "I [ran] a livery-stable," he later recalled, "and r[a]n omnibuses, hacks,
etc."(14)

In Bennettsville (S.C.), bondsman Thomas David owned a construction business, negotiating
contracts, hiring day laborers (many of whom were also bondsmen), and supervising the erection
of numerous houses as well as several larger buildings.(15) This practice became so widespread
in some areas that white mechanics complained of unfair competition. One group of white
builders in North Carolina complained that slaves were undertaking contracts on their own
account," hiring gangs of eight to twelve other slaves, and constructing houses and buildings.
(16) In addition, the slaves were charging only half the price charged by white contractors. These
slaves worked entirely "for their own benefit." Other slaves established businesses as barbers,
storekeepers, shopkeepers, shoemakers, butchers, tailors, boardinghouse keepers, plasterers, and
blacksmiths. Anthony Weston, a slave who managed to live virtually as a freedman, built and
serviced rice mills for various slaveowners at the edge of South Carolina's inland river systems.
Over a period of several decades, Weston amassed a small fortune while remaining legally in
bondage.(17)

Free Black Businesses in the Lower South, 1790-1840 Despite occasionally successful efforts,
the various legal codes as well as the payment demands by slaveowners made it extremely
difficult for even the most industrious slave business people to obtain "freedom papers." Yet,
beginning in the late eighteenth and continuing into the nineteenth century, a wave of
emancipations occurred in the South. Motivated by the ideals of the American Revolution, and
by the belief in some quarters that slavery would never be a profitable institution, slave masters
freed their blacks in growing numbers.(18) In the Lower South, the manumissions were highly
selective, usually involving persons of mixed racial ancestry, often directly related to white
owners. This, coupled with a migration of free mulattoes from the Caribbean following the
Haitian Revolution, gave the small but rapidly expanding free Negro group a unique
configuration. As it grew-from 2,199 in 1790, to 20,153 in 1820, to 41,218 in 1840 (representing
between 1.5 and 3.1 percent of the total black population in the region)-the free Negro
population contained a significant proportion of skilled, often literate or semiliterate mulattoes
who had received financial assistance from white relatives or benefactors. Except in Georgia,
this group could legally own the same types of property and enter into the same types of business
arrangements as free white citizens.(19)

As a result, despite the anti-free black sentiment among some whites, free Negroes in the region
entered a variety of business pursuits. In towns and cities, they became builders, mechanics,
tradesmen, grocers, restaurateurs, tailors, merchants, and barbers. Even during the American
Revolution, a small group of skilled artisans and craftsmen had emerged in Charleston, South
Carolina. By the 1790s, several among them had built up thriving businesses, especially in the
furniture and building trades.(20) House builder and carpenter James Mitchell, who for many
years lived above his shop, had become so prosperous by 1797 that he sought to rent a six-room
house with stables and out-buildings. A Place in the suburbs, with a little Garden," he explained
in a local newspaper, "would be preferred."(21)

With the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 and the Gulf Coast region in 1819, a
significant number of creoles of color (persons born in the Americas of French or Spanish and
African heritage) came under American control. Some of them had already established various
types of businesses. Others had migrated from the Caribbean Islands in the wake of the Haitian
Revolution. By the 1820s and 1830s, free persons of color who owned businesses could be found
in nearly every town and city along the Gulf Coast-from Pensacola, to Mobile, to New Orleans-
and in other areas such as Baton Rouge and Natchez. They managed establishments as
shoemakers, wheel-wrights, millwrights, tailors, butchers, bakers, confectioners, livery keepers,
and barbers.(22)

The center of free Negro business activity during this early period was New Orleans, with its
Spanish and French traditions, its racial intermixing, and its long history of free black enterprise.
As early as 1802, a visitor to the city commented on the "great number" of "free mulattoes" who
had learned special skills as artisans. Several had begun to accumulate property, he said, and a
few had established small businesses.(23) By the 1830s, their numbers had increased
substantially. An 1836 tax list for the city included the names of 855 free persons of color who
paid taxes on property worth $2,462,470. Among them were several highly successful brokers,
grocers, tailors, storekeepers, real estate speculators, and landlords (24) The Crescent City also
boasted the most prosperous free mulatto businesswoman m the South, Eulalie d' Mandeville
Macarty, who owned a wholesale mercantile and dry goods store. Worth an estimated $155,000,
she purchased various manufactured goods from abroad, housed them at her depot in
Plaquemines Parish, and distributed them, through a network of slaves, to various retail
outlets.(25)

Rural business activities also expanded significantly during this early period. Like their urban
counterparts, free persons of color in the Lower South who owned large farms or plantations, or
who had established rural business enterprises, were most often persons of mixed racial ancestry
who had been given financial assistance by white relatives or patrons. The largest black planter
and slaveowner during the eighteenth century, James Pendarvis, of St. Paul's Parish near
Charleston, was the son of a white planter and a slave woman. Bequeathed a large plantation, by
1786 Pendarvis owned more than 3,000 acres and 113 slaves.(26) Although few would equal
Pendarvis's wealth, in subsequent years South Carolina rice planters John Holman, jr., Samuel
Holman, John Garden, and Elias Collins, Alabama cattle rancher Zeno Chastang, Mississippi
cotton planter Andrew Barland, and Louisiana slaveowners Jean Baptiste Meullion, Dominique
Metoyer, and Suzanne Metoyer were given tracts of land and slave property by their white
fathers.(27) Even when there were no direct ancestral ties, rural free Negroes who established
income-producing farms or other rural enterprises usually received assistance from whites.
Alabama bridge builder Horace King, for example, was emancipated in 1829 by Georgia
slaveowner John Godwin, who later became his former slave's partner in a construction
company.(28)

In both urban and rural areas, free Negroes who engaged in businesses, like their white
counterparts, acquired increasing numbers of slaves. Urban artisans-builders, brickmakers, and
mechanics-purchased slave apprentices, hod carriers, and helpers; merchants and storekeepers
bought haulers, carters, and stock boys; plantation owners purchased house servants, cooks,
mechanics, and field hands. The three most successful black businessmen in Georgia-merchant
Solomon Humphries, drayman Andrew Marshall, and fisherman Anthony
Odingsells-used bondsmen to assist them in their businesses. (29) Cattle rancher Zeno Chastang
and his neighbor Maximillian Collins gradually increased the slave labor force working on their
farms in Mobile County. They obtained mainly stockmen, herdsmen, and field hands.(30)
Though once a slave himself, Jean Meullion purchased slaves on a regular basis for his St.
Landry Parish plantation, as did cotton planter Dominique Metoyer of Natchitoches Parish, who
eventually owned thirty-two blacks.(31) By 1830, approximately 1,556 black masters in the
Lower South owned a total of 7,188 slaves. Constituting about 42 percent of Negro owners in the
South, they owned 60 percent of the black-owned slaves (7,188 of 11,912). By then,
approximately one free Negro family in four in the lower states (one in three in Louisiana) held
slaves. A significant number of black slaveowners were engaged in various business enterprises
or owned large farms or plantations.(32)

Free Negro Businesses in the Upper South, 1790-1840 In the Upper South, the free Negro
population emerged from quite different circumstances than in the lower states. Part of a large-
scale manumission process following the American Revolution, those who acquired freedom
were predominately dark-skinned, possessed few skills, and were often illiterate. The free black
population of the Upper South grew from 30,158 in 1790, to 114,070 in 1820, to 174,357 in 1840
(representing between 5.5 and 12.5 percent of the total black population of the region), but few
among them started out with bequests from whites or could claim white ancestry.(33)
Consequently, most free blacks struggled merely to survive. According to one estimate, there
were only two hundred property-owning rural free blacks in the entire state of Virginia in 1820,
when the population of this anomalous group had reached 37,000.(34) As in the lower states, free
Negroes were not denied the legal right to own property (except slave property after 1832 in
Virginia) or to establish enterprises of various sorts, but their tenuous economic situation and
their lack of skins made it virtually impossible, except in extremely rare instances, for them to
enter the field of business.(35)

The dawn of the nineteenth century in the Upper South therefore did not see expanding groups of
black skilled artisans and others who were establishing businesses, as was the case in various
towns and cities in the lower states; instead, there were often only a few free blacks per town or
city in the Upper South who could be considered quasi-businessmen, operating small blacksmith
shops, cooperages, or barbering establishments.(36) Baltimore blacksmith Jacob Guillard built
up a comfortable trade between 1796 and 1806 but lost most of his property after signing a $510
note to acquire his slave son, who promptly ran away to the North.(37) Alexandria Va.) carpenter
and builder Thomas Braddock hired several apprentices in his house construction business
between 1812 and 1829, acquiring and building several rental houses in the process.(38)
Georgetown (D.C.) grocer Joseph Moor, Norfolk (Va.) carpenter Cuddy Dunn, and Lynchburg
Va.) wheelwright Archer Cooper were among the few men who were able to establish small
businesses in their communities during this early period.(39)

In the upper states prior to 1840, the few free Negroes who established larger business operations
were in some respects similar to their counterparts in the Lower South: they were most likely
persons of mixed racial origin; they were often the children or grandchildren of whites; and they
usually received some assistance from white benefactors. The two largest black farmers in
Virginia, Priscilla Ivey and Frankey Miles, had cohabitated with white slaveowners.(40)
Richmond bookkeeper Christopher MacPherson was emancipated by his owner and given some
financial assistance as he began his career.(41) In North Carolina, besides John Stanly, whose
father was white, cabinet maker Thomas Day of Milton, merchant Louis Sheridan of Bladen
County, and contractor James D. Sampson of Wilmington were persons of mixed racial
ancestry.(42) In Tennessee and Kentucky, the few free Negroes who established business
enterprises, including Nashville hotel owner Robert Rentfro, received assistance from their
former owners.(43) With its early Spanish, French, and creole traditions, St. Louis was similar to
the Gulf region, and by the 1830s most of the free persons of color who engaged in business
there-merchant Samuel Mordecai, cattle dealer Louis Charleville, real estate developer Louis
Rutgers, and "fancy goods" dealer Cyprian Clamorgan-were children or grandchildren of whites
who had provided them with financial assistance.(44)

Compared with the Lower South, black slave ownership developed differently in the upper
states. In 1830, a total of 2,128 free Negroes owned 4,728 slaves, slightly more than two blacks
per slaveowner. If approximately one out of four families in the lower states owned slaves, only
approximately one out of fourteen in the Upper South was in that category. Most of them owned
family members or other loved ones whom they could not emancipate according to the laws. Yet
some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the region were slaveowners for profit. Stanly was
the most notable example, but farmer Priscilla Ivey in Virginia, Louis Sheridan and James
Sampson in North Carolina, and Sherod Bryant, one of the largest free black farmers in
Tennessee, purchased or acquired slave laborers, as did Virginia grocer Archibald Batte of
Chesterfield County, who relied on slaves to perform much of the labor he required for stocking
shelves and delivering groceries.(45)

Thus, with the growth and expansion of the free Negro population in the South between 1790
and 1840, two distinct groups of Negro entrepreneurs emerged. In the lower states, with its
relatively small and largely mulatto free Negro population, free persons of color had many
advantages over their brethren in the upper states. In Charleston, New Orleans, and a few other
towns and cities, as well as in some farming districts, a distinct free Negro business class
emerged. Often directly related to the white slaveholding class, these entrepreneur's were persons
of substantial means who owned prosperous enterprises. Free blacks in the upper states, on the
other hand, rarely established themselves in business, and those who did often maintained small
operations working as skilled or semiskilled artisans. The tiny number of Upper South free
persons of color who did own and operate large businesses or who owned large farms were in
some resPects similar to their brethren in the Deep South-they were persons of mixed racial
background and sometimes slaveholders-but they were so few and so widely scattered (except
perhaps in St. Louis) that they represent less a business class than isolated instances of individual
entrepreneurial success.

Continued Growth in the Lower South, 1841-1860
During the late antebellum era, as the sectional controversy intensified, free persons of color in
the lower states came under increasing attack from whites. Those engaged in business, however,
were often large property owners who were able to protect themselves from the tumultuous
political currents. Thus, although the fairly rapid expansion into the entrepreneurial class during
the 1820s and 1830s began to slow in some sections, the 1840s and 1850s witnessed a continued
growth of black business activity in the region. Some large farmers suffered from the depression
of the early 1840s or lost their land and slaves because of droughts, floods, crop failures, or price
fluctuations, but others expanded their landholdings, increased their slave labor force, and
bought new machinery. Although some urban businessmen lost white customers in the hostile
racial climate, others expanded their business operations and attracted new customers. If some
blacks faced increasing competition from white artisans who raised the race question to gain a
competitive edge, others maintained their virtual monopoly in certain trades. Thus, despite racial
tensions, there was a continued growth of the business class during the period. And the
entrepreneurial group in the Lower South remained, by a significant margin, the most prosperous
group of blacks in the country.

The continued expansion can be readily seen by analyzing the middle-period U.S. population
censuses. Any definition of what constituted a black business class during the middle period has
certain limitations, but census takers were instructed to record the occupation household heads,
as well as an estimate of their real (1850-70) and personal (1860-70) property holdings. At the
same time, R- G. Dun and Company, the New York credit rating company, used the "M" rating-
less than $500-as the lowest "estimated pecuniary strength" for individual entrepreneurs.(46) By
combining the occupation and property information in the census with an estimated total estate
(real and personal property) of at least $500, a rough profile of Negro business activity emerges.

But for certain occupations not usually considered business pursuits for whites but that were so
for blacks (carpenters, laundresses, seamstresses), as well as for farmers and planters, such a
small estate would not indicate business involvement. Consequently, two other wealth estimates
have been used to determine business activity among these groups: at least $1,000 for skilled
workers who were sometimes engaged in business, and at least $2,000 for farmers and planters.
In 1850, census takers recorded an estimate only of real, not personal, estate. The adjustments
made to estimate total estates in that year are $300 for business occupations, $600 for skilled
blacks engaged in business, and $1,400 for rural blacks listed as farmers and planters. The three-
fifths realty/total estate ratio was about the same as the distribution in 1860 of real (63 percent)
compared to personal (37 percent) property owned by those engaged in business. Despite this
adjusted scale, the changing configuration of black-owned businesses can be readily seen by
analyzing the censuses in such a manner (see A Note on Sources and Methodology" at the end of
this article).

In the rural Lower South, free persons of color continued to manage large farms and plantations
during the 1840s and 1850s. South Carolina rice planter Margaret Mitchell Harris produced
nearly 250,000 pounds of rice in 1849, while cotton planter and cotton gin manufacturer William
Ellison of Statebutg shipped between eighty and one hundred bales of cotton to market each year
during the 1850s, and his gins could be found in Georgia; Alabarna, and Mississippi. By 1860,
Ellison owned sixty-three slaves and had amassed a fortune of more than $68,000.(47) Alabama
cattle ranchers and farmers Zeno Chastang and Maximillian Collins, who owned land and slaves
on an island in Mobile Bay, were nearly as prosperous, as was the plantation-owning Barland
family of Jefferson and Adams counties, Mississippi, who owned several large cotton
plantations. Three mulatto brothers in Texas, William, Aaron, and Abner Ashworth, managed
thriving cattle ranches. Even after being forced to flee for their fives during a period of racial
unrest in the mid-1850s, they returned to a different county and resumed their ranching business.
(48)

In Louisiana, large-scale farming remained relatively widespread among the state's rural free
Negro population. By 1850, among Louisiana's rural free black owners of real estate, nearly two
out of five (209) controlled at least $1,400 worth of real estate. They owned an average of $9,062
per landholder. The proportion among rural free Negro family heads who had reached this level
was almost exactly the same as the proportion (17 percent) of white landowners in the nation as a
whole.(49) In 1860, among the approximately 1,088 rural free black families, 201 possessed total
estates worth at least $2,000. They owned $3.5 million worth of property-land, slaves, livestock,
and machinery-for an average of 17,000 per property owner.(50) These Louisiana farmers
controlled one-sixth of all black-owned property in the South. Typically, they cultivated a few
hundred acres, owned small gangs of slaves, and tended herds of livestock, but the group also
included some of the most prosperous black merchant-farmers in the United States: St. John the
Baptist Parish's Louisa Ponis, who owned 1,300 acres valued at $35,000 and produced several
hundred hogsheads of sugar each year; Plaquemines Parish's Andrew Durnford, whose 2,660-
acre St. Rosalie plantation was worth $161,300; and Iberville Parish's Madam Cyprien Ricard
who, along with her son Pierre, owned a 1,050-acre plantation valued at $200,000 on the eve of
the Civil War.(51) Like their white neighbors, they bought and sold slaves, marketed their crops
with commission merchants, maintained lines of credit with various brokers, and secured loans
from mercantile houses and banks in New Orleans and Natchez.(52)

Estates of this size were extremely rare, but in towns and cities of the Lower South free blacks
continued to maintain more modest businesses as carpenters and builders, bricklayers and
brickmakers, tailors, grocers, and storekeepers. In Charleston, South Carolina, the building trades
continued to be dominated by free persons of color who worked gangs of free black and
sometimes slave apprentices, but the city also boasted prosperous shoemakers Malcolm Brown
and John Mishaw, hairdresser John Francis, barber Peter Brown, stablekeeper Jacob Green, and
woodyard owner Robert Howard.(53) In Savannah, and along the Gulf Coast in Pensacola and
Mobile, a few free people of color maintained shops and stores, and in Huntsville and Florence
(Ala.), Natchez, and Baton Rouge, they ran livery stables, omnibus lines, barbershops, grocery
stores, and mercantile firms.(54)

Even in New Orleans, despite increased harassment and the emigration of some free black
businessmen to islands in the Caribbean, large-scale free black business activity continued
during the late antebellum era. Eulalie Macarty's son, Drausin McCarty [sic], ran a highly
regarded dry goods brokerage firm in the city, and Drausin's brothers-in-law, merchants and
exchange brokers Bernard and Albin Soulie, were described in an R- G. Dun credit report as very
wealthy, est. w[orth] from 250-300m." Equally impressive were the ascents of undertaker Pierre
Casenave, who, between 1850 and 1857, increased his annual income from $10,000 to $40,000,
and tailor Francois Lacroix, who speculated in various city properties between 1845 and 1860,
and increased his real estate holdings from $30,000 to $242,600, making him one of the largest
individual Negro realty owners in the South.(55)

Under the criteria cited previously, the number of free blacks engaged in business nearly doubled
during the 1850s (from 575 to 1,048) (see Table 1). Although the number of large farmers and
planters fell in some sections of the Lower South, including several Louisiana parishes, in other
sections free persons of color expanded their holdings and began new business operations. There
was also a surge into the entrepreneurial class during the 1850s among free women of color, who
opened boarding and lodging houses, seamstress shops, and laundry businesses. AD the business
occupational categories-artisans usually engaged in business blacksmiths, cabinet makers,
shoemakers, tailors, etc.); small-scale manufacturers (brickmakers, cigarmakers, sugar
manufacturers, etc.); service businesses (barbers, brokers, livery keepers, "landlords," realtors);
retailers (butchers, grocers, lumber merchants, dry goods merchants, etc.); and artisans,
seamstresses, and laundresses with at least $1,000 in total estate holdings or farmers and planters
with at least $2,000-grew between 1850 and 1860. Estimated pecuniary strength also rose,
though not enough to keep pace with inflation or rising land and property values. By 1860, the
mean total estate of Lower South blacks engaged in business stood at $7,000; the median stood
at $2,300 (see Table 2). The figures suggest that those at the top of the business hierarchy were
to some extent protected from the racial turmoil confronting other free blacks during the
tumultuous decade before the Civil War.(56)

Rapid Expansion in the Upper South, 1841-1860
It took Upper South free blacks a generation after freedom to begin their entry into the business
class in significant numbers. Rarely assisted by whites, often emerging from slavery themselves
or the children of slaves, free Negroes in the region confronted substantial barriers to
establishing even the smallest enterprises. But from the mid-1840s onward, with an upturn in the
economy, improved roads and river transportation systems, new techniques for replenishing the
land, and increasing demands for skilled workers, they found conditions more favorable. It was
more than the general prosperity, however, that caused the number of free blacks engaged in
business in the Upper South to rise much more rapidly than that of their counterparts in the lower
states (from 514 in 1850 to 1,402 in 1860) (see Tables 3 and 4). Now a generation removed from
bondage, they had acquired a considerable degree of experience in dealing with economic
matters. In rural areas, some began purchasing land when prices were low and by the 1850s had
acquired total estates in excess of $2,000, whereas in towns and cities they opened shops as
blacksmiths, builders, shoemakers, and barbers or started businesses as draymen and haulers.

Most of those who entered the business field had spent many years building up their enterprises.
The careers of three Upper South free blacks-Georgetown (D.C.) feed merchant Alfred Lee,
Petersburg Va.) livery operator Robert Clark, and St. Louis barber William Johnson-indicate
both the qualities it took to move ahead in the border states and the differences between the
entrepreneurial class in the upper states and their counterparts in the Lower South. Born in 1805,
at about the age of twenty-five Lee opened a small feed store. By close attention to details, he
gradually built up his white clientele, expanded into the flour retailing business, and by 1850 was
one of the most prosperous free blacks in the area. "No man of his race," one observer noted,
"[is] more highly respected in Georgetown."(57) Similarly, Robert Clark began with little capital
and even less experience. After working in a hotel and saving enough to purchase his freedom,
he opened a livery stable, which eventually became the most popular establishment of its kind in
the town of Petersburg. By 1860, he possessed a total estate of $9,000, including $5,000 worth of
real estate.(58) Described as clear, farsighted, and shrewd in business," William Johnson opened
his barbershop on one of the main thoroughfares in St. Louis in 1840. Within a few years he had
saved a small amount of money and began investing in city property. During the 1850s he
greatly increased his business among white lawyers, businessmen, and civic leaders as well as
his property holdings.(59)

As suggested by the careers of Lee, Clark, and Johnson, free blacks who engaged in business in
the Upper South differed markedly from those in the lower states. In the upper states most
Negroes who entered the business field did so without the assistance of whites. Even the most
prosperous among them controlled relatively modest estates, and most worked as draymen,
laundresses, blacksmiths, and barbers. There were very few skilled craftsmen (brickmasons,
carpenters, coopers, mechanics, shoemakers, or plasterers) who established businesses, and even
fewer tradesmen, shopkeepers, and large-scale farmers. In the 1850 census, among free Negroes
with at least $1,400 in realty, there was only one farmer in the entire Upper South listed as a
"planter." William Epps of Halifax County, Virginia, owned no slaves and possessed only
$5,900 worth of real estate. Besides John Stanly, who lost his holdings during the 1830s, the few
free Negroes in the region who did manage relatively large business operations-Baltimore caterer
Henry Jakes, Richmond barber Reuben West, North Carolina merchant Louis Sheridan,
Nashville gardener Lewis Doxey, and St. Louis cooper John Meachum-were among only a
handful of prosperous black businessmen in the entire Upper South.(60)

A profile of free Negro business people on the eve of the Civil War further demonstrates the
differences between the two sections. With six times the total free black population, and even
after the substantial growth of the 1850s, the number of blacks engaged in business in the upper
states (1,402) was not much greater than that in the Lower South (1,048). Among Upper South
black entrepreneurs, about two out of five were residents of towns and cities (compared with
three of five in the Lower South), one out of ten was female (compared with two of five in the
Lower South), and a majority was listed in the census as black rather than mulatto (compared
with 84 percent of mixed racial heritage in the Lower South). In every occupational business
category, free blacks in the upper states remained far below their counterparts in the Deep South
in pecuniary strength, and in some categories they possessed only one-third the average wealth
of the Lower South entrepreneurs. In the upper states the proportion of business people who
owned less than $1,000 worth of property was substantially larger (23 percent compared with 14
percent), and the proportion of those with over $5,000 was significantly smaller (11 percent
compared with 27 percent) than in the lower states. The average total estate among free black
business people in the Upper South stood at about $2,700 (compared with more than $7,000),
and the median holding was $1,700 (compared with $2,300). The lower median reflected a
broader distribution, and suggested that some of these entrepreneurs, like Petersburg's Robert
Clark, had started out as slaves.(61)

The Transition Period, 1861-1880
The Civil War and its aftermath brought profound changes to the antebellum configuration of
black-owned businesses in the South. In the lower states, the unique and privileged position of
free persons of color who managed stores and shops or owned large farms and plantations was
shattered by the intrusion of the Union soldiers. Like their white neighbors, blacks suffered from
wartime destruction, declining land values, and postwar economic dislocations. Those who
owned slaves lost their slave property," and others found it difficult to adjust to the political
upheaval that came in the wake of emancipation.(62) Moreover, political reconstruction in the
lower states was marked by prolonged periods of racial unrest and violence.

In the rural areas of the Lower South, free persons of color who had once owned thriving farms
and plantations and marketed substantial quantities of rice, sugar, and cotton now struggled
desperately merely to hold on to their land. "When [the] war commence it purty hard on folks," a
free Negro in St. Mary Parish, Louisiana, recalled. First came the Confederates, who swept up
the slaves, including those owned by blacks, to work on fortifications. Then came the Yankee
raiding parties who burned, pillaged, and looted. Everywhere the Union Army advanced, free
Negroes told of death and destruction. "The road a the way to Natchitoches," one observer said,
describing the region where some of the wealthiest free persons of color in America owned their
plantations, "was a solid flame." During the 1860s, among blacks listed as large farmers and
planters in the Lower South, the mean value of property held dropped by 68 percent, from
$14,177 to $4,513, more than the general postwar depreciation in total estate values (see Table
5).(63)

Even in New Orleans, where some former free persons of color continued to maintain their
profitable business enterprises during the Union occupation (1862-65), and in Charleston, with
its rapid postwar economic recovery (1865-68), the trend was downward for a majority of the
free black entrepreneurs who had established businesses before the war. Among free persons of
color who owned real estate in 1860 and 1870 in the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth wards, the "heart of
the free mulatto [business] community," as David Rankin has called this section, nearly half
experienced losses, only one out of four improved his position, and nearly a third lost everything.
Grocer Felix Roberts saw his real holdings dwindle from $5,600 to $1,000; builder Casimir
Labat moved from $3,000 to no wealth at all in 1870. Roberts and Labat were joined by several
other former free Negro businessmen in the three wards who lost most of their antebellum
estates.(64) During the 1870s, other leading creoles of color who had managed successful prewar
businesses suffered a similar fate.(65) On the eve of the Civil War, Charleston boasted ninety-
two free Negroes who ran businesses of various types. Most of them were shopkeepers,
storekeepers, skilled artisans, wood dealers, butchers, and boardinghouse keepers. By the 1870s,
despite the substantial increase in the free black population in the wake of emancipation, the
number of businesses operated by the group had remained about the same, with a steadily
decreasing number of free persons of color within their ranks. (66)

The decline of Negro business people free before the war in the deep South gave rise to a new
group of black entrepreneurs. Census takers in 1870 did not ask a question about former status,
but a profile of postwar blacks engaged in business suggests that at least some of those entering
the entrepreneurial class were former slaves. A majority of those engaged in business (53
percent) were now listed in the census as "black" rather than "mulatto." Among them the
proportion who were listed as "planters" with total estates of at least $2,000 had dropped from 14
percent in 1860 to 2 percent a decade later. After large farmers and planters, the next leading
occupations in 1860 had been carpenters with estates of $1,000 or more, boardinghouse keepers,
and seamstresses, laundresses, and shoemakers; in 1870, the next leading business occupations
were blacksmiths, draymen, carpenters, grocers, and barbers (see Table 6). The proportion who
were illiterate rose from 18 percent to 46 percent, and the proportion with estates of less than
$1,000 rose from 14 to 37 percent, while the mean wealth dropped from 7,000 to less than
$2,500. Although none of these indices proves the infusion of ex-slaves into the business class,
taken together they strongly suggest a significant transition in the lower states.(67)

Nearly as precipitous as the decline of former free blacks in business in the lower states was the
rise of black-owned business operations in the Upper South during and immediately after the
Civil War. Upper South blacks possessed many advantages over their brethren in the Deep
South. Except in Virginia and in portions of Tennessee and North Carolina, they were often far
removed from the fields of battle.(68) They had owned relatively few slaves, often members of
their own families or other loved ones, and the value of their total estate holdings did not
depreciate as sharply as the property owned by free persons of color in the lower states.(69) In
some areas, rather than wartime destruction, there was an economic boom during the 1860s,
which created increased demands for service-type businesses, which had long been dominated by
free blacks.(70) Moreover, political reconstruction in the Upper South was of relatively short
duration and white fear of "black domination" less pronounced, at least compared to the black
belt regions of the lower states. Consequently, despite violence, intimidation, white resistance,
and the failure of the federal government to provide assistance, blacks in the upper states,
including a few former slaves, significantly expanded their business operations as well as their
wealth holdings.

They did so by engaging in a broad range of economic activities as shopkeepers, storekeepers,
skilled artisans, haulers and draymen, and restaurant owners. Delaware blacksmith Prince
Colwell, Maryland shoemaker George Adams, District of Columbia laundress Eliza Bean,
Kentucky furniture dealer Moses Spencer, Tennessee hauler-coachman William Napier, and
Missouri wagoner Adam Taylor were among a significant number of antebellum business people
who sustained or slightly improved their economic position after the war.(71) Among the most
successful former free Negroes in this economic expansion were Chestertown (Md.) restaurateur
William Perkins, who more than quadrupled his $2,300 antebellum estate by 1870; Baltimore
barber Augustus Roberts, who owned no realty in 1860, but was listed as being worth $12,000 in
1870; Alexandria Va.) butcher William Gray, who increased his realty from $1,700 to $5,000;
Richmond boiler-maker James Woodson, whose wealth rose from $700 to $4,000; and Louisville
barber Nathaniel Rogers, who increased his holdings from $1,800 to 8,000.(72)

Not only were a number of former free blacks able to improve their business and property
accumulations during the Civil War decade, but in some regions of the Upper South a few
freedmen entered the entrepreneurial class. In the wake of emancipation, with few resources and
the general climate of white hostility, it is not surprising that only a tiny number of former slaves
were able to establish businesses, but the changing profile of black businesses in the postbellum
Upper South suggests that in this region too freedmen were now entering the entrepreneurial
group. There was an increase in the proportion of those listed in the census as "black" from 51
percent to 67 percent, as well as a proportional decline among barbers (after farmers the largest
antebellum business group) and an increase among blacksmiths and draymen. The antebellum
slave population, of course, was overwhelmingly black rather than mulatto, and blacksmithing
and hauling took very small amounts of investment capital. The proportion who were illiterate
rose from 38 percent to 49 percent with an additional 10 percent in 1870 semiliterate), and the
proportion with estates of less than $1,000 rose from 23 to 32 percent, while the mean wealth
dropped from $2,700 to under $2,400 (see Table 7). As in the lower states, none of these indices
proves the infusion of ex-slaves into the business class, but the evidence is strongly suggestive
that such was the case.(73)

Unlike the antebellum period, when afl except a few of the South's wealthiest black business
people were residents of the Lower South, by the 1870s a number of the region's richest
entrepreneurs lived in the urban areas of the Upper South. District of Columbia hotel owner and
restaurateur James T Wormley acquired one of the finest hotels in the city, and its dining room
became "one of the experiences which every visitor to Washington thought he must not miss." In
1870, Wormley, born of free parents, had amassed a small fortune of 87,000. Another hotel
owner, slave-born Henry Harding, was just as well known to visitors of Nashville, and in 1870
he was fisted as being worth $35,000. He later became one of the two largest Negro taxpayers in
Davidson County. Former bondsman james Thomas, a slave and subsequently a free black
barber in Nashville and St. Louis before the war, married Antoinette Rutgers, the daughter of
Pelagie Rutgers, the wealthiest black woman in Missouri, and amassed a fortune speculating in
real estate, some of it originally belonging to his late mother-in-law. By the 1870s, he owned
nearly two entire blocks in downtown St. Louis, rented forty-eight apartment units, and was
worth an estimated $165,000, the third largest estate controlled by a black in the SoUth. (74)

The new center of black business activity, surpassing antebellum Charleston and New Orleans,
was the District of Columbia. During the 1860s, the city witnessed a rapid population growth,
which increased the demand for builders, skilled workers, and supply merchants. In addition,
unlike some rural areas of the Upper South, the new demands for real estate drove D.C. property
values spiraling upward, higher than those of any other city except perhaps St. Louis. Free
Negroes who had acquired buildings and businesses before or during the war, especially in the
First and Second wards, where most black business people owned property, witnessed a marked
appreciation in the value of their holdings. There were also new employment opportunities for
blacks as teachers, physicians, lawyers, government employees, and skilled workers, which
sometimes led to later careers in business. (75)

As a result the city's black entrepreneurial class expanded rapidly. It included former free blacks
of modest means who had expanded their business operations, formerly prosperous free Negroes
who had maintained or improved their prewar enterprises, and a few industrious former slaves
who started new businesses. Prior to the war grocer Edward Crusoe owned a small store and his
real estate was valued at $2,000. By 1870, he ran a large-scale retail grain outlet, and his realty
had increased tenfold.(76) Crusoe was joined by a number of other antebellum free blacks of
relatively modest means who now boasted estates in excess of $5,000-barber Robert Booker,
restaurant owner Richard Francis, salvager Palmer Briscoe, and plastering contractor Richard
Sanders.(77) The city also boasted prosperous prewar blacks who maintained or enhanced their
business operations, including boardinghouse owner Andrew Henson, barber James Wright, and
restaurateur George I Downing, whose estate was estimated at 17,000 in 1870.(78) In all, the
District of Columbia witnessed more than a doubling in the number of blacks who owned
businesses (156 to approximately 318) and a significant increase in their average real and
personal property holdings (see Table 8).(79)

During the period under discussion, in both the Lower and Upper South, black business people
catered almost exclusively to a white clientele. The skilled artisans, shopowners, grocers, and
merchants of the lower states were in this respect similar to the blacksmiths, haulers, and barbers
of the Upper South. Although there were a few instances of free persons of color serving both
races prior to the war (undertaker Pierre Casenave in New Orleans, for instance), the limited
economic resources of blacks in the Upper South and the racial prejudices in both sections made
it virtually impossible for more than a few to serve black customers. Even those who had
themselves emerged from slavery saw their economic prosperity linked to whites. After the war,
most black business people continued to serve white customers and sometimes expressly forbade
their brethren to enter their shops and stores, lest they sacrifice their white customers.(80)

Conclusion
The configuration of the black business class changed dramatically during the late eighteenth
century and the first eight decades of the nineteenth century. Beginning during the 1790s and
early 1800s in Charleston, New Orleans, and a few Louisiana parishes, free persons of color in
the lower states entered the entrepreneurial class with the assistance of whites, often relatives
who provided them with financial assistance. The growth of the business class in the lower states
continued during the late antebellum era, but increasing racial conflicts and growing anti-Negro
sentiment made it difficult for some business people to expand their operations. Only a handful
of free blacks were able to establish themselves in business during the early years in the Upper
South. Most of those who achieved a measure of success were like their brethren in the Lower
South-persons of mixed racial ancestry who had been assisted by white relatives. The significant
expansion in the upper states in the two decades prior to the Civil War was largely the result of
years of effort among free blacks, some of whom had begun life in bondage. The Civil War and
its aftermath proved to be disastrous for most formerly free Negroes in the lower states who had
engaged in business, especially large farmers and planters, but within only a few years after the
war formerly free blacks in the upper states and former slaves in both sections began opening
small shops and stores and establishing themselves as blacksmiths, draymen, shoemakers,
builders, and grocers.

Viewing the period as a whole, one is struck by the remarkable determination of black
southerners to become part of the capitalist system by acquiring business enterprises. Although
many faded in their business endeavors, a few were highly successful. Most of them were strong-
willed, aggressive, industrious, and independent men and women who were able to carve out a
niche in their local economies. Some did so while still in bondage, others as free persons of
color, and still others as former slaves. A few were as successful as the best-known white
business people in their communities. They had to overcome not only various economic
problems, but also slavery, racial oppression, white hostility and violence, discrimination,
segregation, and institutions designed to keep them in a subordinate position. Considering these
difficulties, blacks made impressive strides in the business world during a period that witnessed
the end of the African slave trade, the destruction of the South's "peculiar institution," and the
rise of a small but important black entrepreneurial class. From this perspective, W E. B. Du
Bois's comment early in the twentieth century achieves greater clarity: "It is astonishing," he
wrote, "how the African has integrated himself into American civilization."(81)

A Note on Sources and Methodology
Because the statistical evidence in this study is derived primarily from the U.S. population
census returns for 1850, 1860, and 1870, it seems appropriate to point out some of the strengths
and weaknesses of using the census in studying black business history during the middle period.
As suggested in the text, census takers were instructed to record the name, age, color, gender,
occupation, and wealth holdings of every household head (excluding slaves) in the United States.
The great strength of the census is that it connects the color, occupation, and wealth of
individuals for the entire South. Most sources omit one or another of these variables.

Scholars who have dealt with statistical evidence for the nineteenth century, however, recognize
the limitations of even the best sources. "Color" was sometimes difficult to discern, and some
blacks were listed as mulattoes, while some mulattoes were listed as white. A few individuals
were missed by census takers or listed twice. There was an undercount of Charleston's free
blacks in 1850, and of the South's entire black population in 1870 between 6 and 7 percent) (see
Ransom and Sutch, One Kind of Freedom, 53-54). The occupation category was often
disregarded b), census takers for free women of color, even those who owned substantial
amounts of property, and in 1850 they failed to include about 30 percent of the occupations for
property owners with at least $300 in real estate. In 1860, they omitted occupational listings for
about 18 percent, and in 1870 about 2 percent, of those with total estates of at least $500. These
undercounts and omissions were surely, smaller among black business people, who were often
among the best-known free Negroes and freedmen in their communities, but the census
nevertheless lacks the degree of precision that twentieth-century sources provide.

Added to this is the problem of merely defining what constituted a black-owned business during
the nineteenth century. I have relied primarily on a "wealth model" in this essay, but there were
some propertyless blacks (including slaves) who engaged in various types of business activity. In
general, however, most men and women in business were property owners. I have included
individuals with total estates (real and personal property) worth at least $500. To some extent
this is arbitrary,, but generally, it is in line with R- G. Dun and Company's guidelines for a
business enterprise. An individual's total estate was then connected with his or her occupation.

The census returns included a number of occupations that were of all obvious business nature,
but others were not as easily discernable. Since some blacks who were engaged in business were
fisted as carpenters, masons, mechanics, brickmasons, laundresses, and seamstresses, but most of
those listed in such a manner worked as skilled or semiskilled laborers, I have pushed the total
estate level in these occupations up to at least $1,000, indicating that most of those with such an
estate were engaged in business. Washington Beatie of Washington County, Virginia, for
example, was listed in the 1860 census as a carpenter with $4,000 worth of real estate and $2,500
in personal holdings. Actually,, he was a small builder whose realty holdings placed him among
the upper 10 percent (approximately) of landholders-white or black-in the nation. The same was
true for Catherine Stanly, John Stanly's daughter, who was listed in the census as a seamstress
but actually ran a dressmaking shop in New Bern, North Carolina, during the 1850s. To omit
them and other skilled blacks with significant amounts of property would be to omit a very
important segment of the black entrepreneurial class.

Farmers constituted another group of entrepreneurs. Land values were such that $1,000 would
not be appropriate as a minimum for rural blacks who might be considered engaged in business,
but it seems likely that those with total estates of at least $2,000 had moved away from
subsistence farming and had begun to market their crops for profit. Here, too, to omit farmers
and planters from an analysis of blacks in business would be to exclude some of the most
successful business people and wealthiest free persons of color in the South.

Since the 1850 census included only real property estimates, I have dropped the amounts in the
three categories to individuals with real estate worth at least $300, $600, and $1,400,
approximately the same proportion (three-fifths) of real and personal property that free black
property owners held a decade later. About 15 percent of those who constituted a business class
in 1860 did not own real estate, and thus the 1850 data are only estimates.

Despite these limitations, there is little doubt that analyses of the middle-period censuses show
better than any other source the general trends with regard to black-owned businesses. This is
especially true when comparing the Upper South with the Lower South, since the relative
changes over time can be clearly observed by examining the census returns. And, despite the
multi-tier analysis and the changes in the census, the data strongly demonstrate the general
expansion in the upper states and the changing nature of the business class in the Lower South
during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

In the business categories that follow it should also be noted that, although every property-
owning head of household was included from the censuses of 1850 and 1860, and those with at
least $1,000 total estate from 1870, a sampling procedure was used for those whose total estates
were between $500 and $900 in 1870. The sample included property owners who appeared on
every twentieth page and its facing page (numbers in the upper right corner) of the census
returns. The sampled data were then considered to be 5 percent of the total number of those
engaged in business within this property range. At the local and county levels, these data provide
only rough estimates (thus the information on Charleston and the District of Columbia for 1870
is general), but for the subregional divisions in this article the data probably vary by only a few
percentage points. All of this information was typed into the computer and analyzed with
SPSSX, the most recent version of Statistical Package for the Social Sciences.

LOREN SCHWENINGER is professor of history at the University, of North Carolina,
Greensboro.

The author expresses his appreciation to several funding agencies that provided support for travel
and research assistance in the preparation of this manuscript: the American Philosophical
Society, the American Association for State and Local History, the Academic Computer Center
and the Research Council at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and the National
Endowment for the Humanities.

1 L. C. Vass, History of the Presbyterian Church in New Bern, N. C, With A Resume of Early
Ecclesiastical Affairs in Eastern North Carolina, and a Sketch of the Early Days of New Bern,
N.C (Richmond, Va., 1886), 135-36; Stephen E Miller, "Recollections of Newbern Fifty Years
Ago," 56, typescript, c. 1873, Records of the General Assembly, Session Records, Petition of
John Carruthers Stanly to the North Carolina General Assembly, 19 Nov. 1798; Records of the
County Probate Court [hereafter RCPC], Craven Co., N. C., Petition of Alexander Steward and
Lydia Stewart to Emancipate the Slave John, 12 March 1795; Legislative Records, Session
Records, Petition of John Stanly to the Craven County Superior Court to Emancipate [Bristor
and Boston], c. 1829- RCPC, Craven Co., N.C.: Deeds, bk. 33 (16 Nov. 1798), 503; (10 Jan.
1800), 495; bk. i6 (24 July 1804), 622; bk. 45 (8 May 1828), 429-47; bk. 46 (29 April 1829),
273-74; bk. 53 (17 Feb. 1838), 170-71: all in North Carolina Division of Archives and History,
Raleigh, N.C. [hereafter NCDAH]; John C. Stanly to Ralph Gurley, 12 May 1838, Records of
the American Colonization Society, reel 29, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Calvin D.
Wilson, "Negroes Who Owned Slaves," Popular Science Monthly 81 (Nov. 1912): 486, 491;
John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1943),
23, 31-32, 160-62. See Loren Schweninger, John Carruthers Stanly and the Anomaly of Black
Slaveholding," North Carolina Historical Review (forthcoming).
2 Booker I Washington, The Negro in Business (Chicago, Ill., 1907); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed.,
Economic Cooperation Among Negro Americans; Report of a Social Study Made at Atlanta
University (Atlanta, Ga., 1907); Carter G. Woodson, et al., eds., The Negro as a Business Man
(Washington, D.C., 1929); Abram L. Harris, The Negro as Capitalist: A Study of Banking and
Business among American Negmes (1936; rpt. New York, 1968); Merah S. Stuart, A n
Fconomic Detour.- A History of Insurance in the Lives of American Negros (New York, 1940);
Walter Weare, Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual
Life Insurance Company (Urbana, Ill., 1973) , David O. Whitten, Andrew Durnford: A Black
Sugar Planter in Antebellum Louisiana (Natchitoches, La., 1981); Michael P. Johnson and James
L. Roark, Black Maasters:- A Fire Family of Color in the Old South (New York, 1984); Loren
Schweninger, ed., From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur.- The Autobiography of
James Thomas (Columbia, Mo., 1984) , Juliet E. K. Walker, " Racism, Slavery, and Free
Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship in the United States before the Civil War," Business History
Review 60 (Autumn 1986): 343-82.
3 Legislative Records, Petition of the Inhabitants of Orangeburg District to the South Carolina
Legislature, 4 Dec. 1816, #95, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia,
S.C. [hereafter SCDAH]; Lawrence T. McDonnell, "Money Knows No Master: Market Relations
and the American Slave Community," in Developing Dixie: Modernization in a Traditional
Society, ed. Winfred B. Moore, et al. (Westport, Conn., 1988), 31-"; Philip D. Morgan, "The
Ownership of Property by Slaves in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Low Country," Journal of
Smthern History 49 (Aug. 1983): 399-420. For a comparative perspective, see Ciro Flamarion S.
Cardoso, "The Peasant Breach in the Slave System: New Developments in Brazil," Luso-
Bmziltkn Review 25 (Summer 1988): 49-47.
4 Johann Martin Bolzius, Reliable Answer to Some Submitted Questions Concerning the Land
Carolina, trans. and ed. Paul S. Taylor, et al., in William Mary Quarterly 14 April 1957): 236;
"Scotus Americanus," Information Concerning the Province of North Carolina, Addressed to
Emigrants from the Hiqhlands and Western Isles of Scotland, in William Boyd, ed., "Some
North Carolina Tracts of the Eighteenth Century," North Carolina Historical Review 3 (Oct.
1926): 616.
5 Philip Curtin, et al., African History (Boston, 1978), 108-13,
6 McDonnell, "Money Knows No Master," 31-32; Morgan, "The Ownership of Property by
Slaves," 416-20.
7 Petition of the Inhabitants of Orangeburg District to the South Carolina Legislature, 4 Dec.
1816; Charles Vinzent to Julian S. Devereux, 6, 21 April 1853, Julien Sidney Devereux Family
Papers, Barker Texas History Center, Austin, Texas.
8 Legislative Records, General Report of the Committee on [the] Colored Population, ca. 1858,
#2848, SCDAH; Vinzent to Devereux, 6, 21 April 1853; Virgil Hillyer to J. B. Howell, 22 March
1873, 21 Feb. 1874, Records of the Claims Commission, Records of the Treasury Department
[hereafter RCC], R.G. 56, reel 11, National Archives; Report to the Commissioners of Claims,
18 July 1876, William Paine Papers, Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, Ga.; Morgan, "The
Ownership of Property by Slaves," 399-420.
9 Robert Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the OLd South (New York, 1970), 101-3; Charles Dew,
"Disciplining Slave Iron Workers in the Antebellum South: Coercion, Conciliation, and
Accommodation," American Historical Review 79 April 1974): 405-8.
10 Frederick Law Olmsted, A journey in the Seaboard Slave States, With Remarks on Their
Economy (New York, 1856), 82-85; Loren Schweninger, "The Free-Slave Phenomenon: James
P. Thomas and the Black Community in Ante-bellum Nashville," Civil War History 22 (Dec.
1976): 293-307.
11 Carter Woodson, "The Negroes of Cincinnati Prior to the Civil War," Journal of Negro
History 1 (Jan. 1916): 21.
12 Juliet E. K. Walker, Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier (Lexington,
Ky., 1983), 35-36.
13 Janet Sharp Hermann, The Pursuit of a Dream (New York, 1981), 18-19.
14 Benjamin S. Turner to Claims Commission, 21 April 1871, Deposition, Case #285, RCC.
15 C. W Dudley to Commissioner of Claims, 3 June 1874, reel 4, RCC.
16 Records of the General Assembly, Session Records, Petition of the Mechanical Society of
Wilmington to the North Carolina General Assembly, 29 Nov. 1802, NCDAH; Memorial of
Citizens of Smithville [Brunswick County] to the North Carolina General Assembly, 1856, ibid.
17 RCPC, Campbell Co., Va., Deeds, bk. A (6 june 1808), 103, at Museum of Early Southern
Decorative Arts, Winston-Salem, N.C. [hereafter MESDA]; Legistative Records, Petition of
James Rose, William J. Grayson, Benjamin Huger, et al., to the South Carolina Senate, 1860, ND
#2801, SCDAH; William Eden to Anthony Weston, 29 March 1856, in Documents," Journal of
Negro History 11 (Jan. 1926): 79-80; List of Tax Payers of the City of Charleston for 1860
(Charleston, S.C., 1861), 333.
18 Sylvia Frey, "Between Slavery and Freedom: Virginia Blacks in the American Revolution,"
Journal of Southern History 59 (Aug. 1983): 387; David B. Davis, The Problem of slavery in the
Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), chap. 6; Richard S. Dunn, "Black Society in
the Chesapeake, 1776-1810," in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution,
ed. Ira Berlin, et al. Charlottesville, Va., 1983), 49-52.
19 Ira Berlin, "The Structure of the Free Negro Caste in the Antebellum United States," JOurnal
of Social History 9 (Spring 1976): 297-319; U.S., Dept. of the Interior, Population of the United
Slates in 1860; Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census (Washington, D.C.,
1864), 2-520; Laura Foner, "The Free People of Color in Louisiana and St. Domingue: A
Comparative Portrait of Two Three-Caste Slave Societies," Jourmal of Social Hi" 3 (Summer
1970): 406-40; Herbert E. Sterkx, The Free Negro in Ante-bellum Louisiana (Rutherford, N.J.,
1972), 91-92.
20 RCPC: Charleston Co., S.C., Miscellaneous Land Records, pt. 57, bk. R4 (21 Dec. 21, 1770),
162-63; pt. 57, bk. S4 (I Feb. 1774), 83-90; pt. 63, bk. B5 (16-17 March 1777), 77-80; pt. 67, bk.
G5 (30 March 1783), 465-67, at MESDA.
21 City-Gazette and Daily Advertiser [Charleston, S.C.], 9 Jan. 1797, MESDA.
22 Legislative Records, Petition of James Rose, William Grayson, Benjamin Huger, ct al., to the
South Carolina Senate, 1860, SCDAH; Whittington B. Johnson, "Free Blacks in Antebellum
Savannah: An Economic Profile," Georgia Historical Quarterely 64 (Winter 1980): 418-31; U.S.
Manuscript Population Census [hereafter USMSPC]: Mobile Co., Ala., Mobile, 1850, pp. 294,
297, 299, 399, 441, 453; Madison Co., Ala., Huntsville, 1860, p. 188; Lauderdale Co., Ala.,
Florence, 1860, p. 293; Loren Schweninger, John H. Rapier, Sr., A Slave and Freedman in the
Ante-Bellum South," Civil War History 20 (March 1974): 23-34; USMSPC: Adams Co., Miss.,
Natchez, 1850, p. 14; 1860, pp. 44, 120; William Hogan and Edwin Davis, eds., William
johnson's Natchez: The Anic-Bellum Diary of a Free Negro (Baton Rouge, La., 1951), 23-40. In
Louisiana, the term creole" was also applied to whites culturally related to the original French
settlers. See Ira Berlin, "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British
Mainland North America," American Historical Review 85 Feb. 1980): 45.
23 James Robertson, ed., Louisiana under the Rule of Spain, France, and the United States,
1785-1807.- Social, Economic, and Political Conditions of the Territory Represented in the
Louisiana Purchase, 2 vols. (1910-11; rpt., Freeport, N.Y., 1969), 1:218-19.
24 James E. Winston, "The Free Negro in New Orleans, 1803-1860," Louisiana Historical
Quarterely 21 (Oct. 1938): 1080-85.
25 Helen T Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 5 vols.
(Washington, D.C., 1932), 3:292, 589, 611-12; Walker, "Racism, Slavery, and Free Enterprise,"
350. For the special role of women in business, see Loren Schweninger, "Property Owning
African-American Women in the South, 1800-1870," Journal of Women's Hi" (forthcoming).
26 Brent H. Holcomb, ed., "1786 Tax Returns," South Carolina Magazine of ancestral Research
9 (Spring 1981): 73; Duke de la Rouchefoucault Liancourt, Trravels Through the United States
of North America the Country of the Iroquois and Upper Canada in the Years 1795, 1796, and
1797 London, 1799), 602; Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slaw Masters in South
Carolina, 1790-1860 (jefferson, N.C., 1985), 13-14, 108-10.
27 Legislative Records, Petition to the South Carolina General Assembly, 3 Oct. 1791, SCDAH
[the Holmans]; Koger, Black Slaveowners, 107-8, 119-21, 128-29, 168 [Collins and Garden]-
Jack D. L. Holmes, "The Role of Blacks in Spanish Alabama: The Mobile District, 1786-1813,"
Alabama Historical Quarterly 37 (Spring 1975):10 [Chastang]; Legislative Petitions, Petition of
Andrew Barland to the Senate and House of Representatives of Mississippi, c. 1824, R.G. 47,
boxes 16-17, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Miss. [Barland]; Deed of
Emancipation, 21 Feb. 1776, Meullion Family Papers, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge,
La. [Meullion]; Records of the Parish Probate Court [hereafter RPPC]: Natchitoches Parish, La.,
Successions, #375, 26 July 1839 [Dominique Metoyer); #355, 7 Sept. 1838 [Marie Susanne
Metoyer]; Mills, The Forgotten People, 74-75.
28 George Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, supplement, ser. 1,
10 vols. (Westport, Conn., 1979), vol. 4, pt. 2:368, 371.
29 Johnson, "Free Blacks in Antebellum Savannah," 423-24.
30 Carter G. Woodson, ed , Free - Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830 (1924; rpt.,
Westport, Conn., 1968). 1;United States Manuscript Slave Census, Co., Ala.,
31 Receipt, William Shipp to Jean Meullion, 5 Feb. 1811, Meullion Family Papers Mills, The
Forgotten People 57; RPPC, Natchitoches Parish, La., Successions, #375, 26 july 1839.
32 These statistics are derived from Woodson, ed., Free Negro Owners of Slaves, and Koger,
Black Slaveownen, 20-21; see R- Halliburton, jr., "Free Blacks Owners of Slaves: A Reappraisal
of the Woodson Thesis," South Carolina Historical Magazine 76 (July 1976): 129-35, and Loren
Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (Urbana, Ill., 1990
[forthcoming]), 385-86. The number of free Black families in the Lower South is a rough
estimate derived from the general population figures in Berlin, Slaves Without Masters, 136-37.
In a total population of 30,193 with about one in five counted as a family head, there were
approximately 6,039 free black families in the region.
33 Berlin, "The Structure of the Free Negro Caste," 297-319; and Slaves Without 136-37.
34 Memorial of the Richmond and Manchester Colonization Society, Presented January 1825, in
Annual Reports of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color of the United
States, 91 vols. (1818-1910; rpt., New irk, 1969), 8:55.
35 John H. Russell, The Fire Negro in Virginia, 1619-1865 (Baltimore, Md., 1913), 94.
36 Michael L. Nicholls, "Passing Through This Troublesome World: Free Blacks in the Early
Southside," The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 92 (jan. 1984): 64-67.
37 Federal Intelligencer, and Baltimore Daily Gazette, 25 April 1895; Federal Gazette and
Baltimoir Advertiser 11 April 1805, MESDA; Leroy Graham, Beltimor: The Nineteenth Century
Black Capital (New York, 1982), 261-62.
38 RCPC, Alexandria, Va., Wills, bk. 1821-1831 (25 Nov. 1829), 342, MESDA.
39 Letitia Brown, Free Negroes in the District of Columbia, 1790-1846 (New York, 1972), 132
[Moor]; RCPC, Norfolk Co., Va.: Deeds, bk. 36 (29 Feb. 1796), 123; bk. 38 (10 jan. 1800), 88;
Wills, bk. 3 (26 April 1814), 118, MESDA [Dunn]; RCPC, Campbell Co., Va., Hustings Deed
Book A, 1805-1813 (6 june 1808), 103 [Cooper). In 1816, Cooper was charged with retailing
beer without a license. See ibid., Hustings Court Order Book 1812-1817 (8 Nov. 1816), 232,
MESDA.
40 Luther Porter Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virgin:*, 1830-1860
(Washington, D.C., 1942), 122, 127, 217.
41 Deed of Emancipation, David Ross to Christopher MacPherson, 2 June 1792, in Legislative
Records, Petition of Christopher MacPherson, 10 Dec. 1810, Richmond City, Virginia State
Library, Richmond, Va.
42 Franklin, The Fire Negro in North Carolina, 45, 144, 176 183, 190, 216; USMSPC, Casewell
Co., N. C., 1850, p. 193 [Day]. In this and subsequent census citations, the page number in the
upper right corner of the right-hand page is cited to include both the page on which the number
appears and the facing page. The page numbers are usually printed, but occasionally they are
holograph. Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., " To Be Truly Free': Louis Sheridan and the Colonization
of Liberia," Civil War History 29 (Dec. 1983): 332; Louis Sheridan to Joseph Gales, 20, 27 May
1836, in Records of the American Colonization Society, reel 26 [Sheridan]; John Hope Franklin,
"The Free Negro in the Economic Life of AnteBelluin North Carolina," North Carolina
Historical Review 19 (Oct. 1942), 369-70 [Sampson].
43 Legislative Records, Petition of the Inhabitants of Davidson County to the Tennessee General
Assembly, 1801, #20-1-1801, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tenn.
44 Cyprian Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy of st. Louis (St. Louis, Mo., 1858), 9
[Mordecai], 15 [Charleville]; RCPC, St. Louis, Mo., Estates, #637, 29 July 1825 [Rutgers];
Lawrence O. Christensen, "Cyprian Clamorgan, the Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis 1858),"
Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 31 (Oct. 1974): 5, 6, 13, 14, 16, 22.
45 For Ivey, Sampson, and Sherida. see notes 40 and 42. J. Me on En d, "The Free Negro in
Ante-Bellum Tennessee,"Journal of Southern History 9 (Feb. 1943): 54 [Bryant]; Philip J.
Schwartz, "Emancipators, Protectors, and Anomalies: Free Black Slaveowners in Virginia,"
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 95 (july 1987): 317 [Batte].
46 [F- G. Dun and Company], The Mercantile Agency Reference Book and key) Containing
Ratings of the Merchants, Manufacturers and Traders Generally throughout the United States
(New York, 1865).
47 USMSPC: Georgetown Co., S.C., 1850, p. 309 [Mitchell]; Sumter Co., S.C., 1850, p. 385;
1860, p. 133 [Ellison]. I have estimated Ellison's realty at $15,000, rather than the $8,300 listed
in the census. Koger, Black Slaveowners, 37-38, 62, 121-23, 132, 136, 144-45.
48 USMSPC: Mobile Co., Ala., 1850, pp. 464, 481; Southern District, 1860, p. 27; Northern
District, 1860, pp. 136-37, 140 [Chastang and Collins]; Adams Co., Miss., Natchez, 1860, pp.
44, 120; Jefferson Co., Texas, 1850, pp. 481, 497, 499; Orange Co., Texas, 1860, n.p.; Andrew
Muir, "The Free Negro in Jefferson and Orange Counties, Texas," Journal of Negro History 35
(April 1950): 186, 191, 206 [Ashworths].
49 Computed from USMSPC, Louisiana, 1850; U. S. Census Office, The seventh Census of the
United Stairs: 1850 (Washington, D.C., 1853), 474. The approximate number of rural free black
families in the state was derived from dividing the total rural population by the average family
size (6,302 by 5 = 1,260). In the nation, 22 percent of the families owned at least $1,000 worth of
realty, and 13 percent at least $2,000. Soltow, Men and Wealth, 186.
50 Computed from USMSPC, 1850, 1860; Soltow, Men and Wealth, 64, 76, 81, 186; Joseph
Karl Menn, The Large Slaveholders of Louisiana--1860 (New Orleans, La., 1964), 316; Sterkx,
The Free Negro in Ante-bellum Louisiana, 200-214.
51 United States Manuscript Agricultural Census [hereafter USMSAC]: St. John the Baptist
Parish, La., P. 661; St. Landry Parish, La., 1850, p. 1850 [Ponis] Whitten, Andrew Durnford, 85,
88; USMSPC, Plaquemines Parish, La., 1850, p. 278; USMSAC, Iberville Parish, La., 1850, p.
81; USMSPC, Iberville Parish, La., 1850,.p. 329; James Freeman Clarke, Present Condition of
Free Colored People of the United States (New York, 1859), 13; also see Mills, The Forgotten
People, 221-23 [Ricard].
52 USMSAC: Pointe Coupee Parish, La., 1850, p. 569; St. Landry Parish, La., 1850, p. 695; St.
Mary Parish, La., 1850, pp. 727-29; Menn, The Large Slaveholders of Louisiana-1860, 79, 92-
93; USMSPC, St. Mary Parish, La., 1850, p. 213.
53 USMSPC: Charleston, S.C., 3d Ward, 1860, p. 312 [Francis]; Charleston, S.C., St. Philip and
St. Michael Parishes, 1850, p. 98 [Lee]; 1850, p. 129 [Brown]; 1850, p. 186 [Howard]; 1850, p.
156 [Mishaw]; 1850, p. 269 [Francis]; 1850, p. 110 [Green]; 3d Ward, 1860, p. 283 [Howard];
List of the Tax Payers of the City of Charleston for 1859 (Charleston, S.C., 1860), 389 [Francis).
54 Johnson, "Free Blacks in Antebellum Savannah," 418-31; USMSPC: Escambia Co., Fla.,
Pensacola, 1850, p. 135 [tailor Ransom Lambert]; Mobile, Ala., p. 299 [carpenter and builder
Joseph Lorant]; Madison Co., Ala., Huntsville, p. 188 [Every operator John Robinson];
Lauderdale Co., Ala., Florence, 1860, p. 39 [barber John Rapier, Sr.]; Hogan and Davis, William
Johnson's Natchez, intro.; USMSPC: East Baton Rouge Parish, La., 1850, p. 169 [grocer Michael
Granary); 1860, p. 481 [merchant B. J. Beauregard].
55 Cattcrall, judicial Cases, 3:292, 589, 611-12; WaLker, " Racism, Slavery, and Free
Enterprise," 354, 361-62 [Macarty]; USMSPC: New Orleans, La., 1st Mun., 7th Ward, 1850, p.
396 [Soulie]; New Orleans, 3d Ward, 1860, p. 257 [Lacroix]; 4th Ward, p. 82 [Casenave]; RPPC,
New Orleans, La, Successions, #38,677, 27 May 1876, in New Orleans Public Library [Lacroix);
Leonard Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850: The Shadow of the Dream
Chicago, Ill., 1981), 42 [Soulie]; David Rankin, "The Impact of the Civil War on the Free
Colored Community of new Orleans," Perspectives in American History 11 (1977-78): 402-3
[Lacroix].
56 Computed from USMSPC, 1850, 1860. For a detailed list of occupations in each group, see
the appendix.
57 Henry Robinson, "Some Aspects of the Free Negro Population of Washington, D.C., 1800-
1862," Maryland Historical Magazine 64 (Spring 1969): 52-53; USMSPC: District of Columbia,
Georgetown, 1850, p. 186; Georgetown, 1st Ward, 1860, p. 3.
58 Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding, 97 n, 156; USMSPC Va., Petersburg, East
Ward, 1860, p. 199.
59 Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy, 14; USMSPC, St. Louis, Mo., 2d Ward, 1850, p. 222;
James Thomas to John Rapier, 3 May 1858, Rapier-Thomas Papers, MoorlandSpingarn Research
Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
60 USMSPC, Halifax Co., Va., 1850, p. 95 Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Pro" Holding, 107,
129 [Epps]; Gatewood, To Be Truly Free,' " 332-48; USMSPC: Baltimore, Md., 9th Ward, 1850,
p. 47 [Jakes]; Henrico Co., Va., Richmond, 1850, p. 248 [West]; Davidson Co., Tenn., Nashville,
3d Ward, 1850, p. 356 [Doxey]; St. Louis, Mo., 4th Ward, 1850, p. 49; RCPC, St. Louis, Mo.,
Estates, #4173, 12 April 1854 [Meachum].
61 Computed from USMSPC, 1860.
62 Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of freedom: The Economic Consequences of
Emancipation (New York, 1977), 64-73; Whitelaw Reid, After the War.- A Tour of the Southern
States, 1865-66, ed. C. Vann Woodward (1866; rpt., New York, 1965), 211-12; Koger, Black
Slaveowners, chap. 10; Mills, The Forgotten People, 237.
63 George Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, 19 vols. (Westport,
Conn., 1972-), vol. 5, pt. 4:158 [St. Mary quote]; Mills, the Forgotten People, 237 [Natchitoches
quote]; Petition for Relief of Antoine Meullion, Dec. 1889, #8090, in Meullion Family Papers;
RPPC: St. Landry Parish, La., Successions, #5040, 14 Oct. 1890; Iberville Parish, La., Deeds, bk.
9(15 July 1868), 221-23; J. Ward Gurley, Jr., to Charles Benjamin, 18 May 1875, RCC, reel 6;
Koger, Black Saveowners, 120-24, 193-95; Johnson and Roark, Black Masterds, 314-15, 324,
330-31; Record of General Tax Return, Sout Carolina, 1865, 1866, 1867, SCDAH; Computed
from USMSPC, 1860, 1870. Land values in the South dropped approximately 45 percent
between 1860 and 1870; in some areas of the Lower South, they depreciated between 60 and 70
percent. The average total estate for adult males in the South dropped nearly 50 percent, from
$3,978 for the free population in 1860 to $2,034 for whites in 1870. See U.S. Department of
Agriculture, Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1867, 12 vols.
(Washington, D.C., 1867), 102-19; Ransom and Sutch, One Kind Freedom, 51; Soltow, Men and
Wealth, 65.
64 Computed from USMSPC, 1860, 1870; USMSPC, New Orleans, La., 6th Ward, 1860, p. 189
[Labat]; Rankin, "The Impact of the Civil War," 396-98, 403-6.
65 New Orleans Picayune, 9 Sept. 1874 [Lacroix]; RPPC, New Orleans, La., Successions,
#38,677, 27 May 1876 [Lacroix]; Rankin, "The Impact of the Civil War," 405 [broker John
Racquet Clay].
66 Computed from USMSPC, 1860, 1870; Koger, Black Slaveholers, 197. Some of this decline
came after the deaths of leading antebellum businessmen and the failure of their children to
sustain their wealth holdings. See RCPC, Charleston, S.C., Estates: #239-25, 15 June 1876
[realtor Joseph Dereef]; #220-6, 8 July 1873 [tailor William McKinlay]; #243-20, 5 Feb. 1877
[builder Anthony Weston]; #158-19, 24 Feb. 1864 [butcher Francis L. Wilkinson); Johnson and
Roark, Black Masters, 202.
67 Computed from USMSPC, 1860, 1870. Sec A Note on Sources and Methodology" and
appendix.
68 John Dennett, The South As It Is, 1865-66 (New York, 1965), 48; John T Trowbridge, The
Desolate South, 1865-66 - A Picture of the Battlefields and of the Devastated Confederacy, ed.
Gordon Carroll (1866; rpt., Boston, 1956), 153. Despite the title, Trowbridge described areas in
the upper states that were conducting business as usual within a short period after the war.
69 Jackson, Free Negro Labor, 202-4; Schwarz, "Emancipators, Protectors, and Anomalies,"
329-32; Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 160.
70 Howard Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York, 1978), 62.
71 USMSPC: Kent Co., Del., Murderkill Hundred, 1850, p. 228; 1870, p. 192 [Colwell];
Baltimore Co., Md., Baltimore, 6th Ward, 1860, p. 541; Baltimore, 5th Ward, 1870, p. 159
[Adams]; District of Columbia, 7th Ward, 1860, p. 868; District of Columbia, 7th Ward, 1870, p.
322 [Bean]; Herbert A. Thomas, jr., "Victims of Circumstance: Negroes in a SOuthern Town
[Lexington], 1865-1880," The Register of the Kentucky Histroical Society 71 July 1973): 268
[Spencerl; USMSPC: Davidson Co., Tenn., Nashville, 4th Ward, 1860, p. 400; Nashville, 4th
Ward, 1870, p. 240 [Napier]; St. Louis, Mo., 4th Ward, 1860, p. 73; St. Louis, 5th Ward, 1870,
p. 31 [Taylor].
72 RCPC: Kent Co., Md., Land Deeds, Liber #JR-1 (1849), p. 27; Liber #JKH-2 (1860), p. 230;
Liber #JKH-5 (1866), p. 359, in Maryland State Archives, Annapolis, Md. [Perkins]; USMSPC:
Kent Co., Md., Chestertown, 1860, p. 1006; Chestertown, 4th Dist., 1870, p. 172; A. W Bolenius
to the Freedmen's Bureau, 31 May 1866, Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and
Abandoned Lands, Maryland, R-G. 105, National Archives [Perkins]; USMSPC: Baltimore,
Md., 9th Ward, 1860, p. 426; 9th Ward, 1870, p. 409 [Roberts] - Henrico Co., Va., Richmond,
1860, n. p.; Richmond, Clay Ward, 1870, p. 422 [Woodson]; Jefferson Co., Ky., Louisville, 5th
Ward, 1860, p. 107; Louisville, 6th Ward, 1870, p. 632 [Rogers]. In 1860, Rogers's real estate
was listed under his wife's name.
73 Computed from USMSPC, 1860, 1870. See A Note on Sources and Methodology" and
appendix.
74 Charles R- Douglass to Frederick Douglass, 17 May 1867, Frederick Douglass Papers, reel 2,
Library of Congress; USMSPC, District of Columbia, 1st Ward, 1870, p. 1; RCPC, District of
Columbia, Estates, #1700, 31 Oct. 1884; Broad Ax [Salt Lake City], 31 Aug. 31, 1895
[Wormley]; USMSPC, Davidson Co., Tenn., Nashville, 5th Ward, 1870, p. 266 [Harding];
Rabinowitz, Race Relations, 88 [Harding]; USMSPC, St. Louis, Mo., 3d Ward, 1870, p. 196
[handwritten page number]; RCPC, St. Louis, Mo., Deeds, bk. 405 (1 April 1870), 69- New
York Herald Tribune, 6 July 1871; Schweninger, From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis
Entrepreneur, 12-13 [Thomas].
75 Robinson, Some Aspects of the Free Negro Population," 43-64; Constance Green, Secret
City.- A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital Princeton, N.J., 1967), 94; USMSP
District of Columbia, 1st Ward, 1860, pp. 222, 232-33, 347, 357.
76 USMSPC, District of Columbia, 1st Ward, 1860, p. 378; 1st Ward, 1870, p. 67.
77 Ibid., 2nd Ward, 1870, p. 170 [Booker]; 2d Ward, 1860, p. 525; 2d Ward, 1870, p. 268
[Francis); 4th Ward, 1870, p. 683 [Briscoe]; 2d Ward, 1870, p. 228 [Sanders].
78 Ibid., 2d Ward, 1860, p. 550-, 2d Ward, 1870, p. 300 [Henson); 1st Ward, 1850, p. 26; 1st
Ward, 1870, p. 181 [Wright]; 5th Ward, 1870, p. 22 [Downing]; New York Fyrenun, 7 March
1885 [Downing]. Other antebellum free persons of color in the city not listed as businessmen
were also engaged in various business activities. Isaac Johnson, for example, although fisted as a
messenger in 1870, was actively engaged in a number of real estate transactions. By 1870, he
had increased his holdings substantially and controlled $17,000 worth of property. USMSPC, 1st
Ward, 1860, p. 324; 1st Ward, 1870, p. 53.
79 Computed from USMSPC, 1860, 1870.
80 Anita Goodstein, "Black History on the Nashville Frontier, 1780-1810," Tennessee Historical
Quarterly 30 (Winter 1979): 412-13 [hotel owner Robert Rentfro]; Sterkx, The Fire Negro in
Ante-bellum Louisiana, 206 [Jean Baptiste Meullion]; Robert Reinders, "The Free Negro in the
New Orleans Economy, 1850-60," Loud" Hi" 6 (Summer 1965):279; New Orleans Tribune, 26
March 1865 [Casenave]; Ralph Flanders, "The Free Negro in Ante-Bellum Georgia," North
Carolina Historical Review 9 July 1932): 271 [Humphries]; Mills, The Forgotten People, 128-29
[merchant Jerome Sarpy, Sr.]; Tinsley Spraggins, "The History of Negro Business Prior to 1860"
(MA thesis, Howard University, 1935), 37 [North Carolina merchant Louis Sheridan]; W B.
Hartgrove, "The Story of Maria Louise Moore and Fannie M. Richards," Journal of Negro Hitory
1 (Jan. 1916): 24 [Moore's husband, shopowner Adolphe Richards]. One of the most fruitful
areas for future research in black business history centers on the question of clientele. There is
some preliminary evidence that the movement to serve black customers, well-documented for the
period from the 1880s onward, might well have begun with the expansion of blacks in business
immediately following the Civil War.
81 W E. B. Du Bois, Black Folk Then and Now: An Essay on the History and Sociology of the
Negro Race (New York, 1939), 217. This was an expanded version of Du Bois's The Negro,
published in 1915.