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Were There Black Slaveholders in the Antebellum South?
Yes, there were. According to the 1860 census, there were 250,000 free Blacks in the South, many of whom owned slaves of their own. For example, in 1860, the number of Black slaveholders in the State of South Carolina alone was 171, holding property in 766 slaves. Nearly one-half of those classified as "colored taxpayers" in Charleston owned between them a total of 390 slaves, and at the end of the war, 241 slaves in that city were released from service to their Black masters. It is true that some of the slaves purchased and held by these Negro masters were "their own kindred, bought and held merely because the laws forbade manumission without exile." Nevertheless, others had an economic, not merely a personal, interest in the institution. According to Larry Koger, "...[M]any black masters did not intend to manumit their slaves and viewed the institution of slavery as a source of labor to be exploited for their own benefit. Indeed, free blacks not only used the labor of slaves to till the soil of their farms and plantations but also purchased slaves to work in their businesses as skilled and unskilled laborers.... [T]he system of American slavery was a universal institution in which even Afro-Americans became slaveowners and occasionally ascended to the ranks of large slaveowning planters" (Black Slaveowners in South Carolina, 1790-1860 [Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 1985], page 2).
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