Most slave owners did not own cotton plantations and after the invention of the cotton gin, blacks were seldom used. However, they were used on sugar and rice plantations. Blacks were used for one reason, rice and sugar was grown in some areas of Africa and there was evidence that slaves taken from the Gold Coast by Islamic, Portuguese, and Dutch traders were familiar with the methods of cultivation practiced in their native country.
It is a myth that all white settlers owned slaves and farms could not exist without their labor. In fact, the first documented slave owner was a black. Another issue with the newly taught history they conveniently leave out facts, such as less than 5 percent of whites in the south owned black slaves. Did you know, prior to 1654, all Africans in the thirteen colonies were held in indentured servitude and were released after a contracted period with many of the indentured receiving land and equipment after their contracts for work expired? Probably not.
The first official slave owner in America was an Angolan who adopted the European name of Anthony Johnson. He was sold to slave traders in 1621 by an enemy tribe in his native Africa, and was registered as Antonio, a Negro in the official records of the Colony of Virginia. He went to work for a white farmer as an indentured servant. By July 1651 Johnson had five indentured servants of his own. In 1664, he brought a case before Virginia courts in which he contested a suit launched by one of his indentured servants, a Negro who adopted the name of John Casor. Johnson won the suit and retained Casor as his servant for life, who thus became the first official and true slave in America.
In 1830, a fourth of the free Negro slave masters in South Carolina owned 10 or more slaves; eight owning 30 or more.
Of the blacks residing in the South, 261,988 were not slaves. Of this number, 10,689 lived in New Orleans. Black Duke University professor John Hope Franklin recorded that in New Orleans over 3,000 free Negroes owned slaves, or 28 percent of the free Negroes in that city.
In 1860 there were at least six Negroes in Louisiana who owned 65 or more slaves. The largest number, 152 slaves, were owned by the widow C. Richards and her son P.C. Richards, who owned a large sugar cane plantation.
Another Negro slave magnate in Louisiana, with over 100 slaves, was Antoine Dubuclet, a sugar planter whose estate was valued at (in 1860 dollars) $264,000.
In Charleston, South Carolina in 1860, 125 free Negroes owned slaves; six of them owning 10 or more. Of the $1.5 million in taxable property owned by free Negroes in Charleston, more than $300,000 represented slave holdings. In North Carolina 69 free Negroes were slave owners.
If you love history and digging through old records, you may know this, but in 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the US census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states. The same records has an eye-opening set of records. There were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves.
Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country.
The figures show conclusively that, when free, blacks disproportionately became slave masters in pre-Civil War America. The statistics outlined above show that about 28 percent of free blacks owned slavesas opposed to less than 4.8 percent of southern whites, and dramatically more than the 1.4 percent of all white Americans who owned slaves.
And Georgia, often thought of as a large slave state, actually placed a ban on slave ownership. James Oglethorpe (16961785) was a British general who founded the colony of Georgia in 1732. From the very beginning, Oglethorpe ensured that slavery was banned in the colony, and that Africans were barred from entering the territory.
So.... who picked cotton? Better question, who owned those farms? Another thing that is often overlooked, the white settlers had no prior experience with slave ownership. However, slavery in Africa was practiced from the time they began raid neighboring tribes.
The transatlantic slave trade was dwarfed by the Arab or Muslim slave trade, which lasted from 650 AD to 1900 AD. It is estimated that a minimum of 18 million Africans were enslaved by Arab slave traders, and that over one million Europeans were enslaved by the Muslim world during the same period. But, that is for a future discussion.
RWNJ wrote:
We should have picked our own cotton.