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One of the less well known aspects of the history of slavery is how many and how often non-whites owned and traded slaves in early America. Free black slave holders could be found at one time or another in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery, historian R. Halliburton Jr. observed. That black people bought and sold other black people raises vexing questions for 21st-century Americans like African-American writer Henry Louis Gates Jr., who writes that it betrays class divisions that have always existed within the black community. For others, it's an excuse to deflect the shared blame for the institution of slavery in America away from white people. In the latter vein, a 9 Facts About Slavery They Don't Want You to Know meme lays out a mixture of true, false and misleading historical claims. We'll address each one in turn below: The first legal slave owner in American history was a black tobacco farmer named Anthony Johnson. Possibly true. The wording of the statement is important. Anthony Johnson was not the first slave owner in American history, but he was, according to historians, among the first to have his lifetime ownership of a servant legally sanctioned by a court. A former indentured servant himself, Anthony Johnson was a free negro who owned a 250-acre farm in Virginia during the 1650s, with five indentured servants under contract to him. One of them, a black man named John Casor, claimed that his term of service had expired years earlier and Johnson was holding him illegally. In 1654, a civil court found that Johnson in fact owned Casor's services for life, an outcome historian R Halliburton Jr. calls one of the first known legal sanctions of slavery — other than as a punishment for crime. North Carolina's largest slave holder in 1860 was a black plantation owner named William Ellison. False. William Ellison was a very wealthy black plantation owner and cotton gin manufacturer who lived in South Carolina (not North Carolina). According to the 1860 census (in which his surname was listed as Ellerson), he owned 63 black slaves, making him the largest of the 171 black slaveholders in South Carolina, but far from the largest overall slave holder in the state. American Indians owned thousands of black slaves. True. Historian Tiya Miles provided this snapshot of the Native American ownership of black slaves at the turn of the 19th century for Slate magazine in January 2016: In 1830 there were 3,775 free black people who owned 12,740 black slaves. Approximately true, according to historian R. Halliburton Jr.: Many black slaves were allowed to hold jobs, own businesses, and own real estate. Somewhat true. There were exceptions, but generally speaking — especially after 1750, by which time slave codes had been entered into the law books in most of the American colonies — black slaves were not legally permitted to own property or businesses. From the Oxford Companion to American Law (2002): Brutal black-on-black slavery was common in Africa for thousands of years. True, in the sense that the phenomenon of human beings enslaving other human beings goes back thousands of years, but not just among blacks, and not just in Africa. Most slaves brought to America from Africa were purchased from black slave owners. Sort of true. Historian Steven Mintz describes the situation more accurately in the introduction to his book African-American Voices: A Documentary Reader, 1619-1877: Slavery was common for thousands of years. True, as noted above — though how common slavery has been and what the specific nature of that slavery was has varied according to time and place. White people ended legal chattel slavery. It's rather self-serving to claim that white people ended legal chattel slavery in the United States (much less ended chattel slavery, period), given that the overwhelming majority of blacks in the U.S. could not vote, could not run for political office, and, in every other way conceivable, were excluded from institutional power. Moreover, even as some white people were laboring to put an end to slavery, many others were fighting to preserve it. Slavery was eliminated in America via the efforts of people of various ethnicities, including Caucasians, who took up the banner of the abolitionist movement. The names of the white leaders of that movement tend to be better known than those of the black leaders, among whom were David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Dred Scott, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, and many others. When Congress passed (and the states ratified) the 13th Amendment in 1865, it was the culmination of many years of work by that multi-racial movement.
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