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The census records show that the majority of the Negro owners

of slaves were such from the point of view of philanthropy. In

many instances the husband purchased the wife or vice versa. The

slaves belonging to such families were few compared with the large

numbers found among the whites on the well developed plantations.

Slaves of Negroes were in some cases the children of a free father

who had purchased his wife. If he did not thereafter emancipate

the mother, as so many such husbands failed to do, his own children

were born his slaves and were thus reported by the enumerators.

Some of these husbands were not anxious to liberate their wives

immediately. They considered it advisable to put them on probation

for a few years, and if they did not find them satisfactory they

would sell their wives as other slave holders disposed of Negroes.

For example, a Negro shoemaker in Charleston, South Carolina,

42 JOURNAL OF NEGRO HISTORY

purchased his wife for $700; but, on finding her hard to please,

he sold her a few months thereafter for $750, gaining $50 by the

transaction. The writer personally knew a man in Cumberland

County, Virginia, whose mother was purchased by his father who

had first bought himself. Becoming enamored of a man slave, she

gave him her husband's manumission papers that they might escape

together to free soil. Upon detecting this plot, the officers of the

law got the impression that her husband had turned over the papers

to the slave and arrested the freedman for the supposed offense. He

had such difficulty in extricating himself from this complication

that his attorney's fees amounted to $500. To pay them he disposed

of his faithless wife for that amount.

- May 22, 2016An interesting read.