11 African American slave owners that will completely change your historical perspective

African American slave owners have been largely unknown and unspoken of throughout history. This is primarily because slaves were seen as property and their owners were usually white. However, there were a number of African American slaveholders throughout the United States during the antebellum period.

This changes the historical perspective on slavery in a number of ways. First, it shows that slavery was not just a white man’s institution. Second, it reveals that some African Americans actually benefited from the system of slavery. Finally, it challenges the idea that all African Americans were opposed to slavery.

The existence of African American slave owners challenges many assumptions about slavery and its history. It is important to learn about this little-known aspect of American history in order to more fully understand the complicated reality of slavery in the United States. Now let’s take a look at each of the African Americans who own slaves:

Richard Edward Dereef

An American lumber trader and politician, Richard Edward Dereef lived from 1798 to 1876 and was a former black slave who gained his freedom and owned forty black slaves. He constructed a property in Wraggborough. On the East Side of Charleston, he rented out his properties, and some of his tenants were white people. He was thought to be one of the wealthiest black people in Charleston. Because he was a slave owner and owned 40 slaves, his slaves were darker in skin colour than him, since he belonged to a lighter skin group that did not associate with darker blacks and looked down on them in all areas of life.

 William Ellison

William Ellison Jr., born as April Ellison, was an African-American slave who achieved considerable success as a slaveowner before the American Civil War. He was a U.S. cotton gin producer and blacksmith in South Carolina.

Among the best-documented cases of African American, slave owners is that of William Ellison, a cotton gin maker based in South Carolina. Ellison did not think of himself as black but rather a man of color, a mulatto. At a time when the great majority of blacks in the South were slaves and almost all free blacks were impoverished, Ellison was considered a very wealthy person among free persons of color in the America South and wealthier than many white people.

 Ellison have a massive plantation for cotton and also have slaves that surpassed all persons of color who ever lived in the Southside of Louisiana. He even has more than some of the richest white planters. In 1840 Ellison owned thirty slaves. By 1847 Ellison’s property had expanded to 350 acres and thirty-six slaves. And it is recorded that just before the Civil War, he possessed sixty-three slaves. Ellison’s slaves laboured in fields and were taught to make and repair cotton gins.

Antoine Dubuclet

Antoine Dubuclet Jr. (1810-1887) was the State Treasurer of Louisiana from 1868-1878, and was one of the wealthiest African Americans in the nation before the American Civil War. After the war, he became the first person of African descent to hold the office of Louisiana Treasurer.

 Dubuclet was born in Iberville Parish near Baton Rouge to Antoine Dubuclet Sr. and Marie Felecite Gray, both free blacks. His father was part owner of Cedar Grove, a successful sugar plantation inherited from his parents, Joseph Antoine Dubuclet and Rosie Belly.

 After the death of his father, his mother left for New Orleans with his younger siblings; Antoine Dubuclet then inherited his father’s duties and helped in managing the plantation which contained more than 70 slaves. In 1834, the plantation was shared between Dubuclet and his siblings.

Anthony Johnson

In the early 17th-century Virginia colony, Anthony Johnson, an Angolan black man, became wealthy. He was one of the first African Americans whose lifetime ownership of a slave was acknowledged by Virginia courts. He was initially indentured in 1621, and after several years earned his freedom, acquiring land from the colony.

He then became a tobacco farmer in Maryland. He was known as ‘the black patriarch of the first Negro property owners’ community in America’ after finishing his indenture term.

Andrew Durnford

Andrew Durnford (1792-1859), a black plantation owner who lived in Louisiana between 1828 and 1859, was the only plantation owner during that time who used black slaves. The son of Andrew Durnford Sr. inherited his father’s sugar plantation in Louisiana in 1828, and he died in 1859.

There was a time He travelled to Virginia in 1835 to buy extra slaves. During that trip, he sent letters to his friend and business partner Thomas MacDonough, which were preserved and studied by David O. Whitten for their insights into slave trading.
Durnford, according to Whitten, allowed his slaves to earn money through their extra work. Slaves who wished to buy their freedom were attracted by this sort of work.

Whitten also noted the instances where Durnford’s letters mentioned slave deaths as a result of illness or accidental injury at work.

Marie Laveau

Marie Catherine Laveau, who lived from September 10, 1801 to June 15, 1881 was a Louisiana Creole practitioner of Voodoo, herbalist and midwife who was renowned in New Orleans. Historical records show that Marie Catherine Laveau was born a free woman of color in colonial New Orleans (the French Quarter today), Louisiana (New France) on Thursday, September 10, 1801.

Marie Laveau is the daughter of a white frenchman named Charles Laveau Trudeau, a politician, and her mother Marguerite D’Arcantel, a free woman of color. Marie Laveau is confirmed to have owned seven slaves at least during her lifetime.

John Carruthers Stanly

John Carruthers Stanly (1774-1845), a North Carolina slave owner and a wealthy free black resident, was one of the biggest slaveholders in the state. Stanly was the illegitimate son of privateer John Wright Stanly and the half-brother of U.S. Congressman John Stanly.

The illegitimate son of a privateer, Stanly was born a slave but used his intelligence and family connections to become an entrepreneur, land developer, and plantation owner. Stanly owned a large plantation and twice as many slaves as the second-largest free black slave owner in the South.

Ana Gallum

Anansi Wiggins, also known as Nansi Gallum, who was born in 1755 and died in 1840, was a Senegalese woman who was enslaved in Florida and became a slave-owning planter. Gallum, who worked the plantation after her husband died, actively participated in the cattle and slave trade.

When she was assaulted by a man named Pedro Cassaly in early 1799, Cassaly drowned on the road when he returned to St. Augustine after purchasing cattle. As a result, she gave birth to her final child named Pedro Cassaly II in the same year, who was born as a result of this encounter.

She petitioned the courts for assistance for her child due to his unfortunate birth, but was denied because she inherited the wealth of her husband’s estate, thus making her a wealthy woman. 

Eulalie de Mandéville

Eulalie de Mandéville, better known as Cécée Macarty, a placée and businesswoman who lived from 1774 to 1848, was an American. She is considered the ‘most successful free mulatto businesswoman’ in the Antebellum South. In 1830, she had a fortune worth $155,000.229, made up of 32 slaves. Between 1820 and 1865, she was listed as one of the wealthiest black entrepreneurs in the United States. She was the owner of 32 slaves, the largest slaveholder among the free mulatto population of New Orleans.

Rosette Rochon

Rosette Rochon, who lived between 1767 and 1863, was an American placée and businesswoman in New Orleans. She was a key figure in the Gens de couleur libres society, which fought for the civil rights of free people of color.  Just like Eulalie de Mandéville and Marie Thérèse Metoyer, she was among the most prominent placées in New Orleans, and she made a fortune through investments in dry goods, cattle, banking, slave trading, and real estate.

Anne Rossignol

Anne Rossignol was a prominent signare businessperson and slave trader, who lived from 1730 to 1810. she given birth to On Gorée, she moved to Saint-Domingue in 1775, where she turned out to be one of the three wealthiest free coloured entrepreneurs, alongside Jeanne-Genevieve Deslandes in Port-au-Prince and Zabeau Bellanton in Cap-Francais. she, however, moved to Charleston, South Carolina after which she was known as the first free black person to voluntarily and freely emigrate to the United States during the Haitian Revolution.

Elizabeth Frazer Skelton

Elizabeth Frazer Skelton, better known as “Mammy Skelton,” was an Euro-African slave trader who lived from 1800 to 1855. Elizabeth Skelton, the daughter of a West African trader, married William Skelton Jr., an Anglo-African trader from Kissing. They founded the slave fort Victoria on the Rio Nunez in 1825/26, which they jointly managed.

Slaves were taken to Portuguese Bissau by canoe or overland via Victoria in about 1840, after the British West Africa Squadron and the Blockade of Africa pressured the slave traders of the region to shift to growing peanuts with slave labour. She was also one of the leading figures in this trade. In 1851, Elizabeth received her inheritance after her father died, worth over one million dollars.

source: Wikipedia