Selling Poor Steven (February/March 1993 | Volume: 44, Issue: 1)

Selling Poor Steven

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Authors: Philip Burnham

Historic Era: Era 4: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861)

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February/March 1993 | Volume 44, Issue 1

In the 1640s, John Casor was brought from Africa to America, where he toiled as a servant for a Virginia landowner. In 1654, Casor filed a complaint in Northampton County Court, claiming that his master, Anthony Johnson, had unjustly extended the terms of his indenture with the intention of keeping Casor his slave for life. Johnson, insisting he knew nothing of any indenture, fought hard to retain what he regarded as his personal property. After much wrangling, on March 8, 1655, the court ruled that “the said Jno Casor Negro shall forthwith bee returned unto the service of his master Anthony Johnson,” consigning him to a lifetime of bondage. Given the vulnerable legal status of servants—black and white—in colonial America, the decision was not surprising. But the documents reveal one additional fact of interest: Anthony Johnson, like his chattel, Casor, was black.

Though the vast majority of black owners held no more than a few slaves, some had as many as 70 or 80.

Johnson’s life in America has something in it of a rags-to-riches tale. He appears to have arrived in Virginia in 1621 and is noted in the early records simply as “Antonio, a Negro.” Though the general-muster rolls of 1625 list his occupation as “servant,” twenty-five years later he had somehow accumulated a respectable surname and two hundred and fifty acres of land on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Surviving both a fire that damaged their plantation and the protracted legal tiff with Casor, Anthony and his wife, Mary, moved to the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the early 1660s, their contentious slave in tow. In 1666 Johnson leased a lot of three hundred acres, on which the prosperous landowner remained until his death. As for Casor, he stayed on as a “servant,” witnessing Mary Johnson’s will of 1672 and registering his own livestock brand in the same year, apparently something of a colonial success story himself.

By the early eighteenth century, the Johnson family had disappeared from the historical record. But in the 150 years that followed, many other black slaveowners imitated Johnson’s example, and for a variety of reasons. According to 1830 U.S. census records, 3,775 free blacks—living mostly in the South—owned a total of 12,760 slaves. Though the vast majority of these owned no more than a few slaves, some in Louisiana and South Carolina held as many as 70 or 80. Nor was the South the only region to know black slaveowners. Their presence was recorded in Boston by 1724 and in Connecticut by 1783. As late as 1830, some blacks still owned slaves in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York, as well as in the border states and the District of Columbia.

The motives that guided black slaveowners were many and complex. Most of them appear to have “owned” slaves for the benevolent purpose of protecting family members from a society that habitually regarded free black people with deep