Excerpts from the book FREE NEGRO OWNERS OF SLAVES IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1830 by Carter J. Woodson its available on Amazon.com.
This is in the forward page v
Slaves of Negroes were in some cases the children of a free father who had purchased his wife. If he did not thereafter emancipated the mother, as so many such husbands failed to do, his own children were born his slaves.
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 slaveholders disposed of Negroes.
FOR example a negro shoe maker in Charleston, South Carolina, 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 editor 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 Manu mission papers that they might escape together to free soil. Upon detecting this plot, the officers of the law received 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 extracting himself from this complication that his attorney fees amounted to $500.To pay them he disposed of his faithless wife for the amount.
I think these were just cases of some evil men who were–or had been–slaves themselves, seeing an opportunity to get rid of a wife they no longer liked, and seizing it. It was a hellish era in itself, a negro relationship or even marriage was a difficult situation dictated by the condition most had been born into. Imagine being born on some white man’s farm in Virginia, then some of your siblings are sold in Carolina, and later you get sold to a plantation farmer in Mississippi. Some people must have been so spiritually damaged as to see this state of affairs as their destiny. Even having papers declaring you were free didn’t stop slavers from abducting you and selling you off, while your husband/wife and a children would be sold to some ‘massa’ from another county. It was the devil’s season. The possibilities to trade in humans were endless.
We have always demonized white folk for slavery but we never talk about the fact that the slave was captured by his fellow Africans and Africans had slaves even in Africa. After black slaves started being freed, they also started buying and selling slaves including their wives and children.
Can we admit that Africans were complicit in the scourge of slavery. I’m not buying the victim narrative because Africans did the same thing. To their own. Even after experiencing the slavery themselves. Black people are their own worst enemies. Whites just exploit our nature.
Sadly, this is true. We must confront the fact that some among Africans aided the slave traders, not out of duress, but for wealth. The Spanish and Portuguese slave buyers never used to venture into the interior. Slaves were captured during skirmishes between Africans, then they were sold to Arabs who would make them trek to the coast to the slave markets where the white slave marchants were. Some people were also simply seized by people who knew them when they went to collect water, firewood, to hunt or gather food from the forest. They would never be seen in their village again. There were Arab organized raiding parties whose aim was to subdue and enslave certain groups of people, and these would not have succeeded if African people could have taken a common stand and united against the invaders. But let’s remember that the political groupings of the time were based on clan and tribal identity. Numbers, a unifying ideology, the technology of war, military might and preparednesss were not strong African points in comparison to the fully organized way the slave trade was planned and carried out.
Slavery originated from Africa, these other races simply made a better business model of it. What excuse does a black man who has been a slave have for meting out the same cruelty on his fellow blacks.
I’m very shocked by the things I have been finding out about Black People. No wonder we are the race plagued with most ills.
I’m a bit sceptical about this though. Slavery is mentioned in the Bible, way before the African slave trade happened. Some of the concubines of men like Abraham and Solomon were slaves. Also, the Roman Empire was responsible for the destruction of whole nations and the enslavement and scattering of people all over North Africa and Europe.
From my reading I am now discovering that Africans had slaves in Africa. As in fellow Africans. I read about a man who sold his own daughter as a slave to another tribe then lied that she was eaten by a crocodile. The mom found out the truth later. Africans sold their kids, brothers and sisters as slaves to other Africans before the Arabs and whites entered the scene.
And if you look at current African behavior be it in Africa or America it’s the same thing. Black American men sell drugs to their own parents. Who are hooked on drugs. They pimp out their own sisters and cousins. Our leaders will throw us their own people under the bus for personal benefit. Arabs, Asians and whites just exploit our wickedness and myopic egocentric nature. Do you know that Lobengula sold the Rhode Island what is present Zimbabwe for a bottle of gin. Like that’s Africans for you, they will sell out for next to nothing.
It’s a terrible thing. History is woven with a thread of tears and blood. People have done very evil things. But if I remember right, in Lobengula’s case his inability to read lead him to get conned of Matabeleland, a huge chunk of earth that forms most of what came to be called Rhodesia by the British. Rhodesia straddled the countries we know today as Zimbabwe and Zambia (I’ll re-check some details of that history).
Cecil Rhodes, after whom Rhodesia was named, used business and political guile to capture huge parts of Southern Africa for the British. Leaders like Lobengula had no idea the kind of value agents of colonial powers attached to their land. He had no knowledge of the impact of signing a piece of paper, onstensibly to offer some wild patch of earth to the “pale strangers” to build their church. Unknown to him, Lobengula had just been tricked into signing away the birth right of the Ndebele people to own Matabeleland–all of the area over which he was king. The kings and chiefs of the time used to offer what they thought was “useless” land to wazungus–areas that were infertile, heavily forested, rocky or swampy. The colonial powers of course had a sinister agenda, demanding written evidence from people who couldn’t read or understand the import of the paper they were putting their mark on. But that was the colonial way of “kuingiza kichwa.” After that soldiers would use horses, rifles, and canons to keep the people off their grazing lands.