Urban Slaves & Free Blacks

|  Urban Slavery  |  Free Blacks  |  Inter-Racial Sex  |

Urban Slavery
Natchez illustrates the importance of urban slavery in the South. Melrose Estate, Natchez, is now a federal historic park. In the 1840s John T. McMurran, who belonged to the one percent of the richest men in the South, used slaves to built this mansion, which took 4 years. He born in Pennsylvania, and became a lawyer and planter living in the Northeast or in Eruope during the summer and in the winter months in Natchez. He owned 200 slaves and 4 plantations.

This is the front parlor, in rococo style. 20 slaves ran the household at Melrose.

This section of the 1886 Sanborn Fire Insurance map of Natchez
shows the building materials and structures of a slave owning family.

reddish color  = brick; yellow color = wood; blue circle = well

The house (dwg) in the lower right-hand corner has a wooden back porch
and is attached by a covered walk to the brick kitchen with a wooden porch.

Slave quarters were located in the wooden building next to the kitchen.

Slave owners took their slaves to church. In this Presbyterian church, built in 1828,
white planter families sat downstairs and their slaves sat in the balcony.

Large southern cities, such as Vickburg, Natchez, New Orleans, Charleston, and Savannah, had slave markets.
Natchez was the second largest slave market in this part of the South. Notices, such as this 1860 poster at Fork on the Road, announced a slave auction at one of Natchez's eight slave markets.

Slaves worked in households, built the cities, and did the manual work of the South.
Slaves loaded cotton in southern ports, such as this scene in lower town ("Under the Hill") of Natchez.
A northern building contractor hired slaves from plantation owners to build the "old" courthouse in Vicksburg in 1858. This "famous" historic building, according to the city's tourist brochure, "hosted such great Americans as Jefferson Davis (the president of the Confederacy), U.S. Grant (who, with his Union soldiers, destroyed the city), and Booker T. Washington (a prominent black scholar)" -- what a combination of pro- and anti-slavery individuals! Can they all be great Americans?

Sexual Relations between White Women and Black Slave Men
Only recent detailed research has revealed that illicit sex between Southern white women and black slave men before the Civil War was largely tolerated. Marth Hodes in White Women, Black Men (Yale University Press, 1997) documents that white Southerns tolerated these sexual relations but were concerned about the legal and racial status of the children that resulted. Racial violence against such sexual liaisons followed the Civil War when the Ku Klux Klan and other Whites used terror and lynchings to suppress such inter-racial relationships, which nevertheless continued.
Free Blacks
Throughout the South in 1860, free blacks owned $15 million worth of property.

Louisiana
In 1860, Louisiana contained 350,373 blacks. Of them, 18,647 were free.  Whites numbered 357,456. By 1870, the black population exceeded the white population by 2,000.

In 1862, New Orleans had a black population of 25,000 of which 11,000 were free persons of color. Many of them were well educated and prosperous. This was the largest free black community in the Deep South. The Ricaud family alone in 1859 owned 4,000 acres and 350 slaves. The majority were light-skinned descendants of French settlers and black women or wealthy mulatto immigrants from Haiti. They tended to identify more with whites than slaves. Many spoke only French and their children were educated in Europe. They enjoyed more rights than freed blacks did in other parts of the South before 1862. They owned $2 million worth of property, including slaves. They dominated the skilled crafts of bricklaying, cigarmaking, carpentry, and shoemaking.

Mississippi
In 1860, the state had 353,899 whites. The state also had 473,404 blacks. Fewer than 1,000 were free.

South Carolina
In 1860, South Carolina had 412,320 blacks, 291,300 whites, and nearly 10,000 free blacks.

 

Created by Ingolf Vogeler on 5 March 1997; last revised on 8 November 1997.