This essay analyzes the changing configuration of black-owned businesses in the South over nearly a century. It divides the region into two sections—the Lower South and the Upper South—and examines changes that occurred prior to 1840, during the late antebellum era, and as a result of the Civil War. It uses a “wealth model” to define various business groups, and then creates business occupational categories based on the listings in various sources, including the U.S. censuses for 1850, 1860, and 1870. The article compares and contrasts the wealth holdings among various groups of blacks in business, and it analyzes, within a comparative framework, slave entrepreneurship, rural vs. urban business activity, color—black or mulatto—as a variable in business ownership, and slave ownership among blacks engaged in business.

Frederick Law Olmsted wrote in 1856, a few years after a steamboat trip down the Cane River in Louisiana. Having stopped at several plantations to take on cotton, he had learned that, in fifteen miles of "well-settled and cultivated country" on the bank of the river, beginning ten miles below Natchitoches, there was only "one pure blooded white man." Describing these planters as "GALLIC AND HISPANO-AFRIC CREOLES," Olmsted noted that they were the slave holding descendants of "old French or Spanish planters and their negro slaves." As a reporter for the New York Times and New York Tribune, Olmsted had traveled extensively in the South during the early 1850s, publishing four books about his experiences, but few groups stood out more vividly in his memory than Louisiana's Creoles of color. Not only did these American-born people of color possess a European and African cultural heritage but they also acquired substantial wealth and property.! For many years, historians paid only slight attention to blacks who reached the upper economic levels in the nineteenth-century South. In 1905, amateur historian Calvin Dill Wilson wrote a ten-page essay in the North American Review called "Black Masters: A SideLight on Slavery," and a decade later John Russell added a brief article in the Journal ofNeg;ro History on the same subject.2 The "scientific historians" of the William A. Dunning school

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A reasonable reward will be paid for the recovery of any part of the articles missing," a notice in the Columbian Museum and Savannah Advertiser announced on April 11, 1814. "Silver Smith's and other persons dealing in silver, gold or plated ware, answering the description of the above, are requested to stop the same, and to give to either of the subscribers information of the same." It took nearly a full column to list the missing articles: a dozen large spoons, half dozen tea spoons and one soup ladle, all of silver, a dozen tea spoons and ladle stamped Carrol [of Philadelphia] and engraved with the letter L, two pair of decanter stands, three mahogany dining room tables, a tea table, round stand, three chests of drawers, a dozen chairs, six feather beds, four Marseilles quilts with fringe, one large blue and white counterpane, two lace shawls, one large laced quilt, a dozen wine glasses, four fluted decanters, a mahogany case with two rows of brass hoops, a spy glass marked London with mahogany case, clothing, jewelry, a tambour frame, and numerous other items. The notice explained that on the first night of spring a fire had swept through the residence of Selinah and Lydia Levingston. With the help of neighbors, the two women had carried their belongings into the street, but in the confusion that followed many of their possessions had been carried off by thieves. 1

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