Prosperous Blacks in the South, 1790-1880

Abstract

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

An Archaeology of Community Life: Appalachia, 1865–1920

“…Emancipation, disruption of the established social and economic structure, three successive years of crop failure, as well as a depression during the 1870s affected the livelihoods of Appalachian people (Barnes and Robbins 2006, p. 9;Schweninger 1990;Stuckert 1987). Poor blacks and whites were both affected by Appalachia's transition from self-sufficiency to economic dependency (Salstrom 1994;Steinberg 2002), but it was especially ruinous for African Americans who had been promised freedom after years of bondage.…”

Color Crit: Critical Race Theory and the History and Future of Colorism in the United States

“…Mulattos were advantaged relative to “regular” Black people in a number of arenas. They had more wealth (Bodenhorn & Ruebeck, 2007), more successful businesses (Schweninger, 1989, 1999), better jobs (Gullickson, 2010; Saperstein & Gullickson, 2013), they lived longer (Green & Hamilton, 2013), they had bigger families (Frazier, 1933), and during slavery they were more likely to be manumitted (Bodenhorn, 2011). Disproportionate manumission created stark differences in the color of slaves and the free Black population.…”

The Hydra of Horowitzian History

“…Koger's findings are correct and generally supported, though one should question his logic for deciding “mulatto masters” were unrelated to Black slaves. A better way to comprehend this socioanthropological phenomenon is found in the works of historian Loren Schweninger, who combines class, ancestry, social milieu, and regional factors to explain the split between mulatto slave owners, Black slaves, and, for that matter, Blacks in general (Schweninger 1990a, 1990b). 69…”