Blacks owning Blacks...

5fish

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black man bought his wife
Something has been lost in this conversation... I have on issue of Free Black men buying their wives or children and owning them as slaves to keep their families together. I have no issue in whatever combination it takes to keep one's family together.

they still wanted to be like the pinkskins (the better pinkskins, that is)
You always want to imitate those in charge for that is the role model... If you read about Empires when a new rising empire supplants an old empire they tend to emulate the old empire in selective ways...

An arm of my ancestors were enslaved by Free People of Color in Lousiana. They certainly didn't see themselves as Black -- and would spit at anyone who claimed they were.
The Free people of color can think what they want to think once their state joined to the union. They were considered to be black in the eye of most American white people... I argue you read through Andrew Durnford stuff he knew he was black but was ambiguous about his treatment of slaves in the name of self interest. He was no better than white slave owners and worst in other...

Another point they knew the People of color knew inside them selves look at Ellison son... fleeing the south...

As public opinion turned against free blacks, William Ellison, Jr., a free mulatto whose father owned dozens of slaves, attempted to leave South Carolina in 1860. The agents for a Philadelphia steamer refused Ellison and his children passage, claiming that if they turned out to be escaped slaves, anyone found guilty of helping them leave the South could be executed. They suggested instead that Ellison declare his children slaves—though they were not—and put them in the charge of a white passenger. Sensing danger, he obtained passage for them on another ship by using his influence and financial resources. Clearly even the wealthy mulatto caste had come to feel threatened by the eve of the Civil War.

Its all self interest... Blacks owning Blacks...

Anthony Johnson and his spiritual descendants remind us that however much we may generalize, the experience of individuals ranges from the heights of human compassion to the depths of profound greed—and all variations therein. As Andrew Durnford wrote in his will, “I also hereby emancipate and order to be emancipated, the boy of my servant Wainy born the 2d of January 1857 and when the Said boy shall be ten years old I hereby give him two thousand dollars to contribute to give Said boy a good education.” The boy, it turns out, wasn’t just anyone: He was Durnford’s son by a slave mistress. Even after death Durnford was looking out for his own. As the planter himself had once put it in a letter to McDonogh, “self interest is al la mode.
 

dedej

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They may have been mixed raced but White America's did think of them other than black. Once the Spanish left and after 1803 they were treated as second class people and had to carry papers all the time showing they were free men of color...


In 1806, the territorial legislature passed an act (never fully enforced) prohibiting free black males from entering Louisiana and ordering those over the age of fifteen who had been born elsewhere to leave (Louisiana's native free people of color had been granted U. S. citizenship in 1803). In 1812, one year after the failed German Coast uprising (the largest slave rebellion in U. S. history), free black men were denied the right to vote. Throughout this period and until the abolition of slavery made their separate legal status obsolete, free persons of color were required to carry passes, observe curfews, and to have their racial status designated in all public records.

Plantation owner Durnford , even wrote about selling and buying slaves, he admits in his writing is came down to self interest, his self interest. In his writing you can tell he knows he was a black man...
Maybe so.

But, they ( the individual) gets to decide how they define themselves - and many/most of those who were enslavers did not see themselves as "Black" -- and clearly understood they were not the same as an enslaved "Negro" / "Black" person.

And of course he would have self-interest.

If one does not see himself or see himself as and/or connected to the "Black" enslaved - or sees himself as Black - they usually have no issue with doing such acts. He saw them the same way his father and mother saw them -- as chattel and not human.

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As a man of color, albeit extremely light-skinned, Durnford spoke with surprising pragmatism concerning “the Blacks,” as he repeatedly called the slaves. To Durnford, as well as Thomas Jefferson and countless other slaveholders across the South, “blacks” were not free Negroes, or people of color. They were, in the language and thought of the day, produce, property, items for sale, “black” because they were slaves, not because it most closely approximately the pigmentation of their skin.64

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plantation and slaveowner, physician, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Thomas Durnford, an-English immigrant and merchant, and Rosaline Mercier, a free woman of color. Thomas Durnford was a cousin of Colonel Elias Durnford of the Royal Engineers, lieutenant governor of British West Florida. Andrew Durnford, reared by parents who were denied marriage by law, grew up in New Orleans's free colored community with the comforts afforded the family of a successful merchant and speculator. His schooling, like most of his early life, is a matter of conjecture. In his adult years he revealed a working knowledge of written and spoken English and French, the rudiments of elementary arithmetic, and medical procedures. He apparently passed freely between the white community with his father and the free colored community with his mother and her family. Source

Additional Info about Mr. Durnford:

Andrew Durnford lived on his plantation, St. Rosalie. Born in 1800 to a British officer stationed in West Florida and a free mulâtresse from New Orleans, Durnford quickly scaled the ranks of colored men in New Orleans, inheriting an estate of nearly $40,000 from his father in 1826, and purchasing vast tracts of land in the rural parishes outside the city.59 Through his father, later a merchant specializing in sugar cane, Durnford became a close friend and business partner of John McDonogh, the famed philanthropist, sugar planter, and shipping mogul of the Crescent City. Indeed, he purchased his St. Rosalie plantation from McDonogh 1831 for $22,500, a price indicating the potential of the land.60 Over the next three decades, Durnford, with McDonogh as his agent, created one of the largest sugar cane plantations in the state, complete with 77 slaves, 2,660 acres of land, and three houses.61 Durnford did not simply look the part. He acted and thought like a true elite, a true planter of the sugar parishes. In 1835, he traveled to Richmond, Virginia, to purchase slaves directly from dealers, rather than at auction in New Orleans. Once there, he wrote McDonogh complaining of the high prices in the Virginia capital. “ Source

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Durnford, of course, did not belong to this group, either socially or racially. Himself of “yellow complexion,” Durnford placed no premium on similarly complected slaves. Indeed, as we saw above, he felt $1,800 for a “yellow” family of six too dear for his liking. And although he purchased 25 men and women “of all descriptions,” they remained “Blacks” in his eyes. He clearly had an understanding of where he stood in the social and financial hierarchy of the nation.
Source

It seems as though Andrew Durnford, a free man of color living outside, and doing business within, a city with a free colored population of more than 11,000 in 1860, had no colored friends, partners, or acquaintances. Even those giving testimony to his character, marital status, death, and business relationships came from the “white caste.”6

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In conclusion, Mr. Durnford - and I am sure 99% of these "Black enslavers" -- did not see themselves as "Black" -- and it's disingenuous for people to continue to apply the racial and/or ethnic marker upon him.

He unlike the enslaved "Blacks" had the agency to define himself - and a "Black" he was not.
 

dedej

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I disagree I think they new the were black and did not care about their fellow black slaves...

Durnford was not so sanguine about the prospects of manumission, though he did free four slaves during his life. “Self interest is too strongly rooted in the bosom of all that breathes the American atmosphere,” he wrote in 1843. “Self interest is al la mode.” Paternalism and cruelty went hand in hand at Durnford’s plantation. “Jackson has just left here,” he wrote of a runaway in 1836. “I ordered five rounds to be given him yesterday for cutting my cane and corn. He is a wicked fellow. Was he not a relic I would gett clear of him.”

In fact, Durnford was buying for his own use on the sugar plantation he called St. Rosalie, thirty miles south of New Orleans. A man of business, he lamented the high cost of slaves, complaining that Alabamians had bid too high and driven up the market price. “I could have bought some cheaper but, they are what I call rotten people.”
Your comment is what is revealed when one makes assumptions and disconnected.

I would leave this topic alone, if you are not open to understanding and learning. Because, just because one tells me I'm something - or labels me as something - doesn't make it so.

Just because you and others may see him as "Black" - doesn't mean he saw himself as that. And best believe the enslaved "Blacks" -- did not see him as "Black" either.

And from the sources I supplied - he made that loud and clear.

I hope I helped!
 

dedej

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Something has been lost in this conversation... I have on issue of Free Black men buying their wives or children and owning them as slaves to keep their families together. I have no issue in whatever combination it takes to keep one's family together.



You always want to imitate those in charge for that is the role model... If you read about Empires when a new rising empire supplants an old empire they tend to emulate the old empire in selective ways...



The Free people of color can think what they want to think once their state joined to the union. They were considered to be black in the eye of most American white people... I argue you read through Andrew Durnford stuff he knew he was black but was ambiguous about his treatment of slaves in the name of self interest. He was no better than white slave owners and worst in other...

Another point they knew the People of color knew inside them selves look at Ellison son... fleeing the south...

As public opinion turned against free blacks, William Ellison, Jr., a free mulatto whose father owned dozens of slaves, attempted to leave South Carolina in 1860. The agents for a Philadelphia steamer refused Ellison and his children passage, claiming that if they turned out to be escaped slaves, anyone found guilty of helping them leave the South could be executed. They suggested instead that Ellison declare his children slaves—though they were not—and put them in the charge of a white passenger. Sensing danger, he obtained passage for them on another ship by using his influence and financial resources. Clearly even the wealthy mulatto caste had come to feel threatened by the eve of the Civil War.

Its all self interest... Blacks owning Blacks...

Anthony Johnson and his spiritual descendants remind us that however much we may generalize, the experience of individuals ranges from the heights of human compassion to the depths of profound greed—and all variations therein. As Andrew Durnford wrote in his will, “I also hereby emancipate and order to be emancipated, the boy of my servant Wainy born the 2d of January 1857 and when the Said boy shall be ten years old I hereby give him two thousand dollars to contribute to give Said boy a good education.” The boy, it turns out, wasn’t just anyone: He was Durnford’s son by a slave mistress. Even after death Durnford was looking out for his own. As the planter himself had once put it in a letter to McDonogh, “self interest is al la mode.

 

5fish

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You need to do it in your context this article... your perspective...
 

5fish

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I am not making some right wing ploy about slavery... I read up and yes it does seem his land was taken from his children by local white land owners using the courts... You can argue Johnson is the exception that proves the rule...

 

dedej

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You need to do it in your context this article... your perspective...

Basically, Colonial Era and Antebellum Era Slavery was not the same.

In addition, "Negro/Black" and FPOC is not the same. FPOC does NOT equal "Black."

To highlight less than 1% of enslavers who had complex, different reasons, motives, racial identification loyalties, backgrounds -- and throwing them all in the "Black" bag will continue to leave one in the dark -- never truly understanding this topic.

And for some people to continue to push a narrative without looking at the era, details and complexities of each of these alleged "Black" enslavers showcases a sad agenda -- and/or an effort to keep a simple-minded/false viewpoint.

I think this article sums up Mr. Johnson's case very well: https://www.facinghistory.org/reconstruction-era/anthony-johnson-man-control-his-own

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  • The development of the institution of slavery in North America was complex. In the 17th century, the enslavement of Africans co-existed with indentured servitude, and laws governing both were in flux.

  • When Johnson was brought to North America, status and power in colonial Virginia society depended much more heavily on one’s religion or whether one owned property than it did on skin color or a notion of race.

  • For a period of time in the 17th century, some of the enslaved, like Johnson, were able to gain their freedom, own land, and have servants.

  • By the end of the 17th century, however, colonies began to make legal distinctions based on racial categories; the legal status of black people deteriorated while the rights of white European Americans increased. Johnson’s descendants, who were classified as black, were stripped of the property they inherited from him.

  • A system of slavery in which enslavement was lifelong, hereditary, and based solely on race was established in the colonies in the beginning of the 18th century.
The story of one man, Anthony Johnson, helps illustrate the changes in Virginia society that laid the foundation for the institution of race-based slavery that thrived until the Civil War. Johnson was brought to Virginia, enslaved by an English settler, in 1622. He was able to earn his freedom, own land, and have servants of his own, but his descendants would not be permitted to do any of these things.

. . . In August of that year, however, an all-white jury ruled that Anthony’s original land in Virginia could be seized [from his surviving family] by the state “because he was a Negroe and by consequence an alien.” And fifty acres that Anthony had given to his son Richard wound up in the hands of wealthy white neighbor George Parker. It didn’t matter that Richard, a free man, had lived on the land with his wife and children for five years.

The “hard labor and knowne service” that had served the family so well in the New World was now secondary to the color of their skin. The world that allowed captive slave “Antonio, a Negro,” to grow confident as Anthony Johnson, landowner and freeman, ceased to exist. The Virginians no longer needed to lure workers to their plantations. Now they could buy them and chain them there.
 

dedej

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I am not making some right wing ploy about slavery... I read up and yes it does seem his land was taken from his children by local white land owners using the courts... You can argue Johnson is the exception that proves the rule...


I understand. But, it must be stated that the cases and the topic of "Black enslavers" -- who most of the time were not "Black" -- and didn't see themselves as "Black" -- are used as talking points.

Johnson was enslaved and was an enslaver in Colonial Era. It would be silly to compare him and others who became enslavers under Colonial laws and rules to Antebellum "race-based" slavery.

And I would say the same about comparing a FPOC who inherited thousands from their White father and FPOC mother who willingly immigrated in from Haiti - who did not only not see themselves as "Black" due to racial categories in their respective countries. And, had no connection to those who were enslaved and brought over from the many countries/tribes in Africa.

Skin color/Race does not make one kin or family. As Zora Neale Hurston once said "All Skinfolk aint Kinfolk."

You can look at the many countries in Africa today - to understand that as well.

Sharing skin color/race does not mean anything. It's about one's tribe.

The concept of being "BLACK" came out of the enslaved experience here in the U.S. -- and honestly today still only Black Americans/AA in the U.S. believe that -- and that is because of what our ancestors went through.
 
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