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The Black Businessman in the Postwar South: North Carolina, 1865–1880

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2011

Robert C. Kenzer
Robert C. Kenzer
Affiliation:
Robert C. Kenzer is assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University.
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Abstract

This article uses the R. G. Dun and Company credit ratings to analyze North Carolina black businessmen and their firms in the fifteen years following the Civil War. When combined with data in local histories and in the federal census, the credit ratings reveal how the postbellum black business community, especially the mulatto population, was significantly shaped by antebellum emancipation. Blacks who shared the advantage of prewar freedom employed their superior financial resources and business experience to dominate their local economies after the war. Further, both as individuals and collectively, blacks used their newly acquired political power to foster economic opportunities in ways hitherto unrecognized by both political and business history scholars.

Type
Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 63 , Issue 1: Entrepreneurs in Business History , Spring 1989 , pp. 61 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1989

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References

1 For examples of recent biographies of black entrepreneurs based on autobiographies and personal papers, see Walker, Juliet E. K., Free Frunk: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier (Lexington, Ky., 1983)Google Scholar; Schweninger, Loren, ed., From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur: The Autobiography of James Thomas (Columbia, Mo., 1984)Google Scholar; Johnson, Michael P. and Roark, James L., Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York, 1984).Google Scholar Although black women, as well as men, established businesses, they did so less frequently than their male counterparts, and their historical track is much fainter and harder to follow. The sample with which this article deals contains only males; thus the term “businessman” is used in its specific sense.

2 Du Bois, W. E. B., ed., The Negro in Business (Atlanta, Ga., 1899)Google Scholar; Washington, Booker T., The Negro in Business (Chicago, Ill., 1907)Google Scholar; Harmon, J. H. Jr, “The Negro as a Local Businessman,” Journal of Negro History 14 (April 1929): 116–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harris, Abram L., The Negro as Capitalist: A Study of Banking and Business among American Negroes (College Park, M.d., 1936).Google Scholar In addition to these works, which specifically focus on the black businessman, some studies that discuss this topic in either a more general or more specific context are Meier, August, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915: Race Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1963), 126–27, 139–46Google Scholar; Blassingame, John W., Black New Orleans, 1860–1880 (Chicago, Ill., 1973), 10–11, 70–77Google Scholar; Savage, W. Sherman, Blacks in the West (Westport, Conn., 1976), 129–35Google Scholar; Weare, Walter B., Black Business in the New South: A Social History of the North Carolina Mutual Lift Insurance Company (Urbana, Ill., 1973)Google Scholar; Wier, Sadye H. and Marszalek, John F., A Black Businessman in White Mississippi, 1886–1974 (Oxford, Miss., 1977)Google Scholar; Higgs, Robert, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865–1914 (New York, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Higgs, Robert, “Participation of Blacks and Immigrants in the American Merchant Class, 1890–1910,” Explorations in Economic History 13 (April 1976): 153–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Examples of major works that use business and city directories to investigate southern black businessmen include Blassingame, Black New Orleans; Curry, Leonard P., The Free Black in Urban America, 1800–1850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago, Ill., 1981)Google Scholar; and Rabinowitz, Howard N., Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

4 Examples of works that use the federal published and manuscript census to examine the southern black businessman are Engerrand, Steven W., “Black and Mulatto Mobility and Stability in Dallas, Texas, 1880–1910,” Phylon 39 (Fall 1978): 203–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hopkins, Richard J., “Occupational and Geographic Mobility in Atlanta, 1870–1896,” Journal of Southern History 34 (May 1968): 200–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Worthman, Paul B., “Working Class Mobility in Birmingham, Alabama, 1880–1914,” in Anonymous Americans: Exploration in Nineteenth-Century Social History, ed. Hareven, Tamara K. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971), 172–213.Google Scholar

5 The best description of the system of credit rating and the R. G. Dun and Company during the mid to late nineteenth century is Norris, James D., R G. Dun & Co., 1841–1900: The Development of Credit-Reporting in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn., 1978).Google Scholar

6 One historical study of North Carolina that also used the R. G. Dun and Company credit rating information is Logan's, Frenise A. “The Economie Status of the Town Negro in Post-Reconstruction North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 35 (October 1958): 448–60.Google Scholar However, Logan did not use the actual manuscript ratings but rather the published quarterly reports, the Mercantile Agency Reference Book. This source lists only the name, location, and type of firm, with a coded estimate of net worth and credit status. For another version of Logan's findings, see Logan, Frenise A., The Negro in North Carolina, 1876–1894 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1964), esp. 112–16.Google Scholar

For one study that used the R. G. Dun and Company credit rating ledgers to study black business people in the antebellum South, see Walker, Juliet E. K., “Racism, Slavery, and Free Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship in the United States before the Civil War,” Business History Review 60 (Autumn 1986): 343–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Walker's very valuable examination is not confined to the South and does not use the credit rating ledgers to trace all of the black business people in a state.

7 North Carolina, Vol. 19, Johnston County, R. G. Dun and Company Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School. All subsequent credit rating references are specified in the text by identifying their county and date. Because the ratings are abbreviated and codes are used, all ratings have been rewritten to improve their literary presentation.

8 Only the post office, not the exact location, of each business is indicated in the credit rating. Further, some black firms may have been located just beyond the incorporated limits of the towns and cities. If a firm was located particularly far from a village, town, or city, the credit rating usually stated so since the site would influence the establishment's success. Few such cases were observed.

9 No business records of North Carolina black firms for this era have been preserved in the four major depositories in North Carolina—the Duke University Archives, the Southern Historical Collection, the East Carolina University Archives, and the North Carolina State Archives—or in the Library of Congress.

10 This claim is based on an examination of statewide business directories from this era.

11 W. H. Beveridge, compiler, Beveridge and Co.'s North Carolina State Directory, 1877–78, 405.

12 Of the 126 firms, 104, 82.5 percent, were proprietorships with one owner. The remaining firms were organized with the following structures: twelve, 9.5 percent, were two-member partnerships; seven, 5.6 percent, were proprietorships that also contained the title “company”; two were proprietorships composed of relatives; and one, 8 percent, contained multiple partners.

13 Wellman, Manly Wade, The County of Warren, North Carolina, 1586–1917 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1959), 35, 154.Google Scholar

14 It is impossible to determine exactly how many of the 126 black businesses were conducted by men who were involved in politics or held some elected or appointive office. By examining the credit ratings, community histories, and Branson's North Carolina Business Directory for this era, I have been able to identify seventeen such businessmen. However, if a compilation of county and municipal records for all the counties is ever completed, it probably would reveal that many more businessmen held offices and it would also show that many others ran for but failed to gain office. As proof of this claim, in New Hanover County, where such an investigation has been made, four of the eight credit-rated businessmen held office either in the state legislature or at the county or municipal level. Even those black businessmen who were not involved in politics seem to have been aided economically by the postbellum political climate, which allowed blacks to participate and hold office.

15 For a discussion of the advantages southern merchants had when they also served as a postmaster, see Clark, Thomas D., Pills, Petticoats, and Plows (Indianapolis, Ind., 1944), esp. 96–97.Google Scholar

16 Five out of eleven black firms selling liquor in 1877 went out of business in either 1878 or 1879. For the best discussion of the purpose and results of the 1877 North Carolina County Government Act, see Logan, The Negro in North Carotina, 29–30, 49, 50, 54–55, 118–19, 125–26, 218–19.

17 Montgomery, Lizzie Wilson, Sketches of Old Warrenton North Carolina: Traditions and Reminiscences of the Town and People Who Made It (Raleigh, N.C., 1924), 154.Google Scholar

18 The sixty-six Negro businessmen in this profile conducted 64 of the 126 firms. If a Negro was enumerated as a mulatto in either the 1860, 1870, or 1880 manuscript census, he was designated as such in the analysis in Table 4. Based on the 1870 manuscript census alone, thirty of firry-three Negro businessmen, 56.6 percent, were mulattoes.

Positive identifications of all the Negro businessmen in the manuscript census were difficult for two reasons. First, there were often two men with identical names in the same location, sometimes a father-son combination. Second, because few of the businessmen were conducting their businesses as early as 1870 and many were out of business by 1880, it was difficult to link the information found in the census about them directly to the type of business they conducted. If a positive identification between name and type of firm could not be made, the individual was not included in the profile.

Edward Byron Reuter pointed to a similar mulatto dominance of the Negro business community in The Mulata in the United States (New York, 1918), esp. 293–307. For a study that describes the recent literature on mulatto history, see Morton, Patricia, “From Invisible Man to ‘New People’: The Recent Discovery of American Mulattoes,” Phylon 46 (Summer 1985): 106–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 For a discussion of the differences between the status of North Carolina blacks and mulattoes in 1860 and 1870, see Robert C. Kenzer, “The Making of a New Negro South: A Comparison of Black and Mulatto Landownership in North Carolina, 1860 to 1880,” unpub. paper presented at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting, Minneapolis, Minn., 22 April 1985.

20 Determining the exact number of postbellum Negroes who ran businesses and who were free in 1860 is difficult because many of them were too young in 1860 to have been running a business or to have had any occupation. Further, those who operated a business after the war did not necessarily reside in the same county as they did in 1860. I have been able to identify only six postbellum Negro businessmen in the 1860 manuscript census. However, community histories indicate that many more blacks were free in 1860 than were recorded in the census. For example, John Hyman was a free mulatto in 1860 but was not found in the manuscript census for Warren County. For Hyman's antebellum status, see note 17.

21 The five free Negroes who could be identified in both the 1860 and 1870 manuscript censuses and who ran both an antebellum and postbellum business increased their total estate value during the decade from $1,585 to $11,300, a remarkable increase given the severe decline in property values in the South during this period.

22 Of the businessmen whose race can be identified from the manuscript census who, according to the credit ledgers, initiated their firms between 1870 and 1880, twenty-five were mulatto and twenty-seven were black.

23 Of the businessmen whose race can be identified, 75.9 percent of the blacks could read compared to 83.8 percent of the mulattoes.

24 This description of Alfred Hargrave, who appears in the credit rating ledgers, is largely based on an account of him provided by Garnet Douglass Hargrave, Jr., 12 August 1982, copy located in files on blacks, Wilmington, New Hanover County Museum, Wilmington, N.C.

25 From 1876 to 1880 the median age for new entrants at forty-one years was much closer to the pre-1873 situation.

26 Ransom, Roger and Sutch, Richard, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York, 1977)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 7.

27 This analysis is based on Branson's North Carolina Business Directory, 1869, 1872, 1877 (Raleigh). A comparison of the number of black businesses in those counties that had at least one black firm with the number of white businesses competing directly (located in the same communities in those counties and engaged in the same type of business) reveals that the number of black firms increased over time, but the percentage of all firms conducted by blacks falls by nearly one-half.

28 Montgomery, Sketches of Old Warrenton, 310.

29 This study of black businessmen in North Carolina during the fifteen years following the Civil War represents the nucleus of a book I am writing on blacks who experienced economic success in North Carolina from 1865 to 1915. The full work, Enterprising Southerners, will be published by the University of Illinois Press.