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Racism, Slavery, and Free Enterprise: Black Entrepreneurship in the United States before the Civil War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Juliet E. K. Walker
Juliet E. K. Walker
Affiliation:
Juliet E. K. Walker is associate professor of history at theUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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Abstract

In reconstructing the early business history of black America, Professor Walker emphasizes the diversity and complexity of antebellum black entrepreneurship, both slave and free. With few exceptions, prevailing historical assessments have confined their analyses of pre-Civil War black business participation to marginal enterprises, concentrated primarily in craft and service industries. In America's preindustrial mercantile business community, however, blacks established a wide variety of enterprises, some of them remarkably successful. The business activities of antebellum blacks not only offer insights into the multiplicity of responses to the constraints of racism and slavery, but also highlight relatively unexplored areas in the historical development of the free enterprise system in the United States.

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Articles
Information
Business History Review , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1986 , pp. 343 - 382
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1986

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References

1 Studies that provide an in-depth examination of antebellum black entrepreneurs within the social setting of the communities in which they lived are: Davis, Edwin Adams and Hogan, William Ransom, The Barber of Natchez (Baton Rouge, La., 1954)Google Scholar; Mills, Gary B., The Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge, La., 1977)Google Scholar; Whitten, David O., Andrew Durnforth: A Black Sugar Cane Planter in Antebellum Louisiana (Natchitoches, La., 1981)Google Scholar; Walker, Juliet E. K., Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier (Lexington, Ky., 1983)Google Scholar; Johnson, Michael and Roark, James L., Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York, 1984)Google Scholar. Walker's Free Frank is the only study that examines slave entrepreneurship and the business activities of a nonslaveholding black in both the antebellum South (Kentucky) and in the North (Illinois). For published autobiographical accounts of antebellum blacks who participated in business, see Gibbs, Mifflin Wistar, Shadow and Light: An Auto-biography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century (Washington, D.C., 1902)Google Scholar; Brown, William J., The Life of William. Brown, of Providence, R.I. ([1883]; Freeport, N.Y., 1971)Google Scholar; Hogan, William Ransom and Davis, Edwin Adams, William Johnson's Natchez: The Antebellum Diary of a Free Negro (Baton Rouge, La., 1951)Google Scholar; Peskin, Allan, ed., North into Freedom: The Autobiography of John Malvin, Free Negro, 1795-1880 (Cleveland, Ohio, 1966)Google Scholar; Gatewood, Willard B., ed., Free Man of Color: The Autobiography of Willis Augustus Hodges (Knoxville, Tenn., 1982)Google Scholar; and Schweniger, Loren, From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur: The Autobiography of James Thomas (Columbia, Mo., 1984).Google Scholar

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7 Juliet E. K. Walker, “R. G, Dun & Company Credit Reports as Sources of Antebellum Black Business History,” unpub. MS. Lewis Tappan, who founded Dun & Company in 1841, and his brother Arthur were prominent abolitionists. See Brown, Bertram Wyatt, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery (New York, 1973), 231Google Scholar. Initially, there was opposition to Tappan's Mercantile Agency: “the difficulties he encountered came mostly from the unpopularity of his reformist views in the business community. New York merchants would have hesitated in any case to put their money into some untried scheme, but to deal with an abolitionist was out of the question for many.” Also see Brown, , “God and Dun & Bradstreet, 1841-1851,” Business History Review 40 (Winter 1966); 432–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the Arthur Tappan Papers, American Missionary Association Archives, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, La.

8 McMaster, John Bach, The Life and Times of Stephen Girard, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, Pa., 1918Google Scholar) and Porter, Kenneth Wiggins, John Jacob Astor, Businessman, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1931)Google Scholar; Beach, Moses Yale, Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of New York, Comprising an Alphabetical Arrangement of Persons Estimated to be Worth 100,000 and Upwards, with the Sums Appended to Each Name: Being Useful to Banks, Merchants, and Others (New York, 1855).Google Scholar

9 Edward Pessen, “Moses Beach Revisited: A Critical Examination of His Wealthy City Pamphlets,” Journal of American History 58 (Sept. 1971): 415–426CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pessen, , Riches, Class, and Power before the Civil War (Lexington, Mass., 1973), 323–326Google Scholar for listing; 34-35 for discussion of wealth distribution based on tax assessments. By 1863, of the top 1,600 New York families, the upper one percent earned 61 percent of all incomes in that city; ibid., 45n25.

10 Soltow, Lee, Men of Wealth in the United States, 1850-1870 (New Haven, Conn., 1975), 65Google Scholar. Other wealth distribution studies also based on property ownership include Soltow, “Eonomic Inequality in the United States in the Period from 1790-1860,” Journal of Economic History 31 (1971): 822–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Lindert, Peter H. and Williamson, Jeffrey G., “Three Centuries of Economic Inequality, in Uselding, Paul, ed., Research in Economic History: An Annual Compilation of Research(Greenwich, Conn., 1976), 169–123Google Scholar. Johnson, Michael P., “Wealth and Class in Charleston in 1860,” in From the Old South to the New: Essays on the Transitional South, ed. Fraser, Walter J. Jr,and Moore, Winfred R. (Westport, Conn., 1981), 72Google Scholar. Also see Johnson and Roark, Black Masters, 60-53. For a counter-factual assumption on how wealth would have been distributed had the slave population been free and therefore potential property holders, see Campbell, Randolph B. and Lowe, Richard C., Wealth and Power in Antebellum Texas (College Station, Tex., 1977), 146–53Google Scholar. See also Smallwood, James M., “Blacks in Antebellum Texas: A Reappraisal,” Red River Valley History Review 2 (1975): 443–65Google Scholar; and Srroen, Harold, “The Free Negro in the Republic of Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 39 (April 1936): 292–309Google Scholar; ibid. 40 (Oct. 1936): 85-114; ibid. (Jan. 1937): 169-99; ibid. 41 (April 1937): 267-89; ibid. (July 1937): 83-108; and Muir, Andrew Frost, “The Free Negro in Galveston County, Texas,” Negro History Rulletin 22 (1958): 68–70Google Scholar.

11 A Merchant of Philadelphia, Memoirs and Autobiography of Some of the Wealthy Citizens of Philadelphia with a Fair Estimate of Their Wealth (Philadelphia, Pa., 1846), 12, 44, 50, 58Google Scholar. For “wealthy citizen” pamphlets and books which provide autobiographical sketches on the progress on antebellum blacks, see Mott, Abigail F., Biographical Sketches and Interesting Anecdotes of Persons of Color (New York, 1839)Google Scholar; Willson, Joseph, Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia, by a Southerner (Philadelphia, Pa., 1841)Google Scholar; Delany, Martin R., The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Des-tiny of the Colored People of the United States (Philadelphia, Pa., 1852)Google Scholar; Clamorgan, Cyprien, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis (St. Louis, Mo., 1858)Google Scholar; Brown, William Wells, The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, His Achievement (New York, 1863Google Scholar). The commercial publishing industry provided a basis for black business development beginning in 1817, when the African Methodist Episcopal Church established the AME Book Concern in Philadelphia. Ten years later, the first black newspaper, Freedoms Journal, was founded in 1827, marking the beginning of the black newspaper business. See Joyce, Donald Franklin, Gatekeeper of Black Culture: Black Owned Book Publishing in the United States (Westport, Conn., 1983)Google Scholar; Penn, I. Garland, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (Springfield, Mass., 1891)Google Scholar; Detweiller, Frederick G., The Negro Press in the United States (Chicago, 1922)Google Scholar; Sogarin, Mary, John Brown Russwurm: The Story of Freedom's Journal, Freedom's Journey (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; Bullock, Penelope Laconia, “The Negro Periodical Press in the United States 1838-1909” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1971)Google Scholar; and Richmond, Peggy Jo Zemens, “Afro-American Printers and Book Publishers, 1650-1865” (M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1970Google Scholar). Also, see my Captive Capitalists, for discussion of this antebellum black commercial enterprise. Delany, Condition of the Colored People, 94-95.

12 See Table 1 for documentation on the occupations and wealthholding of the leading twenty-one black entrepreneurs from federal manuscript censuses, R. G. Dun & Company credit reports, and estate inventories.

13 On James Forten, see Douglas, William, Annals of the First African Church in the United States of America, now styled the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas (Philadelphia, Pa., 1862), 107, 110Google Scholar; Child, Lydia Maria, The Freedmen's Book (Boston, Mass., 1865), 102–3Google Scholar; Nell, William C., Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston, Mass., 1855), 172–74Google Scholar; and Dictionary of American Biography (New York, 1937), 6: 536–39Google Scholar. Also see Johnson and Roark, Black Masters, 72-73, 127, for information on William Ellison, master ginwright who, through his business mostly in slaves, valued at $53,000 and real property, 800 acres, valued at $8.250. Although records do not document that Ellison recevied a patent, his cotton gin innovations were widely recognized. Henry Boyd, a Cincinnati manufacturer, was noted for his “patent bedsteads.” Delany, Condition of the Colored People, 98. For Boyd's advertisement, see United States Commerical Register (New York, 1851), 27Google Scholar. See also Ohio, vol. 80, p. 73, R. G. Dun & Co. Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business school, where his business is reported as a “Patent Bedstead Factory.”

14 Pennsylvania, vol. 79, p. 31, R. G. Dun & Co. Collection; vol. 132, p. 322; vol. 79, p. 31; for Whipper, see ibid., p. 121. For Ulysses H. Vidal, see ibid., vol. 132, p. 322. By 1870. Whipper had accumulated property valued at $108,000. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, “population Schedules of the Ninth Census of the United States, 1870, New Jersey, Middles, microcopy M-753, reel 873.

15 Delany, Condition of the Colored People, 95-96. Lancaste County, General Index to Deeds, Grantee, “S,” 44-46, and ibid., Grantors, “S,” 44-47, Lancaster County Courthouse, Recorder of Deeds Office, Lancaster, Pa.

16 R. G. Dun & Co. Collection, Louisiana, vol. 10, p. 497.Google Scholar

17 Macarty et al. c. Mandeville, 3 La. An. 239 (March 1848). A placée was a free woman of color engaged in a common-law marriage.

18 U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Population Schedules of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860, Louisiana, Iberville Parish,” manuscript microcopy M-653, reel 411; and reel 428 for slave schedules.

19 Mills, Forgotten People, 67, 108. For information on antebellum blacks who owned slaves see Woodson, Carter G., Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830 (Washington, D. C., 1928), 11Google Scholar (Madame McCarty slaves), 7 (Metoyer family slaves); Woodson, , “Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830,” Journal of Negro History 9 (Jan. 1924: 41–85Google Scholar; Halliburton, R. Jr,“Free Owners of Slaves: A Reappraisal of the Woodson Thesis,” South Carolina History Magazine 76 (1975): 129–42Google Scholar; Russell, John H., “Colored Freemen as Slave Owners in Virginia,” Journal of Negro History 1 (July 1916Google Scholar). See also Mills, Gary B., “Coincoin: An Eighteenth Century ‘Liberated’ Woman,” Journal of Southern History 42 (1976): 205–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 For biographical information on William Leidesdorff, see Thurman, Sue Bailey, Pioneers of Negro Origin (San Francisco, 1949), 1–5Google Scholar; Beasley, Delilah, The Negro Trail Blazers of California (Los Angeles, 1919), 107–13Google Scholar. Beasley relied heavily on Bancroft, Hubert Howe, The History of California (San Francisco, 1884-1990), 4: 279, 566, 711Google Scholar, and 5: 566. See also California Pioneer Register and Index, 1542-1848. Extracted from The History of California by Hubert Howe Bancroft (Baltimore, Md., 1964).Google Scholar

21 William A. Leidesdorff, log of schooner Julia Ann, 30 July 1840-9 Jan. 1841, Leidesdorff Collection, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. See also William A. Leidesdorff, Cash Account Records, 1843-1844, Leidesdorff Collection; Cowan, Robert G., Ranchos of California: A List of Spanish Concessions, 1775-1822 and Mexican Grants, 1822-1846 (Fresno Calif., 1956), 15Google Scholar: “Americano, Rio de los. Sacramento Co. from close to Folsom. 8 leagues granted in 1844 to William A. Leidesdorff.” Jos. L. Folsom and Anna Marie Spark (Leidesdorffs mother) were claimants to 35,521 acres. William A. Leidesdorff, Account Papers with United States Military and Naval Personnel, 1847, Leidesdorff Collection. For appointment as San Francisco city treasurer, California Star, 18 Sept. 1847. See also Leidesdorff, WilliamSan Francisco Town Journal, 1847-1848 (San Francisco, Calif., 1926Google Scholar), and San Francisco Council, Minutes of Proceedings, 16 Sept. 1847 to 10 April 1848, Leidesdorff Collection.

22 Hammond, George P., ed., The Larkin Papers (Berkeley, Clalif., 1960), 285Google Scholar. The letter is noteworthy because it is an official announcement of the April 1848 Colonia gold strike in California.

23 Cowan, Robert Ernest, “The Leidesdorff-Folsom Estate: A Forgotten Chapter in the Romantic History of Early San Francisco,” Quarterly of the California Historical Society 7 (June 1928): 110Google Scholar. See also California Legislature, Senate, Sixth Sess., Journal of the Sixth Session of the Legislature (Sacramento, Calif., 1855), 324–26Google Scholar, contains the message of Governor John Bigler concerning the William A. Leidesdorff estate; William A. Leidesdorff, Estate papers, 1842-52 [Accounts and Legal papers pertaining to the estate of Leidesdorff], Leidesdorff Collection. See also Leidesdorff Family, Estate Papers, 1846-49, relating to J. L. Folsom, Administrator of the Estate [documents originating in St. Croix, Danish West Indies, securing to Joseph L. Folsom, from the heirs of William A. Leidesdorff], Bancroft Library; and People ex rel. Attorney-General vs. Joseph L. Folsom 5 Calif. Rep., 373 (1855)Google Scholar; and Bancroft Court Records, Leidesdorff-Folsom Court Records, Bancroft Library.

24 For information on how antebellum laws limited black occupational participation, see Jay, William, Condition of the Free People of Color (New York, 1838Google Scholar) and Hurd, John C., The Law of Freedom and Bondage in the United States, 2 vols. (Boston and New York, 1858–1862Google Scholar). For antebellum state statutes, see Farnam, Henry W., Chapters in the History of Social Legislation in the United States to 1860 (Washington, D.C., 1938Google Scholar), and court cases, Catterall, Helen T., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1926-1927Google Scholar). Also see for legal foundation of black laws, Higginbotham, A. Leon, In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process in the Colonial Period (New York, 1978Google Scholar); and Genovese, Eugene D., “The Slave States of North America,” in Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World, ed. Cohen, David W. and Greene, Jack P. (Baltimore, Md., 1972), 258–77Google Scholar. State studies include Walker, Juliet E. K., “The Legal Status of Free Blacks in Early Kentucky, 1792-1825,” The Filson Club History Quarterly 57 (Oct. 1983): 382–95Google Scholar. Brown, Florence R. Beatty, “Legal Status of Arkansas Negroes before Emancipation,” Arkansas History Quarterly 28 (1969): 6–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Currier, James T., “From Slavery to Freedom in Mississippi's Legal System,” Journal of Negro History 65 (Spring 1980): 112–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. William I. Imes, “The Legal Status of Free Negroes and Slaves in Tennessee,” ibid. 4 (July 1919): 255-61; Calligaro, Lee, “The Negroes' Legal Status in Pre-Civil War New Jersey,” New Jersey History 85 (1967): 167–80Google Scholar; and Certz, Elmer, “The Black Laws of Illinois,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 56 (1963): 454–73Google Scholar. Also see Berry, Mary Frances, Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America (New York, 1971)Google Scholar.

25 See Franklin, John Hope, “James Boon, Free Negro Artisan,” Journal of Negro History 39 (April 1945): 150–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gunther, Caroline Pell, “Tom Day—Craftsman,” The Antiquarian 11 (Sept. 1929)Google Scholar.

26 R. G. Dun & Co. Collection, New York, vol. 318, p. 315.

27 Ibid., Pennsylvania, vol. 207, p. 4.

28 “Mercantile Failures in 1856,” Hunt's Merchant's Magazine and Commercial Review 34 (Feb. 1857): 595Google Scholar. Within the broader context of the New Orleans business community, see Roeder, Robert E., “New Orleans Merchants, 1790-1837” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University. 1959Google Scholar) and Roeder, , “Merchants of Antebellum New Orleans,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 1st ser. 10 (1958): 113–22Google Scholar.

29 Reinders, Robert C., “The Free Negro in the New Orleans economy, 1850-1860,” Louisiana History 6 (Summer 1965): 285Google Scholar, and Reinders, , “The Decline of the New Orleans Free Negro in the Decade before the Civil War,” Journal of Mississippi History 24 (Jan. 1962): 88–98Google Scholar. Also see Babin, Claude H., “The Economic Expansion of New Orleans before the Civil War” (Ph. D. diss., Tulane University, 1954)Google Scholar; Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 343, notes that while “The onrushing sectional conflict pushed the free Negro caste to the edge of extinction. … With the exception of a brief financial panic in 1857, the South enjoyed a decade of continuous economic expansion, and many free Negroes shared in the good times.”

30 R. G. Dun & Co. Collection, Louisiana, vol. 10, p. 328; vol. 9, p. 97; vol. 11, p. 30.

31 Foner, Laura, “The Free People of Color in Louisiana and St. Domingue: A Comparative Portrait of Two Three Caste Societies,” Journal of Social History 3 (Summer 1970): 406–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Everett, Donald E., “Free Persons of Color in Colonial Louisiana,” Louisiana History 7 (Winter 1966): 21–50Google Scholar; and Everett, Donald E., “Emigres and Militiamen: Free Persons of Color in New Orleans, 1803-1815,” Journal of Negro History 38 (1953CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Also see Degler, Carl N., Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971)Google Scholar.

32 Ellis, Franklin and Evans, Samuel, History of Lancaster County. Pennsylvania with Biographical Sketches of Many of Its Pioneers and Prominent Men (Philadelphia, Pa., 1883), 574Google Scholar; Delany, Condition of the Colored People, 107-8.

33 For Casenave, see R. C. Dun & Co. Collection, Louisiana, vol. 10, p. 497. Also see Kohler, Max J., “Judah Touro, Merchant and Philanthropist,” American Jewish Historical Society 13 (1905): 104Google Scholar for Touro's will. For Durnford, see Whitten, David O., “A Black Entrepreneur in Antebellum Louisiana,” Business History Review 45 (Summer 1971): 201–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Walker, Juliet E. K., “Slave Entrepreneurs,” in Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, ed. Miller, Randall M. and Smith, John David (Greenwich, Conn., forthcoming 1987Google Scholar). Aptheker, Herbert, “Buying Freedom,” in To Be Free (New York, 1945), 32Google Scholar, notes that “In certain areas the right of a slave to enter into a contract with his master for the working out, or the purchase of, freedom and the binding quality of this instrument upon both parties were legally recognized.” See Morehead, C. S. and Brown, Mason, eds., A Digest of the Statute Laws of Kentucky, of a Public and Permanent Nature, 2 vols. (Frankfort, Ky., 1834), 1: 608Google Scholar, for an example of a law which allowed slaves to contract with their masters for freedom, providing that “an agreement to emancipate was specifically enforced in equity; whereas a promise or declaration made to a slave, or for his benefit cannot be enforced in a court of law or/equity.” See also Walker, Free Frank, 38-40. By the 1850s, southern attitudes regarding manumission had changed, making freedom increasingly difficult. For laws see Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 138-39.

35 See R. G. Dun & Co. Collection, Louisiana, vol. 10, p. 166, lor the Jan. 1854 entry of a slave-barber, F. St. Mark, as an indication of the extent to which slave participation in the business community was considered an intrinsie part of the antebellum social setting. For the business directory advertisement of the Nashville slave who operated a highly exclusive bathhouse and barbershop, see Nashville General Commercial Directory (Nashville, Tenn., 1853), 68Google Scholar. See also Sehweniger, Loren, “The Free-Slave Phenomenon: James P. Thomas and the Black Community in Anteliellum Nashville,” Civil War History 22 (Dec. 1976): 293–307CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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37 Hovey, Horace C., “Our Saltpeter Caves in Time of War,” Scientific American 76 (1897): 291CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For saltpeter prices, see “American Manufacturers,” Niles Weekly Register, 6 June 1812, 227.

38 Walker, Free Frank, 38; Fearon, Henry, Sketches of America: A Narrative of a Journey of Five Hundred Miles through the Eastern and Western States of America, 3d ed. (London, 1819), 238Google Scholar. Also see Walker, Juliet E. K., “‘Free’ Frank and New Philadelphia: Slave and Freedman, Frontiersman and Town Founder” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1976), 56Google Scholar.

39 Walker, “Slave Entrepreneurs,” for a discussion of slave intrapreneurship.

40 Woodson, “The Negroes of Cineinnati,” 21.

41 Moore, John Hebron, “Simon Gray Riverman: A Slave Who Was Almost Free,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 (Dec. 1962): 472–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see Juliet E. K. Walker, “Slave Drivers,” in Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, for a discussion of slave intrapreneurship.

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43 See Eaton, Clement, “Slave Hiring in the Upper South: A Step toward Freedom,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (1960): 663–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Richard Morris, “The Measure of Bondage in the Slave States,” ibid. 41 (1954): 219-40; franklin, John Hope, “Slaves Virtually Free in Antebellum North Carolina,” Journal of Negro History 28 (1943): 284–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sumner Eliot Matison, “Manumission by Purchase,” ibid. 33 (April 1948): 146-67. Traveler accounts also provide examples of self-hired bondsmen: Buckingham, James, The Slave States of America, 2 vols. (London, 1842)Google Scholar; Lyell, Charles, A Second Visit to the United States of North America, 2 vols. (London, 1849)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Olmstead, Frederick Law, A Journey to the Seaboard Slave States, with Remarks on Their Economy (New York, 1859)Google Scholar; Olmstead, , The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton Slavery in the American Slave States, 2 vols. (New York, 1861)Google Scholar; and Redpath, James, The Roving Editor, or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States (New York, 1859Google Scholar). See also Bancroft, Frederic, Slave Trading in the Old South (New York, 1931Google Scholar), and Johnson, James Hugo, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South, 1776-1860 (Amherst, Mass., 1970Google Scholar). Originally a doctoral dissertation (University of Chicago, 1937), Race Relations is insightful for information on self-purchase and free blacks. Wendzel, Julius T., The Dynamics of Capitalism (New York, 1956), 30Google Scholar.

44 Allen, Richard, The Life Experience and Gospel Labors of the Rt. Rev. Richard Allen (Philadelphia, Pa., 1888Google Scholar); Wesley, Charles, Richard Allen, Apostle of Freedom (Washington, D.C., 1935)Google Scholar; George, Carol V. R., Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Rise of Independent Black Churches, 1760-1840 (New York, 1973)Google Scholar. Keckley, Elizabeth, Behind the Scenes, or. Thirty Years A Slave, and Four Years in the White House (New York, 1868Google Scholar). For information on other self-hired bondsmen who continued business participation in the antebellum period after the 1820s, and achieved distinction after the Civil War, see Simmons, William J., Men of Mark, Prominent, Progressive and Rising (Cleveland, Ohio, 1887Google Scholar). See also Bardolph, Richard, “Social Origins of Distinguished Negroes, 1770-1865,” Journal of Negro History 40 (July 1955): 211–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Among blacks who achieved business prominence before the 1820s were the mer-chant importer and exporter Paul Cuffe (1759-1817), a sea captain who owned several ships. See Paul Cuffe Papers, New Bedford Public Library, New Bedford, Mass.; Cuffe, Paul, Memoirs of Paul Cuffe (New York, 1812)Google Scholar; and Harris, Sheldon, Paul Cuffe, Black American and the African Return (New York, 1972Google Scholar). Also see Schick, Tom W., Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settlers in Nineteenth-Century Liberia (Baltimore, Md., 1980Google Scholar). Woodson, Free Negro Heads of Families, xli-xlii, provides examples of antebellum black businessmen who emigrated to Liberia. From 1820 to 1860, some 15,000 blacks emigrated to Liberia. Also see American colonization papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

45 For information on Free Frank's land transactions in Kentucky between 1821 and 1829, sec Pulaski County, General Index to Surveyor Office Books; Pulaski County, General Index to Real Estate Conveyances, both in Pulaski County Courthouse, Somerset. Ky. See also Land Office, Warrants 5805, 16466, 16488, and 16470, Kentucky Secretary of State, Land Office, Frankfort, Ky. For Free Frank's Illinois land transactions, see Pike County Tract Index, Hadley-Berry (T4SR5, 6W), Pike County Courthouse, Pittsfield, III. For New Philadelphia town plat, see Pole County Deed Record Book, 9: 182, Pike County Courthouse. See Walker, Free Frank, 162, for purchase prices of the Free Frank McWorter family. For the founding of New Philadelphia, see Walker, Juliet E. K., “Entrepreneurial Ventures in the Origin of Nineteenth Century Agricultural Towns: Pike County, 1832-1880,” Illinois Historical Journal 78 (Spring 1985): 45–64Google Scholar.

46 See Cooper, Frederick, “Elevating the Race: The Social Thought of Black Leaders, 1827-1850,” American Quarterly 24 (Dec. 1972): 604–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, Lance F. and Payne, Peter L., “From Benevolence to Business: The Story of Two Savings Banks,” Business History Review 32 (Winter 1958): 386–406CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jackson, L. P., “Negro Enterprise in Norfolk during the Days of Slavery,” Quarterly Journal of the Florida A & M College 8 (April 1939): 5–12Google Scholar. Browning, James Blackwell, “The Beginning of Insurance among Negroes,” Journal of Negro History 22 (Oct. 1937): 417–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Martin Delany, see Ullman, Victor, Martin P. Delany: The Beginning of Mack Nationalism (Boston, 1971Google Scholar). See also Miller, Floyd J., “‘The Father of Black Nationalism’: Another Contender,” Civil War History 17 (1971): 310–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the Reverend Lewis Woodson, who in the 1830s stressed the importance of blacks' developing business enterprises and investing their money, principally in banking institutions. While Woodson advocated separate black business and communities, he did not support colonization. See Bell, Howard H., “Negro Nationalism: A Factor in Emigration Projects,” Journal of Negro History 47 (Jan. 1962): 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Bell, , ed., Minutes and Proceedings of the National Conventions, 1830-64 (New York, 1969Google Scholar). For black emigrationist ideology. see Miller, Floyd J., The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Colonization and Emigration, 1787-1863 (Urbana, III., 1977Google Scholar), in which a Wisconsin black entrepreneur, Jonathan J. Myers, is described. For a discussion of the founding of Free Frank's town. New Philadelphia, within the context of antebellum black nationalist thought, see Walker, Free Frank, 113-21.

47 Delany, Condition of the Colored People, 44, 192-93, 195. Not all blacks in the late antebellum period subscribed to the pursuit of wealth. The noted published poet, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), abolitionist and supporter of the Free Produce Movement, which boycotted slave produced commodities, including sugar and cotton, said, “We have money among us, but how much of it is spent to bring deliverance to our captive brethren. Are our wealthiest men the most liberal sustainers of the Anti-slavery enterprise? Or does the bare fact of their having money really help mould public opinion and reverse its sentiments? … Let us not defer all our noble opportunities till we get rich. And here I am, not aiming to enlist a fanatical crusade against the desire for riches, but I do protest against chaining down the soul, … to the one idea of getting money as stepping intopower or even gaining our rights in common with others. The Anglo-American Magazine 1 (May 1859): 160Google Scholar.

48 Schumpeter, Joseph A.,The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest and the Business Cycle (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), 93Google Scholar.

49 Cummings, John, Negro Population in the United States, 1790-1915 (Prepared for the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Washington, D.C, 1918Google Scholar). See also U.S. Bureau of the Census, Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, DC, 1964)Google Scholar.

50 For views on the precapitalist paternalistic ethos seen in the antebellum master-slave relationship, see Genovese, Eugene D., Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974Google Scholar). For a discussion on the “capitalist character of slavery,” see Fogel, Robert W. and Engerman, Stanley, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, Mass., 1974), vol. 1Google Scholar. For some assessments, see David, Paul A., Gutman, Herbert, et al., Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York, 1976Google Scholar); Tushnet, Mark V., The American Law of Slavery, 1810-1860: Considerations of Humanity and Interest (Princeton, N. J., 1981)Google Scholar; Kaufman, Allen, Capitalism, Slavery, and Republican Values: Antebellum Political Economists, 1819-1848 (Austin, Tex., 1982)Google Scholar; and Oakes, James, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York, 1982), xiiiGoogle Scholar, who considers “the profound impact of the market economy on the nature of slavery.”

51 On slave acculturation, see Blassingame, John W., The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, rev. ed. (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; and Berlin, Ira, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society in British Mainland North America,” American Historical Review 85 (Feb. 1980): 44–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Walker, Free Frank, 38, for a discussion of the motivations of the self-hired bondsman, Free Frank, noting that his “motivation and energy after 1810 were derived not only from the satisfaction of being able to remain near his family and earn money for their freedom, but also from being now directly involved in an activity that judiciously weakened the social and economic fabric of the slave system.”

52 For early black business activity and property ownership, see Wood, Peter, Black Majority: Negroes in South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974Google Scholar), and Breen, T. H. and Innes, Stephen, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore (New York, 1980)Google Scholar.

53 “Proceedings of the Colonel National Convention, held in Rochester, July 6th, 7th, 8th, 1853,” Frederick Douglass' Paper, 1853, 18-19, Schomburg Collection, New York Public Library, New York City.

54 Franklin, John Hope, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 5th ed. (Now York, 1980), 132-33, 136Google Scholar. On industrial and urhan slavery, see Starobin, Robert S., Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York, 1980)Google Scholar; Lewis, Ronald L., Coal, Iron, and Slaves: Industrial Slavery in Maryland and Virginia, 1785-1865 (Westport, Conn., 1979)Google Scholar; Wade, Slavery in the Cities; and Goldin, Claudia Dale, Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820-1860: A Quantitative History (Chicago, 1976Google Scholar). Stampp, Kenneth M., The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York, 1956)Google Scholar; and Owens, Leslie Howard, This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South (New York, 1976)Google Scholar.

55 Aitken, Hugh G. J., “The Future of Entrepreneurial Research,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 2d ser. 1 (Fall 1963): 6Google Scholar.

56 See Whitten, “A Black Entrepreneur in Antebellum Louisiana,” 201-19, a study which estimates capitalization, production, and profits for the black Louisiana sugar planter, Andrew Durnford; Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 340. Berlin also admits that “Some freemen slipped through this fine web of discrimination and proscription, practiced lucrative trades, accumulated property, and grew in wealth. Part of this class, because of the independence their skills afforded or because of the support of black customers, stood aloof from whites. … But most of the free elite was intricately involved in the white economy … [and] they absorbed white values and ideals. Ibid., 249.

57 R. G. Dun & Co. Collection, Louisiana, vol. 10, p. 328. See also Fischer, Roger A., “Racial Segregation in Antebellum Louisiana.” American Historical Review 74 (Feb. 1969): 926–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berlin, Ira, “The Structure of the Free Negro Caste in the Antebellum United States,” Journal of Social History 3 (1976): 297–318CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Billington, Ray Allen, ed., A Free Negro in the Slave Era: The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten (New York, 1953), 18Google Scholar. See also Quarles, Benjamin, Black Abolitionist (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Litwack, Leon, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961)Google Scholar; and Bell, National Negro Convention, for information on their antislavery activities. On two occasions, the Columbia lumberyard of Smith and Whipper was burned in opposition to their abolitionist activities. See New York Weekly Advocate, 1 Jan. 1837, and Boston Liberator, 21 Dec. 1849. For the underground railroad activities of Smith, Whipper, Goodridge, and Purvis, see Blockson, Charles L., The Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania (Jacksonville, N.C., 1981), 37, 83, 88–91Google Scholar. For the underground railroad activities of Free Frank McWorter, in both Kentucky in the late 1820s and in Illinois between 1830 and 1850, see Walker, Free Frank, 11, 149, 150, 200n10. See also Weeks, M., “John P. Parker: Black Abolitionist Entrepreneur, 1827-1900,” Ohio History 80 (Spring 1971): 155–62Google Scholar.

59 Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 10.

60 Aptheker, “Buying Freedom,” 33.

61 Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 109.

62 Hutt, W. H., The Economic Consequences of the Colour Bar: A Study of Economic Origins and Consequences of Racial Segregation in South Africa (London, 1964), 173–75Google Scholar.

63 Weber, Max, Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society, ed. Rheinstein, Max (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 38Google Scholar.

64 See Walker, Captive Capitalists.