Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book is difficult to review. It is concerned with the fact that in the years before the Civil War, there were in the states that made up the Confederacy a small number of African-Americans who owned slaves. This may be the only book whose primary purpose is to address the subject. The first problem is that seen from the viewpoint of the early 21st century the very idea is offensive and runs counter to our common understanding the history of slavery in the U.S. The second problem is that even before picking up the book I suspected it would be some sort of racist apology for enslavement of black people by whites. As to the first problem, a short online investigation makes it clear there are many corroborating sources that document the existence of black slave owners. The second problem quickly disappears after reading the introduction and first chapters. The author explains the circumstances of how the book came to be written and then sticks to presenting the data with little commentary. Thus I consider this a serious and informative book that cannot be dismissed out of hand. I would like to know more about the author and his qualifications. Unfortunately, this seems to be the only book he ever published. A brief web search for “Larry Koger” pointed only to this book and no biographical material. It appears the book was written in an scholarly or academic context and is certainly not light reading nor is it engaging in style. He could have used a good editor. Read if for information on the subject matter, not for enjoyment or recreation! The book is not without other shortcomings but to be fair some of this reflects the quality of the data available to the author. For example, early in the book Koger describes the challenges of reconciling US census data (1800- Civil War) with local tax data. The records are sometimes unclear as to whether a person is black, white or mixed race, whether they are free or slave, whether a person is a slave owner or merely resides in a household that includes slaves. Simply sorting out these ambiguities in the limited area of Charleston and the surrounding area of South Carolina during the pre-war era was a task deserving applause. I would also have liked a timeline from mid-17th century to 1860 which showed a demographic breakdown by free/slave and by racial category in order to get a better idea of how significant a role the phenomenon played. Also on the same timeline show the progression of legal hurdles to manumission. Koger uses several racial designations: white, black, Negro, colored, person of color, African-American. White is unambiguous but in the other cases it is not always clear whether the person(s) in question are of strictly African ancestry or are mixed race. This is important because as the book makes clear it was important to the people he is writing about. Nearly all “black slaveholders” were in fact mixed race. Making this distinction may be awkward or rude today but at the time covered by the book it is critical to understand what was going on. The book covers only the area around Charleston. If the data were available it would be informative to see if the same phenomenon occurred in other southern urban areas such as New Orleans or Richmond. The commonly cited explanation for why a former slave would own a slave is that they were buying family members so as to hold the family together and eventually to free them. However, Koger demonstrates that about 70% of all free mixed race individuals in Charleston owned slaves and that the majority of them were not family or friends but purchased strictly for economic reasons. This sounds like a harsh judgement on the mixed race slaveholders but I think that should be mitigated by certain considerations: - Slavery existed for millennia and even though it was undesirable to be a slave, it doesn’t follow that a freed slave would consider the institution immoral or illegitimate. I.e., bad to be a slave but good to own one. This notion didn’t change much until the French enlightenment which was then a recent event. - Newly freed slaves were in a precarious position. Re-enslavement was a possibility. Safety could be improved with enhanced economic and/or social status. Since a slave couldn’t own property including other slaves, being seen to own one asserted that YOU were a free person. - Prosperity advertised your social and legal status as free. Money may not buy happiness but in the antebellum South it could buy freedom. Owning a salve and having a legal right to the slave’s labor was a road to greater prosperity. At that time and place, refusing to own a slave likely placed one at a disadvantage with business competitors. - It was not just a freedman’s own well-being at stake. It was also about attaining a better, safer future for offspring. How many parents would not turn a blind eye to moral principle if doing so provided the wealth and status to insure the freedom of their children and their children? For me one of the biggest benefits of this book is that it posses so many questions points to related areas where I want to know more. [Subsequent observation (2 years after the above): The book helps show how powerful the idea slavery as a legitimate human institution was. After ~5,000 years of acceptance as normal, slavery was first effectively challenged in 1688 in the German Town Petition which was essentially the beginning of the abolition movement in North America. That begin as a religious, moral and intellectual struggle that took 175 years before success resulted in the Emancipation Proclamation amid the terrible violence of civil war.]