We all know blacks owned slaves, buy did any own plantations? If so, what general percentage of plantation owners were black?

by The_Tin_Can_Man

My dad is under the impression that there were more black plantation owners than white, but we're out and about right now so I can't exactly look a ton of stuff up. He's also the type to claim that media is flawed unless it agrees with him, so the closer to primary sources, the better. Older stuff also works too because it's harder to refute for some reason.

Or if I'm the wrong one feel free to tell me and TIL.

lord_mayor_of_reddit

In the United States? Hardly. It was illegal for slaves to own any property without the permission of the slave owner, as exemplified by Section 56 of the 1833 Alabama Slave Code. You'll also notice that in Section 30, the code prohibits freed slaves from living in the state. Once you were freed, you had thirty days to leave Alabama on your way to a free state.

The laws were similar in all the slave states, and in some, slaves couldn't own land even if the slaveowner gave permission.

These laws changed over the course of the mid-1600s to the 1860s.

When New York was controlled by the Dutch, slaves were allowed to own property. However, this right was taken away once the English controlled the government, and it was one of the reasons that led to the New York Slave Revolt of 1712. But there weren't any plantations in New York, so no black plantation owners. (New York did have a few manors granted by the King which practiced tenant farming by both white and freed black farmers, but it wasn't slavery.)

In the Northern states, even those that had slavery, land ownership by both white people and black people was generally held by single families who owned and operated their own farms. Large estates were the exceptions. In the few large estates there were, they typically used indentured servants, or when that was made illegal, then they used immigrants. Cheap labor, but not free labor.

But again, large estates were rather uncommon in comparison to what was going on in the Southern slave states. Slaves couldn't own land down there, and free black people didn't exist in the South, so non-slave black people didn't own land down there, either.

Thus, there were no black plantation owners either in the North or in the South. I'm sure someone can dig up an exception two, but a black-run plantation in the U.S. was almost unheard of.

I'm not well versed in slavery in South America or the Caribbean, so maybe someone else can answer about that. I imagine it's largely the same. The plantations in those places were mostly based on large land grants the King gave to his friends back in Europe when colonization began in the 1500s and 1600s.

Sometimes, these rich European nobles operated plantations from afar, but often they just sold their land off (or their heirs did) to their rich friends and contacts living in America, i.e., other white people. Until intermarriage, I'd be surprised to learn of non-white plantation ownership anywhere in the Americas, but again, my expertise is in the United States, so I could be wrong.