This is something that happened in the French Caribbean, and notably in the colony of Saint-Domingue. During the 18th century, the population of free blacks and mixed-race people ("people of colour") on the island had been steadily growing, both in numbers and in status. This free colored population had increased tremendously in a decade, from 6,000 in 1770 to 27,500 in 1789 and was by then almost as large as the white population, though both remained small compared to the enslaved population (about half a million people). Free blacks and mulattos had made considerable economic progress during the century, their wealth rivalling and at times surpassing that of their white neighbours. This success became a cause for concern for the whites in the second half of the century, resulting in the passing of discriminatory and racially-based laws and regulations. For Fick (1991), those affranchis - former slaves or descendants of slaves - held one-third of the plantation property, one-quarter of the slaves and one-quarter of the real estate by 1789. A more recent estimate based on the analysis of notarial acts is that affranchis owned up to one third of the slaves (King, 2001).

So the free coloured (and the free blacks) - even those of modest means - had slaves. Free coloured people routinely bought slaves, inherited slaves, rented slaves, sold slaves, gave slaves, and freed slaves. Some were in the slave trading business themselves. This should not be so surprising: as writes Stewart King, "slave owning was almost a sine qua non for economic success of any free person". In addition, having slaves was a status symbol, and part of the value of an enslaved person resided in the prestige they granted to their owner.

This does not mean that the slaveholding practices of the free coloured were identical to those of the whites. The free coloured generally owned less slaves per household than the whites. Some wealthy coloured families ran estates with dozens of slaves, but this was far from the hundreds of slaves reported in some white-owned plantations. Some free coloured smallholdings consisted in two families: the master family and the slave family. The analysis of the demographics of enslaved persons owned by free coloured households shows that they were more likely to be bossale (born in Africa rather than creole, born in the colony), from different "nations" (African origin) than those preferred by the whites, and that women outnumbered men, the opposite of what happened in white households and plantations. They also lived longer and their fertility rate was higher. Globally, free coloured slave owners treated their "thinking properties" differently from their white counterparts, and to some (limited) extent, better: more like long-term investments than disposable labour units, expendable and eternally renewable. The reasons for this different attitude remain elusive. It was still chattel slavery anyway.

It is important to note here that the master/slave divide ran through the kin networks, black, mixed-race, and whites. Free blacks and colored people also bought slaves as a way to free them later, or helped their enslaved kin to purchase themselves. This was particularly the case when people wanted to free family members. Sometimes, the future freedom of the slave was notarized in the contract purchase (King, 2001). Manumission, throughout the 18th century, was increasingly made more administrative and above all more expensive due to a heavy "liberty tax" that the owner was required to pay whenever he or she wanted to free a person. One way to free slaves was to exploit a loophole in the Code Noir, the Black Code that regulated slavery since 1685, whose article 9 stipulated that that marriage between a master and slave automatically freed that slave. As a result, free colored masters married their slaves, thus automatically freeing them without having to pay the "liberty tax". Whites willing to free a slave and who wanted to avoid paying the tax simply sold the person cheaply (or gave it) to a free coloured under the promise of marriage.

To my knowledge, the specific situation of former slaves becoming slaveholders has not been studied in a systematic fashion, but it can be found in the many accounts of the lives of those men and women who, after being manumitted, rose to a certain social status, which in turn entailed the possession of enslaved people. Recent literature by Stewart King, John Garrigus, David Geggus and Dominique Rogers, among others, provide several examples of situations where former slaves were in position of own slaves.

• Jean Jasmin, born in Africa in 1714, was freed in 1741. Jasmin later founded an hospice with his wife, another freed African, where he took care of invalids with the help of twelve slaves. In 1789, attempts by local philantropists (notably the pro-slavery Moreau de Saint-Méry) to reward Jasmin with a medal failed due to the virulent opposition of certain white colonists (Garrigus, 2006).

• Paul Carenan, a free man of colour and the probable son of white planter Denis Carenan, was manumitted circa 1727. In 1767, he had become rich enough to buy a large indigo plantation for 130,000 livres, an estate that included 60 slaves. The fact that his manumission was never formally registered made him technically a slave, and he was briefly considered as one - and thus threatened with losing everything - until his wife managed to convince the court using notarized evidence that he had been a free man for 40 years (Garrigus, 2006).

• Cecille Bouchauneau, a mixed-race woman, was manumitted in 1755. The companion of a militia captain, she built a prosperous business by raising livestock and selling meat to plantations, and she later became a landlord who leased to white men. She had at least two slaves, two boys branded with the name of her latest companion (Garrigus, 2006).

• Anne Dominique Acquiez, a free black woman from Curaçao, had been freed in 1737 at 25. She became a prosperous trader in Aquin, buying goods (and perhaps contraband) from French ships and merchants and reselling them. She entrusted her slave François with her goods to sell them in Petit-Goave, across the mountains on the other side of the peninsula (Garrigus, 2006).

• Marie Scipion was born a slave circa 1740 and manumitted some time before 1776. In a relationship with a free mixed-race man, she became independently wealthy as a businesswoman and property owner in Cap Français. She owned slaves, and, for instance, gave four enslaved persons to her daughter Marie-Geneviève (who had already two slaves inherited from her father) as a wedding present. Her stepson Blaise Bréda (born in Africa and brought as a slave with Marie's first husband) was also involved in buying, renting, selling, and occasionally freeing slaves, some of them family members (Rogers and Stewart, 2012; Donnadieu, 2009).

• Marie Bunel, born Fanchette Estève or Marie-Françoise Mouton, was a black woman and a former slave, who, in 1798, accompanied in Philadelphia her (probably white) husband Joseph, who was the envoy and quasi-ambassador of Toussaint Louverture. Marie Bunel, like Scipion and Acquiez cited above, was an independant and prosperous merchant, and she did business in Philadephia as she did in Saint-Domingue. In 1802, while still in the US, she sent a letter to her legal representative asking him to "protect and keep a careful eye on [her] former subjects" - a list of 14 black persons was attached to her letter - and "enforce all the governmental laws and regulations that apply to them, as well as those that the government may pass in the future." The latter seems to be an allusion to the possible restoration of slavery in Saint-Domingue (as it had just happened in Guadeloupe). Philippe Girard has speculated that Marie Bunel had been indeed a slave-owner before 1794, and that she was willing to recover her property if slavery was back in Saint-Domingue. Still, the Bunels were well introduced in the Haitian revolutionary circles and eventually resettled in Haiti to do business (Girard, 2010).

• Jean Kina was born in Africa or in the colony from African parents, probably circa 1750. A craftsman in a cotton plantation in Tiburon, he was recruited in 1792 by white planters to command a militia of armed slaves and tasked with defending white-owned plantations against revolted blacks and free coloured. Kina supposedly refused to be freed (this refusal may have been part of proslavery propaganda) but his manumission was ratified nonetheless. Kina did his job well, becoming a successful commander, and he took his militia to serve under the British who had invaded Tiburon in 1794. In 1796, now a colonel in the British army, he started buying slaves from Jamaica to fight against Louverture, becoming himself a slave owner. His will, drawn in 1798, contains numerous provisions where Kina bequeathed property, including slaves, to members of his family that he had freed himself. His final fate is unknown: he was last seen in Southern France, on his way to fight in Napoléon's Armée d'Italie circa 1803 (Geggus, 2002).

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