The Story of One Black Slave Owner

Andrew Durnford: A Black Sugar Planter in the Antebellum South, by David Whitten, Transaction Publishers, 1995, 133 pp.

What was life like for a black slave owner?
In Andrew Durnford, David O. Whitten has drawn on the correspondence between a free, mulatto master and his lifelong white friend to give us a glimpse into a forgotten corner of the American past.

Andrew Durnford was said to be the child of a free black woman and her wealthy English lover, Thomas Durnford. Thomas gave his son an aristocratic education that included French, mathematics, and medicine. Although the most that illegitimate mulatto children could usually hope for was freedom upon the death of their fathers, Andrew inherited both Thomas Durnford’s name and a portion of his estate. He subscribed to periodicals in both French and English, and valued education enough to send his own son to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania.

John McDonogh had been a close friend and business partner of Durnford’s father, Thomas. When Thomas Durnford died, owing almost $10,000 to McDonogh, McDonogh was granted curatorship over the estate. His association with Durnford’s son was a crucial advantage to the young mulatto. In 1831, McDonogh set up Andrew Durnford as a planter, selling to him — on credit — 14 slaves and 672 acres of land along the Mississippi. McDonogh clearly had an abiding affection for Durnford and appears to have treated him as a social equal. He helped Durnford acquire yet more property, and by 1835, Durnford owned 77 slaves and more than 1600 acres of land.

Durnford was not a successful businessman. He was able to cover the costs of running his plantation for only two out of 26 years. He owned more slaves than he needed and, according to Mr. Whitten, “would have enjoyed greater financial returns had he put his capital out at interest and employed himself at salary.” He lived comfortably, but depended on the kindness of his creditor. When he died he still owed $13,000 to John McDonogh’s survivors.

Mr. Whitten writes that Durnford was a kindly master, but he appears to have had no illusions about his property. On one occasion he wrote of his “rascally Negroes,” saying “I have to threaten them severely to get them to do their dutys . . .” When slaves were incapable of a job, he often hired Dutch or German free hands. When slaves escaped, Durnford sent his overseer to track them down. Of one disobedient slave he wrote, “I ordered five round [lashes] to be given him yesterday . . . He is a wicked fellow.”

Though John McDonogh freed 85 of his blacks and set them up with jobs in Liberia, Durnford thought it was foolish to free slaves, since he thought they could not care for themselves: “There is not one in a hundred that could save money. They have not the moral courage to deprive themselves of luxuries.” During his life he freed only four slaves — a laborer in his 50s and three mulatto children. McDonogh freed all but a few slaves in his will, but Andrew Durnford freed only one at his death — an illegitimate child.

Durnford’s legitimate son was not a kind master to the slaves he inherited. “The race relationship between this mulatto and the slaves may have been more severe than that found between slaves and white owners and overseers,” writes Mr. Whitten. Slavery was, indeed, a vexing question, scarcely illuminated by the clichés with which it is invariably addressed.

Some Important Women of the Civil War: Nurses and the Home Front

 Too large to be presented in one program, this PowerPoint features some of the contributions of Civil War era women. The role of women in caring for the sick and wounded and on the home-front is covered in this program. Women spies and soldiers will be the focus of another one. The PowerPoint program contains additional information in the Notes section of each slide that the PDF version does not contain. The PDF version, however, takes up much smaller memory. A sample of some of the women featured in the program is below. To access the entire program, click on the format you prefer:  PowerPoint    PDF

Flagbearers and Color-guards in the Civil War

A review of the human cost of carrying an American or Confederate flag during our nation's most costly war.  Among the many inspirational stories of our ancestors, read about the war of attrition between the 24th Michigan and the 26th North Carolina at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863. Both regiments suffered the heaviest number of casualties in either army during their encounter. The Union regiment lost 9 Color-bearers and the Confederate regiment lost 14 such men that day. The survivors of the 26th went on to lose another 8 color-bearers in Picket's Charge two days later--a total of 22 men who carried their colors into battle over three days. This doesn't include the loss of several dozen more men who comprised the color guard for the Regiment. To download a PDF version of this program, click HERE.  

A few of the 55 slides for the program are shown below.  We hope that education about the important role our flag has played in the preservation of freedom in our nation and around the world will result in fewer instances of it being burned and destroyed in future 'protests'. This version discusses both important examples of heroism on the part of both Union and Confederate flag-bearers and color guards. A SUVCW PowerPoint that concentrates on Union regiments and soldiers is available HERE. 

1,300 Years of Forgotten Black Genocide of the Arab Islamic Slave Trade

From: 1,300 Years of Forgotten Black Genocide of the Arab Islamic Slave Trade - Geller Report     

Time to Set the Record Straight on Slavery

 James Simpson, American Thinker, September 30, 2019   

Editor's note: Recent discussion in Congress about the role of the United States in the enslavement of Africans and the call for racial reparations for slavery has prompted this historian to put things into perspective.

{snip}

A look into the past is instructive. According to Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, 12.5 million African slaves were shipped to the New World between 1525 and 1866, and 10.7 million (about 86 percent) survived the trip. Of these, only 450,000 (about 4 percent of the total) were sent to America. The rest were shipped to South America and the Caribbean. Brazil alone received 4.9 million. {snip} And the black slave trade to the West pales in comparison to the white and black slave trade conducted by Muslim nations of Africa and the Middle East in its barbarity and numbers.

The much larger and infinitely more barbaric Muslim slave trade began in about 711, capturing both whites and blacks in numbers much higher than those taken by the West, and Muslim slave-traders provided over 80% of those black slaves sold to the West. Of the slaves captured by Muslims for their own use, 80 to 90 percent died on the way to market. Of those shipped to North Africa for sale to Western slavers, about 30–50 percent died enroute. Males slated for Muslim markets were castrated. Only 25 percent survived the operation. Their descendants in those nations are much smaller in number because most male African slaves were used as eunuchs and worked to death. Estimates of total black enslavement in Muslim nations range from 11 million to 32 million. Given the high mortality rate of capture and transport, the impact on black African tribes must have been genocidal.

The Muslim Ottomans, the Barbary pirates, Crimean Tatars, and Turks enslaved European, Russian, Mediterranean, and Caucasus whites between the 15th and 19th centuries. According to The Islamic Trade in European Slaves by Emmet Scott, the most conservative estimate is 15 million white slaves. Women and boys were preferred. Most of the women were sold into sex slavery, while boys were castrated and used as eunuchs. Crimean Tatars, who enslaved about 3 million, gave older men of little value to Tatar youths, who killed them for sport.{snip}

Scott writes:

The great humanitarian impulse to end slavery, from the late eighteenth century onwards, came entirely from the Christian West, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was stamped out completely in most Christian lands.

In the Middle East, it was officially ended only due to pressure from the West:

That slavery no longer exists (officially at least) in the majority of Muslim territories is due entirely to the efforts of Westerners, and in fact Muslim societies vigorously resisted all attempts by Europeans to stamp out the slave trade in Africa during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was not in until the second half of the twentieth century that slavery was finally abolished in the Gulf States and the Arabian Peninsula — after intense Western pressure. Is it not about time that some of this information got through to students in our schools and colleges?

But slavery has not been abolished. Mauritania, the last nation to publicly condone slavery, officially outlawed it finally in 2007.  However, the truth is that slavery in Mauritania is alive and well, with as much as 10-20 percent of the population (340,000 to 680,000) in bondage. Algeria (106,000), Sudan (35,000 or more), Libya (48,000), and certain other nations still practice slavery.  {snip}

Original Article