484 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



members of their families, as husbands their wives and children, and in 

 other cases the wives owned husbands and children, and again children 

 owned their parents, in order to protect them or ultimately to set them 

 free; the complicated legislation in regard to free negroes at various 

 times and in various places often made it difficult for a free member of 

 a family to manumit the others ; sometimes when so liberated they had 

 to be sent out of their state. A large number were owners of slaves 

 without regard to relationships and held them for service and bought 

 and sold them just as did the white people. 



The negroes brought with them from their native land African ideas 

 and customs. They were used from immemorial times to slavery. 

 Many of those brought thence to America had been slaves in their 

 own land. Others had been owners of slaves in Africa. In both cases 

 they were used to slavery. It did not therefore seem to them unnatural 

 for a negro in America to hold his brethren in bondage, when he had 

 become free and able to buy his fellows. William Pitt, the younger, in 

 a speech, April 2, 1792, in the British Parliament, on the abolition of 

 the slave trade, said, " Some evidences say that the Africans are ad- 

 dicted to the practise of gambling; that they even sell their wives and 

 children and ultimately themselves." The black man in America has 

 always been imitative, and his desire to do what the white man did 

 doubtless also influenced him in this matter. Moreover, there were in 

 his country tribal differences and antagonisms which continued to ob- 

 tain in America ; the " Guinea nigger " was looked down on by members 

 of superior tribes, and one of a higher race often felt that a Guinea 

 negro was fit only to serve him. 



Free negroes in this country began to own other blacks at a very 

 «arly period in the history of slavery. As illustrating this fact, there 

 is in the possession of the Connecticut Historical Society at Hartford, 

 Conn., a bill of sale from Samuel Stanton, Stonington, Conn., dated 

 October 6, 1783, to Prince, a free negro, of a slave woman named 

 Binar; on the reverse is a bill of sale from Prince to Isaac Denison, 

 Stonington, August 28, 1785, of the same Binar, a slave. One of the 

 first records in the deed books of St. Augustine, Fla., is that of Joseph 

 Sanchez, a colored carpenter, who sold to Francisco P. Sachez a negro 

 slave for three hundred dollars. Such a servant was sold to a negro in 

 Boston, Mass., November 28, 1724. This bill of sale from Dorcas 

 Marshall to Scipio, free negro man and laborer of Boston, of her servant 

 Margaret is given in full in " The New England Historical and Gene- 

 alogical Kegister," in the eighteenth volume, on the seventy-eighth page. 

 Early records of Mobile, Ala., reveal the same state of things in that 

 region. Juan Batista Lusser, in 1797, was one of these negro slave- 

 holders, as were also Julia Vilard, Simon Andry and the house of 

 Forbes. 



