NEGROES WHO OWNED SLAVES 485 



There is a good deal of human interest to be found in many of the 

 experiences of these colored slaveholders and in their relations with 

 those whom they held in bondage. Bose Petepher, of the neighborhood 

 of New Bern, N. C, was a free colored woman who was married to a 

 slave named Eichard Gasken, who had taken the name of his master. 

 He ran away and was in the woods for years, when his wife finally 

 bought him to take possession when she could find him ; this change of 

 owners brought him in at once. They lived together for many years 

 afterward, raising many children whom they hired out just as slaves 

 were hired out. Thus they all prospered. Near the town mentioned 

 above, on their own land, some of the grandchildren are now living and 

 doing well. 



Judge William Gasken, who owned the man of whom we have just 

 told, was thrice married, one of his wives being a daughter of Colonel 

 McClure, of New Bern. After his death, one of the slaves, Jacob, 

 became the property of Mrs. Gasken. This Jacob's wife was a free 

 woman, and they had a son Jacob, then a young man and free, of 

 course, as the child of a free woman. Aided by his mother's efforts, 

 he managed to purchase his father at a very reasonable price as negroes 

 were then held. All went smoothly for awhile, when young Jacob did 

 not act as his father thought he should and his parent reproved him 

 with fatherly love. Young Jacob was so disgruntled that he went off 

 to a negro speculator named John Gildersleeve, who was from Long 

 Island and was then in New Bern. This trader bought the father at a 

 high price and at once sent him off south. Young Jacob afterward 

 boasted that " the old man had gone to the corn fields about New 

 Orleans where they might learn him some manners." 



There was, about 1840, in the county of Mecklenburg, Va., a family 

 of free negroes who owned slaves. Mr. George W. Brooks, of Atlanta, 

 recalls them when he was a youth in North Carolina in the county of 

 Person, which lay immediately on the Virginia line. There was there 

 quite a colony of free negroes, many of them named Epps, and supposed 

 to be descendants of the slaves set free by Mr. Epps, the brother-in-law 

 of Thomas Jefferson. In Person County there was a free negro named 

 Billy Mitchell, an honest man of genial disposition, who being without 

 means, often hired himself to work for Mr. Brook's father on his 

 tobacco farm. Mr. Brooks remembers hearing Mitchell telling his 

 father of his trip to Mecklenburg, about thirty miles away, when and 

 where he went courting, and told of the lands and slaves which were 

 owned by his girl's father. He told with much humor of an incident 

 which occurred while he was there. He went out one morning with the 

 girl's brother to the pig pen to look at the fattening swine. He said 

 that one of the slave boys came and got upon the pen with them; that 

 soon he heard the girl calling her mother to " look at Jim perched up 



