488 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



in 1902. Dick was first owned by Mr. James Hunter. The master 

 entered into an arrangement with the boy, an intelligent youth, by 

 which the latter was permitted to work for others for wages and reserve 

 a part of his earnings to be applied to the purchase of his freedom, one 

 thousand dollars being the stipulated price. Dick married a woman of 

 color, and had paid six hundred dollars of his purchase money when his 

 master died intestate, leaving no record of his private arrangement with 

 the slave boy. Thereupon Dick was sold as one of the properties of the 

 estate and was bought by a bachelor named Nugent. Meanwhile Dick's 

 wife had died and he married another free woman of color. This 

 woman purchased her husband from Nugent, agreeing to pay for him 

 on the installment plan. During four or five years the installments 

 were paid, amounting to several hundred dollars. Then the civil war 

 broke out, and in a little while Nugent died. His estate was claimed 

 by relatives who lived in the west, and contracts between masters and 

 slaves for the manumission of the latter were at that time frowned upon 

 by the law. Dick was put upon the block and sold for the second time, 

 bringing fifteen hundred dollars. The buyer was again his wife and 

 she was enabled to make the purchase through the generosity and com- 

 passion of a white neighbor, Mr. Clark Templeton, who provided the 

 money. When the war ended this debt was still due Templeton's estate, 

 and Dick did not repudiate it, though doubtless under the law he might 

 have done so. On the other hand, he continued to work and save, and 

 in the course of six or eight years after emancipation he paid the last 

 dollar with interest. 



Aunt Fanny Canady was a colored woman of Louisville, Ky., who 

 bought herself and several members of her family. She also owned her 

 husband, named Jim, a little drunken cobbler. One day Fanny went 

 into her husband's shop with fire in her eyes and finger pointed at her 

 husband. She said, " Jim, if you don't 'have yourself, I'm gwine sell 

 you down river." Jim sat mute and trembling, as to send down the 

 river meant to sell to a negro trader and to be taken to the cotton fields 

 of the far south. 



At the outbreak of the civil war there was in Norfolk, Va., an indus- 

 trious negress who was a huckstress in the market and owned her hus- 

 band. He was an ardent secessionist and was in full sympathy with the 

 firing on Fort Sumter. After Norfolk was evacuated and was occupied 

 by the federal forces, he was loud in his expression of southern views 

 and was at one time in the chain gang because of opinions obnoxious to 

 the military. No slave trader was ever more convinced that the negroes 

 were made for slavery. 



A colored man named Dubroca, who lived until 1906 near Mobile, 

 Ala., had been the owner of numerous slaves. Not long before his 

 death a white acquaintance met him on the streets and asked him how 



