[Footnote 31:  Reverend Charles Peters, Two Sermons Preached at Dominica, with an appendix containing minutes of evidence of three trials (London, 1802), pp. 36-49.]

[Footnote 32:  LaRochefoucauld-Liancourt, Travels in the United States (London, 1799), p. 602, giving the negro’s name as Pindaim.  The census returns of 1790 give no such name, but they list James Pendarvis in a group comprising a white man, a free colored person and 123 slaves, and also a Mrs. Persons, free colored, with 136 slaves.  She may have been Pindaim’s (or Pendarvis’) mulatto daughter, while the white man listed in the Pendarvis item was perhaps her husband or an overseer. Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States:  South Carolina (Washington, 1908), pp. 35, 37.]

[Footnote 33:  For these and other data I am indebted to Professor E.P.  Puckett of Central College, Fayette, Mo., who has permitted me to use his monograph, “Free Negroes in Louisiana,” in manuscript.  The arpent was the standard unit of area in the Creole parishes of Louisiana, the acre in the parishes of Anglo-American settlement.]

[Footnote 34:  Calvin D. Wilson, “Black Masters,” in the North American Review, CLXXXI, 685-698, and “Negroes who owned Slaves,” in the Popular Science Monthly, LXXXI, 483-494; John H. Russell, “Colored Freemen as Slave Owners in Virginia,” in the Journal of Negro History, I, 233-242.]

Slaveholdings by colored townsmen were likewise fairly frequent.  Among the 360 colored taxpayers in Charleston in 1860, for example, 130, including nine persons described as of Indian descent, were listed as possessing 390 slaves.[35] The abundance of such holdings at New Orleans is evidenced by the multiplicity of applications from colored proprietors for authority to manumit slaves, with exemption from the legal requirement that the new freedmen must leave the state.[36] A striking example of such petitions was that presented in 1832 by Marie Louise Bitaud, free woman of color, which recited that in the preceding year she had bought her daughter and grandchild at a cost of $700; that a lawyer had now told her that in view of her lack of free relatives to inherit her property, in case of death intestate her slaves would revert to the state; that she had become alarmed at this prospect; and she accordingly begged permission to manumit them without their having to leave Louisiana.  The magistrates gave their consent on condition that the petitioner furnish a bond of $500 to insure the support and education of the grandson until his coming of age.  This was duly done and the formalities completed.[37]

[Footnote 35:  List of the Taxpayers of Charleston for 1860(Charleston, 1861), part 2.]

[Footnote 36:  Many of these are filed in the record books of manumissions in the archive rooms of the New Orleans city hall.  Some were denied on the ground that proof was lacking that the slaves concerned were natives of the state or that they would be self-supporting in freedom; others were granted.]