during their natural lives the sd Mary Johnson & two daughters of Anthony Johnson Negro be disingaged and freed from payment of Taxes and leavyes in Northampton County for public use.[8]

Subtracting thirty years from 1652, the date of this order of the court, it appeared that this Negro and his wife were in Virginia in 1622.  Examination of a census taken in Virginia after the Indian massacre of 1622 and called “The Lists of Living and Dead in Virginia” revealed the fact that there were only four Negroes in the colony beside the surviving nineteen out of the twenty that came in in 1619.  The name of one of these four was Mary and the name of one of the first twenty was Anthony.[9] It may with good reason be surmised, if it cannot be proved, that Mary became the wife of Anthony and that in the course of the next thirty years they acquired the surname Johnson as well as a large tract of land and a slave by the name of John Casor.

THE EXISTENCE OF BLACK MASTERS AFTER COLONIAL TIMES

Some readers may be inclined to regard the case of the slave John Casor as altogether exceptional and peculiar to an early period in the growth of slavery before custom had fully crystallized into law.  It is true that similar examples are hard to find in the seventeenth century when the free Negroes were few in number.  But if from the paucity of examples it is argued that such a case was a freak of the seventeenth century and that nothing similar could have occurred after slavery became a settled and much regulated institution, the answer is that slave-owning by free Negroes was so common in the period of the Commonwealth as to pass unnoticed and without criticism by those who consciously recorded events of the times.  For abundant proof of the relation of black master and black slave we must refer again to court records and legislative petitions from which events and incidents were not omitted because of their common occurrence.  Deeds of sale and transfer of slaves to free Negroes, wills of free Negroes providing for a future disposition of slaves, and records of suits for freedom against free Negroes, all relate too well the story of how black masters owned slaves of their own race, to require additional proof.

The following record of the court of Henrico County under date of 1795 is an example of what is to be found in the records of any of the older counties of Virginia: 

Know all men by these presents that I, James Radford of the County of Henrico for and in consideration of the sum of thirty-three pounds current money of Virginia to me in hand paid by George Radford a black freeman of the city of Richmond hath bargained and sold unto George Radford one negro woman aggy, to have and to hold the said negro slave aggy unto the said George Radford his heirs and assigns forever.

     James Radford (seal)[10]

Judith Angus, a well-to-do free woman of color of Petersburg, was the owner of two household slaves.  Before her death in 1832 she made a will which provided that the two slave girls should continue in the service of the family until they earned money enough to enable them to leave the State and thus secure their freedom according to law.[11]