Not all African Americans worked as slaves on Southern cotton plantations in antebellum America. On the eve of the Civil War about 226,000 free blacks lived in the North and about 260,000 in the South. One of the most remarkable of these was William Johnson of Natchez, Mississippi, who recorded his activities in a diary from 1835 until his death in 1851. Freed by his owner and the Mississippi legislature in 1830, Johnson learned the barber's trade by apprenticing under his brother-in-law James Miller. Free blacks dominated the barbering trade in several Southern cities, and Natchez was no exception. In 1830 Johnson inherited from Miller the most prosperous barbershop in one of the richest communities in the nation. Prominent planters frequented Johnson's shop, and soon he was pulling in about twenty dollars a day, enough to buy the building for three thousand dollars in 1833 and take a...