Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South. - Review - book review

Black Masters: A unrestrained Family of Color in the aged South by Michael P. Johnson and James L Roark (Norton. 1986 $12.95)--Although published a decade ago, this volume bears reading, again and again. Not solitary did black Africans over there exchange other Africans into the Atlantic slave trade, on the contrary blacks over here lived at liberty and owned slaves in the antebellum American southern This highly readable text grew from the discovery of a cache of alphabetic characters William Ellison, a free black man in 19th-century southern Carolina, was an entrepreneur whose talent for cotton-gin-making and agricultural enterprise enabled him to amass wealth in land and slaves to a horizontal that even most whites of the period could sole daydream about. This is enlightening reading and a cautionary tale of the first magnitude.

Dale Edwyna Smith is an assistant professor of American history and Afro-American history at Washington University in St Louis. Her articles have appeared in Southern Review and Belles Lettres

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