This Day in History: General Robert E. Lee and 26,765 troops surrender to US Lieutenant General Ulysses S Grant on this day in 1865, thus ending the Civil War.
Very few soldiers in the South were actually slave owners. There were however over 3000 black slave owners in the South. One of the biggest free black slaveholders was John Carruthers Stanly in Craven County, North Carolina, who owned three plantations and 163 slaves, and even hired three white overseers to manage his properties!
In fact, Stanly became not only the largest slave owner in Craven County, and one of the largest in North Carolina, and he owned more than twice as many slaves as the second largest free Black slave owner in the South."
Stanly used his revenues to purchase freedom for family members and free others close to him, including his wife and five children. He also rented houses, had income from cotton sales, and attended chattel sales like his white neighbors to purchase slaves. According to author Schweninger [Schweninger, Loren (April 1990). "John Carruthers Stanly and the Anomaly of Black Slaveholding"], state records report that Stanly owned 127 slaves by 1820. These people did a variety of work including working at his barber shop and on his two plantations on Bachelor's Creek along the Neuse River. He loaned out the labor of his slaves for a profit in addition to making money manufacturing and exporting turpentine. Stanly spent a considerable amount of time and money buying and then freeing family members, for example his brother-in-law John Merrick and several slaves owned by familiar white families like the Stewarts. He also took dozens of underage slaves under his guardianship, providing them with jobs and places to live; however, Schweninger was clear to state that "Stanly rose to a position of wealth and prestige through his ownership and use of slave laborers." On one of his properties, Hope Plantation, Stanly hired three white overseers. She also notes that "Stanly differed little from his white neighbors" in his treatment of his slaves. His male slaves were worth twice that of his female slaves, so maintaining families would have been difficult, and Schweninger's research determined that Stanly was not averse to selling his slaves' family members.
In one interesting study, R. Halliburton shows that free black people have owned slaves “in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery.” Source
Black slave owners in the South were also willing to fight for the Confederacy in order to maintain their livelihoods. This was made clear in a statement by free people of color in Louisiana before the outbreak of the Civil War: “The free colored population [native] of Louisiana … own slaves, and they are dearly attached to their native land … and they are ready to shed their blood for her defense. They have no sympathy for abolitionism; no love for the North, but they have plenty for Louisiana … They will fight for her in 1861 as they fought [to defend New Orleans from the British] in 1814-1815.”
See also, When Blacks Owned Slaves, by Calvin Dill Wilson 1905
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