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Article

Apion, Flavius  

Giovanni R. Ruffini

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Egyptian landowner and Roman imperial official, is the best attested member of a family of large landholders prominent in Egypt from the fifth to the seventh centuries. The Apionic estates were one of the dominant forces in the Oxyrhynchite nome or sub-province of Egypt during the Byzantine period. Its surviving papyrological documentation details the activities of these estates, their financial managers, their farmers, and other related figures. This material makes the Apionic estates, so-called “the noble house,” one of the best documented economic institutions during Roman rule in Egypt. By recent count, the published material from the Apionic archive includes nearly 275 texts covering more than 180 years, from 436 to 620/1. The Apionic estates are likely to have been the largest in the Oxyrhynchite nome.

Procopius a sixth century Byzantine historian describes Apion s role during the Roman Empire s war with Persia during the reign of Anastasius in ...

Article

Barberá, Ana Josefa  

Eduardo R. Palermo

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
30 September 2016

was born in Africa in the mid-eighteenth century and brought to the River Plate region as a slave at an unknown date. After she was freed and purchased her own land, Barberá donated her property for the establishment of Tacuarembó, a city in northern Uruguay, in 1832. The donation represents the only documented case of a person of African descent contributing land for the subsequent founding of a town or city.

The existing historical record refers to Barberá as a freedwoman or “morena libre.” Until the late 1790s, she is registered as residing in rural northern Uruguay, with the respective landowner’s permission. She settled at the intersection of the Tranqueras and Tacuarembó Chico rivers, a site that became known among locals as “el rincón de Tía Ana” (Aunt Ana’s Corner). In July 1804 in Montevideo Barberá signed a commitment to officially purchase the plot of land with an ...

Article

Brown, Abraham  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2018

was born in Charles City County, Virginia, the son of Abraham Brown, and his wife Sarah Brown. (The elder Abraham Brown called himself “Abraham Brown, Jr.” in a 1789 will, but Abraham Brown, Sr. was his uncle, not his father). The Browns were descended from William Brown, born around 1670, sometimes referenced in Virginia court records as “William Brown Negro.” Arthur Bunyan Caldwell, in History of the American Negro and his institutions, briefly refers to the family history being traceable back to England, but provides no details.

The Browns had been free for over a century, and many had owned enough property to be taxable, when Abraham Brown was born. Several had owned title to enslaved persons; Abraham owned three in 1810. His father at various times owned both slaves and indentured servants, including one John Bell, indentured in 1771 Abraham Brown Jr ...

Article

Collins, Newton Isaac, Sr.  

Joshunda Sanders

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

former slave and landowner in central Texas at a time when few southern blacks owned land, was born a slave in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1826. The literate son of a slave mother and an Irish slaveholder father, Collins was freed in Alabama and traveled to Manor, Texas, in the mid-1800s as a skilled carpenter.

At the time he left Alabama, Collins was likely one of an estimated 500,000 free blacks in the United States in the decade before the Civil War. Free blacks were never a large population in Texas; in the 1860 census they numbered fewer than 400, but may have been twice that many. Free blacks, nevertheless, made a significant contribution to the early history of Texas. When Collins arrived in Manor, Texas, in 1863, however, he was re-enslaved.

He may have married his wife, Sarah Elizabeth Harrington at a Methodist church in the Austin ...

Article

Crawford, Anthony P.  

Caroline DeVoe

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

businessman, landowner, farmer, and lynching victim, was born into slavery in Abbeville, South Carolina, the youngest son of Thomas and Louisa, slaves on the plantation of Ben Crawford in Abbeville, South Carolina. After Emancipation and Ben Crawford's death, his widow Rebecca may have bequeathed land to her former slave, Thomas, Anthony's father. Thomas continued to acquire land, and in 1873 he purchased 181 acres of fertile land from Samuel McGowan, a former Confederate general and South Carolina Supreme Court Justice. Thomas Crawford's “homeplace” was located in an alluvial valley, approximately seven miles west of the town of Abbeville. The rich land was flanked on the east by Little River and on the west by Penny Creek.

While Crawford's brothers worked the family farm Anthony was sent to school walking seven miles to and from school each day Seventeen year old Anthony was ...

Article

Delamere, Hugh Cholmondeley  

Felix Macharia Kiruthu

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

pioneer white settler in Kenya, settled in the country in 1903. At the time he first visited the country during a hunting expedition in 1897, he had inherited the family title, as Third Baron Delamere, and the family estate, bringing him a fortune at the age of seventeen. Using his family wealth, he traveled widely, visiting Corsica, New Zealand, Australia, India, and Somaliland before settling in Kenya. Benefitting from a land grant from the colonial government in Njoro, between the Mau escarpment in the west and the Aberdare Ranges in the east in 1903, he named his parcel of land the Equator Farm in 1904. In due course, he acquired additional land in the country’s Rift Valley Province, and subsequently relocated to the Soysambu Farm near Lake Elementeita in 1910 Together with the East African Syndicate Delamere owned one fifth of all the alienated land ...

Article

Edimboro (aka AmbaraEdinborough, Philip), Felipe  

Michele Valerie Ronnick

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2018

was born in Africa in either Guinea or Congo, and arrived in the New World by the Middle Passage. Where he disembarked is not known, but at some point he was brought to the northeast coast of Florida, and in 1772 was purchased by Francisco Xavier Sánchez (c.1736–1805), a Floridano planter and cattle baron with extensive holdings in Spanish-colonial Florida. Edimboro worked at Don Sánchez’s original homestead, a thousand-acre plantation-ranch called San Diego (now Guana Tolomata Matanzas National Research Reserve in Palm Valley) and distinguished himself by his valuable skills as a butcher (St. Augustine Record, 2002; Landers, 1991, p. 180). Over the next two decades he and his wife, Filis (1760–? a laundress also owned by Don Sánchez took on a variety of extra jobs and slowly amassed enough money to purchase their freedom According to historian Jane Landers in addition ...

Article

Goyens, William  

Charles Rosenberg

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

was the first African American and perhaps the first of any color to become a millionaire in Texas. His life reflects substantial changes in the social and legal implications of skin color from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteeth century, distinct from, but closely related to, changes in the institution of slavery.

His father was a “free colored” man named William Goyens Sr. (or Goin), born in 1762, who enlisted in a company of the Tenth North Carolina Regiment May 1781–May 1782 for the Revolutionary War. After discharge from the militia, Goyens Sr. married an unknown woman referred to as “white,” who was the mother of the younger William Goyens. Goyens Sr. then remarried a colored woman named Elizabeth in 1793. Goyens Sr. received an invalid pension for North Carolina militia service in 1835, at the age of seventy-two (Research of Cindy Goins Hoelscher ...

Article

Hearne, Azeline  

Dale Baum

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

slave concubine and beneficiary of her former master's will, was born probably in Louisiana. Nothing is known about her parents or relatives who survived her. She endured forty years under slavery only to become in her old age a reclusive, sickly, and impoverished woman wandering from place to place in the Brazos River bottomlands in Robertson County, Texas. Although she was never acknowledged by society to have in any way influenced the course of historical events, the story of her life reveals as much about the period of Reconstruction after the American Civil War as do the lives of those who attained distinction through their fame or extraordinary achievements.

As a slave Azeline had cohabitated with her unmarried master, Samuel (“Sam”) R. Hearne She bore him four children only one of whom survived early childhood During Sam s prolonged illness immediately after the end of the Civil War ...

Article

Jackson, Dinnah  

Karen E. Sutton

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

property owner and matriarch of eighteenth-century free black Albany, New York. Records indicate that Jackson was the first African American to own property in Albany. In January 1779 she bought a city lot on the South side of lower Second Street. We know little of her origins; however, by the time of this fortuitous purchase she had married Jack Johnson, a free man of color from Albany. They had two sons, Jack and Lewis. In 1790Dinnah Jackson worked as the housekeeper at the Masonic Lodge and at Saint Peter's Episcopal Church. Exactly how she was able to purchase her property is unclear, but she may have been extremely frugal and resourceful, or perhaps she had an unknown benefactor.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries people lived near their work and most free blacks lived near one another for support and companionship Unlike many other northern ...

Article

Johnson, Amy  

Nicole S. Ribianszky

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

free woman of color, property owner, and businesswoman in Natchez, Mississippi, was born into slavery. Little is known of her parents or early life. She was emancipated in 1814 at age thirty by her white owner, William Johnson, who was the likely father of her two young children, Adelia and William. He stated in the emancipation document executed in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, that in consideration of five dollars he had liberated Amy, who would be “able to work and gain a Sufficient Livilihood and maintenance” (Davis and Hogan, Barber, 15).

Amy was listed as a free Negro head of household in the Natchez, Mississippi, censuses of 1816, 1818, and 1820. Her children were also freed by William Johnson beginning with Adelia at age thirteen in 1818. Her son, William Johnson (1809–1851), was emancipated two years after this, in 1820 ...

Article

Johnson, Ann Battles  

Nicole S. Ribianszky

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

free woman of color, property owner, and slaveholder in Natchez, Mississippi, was born enslaved. Her mother, Harriet Battles, was an enslaved mixed-race woman. It is not clear who Ann's father was, although presumably it was a white man due to Ann's racial classification as “mulatto.” It is not readily evident, however, that it was Gabriel Tichenor, the white man who claimed ownership of mother and daughter. In 1822 Tichenor crossed the Mississippi River to Concordia Parish Louisiana and manumitted Harriet when she was thirty years old Because of the laws of Louisiana the children of freed people could not themselves be freed until they too reached age thirty Four years after Harriet s manumission Tichenor navigated around that issue by transporting Harriet and the eleven year old Ann to Cincinnati Ohio where he had their free papers duly recorded The mother and daughter then returned ...

Article

Law, Eugenia  

Wanda Feranandopulle

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
28 January 2022

from Hyman, Florence County, South Carolina, formerly enslaved, had eleven children, was a wife to Augustus (Guss) Law who was a legal voter, and was able to own land after the Civil War, when African Americans in the South acquired approximately 15 million acres.

Eugenia and some of her children worked as farm laborers, while others were teachers at the local McKnight School, and another also worked as a mail contractor using a horse and buggy.

Although the postwar Reconstruction era had encouraged African Americans to acquire property, Black landowners received very little or no support from the federal or state governments.

Eugenia did not attend school and could not read or write. In 1902 Guss Law left 450 acres of land and all possessions to Eugenia to be managed by her son Joe Although by the 1920s rural African American land ownership was declining Joe bucked this trend ...

Article

Leiper, Fanny  

Nicole S. Ribianszky

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

free woman of color, property holder, and washerwoman, was born into slavery in Natchez, Mississippi. The exact date of her birth is not now known. She was born to an enslaved woman, Hannah Frey, and to J. S. Miller, a white planter who lived outside of Natchez near the small town of Washington. Mrs. Margaret Overaker, a white woman, and her husband, George, owned Leiper and her mother. While Leiper was still a young girl, her mother was manumitted, but Leiper herself remained enslaved. Sometime around 1831, when Leiper was approximately twenty or twenty-one, she was freed, reportedly at the insistence of her father, who paid her owner $300. In 1834 or thereabouts, following the instructions of her white father, she was taken by boat up the Mississippi River to Cincinnati, Ohio, in the footsteps of her mother.

As was the case with ...

Article

Mañé Elá, Acacio  

Nicole D. Price

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Equatorial Guinean landowner, liberation activist of the Fang ethnic group, and hero of the independence movement, was born in Cameroon. Nothing is really known about his youth. Before his participation in the independence movement of Equatorial Guinea, Mañé Elá was known throughout the Río Muni region (the continental part of Equatorial Guinea) as a fairly wealthy landowner. Because of his status as an emancipado, or privileged African under Spanish colonial rule, Mañé Elá had very few restrictions placed upon him as far as travel and accumulation of wealth, both of which figured prominently in his role in the independence movement.

The independence movement in Spanish Guinea started to formally take shape in the late 1940s, when emancipados realized that even with their privileged status in colonial society, they would never have the same rights as the Spaniards. In 1947 a group of emanicipados, led by Marcos Ropo Uri ...

Article

Metoyer, Augustin  

Fiona J. L. Handley

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

slave, wealthy landowner, and community leader, was born Nicholas Augustin Metoyer in Natchitoches, in the Spanish colony of Louisiana. His mother was Marie-Thérèse Coincoin, a slave and later a free woman and successful agriculturalist, and his father was Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, a wealthy French merchant and planter with whom his mother had a nineteen-year liaison. Marie-Thérèse was enslaved when Augustin and his twin sister Marie Susanne were born, and he was subsequently bought by his father on 31 May 1776 from Madame de St Denis along with three of his siblings for 1 300 livres He grew up as the oldest male child in a wealthy household where in an unusual situation an enslaved woman and a white man cohabited almost completely openly Although Pierre Metoyer never explicitly acknowledged his children with Marie Thérèse as his own most of them took ...

Article

Metoyer, Louis  

Fiona J. L. Handley

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

slave, wealthy landowner, and community leader was born in Natchitoches, in the Spanish colony of Louisiana. His mother was Marie-Thérèse Coincoin, a slave who became a free woman and a successful agriculturalist, and his father was Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, a wealthy French merchant and planter with whom his mother had a nineteen-year liaison. Marie-Thérèse was enslaved when Louis was born, and he was subsequently bought by his father on 31 May 1776 from Madame de St Denis along with three of his siblings for 1 300 livres Louis Metoyer s upbringing was unusual for its day His parents shared a household in a scarcely disguised fashion and unlike most other mixed race families in the Louisianan upper classes there was no white family to compete for the financial and emotional affection of the father Pierre Metoyer reunited his children with Marie Thérèse under one ...

Article

Ngonyo  

Thomas Spear

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

was one of a number of Mijikenda who took advantage of increasing trade and the disruptions of slavery during the nineteenth century in eastern Kenya to attract large numbers of followers and develop their own polities. Prior to the nineteenth century, most Mijikenda had lived in central kayas (villages) surrounding Mombasa, where they farmed and participated in local trade, exchanging livestock, foodstuffs, honey, medicines, and craftwork among themselves. They also traded grain, ivory, copal (used in varnish), orchilla dye, and rubber for cloth, beads, and other trade goods with coastal Swahili.

One of the Mijikenda groups the Giriama had been the leading ivory traders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries acquiring tusks locally from Waata and Oromo hunters and trade partners but with increasing demand for ivory in India China and Europe during the eighteenth century elephants became more scarce and ambitious young men began to organize caravans across the ...

Article

Randon, Matilda Boozie  

Eunice Angelica Whitmal

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 January 2020

was born to an enslaved mother in South Carolina. The names of her parents are not recorded, but Randon labored in the homes of the Boozie family, according to her granddaughter, Annie Mae Hunt. Little else is known about Randon’s early life. The Boozie family sold her parents and siblings, forever separating the family, until Randon was reunited with one of her sisters’ daughters.

The documented evidence of enslaved women s lives reveals the complicated double oppression of race and gender one that Randon had to endure as she navigated slave culture Among various historical resources the fear and threat of sexual violence and assault against black women is constant Unfortunately at thirteen years old Randon was not spared this indignity when living with her owners Perhaps seeking a moment of redress she disclosed to her mistress that she had been raped by the mistress s son The mistress did ...

Article

Sousa, Manuel António de  

Rosemary Elizabeth Galli

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

nineteenth-century Mozambican warlord, was born on 10 November 1835 in Mapusa, Goa (Portuguese India). His parents were Felix de Sousa, a landowner, and Doroteia Tomásia de Mascarenhas. He went to Mozambique in the early 1850s to manage his maternal uncle’s estate and married his cousin, Maria Anastásia de Mascarenhas. He became a rich and powerful ivory trader in the Sena region, gathering together a private army of elephant hunters and slaves with which he raided surrounding territories. He built a heavily fortified base camp in the Gorongosa Mountains in the 1850s from which he built an empire. He helped Portugal gain control over central Mozambique, challenged first by the Nguni and powerful estate holders and later the British. Locally he acquired the name of Gouveia, said to be a corruption of the term meaning “Goan.”

Sousa found his opportunity to extend his landholdings in the 1860s when Nguni armies ...