My Father, My Slave: Close-Kin Ownership in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Suriname and the U.S. South

The study of slavery in the Americas has grown significantly since the 1960s and yet, some aspects remain neglected or ignored. Black slaveownership is one such understudied topic, despite the increasing importance of this phenomenon in the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This paper focuses on one aspect of slave ownership by free people of African descent: “close kin ownership,” whereby a free black person legally owned his or her close relatives. Parents, children, “significant others,” nieces, nephews, and cousins all appear in the documents at one point or another as owned by their close relatives. Cases unearthed from Suriname and the U.S. South in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century will be examined in order to fathom the nature and degrees of freedom in the lives of slaves owned by their black relatives. This paper will help shift the focus of a debate that so far has stressed the dichotomy between benevolence and capitalism.