Slaves and Masters: The Louisiana Metoyers

Posted in Articles, History, Louisiana, Media Archive, Slavery, United States on 2011-12-23 02:59Z by Steven

Slaves and Masters: The Louisiana Metoyers

National Genealogical Society Quarterly (current source: Historic Pathways)
Volume 70, Number 3 (September 1982)
pages 163-189

Elizabeth Shown Mills

Gary B. Mills (1944-2002)

The pursuit of genealogical research by Afro-Americans is a fairly-recent innovation in the American social experience. From an academic standpoint, today’s generation of black family historians are pioneers on the threshhold of a challenge, an adventure through which traditional white genealogists have already passed. They are heirs to a rich legacy of family tradition, almost invariably undocumented. They face a world of resources whose limits appear to be boundless, but are frustratingly underdeveloped. The guides which exist for them are often crude and elementary, even contradictory. There also exists, to some extent, a self-defeating presumption that documentation of miscegenous, illegitimate births is not possible—as reflected in the recent assertion of awell-known black writer:

In those days, slaves were sold and shifted much like livestock, so records were sporadic. Nor did records reflect things like children born from unions between white masters and black women. So to expect these records to provide an accurate account is pure naivete. When it comes to black genealogy, well-kept oral history is without question the best source.

Even more unfortunately, contemporary black genealogists, like the older generations of more naive white genealogists, often begin their pursuit with a handicap; a stereotyped, often onc-dimensional concept of American historiography that may limit their potential success. Americans, black and white, are prone to|draw too-sharp lines between certain races and classes of men. A white with Southern heritage traditionally expects his forebears to be slaveowners, while the American black expects his ancestors to be enslaved.

Both are likely to be surprised at the degree of variance which may emerge between reality and their stereotyped expectations. The Louisiana family of Metoyer provides an intriguing example of the degree to which class, race, and economic lines were blurred in early America. The Metoyers were both slaves and masters, but they were not unique. Pioneer black historian Carter G. Woodson in 1924 identified 3,765 black Southerners who were, in the single year 1830, owners of other blacks. On the eve of the Civil War (1860) the enumerators of the federal census tabulated almost half a million blacks who were already free—roughly one out of every eight blacks in America. Surprisingly, almost half this number were found in the Southern Slates. The white American looks for his heritage among the records of free men, while the black is conditioned to believe his search must begin in slave records…

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