2.)  Can anyone provide any additional material on free black ownership
of slaves.

*** Here's an article from today's Washington Post.  ***

"Up Through Slavery" by Ken Ringle, at F1, F3

Marie Therese Coincoin was in bondage for 44 years.  Yet she freed her
children and became a slave owner herself . . .

"It's a very American story," says Elizabeth Shown Mills, the uncredited
co-author of her late husband Gary Mills's "The Forgotten People" (LSU
Press), the still-definitive and meticulously documented 1977 study of
Coincoin and her descendents . . . As University of Maryland historian
Ira Berlin notes in his masterful 1998 slavery study "Many Thousands
Gone" (Harvard University Press), the differences were not merely from
plantation to plantation, but from region to region . . . Slavery in
Louisiana, however, was unique .  .  .

Louisiana's Code Noir specified that slave families were to be kept
together when possible and all slaves instructed in the Catholic church .
. . [A]ny master who fathered children by his own slave was to lose both
slave and child . . . [Coincoin] caught the eye of a well born Frenchman
. . . Metoyer was so taken with her beauty that he arranged with her
owner to live with her for 19 years in defiance of church and political
censure.  He fathered 10 children by her and ultimately set her free with
68 acres of land . . . In 1796, Coincoin's second son was granted 912
acres . . . [even though] he was still a slave at the time.  The Code
Noir stated that "slaves can have no right to any kind of property," but
this apparently was ignored.  It would be five more years before his
father set him free . . .

The 1830 U.S. Census documented 3600 "Negro slaveholders" . . . [but] the
vast majority of those "owners" were holding as slaves spouses or
relatives they were forbidden by their state's law from formally setting
free . .  . By 1810 Coincoin's seven sons had accumulated 58 slaves,
according to Mills's census research in "The Forgotten People" . . . The
only families [in the census area] to own more slaves than Coincoin's
sons were the families of Metoyer's white children . . .

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