White Slavery in the Southern States

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Frankly, the CSA was founded on principles that a black man was worth 3/4 of a man or some other hogwash.

Whites were explicitly "protected" from equality with non-whites in the Confederate States.

Actually, I think that you are thinking about the original US constitution, where a slave was considered as 3/5 of a person for the purpose of figuring out representation in the US House of Representative.



I think that alot of this may have developed and hardened after the Civil War. Prior to that, some free Blacks did own slaves.

And I believe the reason they were classified as 3/5th was so the south would not be able to have disproportionate representation over the free north. The south would of actually wanted slaves to have counted as a "full person".

The short answer is zero.
At the time of the civil war there were no "white" slaves in the slave states.

In the Colonial 1600's there were endentured servents (kinda temporary slaves) of every skin color (most often european whites) working off debts.

But as the cash crop/plantation economy evolved the colonies enacted laws that made it clear that slaves and servants were not the same. Endentured servetude got phased out and gradually skin color became the basis of your status. By the time of American independence though not all Blacks were slaves virtually all slaves were black ( many middle class free blacks owned slaves as did Cherokee and other Indians)..

But to be a slave, you had to Black.
Pure, simple, and easy!

Partus sequitur ventrem, often abbreviated to partus, in the British North American colonies and later in the United States, was a legal doctrine which the English colonists incorporated in legislation related to definitions of slavery. It was derived from the Roman civil law; it held that the status of a child followed that of his or her mother. It was widely adopted into the laws of slavery in the colonies. The Latin phrase literally means "that which is brought forth follows the womb". The legal doctrine of partus was part of colonial law passed in 1662 by the Virginia House of Burgesses, and by other colonies soon after. It held that "all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother..."

The new law in 1662 meant that white fathers were not required to legally acknowledge or emancipate their illegitimate children by slave women. Slaveholders...could sell their issue or put them to work. Given the prevalence of white males' taking advantage of women slaves, the law resulted in numerous slaves of primarily European ancestry, as European visitors noted in Virginia in the eighteenth century. Such was the case with the children of Thomas Jefferson by Sally Hemings (who was three-quarters white herself, with a white father, mixed-race mother, and white grandfather).

Common throughout the slave-owning South, sexual slavery was part of the patriarchal nature of the institution. Widowers sometimes took slave companions (as did both Thomas Jefferson and his father-in-law John Wayles before him); young white men were likely to have affairs with young slave women before they married; female slaves were at risk by adult white males. Southern diarist Mary Chesnut notably wrote, "This only I see: like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives their concubines, the Mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in every body's household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think..." Fanny Kemble, an English actress married to an American planter in the antebellum era, wrote about the disgrace of elite white fathers' abandoning their mixed-race children in her Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-1839, which she did not publish until 1863.

But they did not want them to vote. To count someone for purposes of apportioning representation when they are not permitted to vote is a flagrant fraud.

Elizabeth Key or Kaye was born in 1630 in Warwick County, Virginia to a black slave mother. Her father was Thomas Key, an Englishman and planter, a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses.

In a civic case at Blunt Point court about 1636, Thomas Key was charged with fathering the bastard child Elizabeth, which he at first denied. Complaints about illegitimate children were brought to court in order to force fathers to support them, including arranging for apprenticeships. He first blamed an unidentified "Turk", but the Court relied on witnesses who testified to his paternity. Key took responsibility for the girl, arranging for her baptism in the established Church of England. Sometime before his death in 1636, Key put the six-year-old Elizabeth Key in the custody of Humphrey Higginson by a nine-year indenture. Higginson, a wealthy planter, was expected to act as her guardian, but she would be free at age 15, considered the "coming of age" for girls, who frequently married that young or started work for wages.

During this period in early Virginia, both African and English servants were likely to be indentured for a period of years, usually to pay off passage to the Americas. The colony required illegitimate children to be indentured for a period of apprenticeship until they "came of age" and could be expected to support themselves. It was common for indentured servants to earn their freedom. Working-class people of different origins lived, worked, ate, and played together as equals, and many married or formed unions during the colonial period.

Key intended Higginson to act as Elizabeth's guardian, but the latter did not keep to his commitment to take the young girl with him if he returned to England. Instead, he transferred (or sold) her indenture to a Col. John Mottram, Northumberland County's first settler. About 1640, Mottram took Elizabeth at age 10 as a servant with him to the undeveloped county.

There is little record of Key's next 15 years. About 1650 Mottram paid for passage for a group of 20 young Englishmen, white indentured servants, to Coan Hall, his plantation in Northumberland County. To encourage development at the time, the Crown awarded Virginia colonists headrights of 50 acres (200,000 m2) of land for each person they transported to the colony, who were generally indentured servants. Each indentured person would serve for six years to pay for the passage from England.

Among the group was 16-year-old William Grinstead (also spelled Greenstead), a young lawyer. Although Grinstead's parents are not known, he may have learned law as the younger son of an attorney. Under English common law of primogeniture, only the eldest son could inherit the father's real property, so many younger sons crossed the Atlantic to seek their lives in the American colonies.

Recognizing Grinstead's value, Mottram used the young man for representation in legal matters for Coan Hall. During this period, Grinstead and Elizabeth Key began a relationship and had a son together, whom they named John. They were prohibited from marrying while Grinstead was serving his indenture, and Elizabeth Key's future was uncertain.

After Mottram died in 1655, the overseers of his estate classified Elizabeth Key and her infant son John as Negroes (and essentially as slaves and part of the property assets of the estate). With William Grinstead acting as her attorney, Elizabeth Key sued the estate over her status, claiming she was a free woman, an indentured servant with a freeborn son.[1] At age 25, Elizabeth had been a servant for a total of 19 years, having served 15 years with Mottram. According to Taunya Lovell Banks in the Akron Law Review (2008), at that time "English subjecthood" rather than "citizenship" was more important for determining social status in the colony and in England. In the early seventeenth century, "children born to English parents outside the country became English subjects at birth, others could become naturalized subjects" (although there was no process at the time in the colonies.) What was unsettled was the status of children if only one of the parents were English, as foreigners (including Africans) were not considered English subjects. Because non-whites came to be denied civil rights as foreigners, mixed-race people seeking freedom often had to stress their English ancestry (and later, European).[1] Elizabeth had served as a servant ten years beyond the terms of her indenture. In trying to establish whether Key's father was a free English man, the Court relied on the testimony of witnesses who knew the people in the case.

Nicholas Jurnew, 53, testified in 1655 that he had "heard a flying report [rumor] at Yorke that Elizabeth a Negro Servant to the Estate of Col. John Mottrom (deceased) was the Childe of Mr. Kaye but ...Mr. Kaye said that a Turke of Capt. Mathewes was Father to the Girle."[2] If the Court had believed his testimony, it would have influenced the outcome, as in 1655, the English colonists would not have considered a Turk a free English subject nor a Christian.[1]

"The most persuasive evidence" came from Elizabeth Newman, 80 and a former servant of Mottrom[1], who testified that "it was a common Fame in Virginia that Elizabeth a Molletto (sic mulatto), now (e) servant to the Estate of Col. John Mottrom, deceased, was the Daughter of Mr. Kaye; and the said Kaye was brought to Blunt-Point Court and there fined for getting his Negro woman with Childe, which said Negroe was the Mother of the said Molletto, and the said fine was for getting the Negro with Childe which Childe was the said Elizabeth."[2] Similar testimony was asserted by other witnesses.

Believing Thomas Key's paternity proved, by common law the Court granted Elizabeth Key her freedom. Mottram's estate appealed the decision to the General Court, which overturned it and ruled that Elizabeth was a slave because of her mother's status as Negro.[1]

Through Grinstead, Elizabeth Key took the case to the Virginia General Assembly, which appointed a committee to investigate. They sent the case back to the courts for retrial. Elizabeth Key finally won her freedom on three counts: the most important was that, by English common law, the status of the father determined the status of the child. Elizabeth Key's father was a free Englishman, and she was a practicing Christian. Other cases had demonstrated that black Christians could not be held in servitude for life.[1] The Assembly may also have been influenced by the reputation of her father Thomas Key and wanted to carry out his wishes for his acknowledged daughter and the fact that the father of her child was also an English subject.[1] The court ordered Mottram's estate to compensate Key with corn and clothes for her lost years.

Although Elizabeth Key won her court battle for freedom for her and her son John, she and Grinstead could not marry until he completed his indenture, which occurred in 1656. Theirs was one of the few recorded marriages in the seventeenth century between an Englishman and a free woman of African descent.[1] They had two sons together, and William Grinstead died early in 1661.

The widow Elizabeth Grinstead later remarried, to the widower John Parse (Pearce). Upon his death, she and her sons John and William Grinstead II inherited 500 acres (2.0 km2), helping to secure their future. It enabled Elizabeth Grinstead and her sons to get on in the world.

As a result of the Elizabeth Key freedom suit (and similar challenges), in December 1662 the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a colonial law to clarify the status of the children of women of African descent. It required Negro women’s children to take the status of the mother, whether bond or free, using the principle of partus sequitur ventrum. The statute was a departure from the English tradition in which a child received his or her social status from his or her father. Some historians believe the law was based mostly in the economic demands of a colony that was short on labor; the law enabled slaveholders to control the children of women slaves as laborers.[1] It also freed the fathers from acknowledging the children as theirs, providing support or arranging for apprenticeships, or emancipating them. Some white fathers did take an interest in their mixed-race children and passed on social capital, such as education or land; many others abandoned them.

Other English colonies (and later American states) passed similar laws, which defined all children born to slave mothers as slaves. If they had free white fathers, as many did under the power conditions of the time, the fathers had to take separate legal action to free their children. In the 19th century, the legislatures of the South made such manumissions more difficult and had legal restrictions on the rights of free blacks. While northern states began to abolish slavery in the early 19th century, only in 1865 did the 13th Amendment to the Constitution end slavery in the South and across the United States.

In January of 1857 Jane Morrison was sold in the slave market in New Orleans. The man who bought her was James White, a longtime New Orleans slave trader, who had recently sold his slave pen and bought land just up the river from New Orleans, in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana.1 Morrison, apparently, was to be one of his last speculations as a trader or one of his first investments as a planter. Sometime shortly after her sale, however, Morrison ran away. By the time White saw her again, in October 1857, they were in a courtroom in Jefferson Parish where Morrison had filed suit against him. Before it was settled, that suit would be considered by three different juries, be put before the Louisiana Supreme Court twice, and leave a lasting record of the complicated politics of race and slavery in the South of the 1850s. The reason for the stir would have been obvious to anyone who saw Morrison sitting in court that day: the fifteen-year-old girl whom White claimed as his slave had blond hair and blue eyes. 1
Morrison began her petition to the Third District Court by asking that William Dennison, the Jefferson Parish jailer, be appointed her legal representative and that she be sequestered in the parish prison to keep White from seizing and selling her. In her petition, Morrison asked that she be declared legally free and white and added a request that the court award her ten thousand dollars damages for the wrong that White had done her by holding her as a slave. She based her case on the claim that her real name was Alexina, not Jane, that she was from Arkansas, and that she had "been born free and of white parentage," or, as she put it in a later affidavit, "that she is of white blood and free and entitled to her freedom and that on view this is manifest." Essentially, Alexina Morrison claimed that she was white because she looked that way.2 2
In his response, White claimed that he had purchased Morrison (he still called her Jane) from a man named J. A. Halliburton, a resident of Arkansas. White exhibited an unnotarized bill of sale for Morrison (which would have been legal proof of title in Arkansas, but was not in Louisiana) and offered an alternative explanation of how the young woman had made her way into the courtroom that day. Morrison, he alleged, was a runaway slave. Indeed, he said, he had it on good authority that Morrison had been "induced" to run away from him by a group of self-styled "philanthropists" who were "in reality acting the part of abolitionists." In particular, White blamed Dennison, whom he accused of having used his position to "incourage" Morrison to run away and of having "afterwards harboured her, well knowing that she was a runaway." White was drawing his terminology from the criminal laws of the state of Louisiana and accusing Dennison and his shadowy "abolitionist" supporters of committing a crime: stealing and harboring his slave.3 3
The record of the contest that followed is largely contained in the transcription that was made of the records from the lower court hearings of the case when the state supreme court considered Morrison v. White for the final time in 1862. As codified in the statutes of the state of Louisiana and generally interpreted by the Louisiana Supreme Court, the legal issues posed by the case were simple enough: If Alexina Morrison could prove she was white, she was entitled to freedom and perhaps to damages; if James White could prove that her mother had been a slave at the time of Morrison's birth or that Morrison herself had been a slave (and had not been emancipated), he was entitled to her service; if she was not proved to be either white or enslaved, her fate would be decided by the court on the basis of a legal presumption of "mulattoes'" freedom under Louisiana law. Captured in the neat hand of the legal clerk who prepared the record of the lower court hearings of the case, however, are circumstances that were apparently considerably more complicated than the ones envisioned by those who had made the laws.4

I was just wondering, and maybe someone in the South would know off hand: what proportion of the slaves in the South were White?

Exactly. The 3/5 rules a way of augmenting the white representation of the slave states in Congress. It was a cheat. The entire constitution of 1787 was shot through with compromises and cheats.

ruveyn