eration being taken of their hard
labor and honored service performed by the petitioners in this
Country for ye obtayneing of their Livelyhood and ye great Llosse
they have sustained by an unfortunate fire with their present charge
to provide for. Be it therefore fitt and ordered that from the day of
the debate hearof during their natural lives the sd Mary Johnson &
two daughters of Anthony Johnson Negro be disingaged and freed from
payment of Taxes and leavyes in Northampton County for public use.[8]

Subtracting thirty years from 1652, the date of this order of the court, it
appeared that this Negro and his wife were in Virginia in 1622. Examination
of a census taken in Virginia after the Indian massacre of 1622 and called
"The Lists of Living and Dead in Virginia" revealed the fact that there
were only four Negroes in the colony beside the surviving nineteen out of
the twenty that came in in 1619. The name of one of these four was Mary and
the name of one of the first twenty was Anthony.[9] It may with good reason
be surmised, if it cannot be proved, that Mary became the wife of Anthony
and that in the course of the next thirty years they acquired the surname
Johnson as well as a large tract of land and a slave by the name of John
Casor.

THE EXISTENCE OF BLACK MASTERS AFTER COLONIAL TIMES

Some readers may be inclined to regard the case of the slave John Casor as
altogether exceptional and peculiar to an early period in the growth of
slavery before custom had fully crystallized into law. It is true that
similar examples are hard to find in the seventeenth century when the free
Negroes were few in number. But if from the paucity of examples it is
argued that such a case was a freak of the seventeenth century and that
nothing similar could have occurred after slavery became a settled and much
regulated institution, the answer is that slave-owning by free Negroes was
so common in the period of the Commonwealth as to pass unnoticed and
without criticism by those who consciously recorded events of the times.
For abundant proof of the relation of black master and black slave we must
refer again to court records and legislative petitions from which events
and incidents were not omitted because of their common occurrence. Deeds of
sale and transfer of slaves to free Negroes, wills of free Negroes
providing for a future disposition of slaves, and records of suits for
freedom against