Black Fortunes: The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires

by Shomari Wills

John Mott Drew, born in 1883, was a boisterous man with a hearty laugh who dressed in all-black three-piece suits and wore a white Panama hat on top of a head of wavy white hair.

After Emancipation, he bought a farm in 1897 near the plantation where he had been enslaved and became the first black person in Powhatan County to own property.

John Mott Drew was an even shrewder investor. John started his career in real estate like Simon, but he eventually branched out to other, more lucrative businesses.

John Drew Bus Line, he became the first African American to own a bus line.

In 1930, he sold his business to a larger conglomerate under the condition that it would retain his black employees and never allow segregation on his bus route.

John purchased a local Negro League baseball team, the Darby Daisies. He operated the team for two years, until it folded in 1932 due to low attendance, as during the Great Depression fans had less money for recreational activities.

The creation of black wealth is an important but overlooked subject in the economic and social history of the United States.

Attaining economic independence and power was a revolutionary act. Black millionaires disrupt stereotypes of black economic impotence. They remind us that African Americans do not lack the desire or ability to work or build businesses and wealth, but that instead they have often had to overcome great struggles to achieve economic stability, let alone independence and power.

African Americans who achieved wealth were often attacked, demonized, or swindled out of their money by those who knew the Jim Crow court system would offer no redress to a black person. The black elite in their first decades of existence survived assassination attempts, lynchings, frivolous lawsuits, and criminal cases all meant to destroy or delegitimize their wealth. Madam C. J. Walker was memorialized as the first black millionaire not because she was the first to achieve wealth—she was far from the first—but because she was one of the first African Americans to flaunt and claim her wealth openly and fearlessly. The earliest black millionaires were conditioned not to be so brazen.

Black Fortunes tells the story of Mary Ellen Pleasant, Robert Reed Church, O. W. Gurley, Hannah Elias, Annie Turnbo Malone, and Madam C. J. Walker, America’s first cohort of black mill...

At the time, they were often viewed as noncitizens and seldom cataloged by census takers or vital-records keepers. Further, in many cases, these men and women were self-educated and could read but not write effectively, and as a result they did not keep diaries or engage in letter writing. They had small families and only a few of their children lived to adulthood, leaving virtually no surviving relatives to tell their stories directly.

The establishment of wealth is fundamental to social and political progress. Wealth has the ability to transform communities and close gaps in racial disparities.

Through the stories of America’s first black millionaires, we see the limitless potential of black Americans despite structural inequalities, and we can glimpse the hope for one day achieving racial economic parity.

On a warm night in 1841, William Alexander Leidesdorff sat on the porch of an old white house covered in vines in New Orleans with his fiancée, Hortense.

In 1847, he built California’s first public school and a horse racing track for the citizens’ entertainment. In 1848, when gold was discovered in the Sacramento valley, the value of his property and business skyrocketed to over $1 million, making him the first African American to achieve a net worth of more than a million dollars in the history of the United States.

After his death, Joseph Folsom, a real estate investor, traveled to the Virgin Islands and found Leidesdorff’s estranged mother, Anna Marie Sparks, his sole known heir. He convinced her to sign over her son’s property for a payment of $75,000 ($2.1 million). The Leidesdorff estate was worth more than $1.4 million ($38 million). With the stroke of a pen, the fortune and legacy of America’s first black millionaire was stolen.

They were led by the town’s most prominent citizen, Absalom Boston. Absalom was a well-muscled man with a beard that stretched from his ears down his entire jaw with no mustache.

Absalom inherited money from his parents, who died when he was young, and used it to build one of the first structures in Newtown, a small shop in a clapboard house, where he sold fishing equipment and groceries. In 1822, he bought and captained his own whaling ship called Industry, becoming the first black man in New England to own and lead a whaling outfit. Subsequently, he used his earnings to develop Newtown by underwriting mortgages for the houses of free blacks.

As the demand for the oil increased, Nantucket’s deep ocean fishing boats were refitted as whaling ships, and the town emerged as the largest producer of whale oil in the United States.

Whaling was also a catalyst for social change. With the onset of whaling in Nantucket, men abandoned work in town for high-wage jobs working on docks and in open waters in whaling crews.

The whaling boom also created a black middle and upper class in Nantucket. Benefiting from racial stereotypes about their unnatural strength, black men were recruited to the island to hunt whales. Whaling offered a much better life than slave labor or tenement farming; in addition, men who worked on whaling crews were often shareholders, not employees, and were entitled to a percentage of the profits from the whales they helped bring in. As a result, black men in Nantucket could achieve moderate to high incomes that were unheard-of by blacks in the slave era. As the whaling industry grew, so did the black middle class on the island. Pleasant watched as Newtown grew from a poor village into an enclave of black middle-class families.

Salt mining drove West Virginia’s economy, rather than slave-dependent crops such as cotton. Charles Town did, however, have frequent slave auctions. The spectacles took place on the steps of the Jefferson County Courthouse in the town square and were well attended by slave traders from Virginia, which was just over the state line.

the normal life expectancy for an enslaved person and had lived a long life for her era. In the 1850s, the average life span of enslaved African Americans was between twenty-two and thirty-six years. Between tetanus contracted from rusted farm equipment, food- and waterborne illnesses, sexually transmitted infections, disease-carrying mosquitoes, and hemorrhaging childbirths, enslaved people were considered lucky to reach their thirtieth year.

The fugitive slave law of 1850 empowered slave traders to capture free African Americans and enslave them with or often without proof that they had ever been enslaved.

Cotton shippers like Captain Church were part of the global supply chain for cotton fiber. Cotton was planted, harvested, ginned, and baled into parcels by enslaved African Americans on plantations in the Mississippi delta. From there thousands of bales of cotton were loaded onto carts pulled by horses and donkeys and taken to a port along the Mississippi, where it was then loaded onto steamboats and transported to warehouses in Mississippi river towns or to St. Louis or the port of New Orleans.

Cotton fiber, an industry worth $100 million a year ($20 billion), was the United States’ top export and made up 60 percent of the gross domestic product. The United States’ second-largest (and England’s biggest) industry, textile production, depended on cotton, which was much cheaper than wool or silk. Wall Street fed tens of millions of dollars of financing into cotton growing. Planters

By 1851, cotton had become so profitable that Natchez, Mississippi, the cotton-growing capital of the world, was home to half of the millionaires in the United States and per capita had the most millionaires of any town in the world, beating out New York City, Paris, and London. Robert’s grandmother had been enslaved to a planter in Natchez.

He hoped, perhaps for the first time, to escape life as his father’s slave on the river.

Pleasant had made friends everywhere she went, from Nantucket to Boston, and now she did the same in the international town of San Francisco. “When I have attached myself to one as a friend, I have remained to the end,” she later said.

The difference in price accumulated over multiple transactions into tens of thousands of dollars of profit.

Her success as an investor was a mystery. Some speculated that she had such good fortune through voodoo. Others speculated that she learned to invest by trading sex for financial advice with San Francisco’s rich bachelors. Another popular rumor said she eavesdropped on business conversations during the dinners she catered. “I have never been given to explaining away lies, and you can’t explain away the truth,” she would say. The truth is that the gold rush was an opportunity that the circumstances of Pleasant’s life up until that point had prepared her for.

Pleasant had used her days in the whaling years of Nantucket to prepare her for gold rush San Francisco. In many ways, her success was not unusual; many of the most successful participants in the gold rush came from whaling towns such as Nantucket and New Bedford. Nonetheless, for decades going forward, the brilliant black gold rush investor would confound racial stereotypes and popular explanation.

In the spring of 1852, as her wealth increased, Frederick Douglass’ Paper printed a series of essays on black wealth. The series, by James McCune Smith, a public intellectual and the first African American to earn a medical degree, pondered whether free blacks should use their liberty to pursue wealth, abolition, and civil rights. “Hundred thousand dollar black men would be no better than hundred thousand dollar white men,” he wrote.

“Gold freezes up the humanities and all their surroundings. The wealthy are never a progressive class; they are by necessity conservatives.”

Pleasant, he was an investor. He was worth at least half a million dollars and lived in a brownstone in lower Manhattan. Hamilton shunned abolitionist causes and, like Pleasant’s first husband, defined his race as Cuban.

Compare Sam Ward with the only black millionaire in New York, I mean Jerry Hamilton; and it is plain that manhood is a “nobler ideal” than money. The former has illustrated his people and his country, the other has fled from his identity (to use the elegant phraseology of Ethiop), like a dog with a tin kettle tied to his tail!

Wealth and activism were binary characteristics, Smith argued in the United States’ most distributed black newspaper of the antebellum period. One could either seek liberation or seek wealth, not both. As

She set her mind to pursue wealth but to the end of using the money she made to seek liberation for slaves,

In 1854, President Franklin Pierce, an anti-abolitionist Democrat, signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law, sending slavery’s opponents into a fury. The law, authored by Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska but also allowed for the expansion of slavery into the North, where it had been banned since 1819. Slavery would be permitted or banned in Kansas, a northern territory, based on a popular vote among white males in the territory. The law would potentially reintroduce slavery into the North, endangering freedmen and -women and reinforcing slavery’s grip on America.

“Bleeding Kansas,” a battle between slave owners and abolitionists. After rumors circulated that he had been killed during Bleeding Kansas,

In a landmark case in 1854, the California Supreme Court passed a law that banned blacks, Indians, and Chinese from testifying against white men in court.

They convened just after 10 a.m. Dr. Martin Delany, a black man with thinning hair, dark skin, and downturned eyes, stood to address the attendees. They were there to discuss a plan to form a new free territory in West Virginia. After Delany, Brown stood to explain his scheme in detail. As he began to speak, he was interrupted by Delany, who insisted that everyone swear an oath of secrecy before Brown revealed anything. “I solemnly affirm that I will not in any way divulge any of the secrets of this convention, except to persons entitled to know the same, on the pain of forfeiting the respect and protection of this organization,” he stated. The attendees repeated the oath after him.

Brown told the gathering that he planned to form a militia in West Virginia, liberate several slave plantations, and establish a free territory and military stronghold in the Appalachian Mountains. It would be a place slaves could escape to, a permanently free, multiracial community. He assured his listeners that his plan would be successful because he had been studying insurrectionary warfare, particularly the history of the Haitian Revolution and the military strategy of Toussaint L’Ouverture. He planned to establish the territory by staging a slave insurrection in West Virginia after he sacked the US armory in Harpers Ferry for weapons. He also had a provisional constitution he had written for the new region read aloud. It was voted on and ratified. The men and women present hugged and thumped one another on the back in congratulations.

John Brown began his raid the month after the train robbery, to the dismay of his collaborators, whom he had promised he would wait until he was better prepared. He was undersupplied and undermanned, with only eighteen men in his militia and a small supply of artillery. In the first hours, they were successful: he and his men captured hostages, including George Washington’s great-grandnephew Lewis Washington, and took control of the areas surrounding the armory by early the next morning. Brown had hoped that word of his effort would spread to local slaves, who would come to his aid to reinforce their ranks. They, however, were unaware of what was happening. By the afternoon, Brown and his men were surrounded by a local militia and holed up in a barn. A day later, they were captured.

Marriages arranged between people owned by slaveholders were explicitly sexual in nature, as the expectation was that the coupling would result in children and produce more slaves for the owners.

Late one hot evening in New York City, a lynch mob made up of white men and adolescent boys marched down East 29th Street in Manhattan toward the home of New York’s richest black man, Jeremiah Hamilton.

The streets had been a war zone for two days, ever since the federal government had begun draft lotteries for the Civil War. After the first names were drawn in New York, the city exploded in violence as working-class white men took to the streets and raged against the prospect of being forced to fight and end the enslavement of African Americans. In mobs of thousands, they overpowered the police, destroyed government buildings, lynched and crucified black citizens, and destroyed black churches and orphanages. High-profile African Americans were hunted as prize kills for lynch mobs. The day before they set upon Hamilton’s home, rioters had sacked and burned a pharmacy that belonged to James McCune Smith, America’s first black medical doctor.

Hamilton, the richest black man in New York, narrowly escaped death that day. However, it was the fleetness of his feet and not his wealth and talent that saved his life. There had been a time when he believed that his money would protect him from racism. His brush with death at the hands of a white mob was perhaps proof that African Americans, even if they had the opportunity and skill to amass a fortune, would still face threats to their lives and prosperity, similar to the ones the masses of African Americans faced, perhaps greater because of their stature. Hamilton died in his seventies, a decade after the Civil War ended. At the time of his death in 1875, he had a net worth of nearly a million dollars, making him, at that time, the richest black man in the United States.

Freedom and Progress If there be any who are afraid of the rivalry of the black man in office or in business, I have only to advise them to try and beat their competitor. —THADDEUS STEVENS, 1867

Oklahoma was vast, full of frontier towns, farms, and Indian settlements. More than five thousand African Americans lived in the territory in bondage. Despite what they may have been told, African Americans in Oklahoma would not be liberated until much later. They had been enslaved not by white men but by the Indians of the Creek, Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes who ruled the region. The people of the five major tribes of Oklahoma fought with the Confederacy during the war and were slow to surrender to the Union even after General Robert E. Lee and the rest of the Confederacy’s soldiers laid down their weapons.