n two thousand acres of land when she died in 1840;
Charles Roques of the same parish died in 1854 leaving forty-seven slaves
and a thousand acres; and Martin Donato of St. Landry dying in 1848
bequeathed liberty to his slave wife and her seven children and left them
eighty-nine slaves and 4,500 arpents of land as well as notes and mortgages
to a value of $46,000.[33] In rural Virginia and Maryland also there were
free colored slaveholders in considerable numbers.[34]

[Footnote 31: Reverend Charles Peters, _Two Sermons Preached at Dominica,
with an appendix containing minutes of evidence of three trials_ (London,
1802), pp. 36-49.]

[Footnote 32: LaRochefoucauld-Liancourt, _Travels in the United States_
(London, 1799), p. 602, giving the negro's name as Pindaim. The census
returns of 1790 give no such name, but they list James Pendarvis in a group
comprising a white man, a free colored person and 123 slaves, and also a
Mrs. Persons, free colored, with 136 slaves. She may have been Pindaim's
(or Pendarvis') mulatto daughter, while the white man listed in the
Pendarvis item was perhaps her husband or an overseer. _Heads of Families
at the First Census of the United States: South Carolina_ (Washington,
1908), pp. 35, 37.]

[Footnote 33: For these and other data I am indebted to Professor E.P.
Puckett of Central College, Fayette, Mo., who has permitted me to use his
monograph, "_Free Negroes in Louisiana_," in manuscript. The arpent was the
standard unit of area in the Creole parishes of Louisiana, the acre in the
parishes of Anglo-American settlement.]

[Footnote 34: Calvin D. Wilson, "Black Masters," in the _North American
Review_, CLXXXI, 685-698, and "Negroes who owned Slaves," in the _Popular
Science Monthly_, LXXXI, 483-494; John H. Russell, "Colored Freemen as
Slave Owners in Virginia," in the _Journal of Negro History_, I, 233-242.]

Slaveholdings by colored townsmen were likewise fairly frequent. Among the
360 colored taxpayers in Charleston in 1860, for example, 130, including
nine persons described as of Indian descent, were listed as possessing 390
slaves.[35] The abundance of such holdings at New Orleans is evidenced by
the multiplicity of applications from colored proprietors for authority
to manumit slaves, with exemption from the legal requirement that the new
freedmen must leave the state.[36] A striking example of such petitions was
that presented in 1832 by Marie Louise Bitaud, free woman of color,
w