I am a grad student at U. Memphis working on a dissertation focusing on free black and slave life in antebellum to Reconstruction era Middle & West TN from their own perspectives. To date, my main focus has been upon the WPA ex-slave narratives gathered in the mid-to-late 1930's. This has been a problem because E.H. Crump, a Democrat who hated FDR and controlled TN, prevented any interviews in TN save for 6 in Knoxville.

Recently, however, I discovered that black for-profit slaving (as opposed to buying family members) was not as 'numerically insignificant' as I'd always believed-- at least in some places. In New Orleans for example, 28% of the free black population in 1860 owned slaves. In 1860, only 4.8% of the white population of the South owned 1 or more slaves (I don't know if the last stat includes Delaware or Maryland).