With Juniteenth that year becoming a federal holiday commemorating the emancipation of slaves, a reader asked Curious Texas if the early residents of Dallas owned slaves.
Dallas, like much of the south, was shaped by slavery in the 19th century.
According to the tax lists of the Republic of Texas, more than a quarter of the approximately 29,000 slaves in Texas in 1846 were in the East Texas region, which also included Dallas County.
Dallas County had a small fraction of that number – 62 enslaved people – while Harrison County, near the Louisiana Line, had more than 2,600.
The U.S. census tracked the following growth, reporting 207 enslaved people in 1850, representing 8% of the county’s population, and 1,074 enslaved people owned by 228 slave owners in 1860, representing 12% of the population. 97 of the slaves were within the Dallas city limits that year.
The population of enslaved people grew faster than that of whites, so in 1864 the Dallas County’s tax records recorded 2,482 enslaved people.
Most of the enslaved people lived in rural Dallas County and worked on small farms, said Mike Campbell, former history professor at the University of North Texas and author of An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865. Some others worked on large plantations with 20 or more slaves. And some worked in small households, doing housework and livelihood.
Slaves represented great wealth in Dallas in the mid-19th century.
“People who could afford slaves in Dallas wanted them because it made life easier as a slave owner,” Campbell said.
Newspaper ads in Dallas’ first weekly newspaper advertised enslaved people for sale in the slave trade between Houston and Galveston.
But the majority of Texas slaves originally came from other southern states with their owners, Campbell said.
Slavery became known in Texas after white settlers began establishing colonies in the 1820s. When Texas became a republic, its dependence on slavery was perpetuated as an institution.
The republic’s dependence on slavery resulted in laws to protect it.
People of color were punished more severely than whites for the same offenses, and a black who attacked a white person was killed without trial.
Slave owners were constantly on the alert that their slaves would revolt.
W. Marvin Dulaney, associate director and COO of the African American Museum in Dallas, said white settlers have a dual awareness of slaves.
“On the one hand, they thought that enslaved people were passive, happy people who loved them,” he said. “But on the other hand, they were afraid that there would be a riot and that they would be killed.
Dulaney said that slave owners probably knew what they were doing was wrong because they must have pondered what they would have done themselves if they had been slaves.
“‘If someone did this to me, forced me to work, rape my wife, or beat my children, I would get up and cut their heads off, just as they expected enslaved people to do,” he said.
When a large fire ravaged several Dallas businesses in 1860, the community accused slaves and abolitionists. Three enslaved people were hanged, every Dallas County slave was flogged, and abolitionists were evicted from the city.
“They were probably caused by a new type of phosphorus match that exploded in spectacular heat,” said Campbell. “No surprise, Dallas got really hot back then.”
Although Dallas didn’t have a large concentration of slaves, “it was still exposed to this kind of fear and panic,” he said.
At the end of the Civil War, on June 19, 1865, Union soldiers came to Galveston, Texas to carry out the Emancipation Proclamation two years after it was published. The day was recognized by people across the South as the day slavery officially ended.
Also shortly after the war, the first railroad was built in Dallas and cotton boomed in the county.
“You can grow cotton fine, but you can’t move it, so Dallas County didn’t become a big cotton-producing county until the railroads got there,” Campbell said.
Many liberated blacks had experience in the fields, so they kept working. But they became tenants. Most landowner contracts resulted in injustices. How many workers were paid depended on the quality of the harvest, which was as varied as the Texas weather.
“It was a brutal system,” said Campbell. “It wasn’t slavery. Don’t make this mistake. Nothing was as bad as slavery, but leasing wasn’t a way for anyone to get ahead in the world. “
Many liberated blacks from across North Texas moved closer to the Dallas city limits, away from plantations, in search of new work after the war.
They started their own freelance towns on the fringes, and neighborhoods like Deep Ellum filled the city with new culture and entrepreneurship.
“You came in search of freedom … a new life,” said Dulaney. “They wanted … to leave these plantations, not to have to work for anyone anymore.”
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