William Johnson: Barber, Musician, Parable

William Johnson lived in Natchez, Mississippi, from 1830 until his murder in 1851. He was an astute and successful businessman who built a fine, three-story brick home in a fashionable neighborhood on State Street one block from the busy town center. By the time of his death he also owned an 800-acre plantation just outside Natchez and had held a total of thirty-one slaves in bondage. His estate was worth about $25,000 at a time when $50,000 marked the passage into high-elite status.¹

Johnson also had an abiding interest in music. He was proficient on the violin and could play somewhat the flute, guitar, and piano (which according to the tax rolls was his most prized and valuable household property).² He attended concerts and performances by many of the day’s leading musicians and actors; he bought, used, and treasured sheet music and books on music.

This short biography would be of only some modest interest but for one detail: William Johnson was a black man, living near the epicenter of antebellum southern slavery.³

Figure 1.

This portrait has been identified by descendants of William Johnson as his likeness. The original daguerreotype was later copied and, perhaps, somewhat “modernized” by a photographic studio in New Orleans. The portrait was lost soon after being reproduced as the frontispiece to Edwin Adams Davis and William Ransom Hogan, The Barber of Natchez … (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1954). That reproduction is used here with the understanding of LSU Press.

Johnson was born a slave in 1809. His owner, who was also very likely his father, filed a petition with the Mississippi State Legislature in 1820 to manumit his namesake, young William. The first unexpected turn in this convention-defying story shows up in the language of the resolution.

Your Petitioner humbly prays your Honorable Body to permit him to make that disposition of his property most agreeable to his feelings & consonant to humanity … [to give] the Liberty to a human being which all are entitled to as a Birthright, & extend the hand of humanity to a rational Creature, on whom unfortunately Complexion Custom & even Law in This Land of freedom, has conspired to rivet the fetters of Slavery.⁴

The “Act to Emancipate William, a Person of Color” laid responsibility for the education of young William “until he arrive at the age of twenty-one years” upon the senior Johnson. That he discharged his responsibility is manifest in the more than 2,000 pages of journals, daybooks, cashbooks, and jottings kept by the younger Johnson between 1835 and 1851, collectively the longest and most detailed personal chronicle maintained by an African American in the antebellum-period South.⁵

William Johnson, Barber

Johnson’s Natchez was a vital and dynamic major port on the Mississippi River. Long a melting pot (established in 1716), it was shaped by French, Spanish, English, Caribbean, African, Creole, and other (often far-flung) social and cultural influences that came upriver from New Orleans or downriver from points on the Mississippi or Ohio. It was during Johnson’s lifetime little more than a large village (3,612 population in 1840), yet still the largest and most important municipality in overwhelmingly rural Mississippi.

After serving an apprenticeship as a barber, Johnson bought the Natchez shop of his brother-in-law in 1830 with capital provided by his former owner. Clearly of an entrepreneurial bent, he eventually owned and operated several barber shops, a bathhouse, and other business ventures in Natchez, both in the more socially respectable area on the bluff high above the Mississippi and in the rougher riverfront section “under the hill.” Married in 1835, he and his family became the most respected (and wealthiest) free blacks in Natchez.⁶

Figure 2.

A view of Natchez “On the Hill” drawn by James Tooley (1816–44), ca. 1835. Many of the buildings depicted here are still Natchez landmarks.

Image courtesy of the Natchez Historical Society.

It is not unimportant that Johnson was a...