These were two items in an inventory of the estate Phillip B. Saddler returned to the Orphans’ Court of Baltimore in 1860. Even _The Liberator_ mentions some cases of the kind. For example: A man in Kentucky _willed_ to his slaves, whom he made free, horses, wagons, farming implements, and $4,000. Another, also in Kentucky, freed a Negro family of four, purchased an excellent farm for them, paying fifty dollars an acre, and in addition gave them a wagon, a pair of mules and a quantity of provisions. These are given merely as examples of what was constantly taking place.[124:2] Indeed, there were many rich free Negroes in the South at the time of the Civil War. Although there is abundant evidence that the free Negroes, as a rule, were an indolent, thriftless, and even vicious class, some of them, no doubt on account of the reënforcement of white blood in their veins, were industrious and prosperous. At Charleston, S. C., alone in 1860, there were 355 free Negroes who paid taxes.[124:3] Of these 226 owned real estate valued at $1,000 or more, each. Some of them had $10,000 to $40,000 worth of property. Altogether they had almost $1,000,000 worth. In Louisiana also, as might be expected, there were many wealthy free Negroes. Most of these were descended from the French and the Spanish planters and their Negro slaves. One free Negro family of Louisiana was said to be the richest Negro family in the United States before the War, having property valued at several hundred thousand dollars.[125:4] Frederick Law Olmsted, who traveled through the State about 1855, was told that some of the free Negroes owned property worth $400,000 or $500,000, which included some of the best sugar and cotton plantations. Indeed, all over the country might have been found free Negroes with more or less property. The greater part of it, no doubt, had been given them by white masters or white relatives. In reference to the amount of property held by Negroes at the time of the Civil War, William H. Thomas, a Negro writer, says: “We have no trustworthy data by which to measure the wealth of those residing in the North, though it is known to have been considerable; but in the South, where separate racial statistics were kept, the value of property owned by free Negroes was between $35,000,000 and $40,000,000.”