They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

In They Were Her Property I build upon these earlier studies, but I also depart from them in significant ways. I focus specifically on women who owned enslaved people in their own right and, in particular, on the experiences of married slave-owning women. In addition, I understand these women’s fundamental relationship to slavery as a relation of property, a relation that was, above all, economic at its foundation. I am not suggesting that this was these women’s only relationship to the institution or that the economic dimension of their relations overrode other aspects of their connections to slavery; rather, I argue that pecuniary ties formed one of slave-owning women’s primary relations to African American bondage.

By definition and in fact, the mistress was the master’s equivalent. Thus, when South Carolina legislators declared that “every master, mistress or overseer, shall and may have liberty to whip any strange negro or other slave coming to his or their plantation with a ticket” (the pass an enslaved person had to carry when he or she left the master’s estate), they were not imbuing mistresses with subordinate powers or power in their husbands’ stead; they were recognizing the comparable powers and authority that these women possessed.20

which abolition eventually put an end. When FWP employees traveled through the South searching out glimpses of the past through their interviews with formerly enslaved African Americans, individuals like Litt Young discussed and identified their female owners. Serving as the metaphorical flies on the walls of southern households, formerly enslaved people talked about some of the most violent, traumatic, and intimate dimensions of life for those who were bound and those who were free. They heard and saw things that typically remained obscured from view, details that white slave-owning couples often left out of personal correspondence or public communications—that is, when they were able to write at all. Many of the slave-owning women I discuss in this book contended with some form of illiteracy; they either were unable to read and write or possessed the ability to do one but not the other.24 Enslaved and formerly enslaved people’s recollections about their female owners thus serve as some of the only archival records about these women to survive.

Additionally, although some formerly enslaved people were young when they were freed, it is unlikely that they could forget what psychologists and gerontologists call “salient life events”: pivotal experiences such as marriages, births, deaths, and, in the context of slavery, brutal beatings, sexual assaults, or familial separations that occurred after the sale or relocation of loved ones. Delicia Patterson, for example, was fifteen when her owner brought her “to the courthouse,” and “put [her] up on the auction block to be sold.” When Anne Maddox was thirteen, she was part of a speculator’s drove that traveled from Virginia to Alabama. Tom McGruder, “one of the oldest living ex-slaves in Pulaski County,” was “eighteen or twenty” when he “was sold for $1250.” These formerly enslaved people could not forget such events or the slave owners who initiated them and were ultimately responsible for the trauma that followed. Moreover, remembering certain details about their bondage could mean the difference between life and death for such people both during and after slavery. As enslaved and formerly enslaved people navigated the southern landscape, their safety, and sometimes their very lives, often depended upon their ability to produce passes (“tickets”) which accurately identified their owners, among other things.28 And their continued ties to the white families that previously owned them could spare them some of the racial violence that characterized Reconstruction in the South.

30 To be sure, formerly enslaved people often responded to questions about their enslavement with silence because they did not always want to remember or talk about their experiences. But thousands chose to do so despite their reservations. They told their stories in an atmosphere of intense racial hostility and in a region where simply refusing to step off the sidewalk when a white person passed by could result in their deaths. They believed that telling their stories was worth these risks. I honor their courage, heed their words, and foreground their testimony and remembrances in this book.

Slave-owning women rarely talked about their economic investments in slavery, and they wrote about them even less. Their silence did not reflect their aversion to slavery or human trafficking. Many of them simply did not have the time or the skill to put their thoughts on paper, while those who did probably saw their pecuniary investments in slavery as commonplace and unworthy of note. This is their story.

No group spoke about these women’s investments in slavery more often, or more powerfully, than the enslaved people subjected to their ownership and control. They were the people whose lives were forever changed when a mistress sold someone just so she could buy a new dress. They were best equipped to describe the agony that shook their bodies and souls when they returned from their errands to discover that their children were gone and their mistresses were counting piles of money they had received from the slave traders who bought them. Only enslaved people could speak about their female owners’ profound economic contributions to their continued enslavement with such astonishing precision. This is their story, too.

Slave owners occasionally gave their female family members human property in ritualized affairs that helped mold their young daughters’ development as slave owners from early on. The elders would join the hands of young heiresses together with those of the slaves they were receiving and tell them that the enslaved people in question were their property forever.11

The objective in requiring such deference was simple. Slave owners wanted enslaved people to recognize the power that white children possessed over them, even at the time of their birth. George Womble asserted that his owner wanted the slaves he owned to hold “him and his family in awe”; he compelled them to “go and pay their respects to the newly born white children on the day after their birth. They were required to get in line, and one by one, they went through the room and bowed their heads as they passed the bed and uttered ‘Young Marster,’ or if the baby was a girl they said: ‘Young Mistress.’”21 Enslaved people paid a high cost if they failed to use these salutations. Rebecca Jane Grant would not call her mistress’s young son “Marster.” One day, her mistress wrote a note and asked her to deliver it to a local store clerk. The clerk prepared a package in accordance with the note’s instructions and gave it to Grant to deliver to her mistress. When she returned, she quickly learned what was inside: “a cowhide strap about two feet long.” Her mistress immediately pulled the whip out of the package and began to beat Grant with it. She did not know why her mistress was beating her until she exclaimed, “You can’t say ‘Marster Henry,’ Miss?” Grant quickly responded, “Yes’m. Yes’m. I can say ‘Marster Henry!’” She bitterly remarked to her interviewer: “Marster Henry was just a little boy about three or four years old. . . . Wanted me to say ‘Marster’ to him—a baby!”22 When ano...

This young white girl and the enslaved woman who had cared for her learned at least two important lessons that day. They came to understand that there was no inherent chasm between violence and ladyhood in everyday life, even in the eyes of white patriarchs. They also learned that the intimacies that might have been forged between them over the years made no difference to the power that their society accorded to this young white girl over her racial “inferiors.” In fact, it was that power that made such cross-racial intimacies possible in the first place.

In 1835, the abolitionist Catharine Sedgwick wrote a three-volume novel, set during the American Revolution, whose protagonists were the Linwoods, a slaveholding New England family. They owned a woman named Rose who was very close to her owner’s daughter, Isabella. One day, Isabella asked Rose if she was happy, and Rose replied that she was not because she was a slave. Isabella recounted her parents’ kindness toward Rose and remarked how much she and her brother loved her. Rose replied that slavery was a “yoke, and it gall[ed]” her that she could be “bought and sold like cattle”; she would “die to-morrow to be free to-day.” Seeing Rose’s pain, Isabella promised the enslaved woman that she would be free and asked her father to manumit her. He refused her request, but through a bit of trickery, Isabella was able to keep her promise to Rose.44 In response, Caroline Gilman wrote an op-ed in the Southern Rose, the new name of the Rose Bud, that refuted Sedgwick’s description of slavery and characterization of enslaved people as embodied by Rose. She argued that “it is not true that African slaves pine for ‘free breath;’ they are the most careless, light-hearted creatures in the world.” Without reservation, she believed that “the great mass ‘enjoy the service they render,’” and that Sedgwick did not understand their character. She also questioned why Sedgwick and other northern women would “waste their sympathy on a subject so distant from their sphere of observation.” She encou...

It is important to note that young white southerners, by virtue of their skin color, were empowered by law and custom to exercise control over any enslaved person they crossed paths with, even those they did not own. The landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted published an account of his travels throughout the region that included an encounter he had with a southern girl and an elderly enslaved man: I have seen a girl, twelve years old in a district where, in ten miles, the slave population was fifty to one of the free, stop an old man on the public road, demand to know where he was going, and by what authority, order him to face about and return to his plantation, and enforce her command with turbulent anger, when he hesitated, by threatening that she would have him well whipped if he did not instantly obey. The man quailed like a spaniel, and she instantly resumed the manner of a lovely child with me, no more apprehending that she had acted unbecomingly, than that her character had been influenced by the slave’s submission to her caprice of supremacy; no more conscious that she had increased the security of her life by strengthening the habit of the slave to the master race, than is the sleeping seaman that he tightens his clutch of the rigging as the ship meets each new billow.50

These affairs also underscored the economic relationship between slaves and young white women’s coming of age because white parents often sold enslaved people in order to help finance their daughters’ weddings. Ben Johnson’s master, for example, sold Ben’s brother Jim in order to pay for his daughter’s wedding dress.58 Transactions such as these served as a brutal lesson for the other enslaved people in Ben Johnson’s community, and an equally important one for the new bride: she could always sell one of her slaves, separating him or her from everything and everyone he or she knew and loved, if a more pressing need, like the purchase of a dress, arose. Even

sole and separate use.63 While parents presented their daughters with both enslaved males and females as inheritances upon marriage, they more frequently gave them female slaves. From a logical perspective, their decision to do so might seem motivated by the rationale that enslaved women and girls would be more useful to daughters, who bore the bulk of the domestic responsibilities in and management of their households, and sometimes this was the case. But they also gave enslaved girls and women (especially those of childbearing age) to their daughters, because females possessed the reproductive capacity to add to their daughters’ labor force. Of course, slaveholders in the colonial period did not value enslaved females’ reproduction in the ways that their counterparts would in the nineteenth century. In the colonial period, especially before the abolition of the African slave trade to America in 1808, many slave owners discouraged enslaved women from reproducing. They considered enslaved infants to be time-consuming financial burdens who prevented their mothers from devoting all of their attention to their white households. Slave owners often sold such women simply because they were conceiving and delivering children too frequently. After 1808, however, when slave owners could no longer depend upon a steady supply of newly imported African captives, they had to rely on a domestic supply of enslaved laborers, and they became invested in the “natural” reproduction of the en...

But over the long term, enslaved women, because of the children they would potentially produce over the course of their lives, were far more valuable. If slave owners were patient, “producing children was a cheap alternative to purchasing them at the market.”69 Henrietta Butler’s mistress Emily Haidee clearly knew the value that enslaved women possessed, and she developed two long-term financial strategies to maximize their worth. She not only forced Butler’s mother to engage in nonconsensual sex with enslaved men so she could “have babies all de time,” she made Butler do the same. When the coerced sexual liaisons that Haidee orchestrated produced offspring, she was known for “sellin’ the boys and keepin’ the gals.”70

One formerly enslaved woman remembered overhearing her mistress tell a prospective buyer that she “wouldn’t sell her for nothing” and “wouldn’t take two thousand for her” because she was her “little breeder.”76 In another community, a white traveler named Eli West remembered one enslaved woman who simply could not, or would not, conceive. After she continually failed to become pregnant, her mistress had her stripped naked and whipped her severely. When this brutality proved ineffectual in remedying the problem, her mistress sold the woman to slave traders.77

White slave-owning women further underscored their investments in the children enslaved women bore when they made efforts to provide for their nutritional and physical needs. While such actions might seem benevolent or “maternalistic,” the economic advantages of caring for the children they enslaved often motivated these women’s choices, and frequently these mistresses had their eyes on the slave market. Sallie Paul reasoned that slave owners in her community fed enslaved children well in large part because they wanted to “make dem hurry en grow cause dey would want to hurry en increase dey property.”81 John Brown’s experience gives credence to her assertion. Brown’s mistress Betty Moore would summon all the enslaved children to the “big house” each morning and give each of them a dose of garlic and rue, a medicinal plant used to treat a variety of ailments. To keep them physically fit, she would order them to “run round a great sycamore tree in the yard.” When the children did not run fast enough to suit her, she would crack a cowhide whip at them, a disciplinary tool she kept by her side at all times. Brown said that she did this to keep them “wholesome,” and to make them “grow likely for market.”82

Scholars of jurisprudence define ownership as a “bundle of rights” that an individual has to a thing. According to A. M. Honoré, that bundle includes “the right to possess, the right to use,” the right to be secure in one’s property, “the right to manage (which involves ‘the right to decide how and by whom the thing owned shall be used’), the right to the income of a thing (which includes the ‘fruits, rents, and profits’) . . . the right to alienate the thing . . . during life or on death, by way of sale, mortgage, gift or other mode . . . and the liberty to consume, waste or destroy the whole or part of it.” If someone infringed upon any of these rights, the owner could call upon “a battery of remedies in order to obtain, keep, and if necessary, get back the thing owned.”80 Honoré was not referencing slavery in his essay—or if he was, he did not mention it. But when applied to slavery, this definition describes the position of nineteenth-century southern slave owners. An owner’s near-absolute right to discipline, maim, and even kill the enslaved people he or she owned and the power to delegate management and discipline to others were the cornerstones of the institution. Slave-owning women exercised all the rights included in the bundle, including the right to do what one formerly enslaved man referred to as their “own bossing.”81

Enslaved and formerly enslaved people recalled the ways their female owners exercised authority over them. They made it clear that white women did not subordinate their authority to white men nor did they confine themselves to operating at the “mid-levels of power,” in Foster’s phrase.12 Their status as slave owners granted them access to a community that was predicated upon the ownership of human beings and afforded them rights they did not possess in other realms of their lives. White women embraced their role within this community, assumed positions of power over slaves within and outside their households, and challenged anyone who attempted to infringe upon that power. And local, state, and federal courts recognized, upheld, and protected them when they did so. Mastery was an objective that male and female slave owners and their delegates aimed to acquire through techniques ranging from kindness to brutality. Their goal was to compel enslaved people to submit to their will and work efficiently and profitably. The system was malleable because it had to be; one strategy might be effective with one enslaved person yet ineffective with another. Even the specific circumstances under which an owner compelled an enslaved person to work—such as trying to force recently sold, relocated, and traumatized enslaved people to labor after being separated from their homes and loved ones—could affect the management and disciplinary techniques a slave owner used.13

South. Laws dating back to the colonial period routinely recognized that mistresses owned enslaved people in their own right, and these same laws acknowledged the fact that these women were capable of exercising mastery over the enslaved people they owned.14 In fact, southern laws held the mistresses accountable for their slaves’ misconduct. For example, when an enslaved person in Louisiana was found “guilty of revolting, or of a plot to revolt against his or her . . . mistress . . . or of willfully and maliciously striking his or her . . . mistress, or the child or children of his or her . . . mistress, or any white overseer appointed by his or her owner to superintend said owner’s slaves, so as to cause a contusion or shedding of blood,” mistresses were required to report these acts to the state. If a mistress were to “wilfully and intentionally neglect to give information against, or refuse to give up . . . her slave or slaves . . . said . . . mistress shall, upon conviction thereof, forfeit and pay the sum of five hundred dollars, one half of which shall be given to the informer or informers, and the other half to and for the parish in which the offence shall have been committed, and imprisoned until the same is paid.”15 Furthermore, southern laws make it clear that legislators expected mistresses to discipline the enslaved people they owned, whether by proxy or by their own hand. In South Carolina, for example, if an enslaved person ran away for a period of twenty day...

The “management of negroes” advice columns that appeared in agricultural journals such as DeBow’s Review and the Southern Planter suggest that many southern white men coveted the role of slave master and yearned to rule over enslaved people, even those who were not their own. But this was not always the case. Rosalie Calvert found that her husband had no interest in being a master, and she had to assume the role herself. In 1818 and 1819, Calvert wrote several letters to her sister Isabelle complaining about her husband’s laziness and indifference to all matters related to plantation operations and slave management. Exasperated by all the work she had to do, she told her sister that her husband conducted himself “as if he were not the master—not giving any instructions, not worrying about anything.” As she became more heavily encumbered by the tasks that needed to be completed within and around her household, Calvert noticed how little her husband did. She confessed to Isabelle: “My husband takes care of nothing regarding the household or the servants. I must manage everything . . . all the arrangements fall on me.”17 But men who conducted themselves like Calvert’s husband occupied only one extreme on the behavioral spectrum. Far more frequently, spouses and overseers of slave-owning women, as well as public officials such as patrollers, gravitated toward the opposing end of this continuum. They often went too far when disciplining these women’s slaves, and they challenged...

time. Mistresses also sought to establish the parameters of proper conduct for men whom the state empowered to punish their slaves. A woman named Mrs. Harris, for example, hired out an enslaved boy she owned to various men in her community. On one occasion, the boy clashed with the man who had hired him, and during their altercation the boy “knocked” his employer in the head. The injured man summoned the community squire and constable, the two men stripped the boy, and the squire whipped him. The boy began to make so much noise that Mrs. Harris heard him, “came out and told the squire to turn [him] loose.” She threatened to kill the squire if he struck her slave one more time and “she showed him her gun.” Appalled by her challenge to his authority, the squire reminded her that they were acting “within the law.” Mrs. Harris retorted that she did not “care nothing about the law” and warned the squire not to hit her slave again. In the face of her defiance, the men saw no choice but to comply. They released the boy. This stand-off between the neighborhood squire and Mrs. Harris suggests that communal custom may have shaped the operation of law at the local level far more than the state did, a phenomenon that the historian Laura Edwards refers to as “legal localism.” The larger community may have subscribed to certain forms of discipline that constrained the squire’s power to inflict punishment under certain circumstances. Perhaps the squire overstepped those boundaries, and h...

The similarities between men and women’s systems of management become clearer through the testimony of formerly enslaved people. According to Henry Watson, his “mistress had been brought up in Louisiana, and had witnessed punishment all her life, and had become hardened to it.” He had seen her “perpetrate some of the most cruel acts that a human being could, yet I never saw her in a passion when she was inflicting punishment.” Cecelia Chappel recalled that her mistress would give her slaves “sum wuk ter do, so she would kind ob git ober her mad spell ’fore she whup’d us.” This was not feminine weakness; southern agricultural journals carried advice from slave-owning men to other slave-owning men urging them to avoid getting “overexcited,” remain “dispassionate and detached,” and ensure that they “never inflicted punishment on slaves in anger.” One South Carolina planter went so far as to suggest that masters “allow 24 hours to elapse between the discovery of the offence and the punishment.” Other men echoed his advice when they suggested that punishment should never be administered while “in a passion.” And so far from indicating a womanly or ladylike gentleness, such calmness could accompany vicious cruelty: Henry Watson proclaimed of his mistress, “She seemed to take delight in torturing,—in fact, she made it a pastime; she inspired every one about her with terror.” The practice of waiting to become calm before punishing a slave was not a matter of gender but of good sla...

But beyond their aversion to blood-stained clothing, slave-owning men tried to distance themselves from the violence of slavery in order to maintain a particular esteem among enslaved people. A slave-owning man from Georgia declared, “I rarely punish myself but make a driver”—typically an enslaved man who assumed the responsibilities of an overseer—“virtually an executive officer to inflict punishment [so] that I may remove from the mind of the servant who commits a fault the unfavorable impression too apt to be indulged in, that it is for pleasure rather than for the purpose of enforcing obedience and establishing good order that punishments are inflicted.” By delegating brutal forms of mastery to subordinates, slave-owning men and women cleansed themselves of the dark taint that subsequently stained the men who carried out their orders. The alleged differences that scholars claim existed between men and women’s punishment of the enslaved people they owned probably have more to do with these historians’ own interpretations than with the evidence of the time.29

Sometimes slave-owning women had good reason to delegate slave punishment to others, and their decision to do so aligned with the choices slave-owning men made in this regard. The white men in their families or those they hired generally proved to be willing participants. Yet slave-owning women also knew firsthand that slave management and discipline could pose difficulties that neither a master nor a mistress was capable of handling. Violent and resistant enslaved people might need more than the authority of a single man to keep them in line.31 Pauline Howell’s enslaved aunt, for example, killed two male overseers after she “grabbed [their] privates and pulled ’em out by the roots.” Afterward, her aunt was sold, along with all of her children, to a man who lived in Mobile, Alabama.32 A woman who could mutilate and kill two adult men in this way was not going to acknowledge the authority of a master because he was a man. And who knew what kind of damage she might inflict upon a mistress? Whether master or mistress, the owner was likely to seek reinforcement before attempting further punishment.

the slave market. Most commonly, when formerly enslaved people described households in which double mastery prevailed, they remarked upon a clear differentiation between the broader systems of management and discipline their masters and mistresses used, and frequently they reported that one of their owners would beat them while the other did not. While assumptions based on gender might suggest that women were the ones who refrained from beatings, this was not always the case. Husbands frequently disagreed with their wives’ chosen disciplinary strategies because they were too brutal, and they were not always willing to dole out punishment on their wives’ behalf. Julia Blanks recalled that her “marster was good” because “he wouldn’t whip any of his slaves. But his wife wasn’t good. If she got mad at the woman, when he would come home she would say: ‘John, I want you to whip Liza. Or Martha.’ And he would say, ‘Them are your slaves, You whip them.’” In these cases, slave-owning women had little choice but to assume the role of disciplinarian or to delegate the task to others.37 Slave-owning husbands sometimes found their wives’ violence toward enslaved people so disturbing that they could not ignore it and felt compelled to intervene. Penny Thompson’s master Calvin Ingram would fight with her mistress “lots of times ’bout de treatment” of the slaves they owned. He just “wouldn’t let her ’buse” them.

When King’s mistress discovered her husband’s plan, she prevented the sale and swiftly retaliated. As King and his master were forced to stand and watch, the mistress commanded the overseer to strip, bind, and whip his mother. The beating “left her laying, all a shiver, on the ground, like a wounded animal dying from the chase.” King remembered his mistress walking away “laughing, while his Mammy screamed and groaned.” His master had a remarkably different response; he stood there “looking sad and wretched, like he could feel the blows.” One woman’s violence toward her slaves was enough to drive her husband to abandon her. When he left, he took all the slaves he owned with him and left her with the three she had brought into their marriage.38

Most states were in agreement. As long as the punishment did not maim, mutilate, or imperil the life of an enslaved person, brutality was legal. There were, however, exceptions that allowed whites to kill enslaved people with impunity. South Carolina declared it “lawful for any white person to beat, maim or assault” a black person, and “if such negro or slave cannot otherwise be taken, to kill him, who shall refuse to shew his ticket, or, by running away or resistance, shall endeavor to avoid being apprehended or taken.”47

it. One Missouri man recounted in precise detail how Mann’s wife had brutalized Fanny, and claimed that the day after Mann’s wife had tortured Fanny, she was found dead. Fanny was “silently and quickly buried, but rumor was not so easily stopped. . . . The murdered slave was disinterred, and an inquest held; her back was a mass of jellied muscle; and the coroner brought in a verdict of death by the ‘six pound paddle.’” Mrs. Mann fled the district for a few months, but no action was taken against her.52 By some accounts, white slave owners concealed their most brutalized slaves from observers who might object to their violence, even going so far as to borrow healthy slaves from neighbors when they entertained visitors. When slave owners inflicted punishments that resulted in a slave’s death, some rid themselves of the body or told inquisitive people that the slave in question had died of disease. Enslaved people’s deaths were not complete financial losses to their owners. Medical schools across the nation bought the bodies of deceased enslaved people from southern slave owners for dissection and research and thereby offered slave owners a profitable way to make such bodies disappear.53

The brutality of some slave-owning women, especially when it led to disfigurement or death, might strike us as “irrational destruction” that was counterproductive, in large part because it seemed to be in direct conflict with their financial investment in the people they owned. After all, such violence impaired enslaved people’s ability to work and decreased or obliterated their value in the market.54 But a slave-owning woman’s decisions to abuse, maim, or kill her slaves was simply an “extreme version” of her “right to exclude” others from reaping the benefits of having access to the slaves she herself abused or destroyed. Moreover, there were “benefits” that accrued from such actions, and they served an important purpose for slave-owning women and their communities. The abuse and murder of enslaved people had “expressive value” that affirmed a slave-owning woman’s power.55 It was also expressive because some slave-owning women enacted this violence in ritualized performances and forced enslaved men, women, and children to watch as a way of further convincing them of that power.

or who allowed their slaves too much freedom.59 Finally, legislators did not impose legal constraints upon slave owners’ powers to abuse, punish, and kill their slaves out of concern for enslaved people’s well-being. They did so in order to preserve the interests of relatives who would inherit their estates and would suffer if the property was squandered. If abuse and destruction did not threaten to deprive heirs of their rightful inheritances, courts might acquit a slave owner who killed.60

Dang

Some of the cases discussed here might appear to suggest that when slave-owning women brutalized and killed enslaved people, southern judges and jurors exonerated them because of gendered ideas about women or an assumption that a woman’s violence toward enslaved people was somehow different from a man’s. But judges and juries were consistent in their leniency toward slave-owning men and women, and southern laws generally allowed most white southerners, not just women, who killed, dismembered, or maimed enslaved people (even those who did not belong to them) to do so with impunity. Most southern judges and members of southern juries were slave owners themselves and could sympathize with the defendants before them. Even if they did not, their decision to exonerate a defendant might have been influenced by the thought that they might eventually find themselves before a jury of their slave-owning peers, from whom they would hope for similar consideration. Judges and jurors generally adjudicated their cases according to precedent, building upon other decisions in cases involving an owner’s murder of an enslaved person. With the exception of the most egregious cases, slave-owning and non-slaveholding white men and women were not held accountable for such crimes beyond a possible fine—say, the estimated value of the deceased slave if she or he belonged to someone else—though their actions would have been punishable by death if their victims had been free and white. White