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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

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