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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

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...