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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

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...