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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

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