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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

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.