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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

The similarities between men and women’s systems of management become clearer through the testimony of formerly enslaved people. According to Henry Watson, his “mistress had been brought up in Louisiana, and had witnessed punishment all her life, and had become hardened to it.” He had seen her “perpetrate some of the most cruel acts that a human being could, yet I never saw her in a passion when she was inflicting punishment.” Cecelia Chappel recalled that her mistress would give her slaves “sum wuk ter do, so she would kind ob git ober her mad spell ’fore she whup’d us.” This was not feminine weakness; southern agricultural journals carried advice from slave-owning men to other slave-owning men urging them to avoid getting “overexcited,” remain “dispassionate and detached,” and ensure that they “never inflicted punishment on slaves in anger.” One South Carolina planter went so far as to suggest that masters “allow 24 hours to elapse between the discovery of the offence and the punishment.” Other men echoed his advice when they suggested that punishment should never be administered while “in a passion.” And so far from indicating a womanly or ladylike gentleness, such calmness could accompany vicious cruelty: Henry Watson proclaimed of his mistress, “She seemed to take delight in torturing,—in fact, she made it a pastime; she inspired every one about her with terror.” The practice of waiting to become calm before punishing a slave was not a matter of gender but of good sla...