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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Scholars of jurisprudence define ownership as a “bundle of rights” that an individual has to a thing. According to A. M. Honoré, that bundle includes “the right to possess, the right to use,” the right to be secure in one’s property, “the right to manage (which involves ‘the right to decide how and by whom the thing owned shall be used’), the right to the income of a thing (which includes the ‘fruits, rents, and profits’) . . . the right to alienate the thing . . . during life or on death, by way of sale, mortgage, gift or other mode . . . and the liberty to consume, waste or destroy the whole or part of it.” If someone infringed upon any of these rights, the owner could call upon “a battery of remedies in order to obtain, keep, and if necessary, get back the thing owned.”80 Honoré was not referencing slavery in his essay—or if he was, he did not mention it. But when applied to slavery, this definition describes the position of nineteenth-century southern slave owners. An owner’s near-absolute right to discipline, maim, and even kill the enslaved people he or she owned and the power to delegate management and discipline to others were the cornerstones of the institution. Slave-owning women exercised all the rights included in the bundle, including the right to do what one formerly enslaved man referred to as their “own bossing.”81