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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

the slave market. Most commonly, when formerly enslaved people described households in which double mastery prevailed, they remarked upon a clear differentiation between the broader systems of management and discipline their masters and mistresses used, and frequently they reported that one of their owners would beat them while the other did not. While assumptions based on gender might suggest that women were the ones who refrained from beatings, this was not always the case. Husbands frequently disagreed with their wives’ chosen disciplinary strategies because they were too brutal, and they were not always willing to dole out punishment on their wives’ behalf. Julia Blanks recalled that her “marster was good” because “he wouldn’t whip any of his slaves. But his wife wasn’t good. If she got mad at the woman, when he would come home she would say: ‘John, I want you to whip Liza. Or Martha.’ And he would say, ‘Them are your slaves, You whip them.’” In these cases, slave-owning women had little choice but to assume the role of disciplinarian or to delegate the task to others.37 Slave-owning husbands sometimes found their wives’ violence toward enslaved people so disturbing that they could not ignore it and felt compelled to intervene. Penny Thompson’s master Calvin Ingram would fight with her mistress “lots of times ’bout de treatment” of the slaves they owned. He just “wouldn’t let her ’buse” them.