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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

The “management of negroes” advice columns that appeared in agricultural journals such as DeBow’s Review and the Southern Planter suggest that many southern white men coveted the role of slave master and yearned to rule over enslaved people, even those who were not their own. But this was not always the case. Rosalie Calvert found that her husband had no interest in being a master, and she had to assume the role herself. In 1818 and 1819, Calvert wrote several letters to her sister Isabelle complaining about her husband’s laziness and indifference to all matters related to plantation operations and slave management. Exasperated by all the work she had to do, she told her sister that her husband conducted himself “as if he were not the master—not giving any instructions, not worrying about anything.” As she became more heavily encumbered by the tasks that needed to be completed within and around her household, Calvert noticed how little her husband did. She confessed to Isabelle: “My husband takes care of nothing regarding the household or the servants. I must manage everything . . . all the arrangements fall on me.”17 But men who conducted themselves like Calvert’s husband occupied only one extreme on the behavioral spectrum. Far more frequently, spouses and overseers of slave-owning women, as well as public officials such as patrollers, gravitated toward the opposing end of this continuum. They often went too far when disciplining these women’s slaves, and they challenged...