These affairs also underscored the economic relationship between slaves and young white women’s coming of age because white parents often sold enslaved people in order to help finance their daughters’ weddings. Ben Johnson’s master, for example, sold Ben’s brother Jim in order to pay for his daughter’s wedding dress.58 Transactions such as these served as a brutal lesson for the other enslaved people in Ben Johnson’s community, and an equally important one for the new bride: she could always sell one of her slaves, separating him or her from everything and everyone he or she knew and loved, if
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