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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

White slave-owning women further underscored their investments in the children enslaved women bore when they made efforts to provide for their nutritional and physical needs. While such actions might seem benevolent or “maternalistic,” the economic advantages of caring for the children they enslaved often motivated these women’s choices, and frequently these mistresses had their eyes on the slave market. Sallie Paul reasoned that slave owners in her community fed enslaved children well in large part because they wanted to “make dem hurry en grow cause dey would want to hurry en increase dey property.”81 John Brown’s experience gives credence to her assertion. Brown’s mistress Betty Moore would summon all the enslaved children to the “big house” each morning and give each of them a dose of garlic and rue, a medicinal plant used to treat a variety of ailments. To keep them physically fit, she would order them to “run round a great sycamore tree in the yard.” When the children did not run fast enough to suit her, she would crack a cowhide whip at them, a disciplinary tool she kept by her side at all times. Brown said that she did this to keep them “wholesome,” and to make them “grow likely for market.”82