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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

In 1835, the abolitionist Catharine Sedgwick wrote a three-volume novel, set during the American Revolution, whose protagonists were the Linwoods, a slaveholding New England family. They owned a woman named Rose who was very close to her owner’s daughter, Isabella. One day, Isabella asked Rose if she was happy, and Rose replied that she was not because she was a slave. Isabella recounted her parents’ kindness toward Rose and remarked how much she and her brother loved her. Rose replied that slavery was a “yoke, and it gall[ed]” her that she could be “bought and sold like cattle”; she would “die to-morrow to be free to-day.” Seeing Rose’s pain, Isabella promised the enslaved woman that she would be free and asked her father to manumit her. He refused her request, but through a bit of trickery, Isabella was able to keep her promise to Rose.44 In response, Caroline Gilman wrote an op-ed in the Southern Rose, the new name of the Rose Bud, that refuted Sedgwick’s description of slavery and characterization of enslaved people as embodied by Rose. She argued that “it is not true that African slaves pine for ‘free breath;’ they are the most careless, light-hearted creatures in the world.” Without reservation, she believed that “the great mass ‘enjoy the service they render,’” and that Sedgwick did not understand their character. She also questioned why Sedgwick and other northern women would “waste their sympathy on a subject so distant from their sphere of observation.” She encou...