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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

which abolition eventually put an end. When FWP employees traveled through the South searching out glimpses of the past through their interviews with formerly enslaved African Americans, individuals like Litt Young discussed and identified their female owners. Serving as the metaphorical flies on the walls of southern households, formerly enslaved people talked about some of the most violent, traumatic, and intimate dimensions of life for those who were bound and those who were free. They heard and saw things that typically remained obscured from view, details that white slave-owning couples often left out of personal correspondence or public communications—that is, when they were able to write at all. Many of the slave-owning women I discuss in this book contended with some form of illiteracy; they either were unable to read and write or possessed the ability to do one but not the other.24 Enslaved and formerly enslaved people’s recollections about their female owners thus serve as some of the only archival records about these women to survive.