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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

But beyond their aversion to blood-stained clothing, slave-owning men tried to distance themselves from the violence of slavery in order to maintain a particular esteem among enslaved people. A slave-owning man from Georgia declared, “I rarely punish myself but make a driver”—typically an enslaved man who assumed the responsibilities of an overseer—“virtually an executive officer to inflict punishment [so] that I may remove from the mind of the servant who commits a fault the unfavorable impression too apt to be indulged in, that it is for pleasure rather than for the purpose of enforcing obedience and establishing good order that punishments are inflicted.” By delegating brutal forms of mastery to subordinates, slave-owning men and women cleansed themselves of the dark taint that subsequently stained the men who carried out their orders. The alleged differences that scholars claim existed between men and women’s punishment of the enslaved people they owned probably have more to do with these historians’ own interpretations than with the evidence of the time.29