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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

Historians have acknowledged that some southern women owned slaves, but they usually focus on the wealthiest single or widowed women. When they do encounter married slave-owning women in nineteenth-century records, they generally assume that the women’s legal status as wives prevented them from owning slaves in their own right. Historians rarely differentiate between married women who owned enslaved people in their own right and married women who merely lived in households in which they engaged with, managed, and benefited from the labor of the enslaved people that others owned. Historians rarely consider why slave ownership might have mattered to the women in question, to the enslaved people they owned, to slaveholding communities, to the institution of slavery, or, more broadly, to the region. Historians have neglected these women because their behaviors toward, and relationships with, their slaves do not conform to prevailing ideas about white women and slave mastery.

The story of these women’s economic investments in slavery, I shall argue, tells us much about their economic roles in the institution and the process of nation-making that historians did not know (or want to know) about before. The economic historian Sven Beckert has argued that “slavery was a key part of American capitalism” and that “slave plantations, not railroads, were in fact America’s first ‘big business.’” If we examine women’s economic investments in slavery, rather than simply their ideological and sentimental connections to the system, we can uncover hitherto hidden relationships among gender, slavery, and capitalism.11 The products of these women’s economic investment—the people they owned—including the wages enslaved people earned when hired out to others, the cash crops they cultivated, picked, and packed for shipment, and the babies they nursed, were fundamental to the nation’s economic growth and to American capitalism.

A white man’s pecuniary circumstances could change drastically upon marriage because state and local laws generally gave husbands control over the property their wives brought to the marriage. Simply by marrying a woman with property, even if she maintained control of it, a man could improve his position: husbands often borrowed money from their wives and used the enslaved people their wives inherited to cultivate the lands they bought with those loans. Legal petitions are on record in which women describe themselves as their husbands’ creditors and financiers. Many of these women did not accept the loss of their legal claims to the property they brought into their marriages. In fact, many married female petitioners described their slaves as property they still owned and controlled, considering their husbands’ control temporary—and as we shall see, the courts often agreed with them. Enslaved people also testified to the ways such ideas shaped marital relations in white households. Thus, in many respects, married women, their slaves, and their other assets made their husbands’ commercial endeavors possible and enabled slavery to thrive in ways it might not have without those women’s economic investments in the institution.

Slave-owning women rarely talked about their economic investments in slavery, and they wrote about them even less. Their silence did not reflect their aversion to slavery or human trafficking. Many of them simply did not have the time or the skill to put their thoughts on paper, while those who did probably saw their pecuniary investments in slavery as commonplace and unworthy of note. This is their story.

Mastery was an objective that male and female slave owners and their delegates aimed to acquire through techniques ranging from kindness to brutality. Their goal was to compel enslaved people to submit to their will and work efficiently and profitably. The system was malleable because it had to be; one strategy might be effective with one enslaved person yet ineffective with another. Even the specific circumstances under which an owner compelled an enslaved person to work—such as trying to force recently sold, relocated, and traumatized enslaved people to labor after being separated from their homes and loved ones—could affect the management and disciplinary techniques a slave owner used.13

The regime of slavery could not have been sustained if the power, authority, and violence that characterized it had belonged to elite white men alone. It required modes of flexible power. Those who owned enslaved people wielded extraordinary authority, but so did overseers and enslaved drivers, as well as employers who hired enslaved people from their owners. There were even occasions when enslaved people exercised power over the lives and deaths of free people and other enslaved persons. They could, for example, implicate an enslaved or free person in a plan for revolt, and thereby seal that person’s fate. The hyper-surveillance the regime required was possible only if every white person—be it man, woman, child, slave owner, or non–slave owner—had the potential power to make an enslaved person obey him or her and submit to his or her will. And the law so empowered them. Such systems of shared power did not typically characterize hierarchical societies wherein white men sat at the apex; they existed in societies

that could be considered “heterarchical” in nature.

The brutality of some slave-owning women, especially when it led to disfigurement or death, might strike us as “irrational destruction” that was counterproductive, in large part because it seemed to be in direct conflict with their financial investment in the people they owned. After all, such violence impaired enslaved people’s ability to work and decreased or obliterated their value in the market.54 But a slave-owning woman’s decisions to abuse, maim, or kill her slaves was simply an “extreme version” of her “right to exclude” others from reaping the benefits of having access to the slaves she herself abused or destroyed. Moreover, there were “benefits” that accrued from such actions, and they served an important purpose for slave-owning women and their communities. The abuse and murder of enslaved people had “expressive value” that affirmed a slave-owning woman’s power.55 It was also expressive because some slave-owning women enacted this violence in ritualized performances and forced enslaved men, women, and children to watch as a way of further convincing them of that power.

With the exception of the most egregious cases, slave-owning and non-slaveholding white men and women were not held accountable for such crimes beyond a possible fine—say, the estimated value of the deceased slave if she or he belonged to someone else—though their actions would have been punishable by death if their victims had been free and white. White women were members of slave-owning communities built on a system of white supremacy and the subjugation of African-descended people. The laws governing these communities gave slave-owning women the right to make enslaved people submit to their will and they routinely exercised that right.

Historians of the southern slave market view it as corrosive, corrupting, sexually charged, and brutal, and many claim that it was considered too abhorrent a place for white women to visit. But when women chose to hire, buy, or sell enslaved people in or near their homes and beyond the formal marketplace, they were not avoiding the “perceived sexual and social disorder” associated with these markets; the plantation landscape was itself marked by that disorder.

The slaveholding household was a place of coerced production and reproduction, racial and sexual exploitation, and physical and psychological violence.7 It was a place where white southern women grew accustomed to the violence of slavery, contemplated the sale and purchase of slaves, and used the bodies of the enslaved people they owned in ways that reinforced their pecuniary value. The household became an extension of the slave market, and white women capitalized upon their access to both. They not only “did the thinking about slave buying,” taking stock of their labor needs and the kinds of workers who could meet them, they orchestrated the sale, purchase, and exchange of slaves in these domestic spaces.

Slave-owning women relied upon people they knew or individuals whom loved ones recommended to conduct their business, and these proxies served very practical purposes. Employing factors was risky because such business partnerships required planters to invest enormous amounts of trust in men they knew only cursorily—men who might take their crops and their money and abscond with them. White slave-owning women reduced their level of risk by employing family members and friends. Of course, family and friends were not always above betrayal. But relying on male friends and kin decreased the likelihood of it.

It is crucial to recognize that, as human property that was exchanged, bought, sold, hired, and parceled out among white southerners, enslaved people were not simply objects of sale or potential liquidation; they took an active interest in the market processes to which they were subjected and acquired extensive financial knowledge as a consequence. The slave market in all its aspects was a pervasive feature of enslaved African Americans’ daily lives, and their direct and indirect encounters with three dimensions of the slave-market economy—slave auctions and sales, inheritance or debt collection, and self-purchase—offered opportunities to learn about credit, debt, and contracts; allowed them to engage in financial negotiations; and taught them to develop strategies for fiscal management. They calculated their own value, established the price for their freedom, decided terms of payment, and worked until they reached their financial goal. These financial calculations and dealings challenge us to rethink the intellectual and economic relationships between slavery and freedom for African Americans in the nineteenth century and the roles white slave-owning women played in the process.

Southern women constructed and participated in an informal market network of family and friends from within their own homes, and they relied on this network for information about enslaved wet nurses who might be available. The market was informal in the sense that it was contingent upon the circulation of wet nurses largely outside the brick-and-mortar slave market, and it did not usually involve the exchange of currency, although money did occasionally change hands. Rather, this informal market resembled other female-dominated systems of barter and exchange that characterized early American households.

White southerners developed a special terminology to describe enslaved people’s emotions, terms and phrases intended to render their pain, grief, trauma, and emotional loss invisible. The literary scholar Anne Anlin Cheng identifies a discourse common to both scholars and laypeople in discussions of race that views marginalized people’s expressions of grief as pathological, while simultaneously defining white people’s expressions of grief as healthy. Nineteenth-century white southerners employed their own version of this.78 When confronted with enslaved women’s emotional responses to losing or being separated from their children, white southerners construed their grief as “the sulks,” or even a form of madness—“vices,” flaws, or pathological conditions—that made such women less valuable and less desirable in the slave market.

Enslaved mothers’ grief and white southerners’ attempts to render it invisible stand in stark contrast to the simultaneous “culture of mourning” that allowed whites to openly express their sorrow after the loss of loved ones. During the nineteenth century, white women were encouraged to mourn for the dead, and their “private expressions of grief helped usher in new conventions that enabled women to more fully express their acute sense of loss.” However, while “nineteenth-century [white] Americans were encouraged to openly mourn for the dead, especially for infants and young children,” white southerners brutally denied enslaved mothers and fathers the right to do the same. In the face of these denials, the enslaved mothers whom slave owners compelled to serve as wet nurses, particularly those who had recently lost a child or who were forced to separate from him or her, could not, or would not, hide their sorrow and grief, and such emotional displays were disturbingly obvious to owners and potential buyers. While from today’s perspective we might have assumed that the culture of mourning would inevitably

Whether they recognized it or not, white southern mothers were ultimately responsible for the ordeals that many enslaved wet nurses endured in and out of the slave market. These women decided when enslaved wet nurses would best serve them and their children, and only they knew the motives underlying these decisions. White mothers determined whether they could withstand the physical toll breastfeeding imposed upon them and whether they would be able to produce an adequate supply of milk to feed their newborns. Consequently, they were the ones who decided whether to borrow, hire, or buy an enslaved wet nurse, even if a man might finalize the transactions in the slave market. Some men did influence their wives’ decisions to charge other women with nursing their children.81 But the politics of respectability that shaped white southern culture and domestic relations ensured that few men would dare violate

white women’s bodies in order to determine whether they were concocting reasons not to nurse, especially those of the elite and planter classes. Physicians, husbands, and other men had to take women at their word and allow them to make maternal decisions for themselves.82 White women separated enslaved mothers from their children and placed their own infants at the breasts of these women. They compelled enslaved women to suckle their white children shortly after these mothers had lost their own. They denied enslaved women the right to publicly express their grief. In short, they perpetrated acts of maternal violence against these enslaved mothers, and the slave market made this violence possible.

Women could examine enslaved people’s bodies, take notice of their features, talk to them, and express a desire to buy them, all in public view. If what they saw piqued their interest, they could enter the trader’s establishment and be assured that the proprietor would cater to their needs. Such evidence further refutes the argument that white southern women were repulsed by or alienated from slave markets and ignorant of the details of slave transactions.

Children cost far less than enslaved adolescents or adults, and if a slave owner was willing to pay the lower purchase price and invest in the care of the child until he or she was old enough to work, the owner could see his or her investment grow exponentially over the enslaved child’s lifetime, especially if the child was female. Some white women chose to acquire enslaved infants and children for free or at rock-bottom prices, a decision that would eventually pay off handsomely.

The thought of losing the people who embodied their most significant financial investments pushed some women to go beyond refugeeing to hiding their slaves, holding them in captivity, or imprisoning them. Whenever Ike Thomas’s mistress got word that the Yankees were approaching, she “would hide her ‘little niggers’ sometimes in the wardrobe back of her clothes, sometimes between the mattresses, or sometimes in the cane brakes. After the Yankees left, she’d ring a bell and they would know they could come out of hiding.”59 These enslaved children probably thought their mistress was allowing them to play a rare game of hide-and-seek, but there was no element of entertainment in the methods of “hiding” that some white women employed to conceal the whereabouts of the enslaved men and women they owned. Enslaved adults could not fit in the backs of closets or between mattresses, nor would they be likely to try to, so their mistresses held them captive in makeshift and local jails throughout the South.

Individuals within southern communities recognized the purpose of these laws and why former slave owners were seizing the opportunities that apprenticeship afforded them. Former slave owners wanted a bound labor force that was legally obligated to submit to their will, and the apprentice laws provided them with one way to secure it. But neighbors who witnessed the injustices they committed against their apprentices and the freed parents of these children might plead with officials “in the Name of Humanity” to stop what they considered the involuntary enslavement of freed children.

Some women adapted poorly to postbellum free labor systems, and they complained that freed people were unwilling to work for them under the same conditions that had existed before the war. But others proved to be well prepared for their new role as employers, particularly in regard to negotiating terms of labor with freed people. Before the war, slave-owning women had routinely negotiated with enslaved people who hoped to hire themselves out so they might purchase their freedom.36 They had also contracted with other whites who sought to hire their slaves. These were complex transactions that educated both white slave-owning women and the people they owned in the intricacies of labor negotiations. But now that the conditions under which these negotiations were conducted had changed so drastically, white women had to adapt their tactics accordingly.

Before the Civil War, slave-owning women held the upper hand in labor transactions. When slaves wanted to hire themselves out so they could buy their freedom, their female owners could always renege on the agreement or later choose to simply pocket the wages they earned. Additionally, as slave owners, these women held legal title to the men, women, and children that other white people hoped to hire. Their slave ownership granted them extraordinary leverage in prewar hiring arrangements, but this changed when they negotiated with freed laborers after the war. So although former slave-owning women did not lack the skills to negotiate labor agreements with freed people, emancipation required them to modify their prewar strategies to accommodate the constraints which abolition imposed upon their ability to command enslaved people’s labor.

Former slave-owning women’s deeper and more complex investments in slavery help explain why, in the years following the Civil War, they helped construct the South’s system of racial segregation, a system premised, as was slavery, upon white supremacy and black oppression. Understanding the direct economic investments white women made in slavery and their stake in its perpetuation, and recognizing the ways they benefited from their whiteness, helps us understand why they and many of their female descendants elected to uphold a white-supremacist order after slavery ended. If we acknowledge that white women stood to personally and directly benefit from the commodification and enslavement of African Americans we can better understand their participation in postwar white-supremacist movements and atrocities such as lynching—as well as their membership in organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. Southern white women’s roles in upholding and sustaining slavery form part of the much larger history of white supremacy and oppression. And through it all, they were not passive bystanders. They were co-conspirators.