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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

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.