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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

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.