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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

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.