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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

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.