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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

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