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

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

A white man’s pecuniary circumstances could change drastically upon marriage because state and local laws generally gave husbands control over the property their wives brought to the marriage. Simply by marrying a woman with property, even if she maintained control of it, a man could improve his position: husbands often borrowed money from their wives and used the enslaved people their wives inherited to cultivate the lands they bought with those loans. Legal petitions are on record in which women describe themselves as their husbands’ creditors and financiers. Many of these women did not accept the loss of their legal claims to the property they brought into their marriages. In fact, many married female petitioners described their slaves as property they still owned and controlled, considering their husbands’ control temporary—and as we shall see, the courts often agreed with them. Enslaved people also testified to the ways such ideas shaped marital relations in white households. Thus, in many respects, married women, their slaves, and their other assets made their husbands’ commercial endeavors possible and enabled slavery to thrive in ways it might not have without those women’s economic investments in the institution.