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

Jones-Rogers looks into the marriage and arrangements of Sarah Davis and her husband John Bethea. Under the legal doctrine of coverture, the enslaved people owned by Sarah Davis fell under the control and ownership of her husband. As a “feme covert,” Sarah technically lost legal ownership of her enslaved people upon her marriage to John. In reality, however, according to the firsthand accounts of enslaved people owned by her, Sarah Davis maintained control of her enslaved people throughout her marriage. Jones-Rogers remarks that, despite this departure from clear legal doctrine, Sarah Davis’s circumstances were normal and unexceptional for the times in which she lived. Using her research on firsthand accounts documented by the Federal Writers’ Project, the author claims that “these women challenged their male kinfolks’ alleged power to control their property, human and otherwise” (27).

While some women struggled under the doctrine of coverture, Jones-Rogers documents others who circumvented these legal constraints. She recounts examples of how married women’s legal ownership of enslaved people was often acknowledged by those outside their household. The author points out the flaws in coverture as a legal doctrine that relied upon perfect conditions that were rarely met. She also describes how legislators were aware that it was problematic for women to cede total control of their property to husbands and often offered women protections under the doctrine of coverture (29). Many slave-owning families took steps to protect their daughters, especially from greedy suitors who hoped to benefit from the inheritance of their wives. According to Jones-Rogers, many of these women warned each other about suspicious suitors who were only after their property, enslaved people included.

One of the main ways a woman was protected under coverture was through the formulation of what modern readers would recognize as a prenuptial agreement, referred to then as an antenuptial contract. While the details of these trust deeds differed for each woman, they each “forbade their present and future husbands from having any control over their property” (31). The gift of an enslaved woman of childbearing age from parents to a child was like a “nest egg,” writes Jones-Rogers. (31).

Slave-owning women navigated proposals of marriage carefully and considered whether to trust their prospective husbands’ claims of financial security and trust. Given future husbands’ opposition to marriage contracts, some women turned to ultimatums to ensure the protection of their inherited property and assets. Slave-owning widows were often cautious enough to avoid repeating any failure from their first marriages to protect their properties or assets. In such cases, women relied upon postnuptial agreements that established separate estates. In Louisiana, women sometimes sued their husbands for separation of property, which allowed women, under certain circumstances, to keep her property legally separate from her husband’s. These notices of separation were important as “they served to alert the couple’s community and their creditors about the change in the wife’s legal status and her newly expanded control over her property” (35).

Jones-Rogers provides firsthand accounts of “altercations between husbands and wives who owned enslaved people. She disputes the picture of “the gendered, hierarchical organization of nineteenth-century households that most historians describe” (37). She also provides a counterclaim to some historians’ argument enslaved people would not be privy to their owners’ property rights and the legal disputes concerning them. Jones-Rogers offers the example of Winney, an enslaved woman who challenged the heirs of her deceased mistress, Elizabeth Stout Whitehead. Through her service, Winney became aware of a stipulation in her mistress’s marriage contract that stated she was to be freed when Elizabeth died. After providing witness corroboration from a minister and one of Elizabeth Stout Whitehead’s heirs, Winney ultimately gained her freedom.

Jones-Rogers explores the litigious nature of white slave-owning women, who took legal action against their husbands when they sought to claim property rights to which they were not entitled. This litigious nature arose from a defensive protection of what they considered their property and not from a desire to restore the peace, as proffered by historian Laura Edwards. Jones-Rogers explores the marital conflicts that arose from these women’s pursuits of independence, outlining how some husbands used lies and domestic violence to seize control of wives’ property. When unable to find redress in common law courts, women turned to chancery courts, which acknowledged married women as individuals distinct from their husbands. Through chancery courts, women found protection from the failures of coverture and common law, which left them vulnerable to the financial indiscretions of their husbands. When filing petitions in chancery courts, women appointed trustees to represent them.

There is evidence that women did not always delegate this authority as a trustee to men, often calling on female family members for these roles. Despite opening “their households to intense public scrutiny, laying out their husbands’ fiscal mismanagement, commercial failures, and insolvency for public view,” the majority of women who pursued separation remained married to their husbands (54).