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

Chapter 4 begins with a look at the slave market. Jones-Rogers pushes back against the common understanding of the slave market promoted by historians who saw it as a masculine arena which excluded white women. She claims that the slave market extended into the home life of slave-owning families and that women actively participated in it.

Using the testimony of formerly enslaved people, Jones-Rogers presents a definition of the slave market as “a mobile, spatially unbounded economic network that connected urban commercial districts to plantation estates” (82). In addition to participating in the traditional zones of the slave market, like the auction block, white women and girls witnessed the same violence at home, where enslaved people were also sold and exchanged in more informal transactions with friends or acquaintances. Jones-Rogers also clarifies that both male and female slave owners hired other women to serve as proxies in slave marketplaces.

These proxies were known as factors who would handle the business affairs of planters that would normally require them to travel away from home. These relationships with factors demanded an immense measure of trust, and therefore many slave-owning women appointed family and friends to serve in these roles. Jones-Rogers comments on the collaborative nature of slave sales between individuals who were bound to each other in various ways.