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

Jones-Rogers begins Chapter 8 with her examination of an 1865 letter written by Eva Jones, a former slave-owning woman from Georgia, who laments over the abolition of slavery. In the letter, Jones writes that, “slavery is entirely abolished—a most unprecedented robbery, and most unwise policy” (181). Jones’s description of emancipation as a robbery serves as the inspiration for the title of Chapter 8.

In her final chapter, Jones investigates the aftermath of the Civil War and economic effects of abolition on white slave-owning women. Jones-Rogers explains that many of these women, in the face of poverty and starvation, turned to new options: either attempting to force formerly enslaved people to continue working under them or adapting “old management methods to accommodate new labor arrangements” (183).

Jones-Rogers chronicles the joy expressed by the newly freed enslaved people and the despair that overwhelmed their former owners. These slave-owning women struggled to adapt to a new reality in which slavery, so core to their identities, no longer existed. Many of these women regretted not selling their slaves earlier in preparation for a world without slavery. Others resisted emancipation and promoted the popular belief that African Americans did not possess the moral or intellectual ability to take care of themselves.