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

“And when we consider that the enslaved people that women owned before they married or acquired afterward helped make the nineteenth-century scale of southern cotton cultivation possible, the narrative of slavery, nineteenth-century markets, and capitalism as the domain of men becomes untenable.” 

Here, Jones-Rogers rejects the widely promoted understanding of white men as the primary or even sole contributors to the capitalistic growth of the American market. She places women at the center of this growth and attributes women as vital players in the southern cultivation of cotton, the institution of slavery, and the development of 19th century markets. For evidence of this thesis, Jones-Rogers looks to firsthand accounts that show women as active participants in buying enslaved people at slave markets and in devising brutal disciplinary strategies.

“For them, slavery was their freedom. They created freedom for themselves by actively engaging and investing in the economy of slavery and keeping African Americans in captivity.” 

Jones-Rogers refers to what slavery signified for slave-owning women. More than a way of life or tradition, slavery offered white women freedom from restrictive gender roles and empowered women to increase their personal wealth and, subsequently, their personal freedom. Through the subjugation of enslaved people, white women found a path towards greater independence separate from the wealth and control of their husbands.

“White southern girls grew up alongside the slaves their parents gave them. They cultivated relationships of control and, sometimes, love. The promise of slave ownership became an important element of their identities, something that would shape their relationships with their husbands and communities once they reached adulthood.” 

Slave ownership acted not just an occupation or method to obtain financial stability but also a part of a slave-owning woman’s identity. Despite the familiarity present in the relationships they cultivated with the enslaved people they inherited, these women ultimately thrived in their new identities as mistresses. Without slavery, these women lost a piece of their identities.

“Teaching enslaved children to call their owner’s offspring ‘Master’ or ‘Mistress’ also served to educate white slave-owning children about their difference from and superiority to all African Americans, regardless of age, and the deference that all African Americans had to show them.” 

Here, Jones-Rogers presents the power of language to shape systems of power and control. The language of master and mistress allowed white slave owners to reinforce racist ideas of white superiority. These power dynamics began early in the lives of both slave owners and enslaved people.

“All these observations enabled them to understand the chasm between the free and enslaved, between those seen as human merchandise and those seen as human beings, and ultimately, to acknowledge the security their whiteness afforded them.” 

By observing the normalized business of slavery from a young age, white slave-owning women digested an understanding of the differences between the free and the enslaved. These observations perpetuated the institution of slavery by teaching these young women to value the security they found in their whiteness and by dehumanizing the enslaved people they owned. In turn, this also reinforced the white supremacist hierarchy for the enslaved person, who saw that even white children were above all African Americans in this hierarchy.

“Marriage did not constitute civil death for these women. It marked another important life transition that allowed them to put the strategies of slave management and discipline that they learned as girls into practice and to increase their control over enslaved people.”

Jones-Rogers presents a divergence from the understanding of marriage as an institution that trapped white women in patriarchal systems. For slave-owning women, marriage offered them the opportunity to put into practice the lessons about control and ownership they had been taught from a young age. Slave-owning women were not victims to the control of their husbands but were powerful managers of the enslaved people they owned.

“Throughout the antebellum period, married women consistently asserted their rights to own and control human property without their husbands’ interference, and they exercised those rights as well.” 

Jones-Rogers reiterates the strength and independence of women in the antebellum South. Slave-owning women rejected the interference of their husbands and asserted their dominion over their human property. This was a pattern commonly seen and practiced in this time period.

“Yet women’s bills of complaints make it clear that they had their own reasons for taking their cases to chancery courts and appealing to the judges who presided over them for remedy. They sought to protect, acquire, or reclaim property by any means necessary, and if that meant pandering to judges who considered themselves de facto patriarchs, they were willing to do so.” 

Here, Jones-Rogers demonstrates the commitment of slave-owning women to maintain their control and ownership of what they considered their rightful property. These women adapted and pandered to maintain their independence and establish themselves as separate entities from their husbands. This commitment to the institution of slavery reflects how significant their role as slave owner was to their identity as a whole.

“Maria’s views about marriage and her conduct toward Elisha were the likely outcome of being raised by parents, particularly a father, who nurtured her independence and ensured that she would continue to exercise a certain legal and economic autonomy during her marriage and throughout her lifetime.” 

Jones-Rogers presents a personal example of the influence Southern families had on raising independent and knowledgeable young women who were able to exercise their power and control. This foundation of support and knowledge empowered these young women in their journeys of slave ownership. The development of white women in these roles was not independent but a part of a larger societal and familial system.

“As we shall see, other enslaved men and women recalled mistresses who meted out calculated, systematic, and rationalized violence and discipline, not as masters’ subordinates and surrogates but as slave owners in their own right who possessed the authority to do so.” 

Jones-Rogers introduces the topic of Chapter 3 clearly and presents her major claim that slave-owning women operated in calculated and violent ways to “discipline” their slaves. These actions were not isolated to white men. Slave-owning women were capable and calculated in their discipline of enslaved people. They were knowledgeable in the various management techniques and discipline styles promoted by slave owners and were assertive in their use of these techniques.

“Their status as slave owners granted them access to a community that was predicated upon the ownership of human beings and afforded them rights they did not possess in other realms of their lives.”

Here, Jones-Rogers discusses the importance placed upon white women’s identities as slave owners. Slave-owning women were offered a sense of independence and power that was withheld from them in other aspects of their lives. This presents a reasoning for why many slave-owning women struggled to adapt to life without slaves after the end of the Civil War. The loss of enslaved people equaled the loss of power.

“For them, the slave market was a mobile, spatially unbounded economic network that connected urban commercial districts to plantation estates and incorporated boardinghouses, rural pathways, urban streets, taverns, and coffee shops, as well as holding pens and auction houses.”

Jones-Rogers explains what the slave market was like from the perspective of formerly enslaved people. The mobile and expansive nature of the slave market allowed white women to participate more readily in the slave trade. By representing the inclusive nature of the slave market, Jones-Rogers proves that women were provided the opportunity to play an active role in the slave market.

“The slaveholding household was a place of coerced production and reproduction, racial and sexual exploitation, and physical and psychological violence.” 

Jones-Rogers does not provide a romanticized version of the institution of slavery. She states clearly and directly the coercion, exploitation, and violence that characterized slave ownership. By displaying the horrific nature of slavery, Jones-Rogers makes clear the role women played in preserving slavery as an institution in all its most brutal manifestations.

“They were crucial to the further commodification of enslaved women’s reproductive bodies, through the appropriation of their breast milk and the nutritive and maternal care they provided to white children.” 

Jones-Rogers directly attributes the commodification of enslaved women’s bodies to white slave-owning women. She clearly explains the ways white women appropriated the breast milk of enslaved women and used it for their own personal gain. The use of the word “crucial” elucidates the pivotal role white women played in the institution of slavery and the selfish use of African American women’s bodies throughout history.

“Women were key to defining the contours of this market because they were ultimately responsible for deciding which wet nurses would best serve their infants’ needs; they were the primary hirers and the only laborers.” 

By exploring the uniquely female market of wet nursing, Jones-Rogers reveals that white women did not merely adopt the slavery practices of white men but cultivated markets of their own. With little interest in or knowledge of rearing infants, men played little to no role in this aspect of slavery. This serves the author’s larger argument of the ways in which white women left an indelible mark on the institution of slavery.

“While from today’s perspective we might have assumed that the culture of mourning would inevitably lead white mothers to commiserate with enslaved women who lost their children or were separated from their infants, contemporary evidence makes it clear that women who employed wet nurses often chose to ignore enslaved women’s expressions of maternal grief.” 

Jones-Rogers illustrates the self-centered cruelty of white female slave ownership. Jones-Rogers’s use of the word “chose” exemplifies the power and conscious choice made by slave-owning women to dehumanize enslaved women, even in the depths of their maternal grief. By showing how white women opted to disregard the grief of enslaved women, Jones-Rogers confronts the truth of their callousness.

“Women do appear in these histories, yet rarely does one find them among the ranks of ‘slavery’s entrepreneurs.’ Instead, women often appear as mere tag-alongs.” 

Throughout her text, Jones-Rogers criticizes the historical representations of slavery and slave-owning women. She acknowledges the flaws in these historical representations in the way they victimized white women and ignored the active role they took in the preservation of slavery. This criticism serves as one of the major themes of Jones-Rogers’s work as she unveils the powerful reality of female slave ownership.

“The woman was not repulsed or disgusted at the sight of an enslaved mother being sold with her children, even though she was a mother herself. Her gender and motherhood did nothing to compel her to sympathize with the enslaved woman’s plight.”

Jones-Rogers again highlights the dehumanization of enslaved women. Here, Jones-Rogers offers common understandings of womanhood and motherhood as points of contrast to the indifference and apathy seen in many slave-owning women. Jones-Rogers offers the harrowing visual of a mother being sold with her children as a point of empathy for the reader.

“It robbed them of their primary source of personal wealth by redefining enslaved African Americans as people, not property; placed them in positions of economic dependency; and forced them to establish restrictive relationships with those who still had financial resources, in order to survive.” 

Jones-Rogers chronicles the struggles of slave-owning women to adapt to life after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Jones-Rogers explores the impact of these changes on white women who were forced to see their former slaves as people, became dependent on others for survival, and placed them in restrictive relationships of diminished power. This was in stark contrast to the power, independence, and financial freedom slave-owning women experienced in the antebellum south.

“For them, the value ascribed to the people they owned and the labor those people performed constituted their only means of survival. Reclaiming their slaves was, they believed, a matter of life and death, and when Union soldiers ‘persuaded off’ their slaves or when enslaved people ran away, these events marked the beginning of their financial ruin.” 

Jones-Rogers captures the desperation of former slave-owning women who attempted to cling to their former slaves for survival. By classifying this as a matter of life and death, Jones-Rogers depicts the magnitude of these struggles in the post-Civil War south. For these former slave owners, the loss of their enslaved people equaled total destruction.

“These women fought their own battles for the preservation of slavery. They constructed their own battlefields, scenes of conflict and violence that were often located within the boundaries of their plantations and estates, but also moved beyond them. They took their fight to Union encampments and contraband camps, and into southern courtrooms.” 

Jones-Rogers describes how former slave-owning women attempted to fight for their properties in the transition period after the Civil War. She compares these fights to the battles fought by men in the Civil War. This comparison demonstrates the severity of these fights for ownership over their former slaves and properties.

“Deeming themselves entitled to the bodies and labor of freed children and adolescents, former slave-owning women routinely exploited the chaotic familial circumstances that slavery, antebellum migration, the war, and refugeeing had brought about in order to extend their access to these young people’s labor.” 

Jones-Rogers explores the continued exploitation of African Americans at the hands of former slave-owning women. She addresses the entitlement which classified this exploitation and bolstered the coercive actions of these women. The use of the word routinely expresses the consistent patterns of exploitation that characterized the actions of slave-owning women throughout the 19th century.

“When historians write about white southern women’s experiences during the Civil War and after, they tend to foreground their human loss, rather than the direct, economic losses that these women suffered. Certainly they grieved for lost family and friends. And they suffered from the loss of slaves their husbands and male kin owned. But the applications of former slave-owning women for pardon and amnesty make it clear that losing the enslaved people they owned in their own right was no small part of the trauma wrought by the war.” 

Jones-Rogers confronts the historical representations of white southern women who are often depicted within the context of loss and grief in the Civil War. Jones-Rogers offers a clear understanding of the economic factors that contributed to the suffering experienced by white southern women in this time period. This aligns with Jones-Rogers’s conclusion that women were invested in the institution of slavery for economic reasons primarily.