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

Jones-Rogers begins her introduction with a retelling of New York Times editor James Redpath’s 1859 explanation for why white women opposed the emancipation of enslaved people in the antebellum South. Redpath writes of the indoctrination of these women who were born and surrounded by pro-slavery sentiment. Redpath argues that these Southern white women were unaware of slavery’s most horrifying details; he believes that, if these women knew of the true atrocities of slavery, they would join the movement to abolish it. However, Jones-Rogers argues that “Redpath’s assumptions represented a commonly held patriarchal view” (10). In contrast, Jones-Rogers states her claim clearly: that white women played an active role in and profited from the owning of enslaved people.

Jones-Rogers presents a specific example of a white female slave owner when she introduces Martha Gibbs, who is described by one of her former enslaved people Litt Young as “a ‘big, rich Irishwoman’ who ‘warn’t scared of no man’” (x). Jones-Rogers reports how Gibbs kidnapped the people she enslaved after the Civil War. Despite their freedom, Gibbs kept these legally free but still enslaved individuals under her control for a year after the war’s end. Jones-Rogers then confronts how little scholarly attention is paid to women like Gibbs.