For Many White Women, Slaves Were Their Freedom
The compelling testimony of formerly enslaved people defies a gendered interpretation of power in the Deep South.
--
The plantation of the American South was the wealthy white girl’s schoolyard. ‘“Some persons are free and some are not — do you know that?’” a white child asked her enslaved chambermaid.
It was also the slave-owning woman’s marketplace. “She ‘was all time sellin’ [her slaves] for big prices atter she don trained ’em […]’” said a man of his former mistress.
And when emancipation came, the plantation was the slave-owning woman’s ruin. A “‘joyless future of probable ignominy, poverty, and want,’” predicted one female owner, imagining a future without the profits of slave labor.
In They Were Her Property, historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers delivers a cogent challenge to the sentimentality of wealthy white womanhood in the American South: Married, slave-owning women — the very same ones in fine silk, ready with a Bible verse in the popular imagination — were shrewd, independent investors in the peculiar institution. As such, they were consequential, often ruthless actors with public roles in the perpetuation of slavery and the growth of the nineteenth-century American economy.
To tell the stories of slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers draws principally on the testimony of formerly enslaved people collected by the Federal Writers’ Project, an undertaking of the Works Progress Administration. Between 1936 and 1938, the WPA paid out-of-work writers in seventeen states to interview people once held in slavery and record their stories. “No group spoke about […] women’s investments in slavery more often, or more powerfully, than the enslaved people subjected to their ownership and control,” writes Jones-Rogers.
Those testimonies join legal documents, personal correspondence, and newspaper ads in this paradigm-shifting construction of slave ownership in the American South.
From early childhood, girls in slave-owning families learned many of the violent expectations of the mistress-slave relationship firsthand. Brutal punishments were often exacted for an enslaved person’s failure to refer to the family’s children as “master” or “miss,” including — in the memory of one enslaved woman — a disciplinary beating at the hands of the child. “‘It didn’t matter whether the child was large or small, they always beat you ’til the blood ran down.’”
Such performances of superiority reinforced a hierarchy that served these girls well into adulthood as they were gifted or inherited enslaved people from their parents. Another formerly enslaved woman noted that a gift or bequest of an enslaved female was ‘“a kind of nest egg’” from parents to their daughters because she could ‘“breed slaves’” and multiply her value.
And ownership of those nest eggs was scrupulously guarded by those women from anyone who threatened it, including, and especially, their indebted husbands. Though the legal doctrine of coverture ruled the American South — depriving married women of legal personalities separate from their husbands — court documents, newspaper advertisements, and the testimonies of formerly enslaved people point to the widespread acknowledgment that women owned slaves in their own right, and they could execute legal instruments to maintain independent ownership within a marriage.
While the cultivation of cash crops seems like the obvious benefit of slave ownership to a white woman—cotton out, money in —Jones-Rogers spotlights a distinct commodity produced by enslaved women and widely coveted by white mistresses: breast milk. The demand for wet nurses, she explains, “created a largely invisible niche sector of the slave market that catered exclusively to white women.”
Whether it was for convenience (‘“[Breastfeeding] made her ‘a slave’ to her children,’” according to one white mother) or for aesthetics (‘“White women wouldn’t nurse their own babies cause it would make their breast fall,” said one formerly enslaved woman), many slave-owning women raised the next generation of masters on the nutritive products of enslaved women’s bodies. Compounding that cruelty is the reasonable and horrifying conclusion that many enslaved women conceived children as a result of sexual assault in order to continue lactating.
Jones-Rogers has built a commanding analysis of the overlooked, crucial voices of formerly enslaved people and, in so doing, exposed the unsparing power wielded by many white women in the American South. Her work is a timely reminder that political and economic phenomena — like election results, or human trafficking — deserve un-gendered unpacking. Oppression and exploitation aren’t the exclusive property of the masculine imagination.
They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
By Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Yale University Press
Hardcover, 320 pages, $30.00
