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

Chapter 3 commences with a look into the turbulent marriage of Maria and Elisha Betts. The Bettses struggled to find common ground around the treatment and authority over the enslaved people inherited by Maria. While Elisha acknowledged Maria’s legal rights of ownership, he frequently complained about Maria’s outright refusal to let Elisha discipline her enslaved people however he wanted. This discord in their relationship ultimately led to Elisha’s abandonment of Maria and her pursuit of a divorce.

Jones-Rogers goes on to explore the management and discipline of enslaved people under the ownership of slave-owning women. Although enslaved people rarely referred to female owners as “master,” they described them as formidable disciplinarians who behaved similarly to male slave owners in many ways. Through her examination of firsthand accounts, Jones-Rogers learned “that mastery did not always involve brute strength or physically violent methods of discipline” (60). Despite these accounts, historians claimed that women, without the physical strength to overpower an enslaved person into submission, cannot be classified as “masters” in the same sense as their male counterparts. However, Jones-Rogers cites research that contradicts historians’ attempts to differentiate between the management styles of slave-owning men and women.

Jones-Rogers provides specific personal examples of the various ways “married women understood, articulated, and asserted their power as slave owners and masters” (64). These examples demonstrate how slave owning women would confront their husbands and hired overseers, sometimes even in the middle of a beating, to reinforce their roles as owner and master. These mistresses were empowered by “legal localism,” a phenomenon that demonstrated how community customs, more than state legislation and enforcement, dictated how laws were implemented and interpreted at the local level. Jones-Rogers recounts the case of one slave-owning woman named Mrs. Harris who threatened to murder an overseer if he continued striking her enslaved person Despite the legality of the overseer’s actions, he knew that individuals in Mrs. Harris’s community would take her side over his.

Yet Jones-Rogers clarifies that many slave-owning women did little to protect their enslaved people from severe punishment. Testimonies of formerly enslaved people confirm the similarities between how men and women managed their human property. Like slave-owning men, slave-owning women adopted the practice of allowing 24 hours to pass between the discovery of an act of perceived disobedience and the punishment to avoid inflicting punishment while “in a passion” (68). This was considered “good slave management” (68). Both slave-owning men and women also often delegated the task of inflicting punishment on enslaved people to overseers, thereby avoiding the “dark taint” of the men who performed these brutal acts of punishment. Jones-Rogers argues that distancing themselves from these violent punishments allowed slave owners “to maintain their reputations as members of the southern gentility while preserving their authority as slave owners and employers of lower-class white southerners” (70).

Jones-Rogers explores how this “regime of slavery” was able to sustain itself (70). Jones-Rogers states it is the “herterarchical” nature of society that sustained this regime. While a hierarchy might have granted white men all power and authority, in a heterarchy power is shared and distributed both vertically and horizontally. Firsthand accounts describe slave-owning husbands who were so disturbed by their wives’ violent treatment of their enslaved people that they intervened. Some examples of this violence include hitting enslaved people with thorn-covered branches and forced starvation.

Jones-Rogers highlights the ways in which white slave-owning women were able to exculpate themselves from guilt because their “crimes against their slaves remained confined within their households, and more often than not enslaved people were the only witnesses” (78). Convictions often relied upon the community’s opinion of the killing and legal constraints that were meant not to protect enslaved people but to protect those who would inherit that property upon the slave owner’s death. As enslaved people were forbidden from testifying against white people in the South, these women were able to escape conviction. Jones-Rogers discusses the “counterproductive” nature of these killings as they appeared to conflict with the women’s financial interests. Yet she lists the various benefits white women experienced from these violent killings. Such acts of violence against enslaved people “affirmed a slave-owning woman’s power” and solidified a “broader social order” (79).

Jones-Rogers counters the gendered, patriarchal claim that many slave-owning women were exonerated in the courts because they were female. Instead, Jones-Rogers argues that leniency from judges was consistent towards both slave-owning men and women, and that most judges, given that they owned enslaved people themselves, empathized with defendants.