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

Also known as “courts of equity,” chancery courts aided women in their attempts to manage and control their property on their own. Originating in 14th century England, chancery courts differed from common law courts and often “treated married women as distinct persons, not as individuals joined in unity with their husbands” (45). Slave-owning women would rely on chancery courts to defend their property. Jones-Rogers lists multiple examples of slave-owning women who successfully navigated chancery courts.

Legal localism is the idea that local level law influences the communal customs of a community much more than state level laws do. This concept protected slave-owning women from the repercussions of not following the legal restrictions set by state level laws on their ownership of enslaved people. The enforcement of these laws was determined by the local laws and would often allow slave-owning women to continue taking ownership of their slaves after their marriage ended, either through divorce or the husband’s death.

As opposed to a hierarchy, a heterarchy shares power not only vertically but also horizontally. While a hierarchy may have established white men at the top with power only distributed vertically, in a heterarchy power is shared across certain divisions like sex and gender. Jones-Rogers presents evidence of heterarchies in 19th century southern households where “slave-owning couples owned enslaved people independent of each other” (71). This was often referred to as “double mastery” (71). The existence of heterarchies in this time period proves that slave-owning women were able to exert their power over their inherited slaves and did not relinquish their ownership to their husbands.