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

Chapter 1 begins with a testimony about a young white slave owner’s daughter. Despite her “intense bond” with the enslaved woman named Fanny who cares for her, three-year-old Lizzie Anna Burwell grows displeased with her caregiver and demands her father cut the woman’s ears off and acquire a new maid. Jones-Rogers uses this testimony to discuss the ways in which young children like Lizzie learned how to be slave owners by closely observing and imitating the actions of their parents.

Jones-Rogers details how young daughters received enslaved men, women, and children from their parents as gifts on birthdays and other occasions, like baptisms and holidays, or often for no special reason. Many of these women also inherited enslaved people. Jones-Rogers argues that this common practice led women to “value the crucial ties between slave ownership and autonomous, stable financial futures” (2). These various factors led slave ownership to become a part of their identity.

Jones-Rogers explains the concept of primogeniture, in which all of a family’s property is left to the oldest son. Americans rejected primogeniture as a rebuke to the practices of the British aristocracy which they fought to escape during the American Revolution. This rejection of primogeniture often resulted in the transfer of slave ownership to the daughters of slave-owning families. Jones-Rogers breaks down how these giftings would continue throughout a young woman’s adolescence, often “in ritualized affairs that helped mold their young daughters’ development as slave owners from early on” (3). These rituals and the power granted to young mistresses over their enslaved people began the process of instruction in ownership and control from a young age. Daughters could assume disciplinary roles with respect to enslaved people very early in life.

Naming practices demonstrate one such lesson in ownership and control. Slave-owners often named enslaved people after their young children as a sign of ownership and required enslaved children to address their children as Master and Mistress even from infancy as a sign of respect. If enslaved people did not adhere to these practices, they were beaten, sometimes even by the children themselves. Jones-Rogers explores the ways in which these naming practices perpetuated the institution of slavery by giving children practice at serving as brutal masters and mistresses and by reinforcing the superiority of these children over the enslaved people they owned.

Slave owners’ daughters actively engaged in a selection process to determine which enslaved people should serve them. As children, these women generally considered enslaved children as playmates, but as they matured into adulthood, they began to think of enslaved people as property that would follow them into their marriages and motherhood. To prepare for this transition into adulthood and slave ownership, slave owners’ daughters were taught various management and disciplinary tactics. They witnessed, learned about, and participated in the brutality of slave discipline practiced by their fathers.

Jones-Rogers recounts the case State of Georgia v. Green Martin, which discussed the death of an enslaved boy named Alfred who was beaten to death by his master Green Martin and his master’s son Godfrey. Alfred was killed for disrespecting Godfrey and suffered beatings for three straight hours. Jones-Rogers explores the role Godfrey Martin’s three daughters played in Alfred’s death and their father’s trial. Although in most cases slave owners were legally allowed to punish their slaves with whatever brutality they saw fit, even to death, slave owners could face punishment if they were found to discipline their slaves with “malice.”

Despite witnessing the brutal beating and death of Alfred, the Martin sisters did not report their father and brother for their murder. Instead, their father was reported by someone else in his community. Rogers poses the following questions: “Why did the Martin girls choose to keep out of the affair? Was it fear of the Martin men?” (9). When asked why they did not intervene, the sisters replied that they considered the Martin men’s behavior unexceptional and that Alfred deserved the beating. Jones-Rogers concludes that “they exhibited a level of indifference to Alfred’s suffering that many slave owners and their employees found necessary in their interactions with and control of enslaved people” (10). Discussing the impact of witnessing such violence, Jones-Rogers concludes that, in response, slave owners’ daughters could react in one of three ways: avoid violence altogether, use less violent disciplinary tactics, or adopt their fathers’ and brothers’ abject brutality in doling out punishment.

Jones-Rogers lists examples of women who chose to embrace the brutality of their fathers. Through these examples, she posits “that there was no inherent chasm between violence and ladyhood in everyday life, even in the eyes of white patriarchs” (10). Women maintained their ladylike reputations even while perpetuating and participating in acts of violence against enslaved people. Even in motherhood, white slave-owning women taught their daughters and sons how to wield power over enslaved people. Sometimes, mothers and daughters punished enslaved people together as a family, with mothers sometimes rebuking their children for going too far. They did so under the rationale that punishment should be used in a way that maximizes the enslaved person’s long-term usefulness.

Jones-Rogers details how young women also learned “proper slave-management techniques” from publications like the Rose Bud, a weekly newspaper. Within the Rose Bud, later renamed the Southern Rose, editor Caroline Gilman would criticize abolitionist literature and teach young readers to respond to political arguments against slavery. Publications like Gilman’s were supplements to the lessons young women received from their slave-owning parents.

The author then explores how young white southerners were encouraged and empowered to exercise power over enslaved people who did not even belong to them. She discusses the firsthand account of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead who observes a young white girl threatening an elderly enslaved man. Jones-Rogers concludes from this example that such instances emboldened young white women and taught them “important lessons about the power of whiteness and its pricelessness” (16).

Jones-Rogers writes that there is some evidence showing caring relationships between young owners and their enslaved people. However, this evidence should be approached with care and skepticism, and these relationships cannot be viewed without taking into account the power structures of white supremacy and subjugation of enslaved people. The author posits that slave owners did not just acquire wealth by owning enslaved people but also “a new identity” (17). This slave owner identity persisted through generations as women bequeathed enslaved people to younger generations of women. They did so to ensure young women’s financial security regardless of their husband’s property and holdings.

According to historical research, these women often inherited female enslaved people because they could give birth to new children, adding to and replenishing the daughters’ total slave holdings. White southerners began to view enslaved females of childbearing age “as sound investments that would augment their wealth with little effort or additional expense” (20-21). Parents also viewed enslaved women to be more beneficial to their daughters as they could assist with domestic duties; they deduced that enslaved men might be co-opted by their daughters’ husbands. From a legal standpoint, many colonies allowed slave owners to own the offspring of enslaved women, no matter who was the father.

Jones-Rogers describes how female slave owners would constantly calculate the value of the enslaved women and children they owned, display the enslaved children for guests, and force enslaved people to engage in sexual relations with one another to produce more children. When enslaved women did not produce children, they faced beatings at the hands of their owners. Jones-Rogers’s research shows that “a host of environmental and physiological factors could have interfered with an enslaved woman’s capacity to reproduce” (23). To increase the likelihood of successful pregnancies and births, white slave-owning women eventually turned to creating better living and working conditions to promote more viable pregnancies and infants. Jones-Rogers argues that these seemingly altruistic changes originated from white slave-owning women’s desire to protect their investments.