American History Hit - White Women Slave Owners

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

Of all of the people enslaved in the southern United States over time, 40% of them were owned by women. For example, when she married George Washington in 1759, Martha Washington was herself the enslaver of 84 people.So why has the trading and enslaving of people been commonly perceived as a male domain? Why, in fact, were many white women so entrenched in this trade in human lives?In this episode, Don is joined by Dan David Prize Winner, Stephanie Jones Rogers. Stephanie has been exploring the testimonies of these people formerly enslaved by women to find out more about their experiences.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Siobhan Dale. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Whether it's novels, movies, or in the popular imagination, the usual stereotype of an enslaver in pre-Civil War America is certainly a male. Today, we're going to find out just how wrong this presumption really is.

White women of that era not only owned enslaved people, but profited from them. For many, it was a direct and efficient route to economic empowerment. And as such, those same women would have opposed the abolition of slavery to the strongest possible. degree. Hello, this is American History Hit, and I'm Don Wildman. Welcome and thanks for listening. The Institution of Slavery in America is historically considered a thoroughly male domain, the purview of, say, patrician plantation owners who manage their lands and their enslaved labor force, has legal holdings, like the rest of everything else in that patriarchal society. And always important to remember, prior to the 19th century, this was in the north as well as

the south. But is a surprising fact to many, including myself, that over time, some 40% of the enslaved population in the South was owned by white women. In an era, when American women otherwise operated without much agency or independence, they were utterly reliant, bound to their husbands or fathers in every legal realm, including the custody of the children they'd born. But when it came to the buying and selling of enslaved human beings, white women had full rights to do as they wished. Dr. Stephanie Jones-Rogers is an associate professor of history at the University of California,

Berkeley, whose award-winning book, They Were Her Property, White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, examines this systematic aberration and the motivations behind it, how this double standard reality advantaged both white men and women over generations and centuries. Greetings, Stephanie. Thanks for joining us on American History Hit. Thank you so much for having me, darn.

I hope I spelled that out correctly. I mean, it's a very fine sort of subtle reality we're talking about. In a society in which women rank second to men in every regard, Can't vote, can't hold political office, barred from higher learning, job choices limited, obviously, you name it. In marriage, they are the property of their husbands, as are the children they've born. Yet somehow women in the South have every right to enslave to buy, sell, and trade human beings. How did this weird duality come to pass? So I think, you know, one of the things that you mentioned, the fact that this is an aberration, is an interesting way to

kind of conceptualize it because, you know, what I found in my own research is that, while I, many historians have framed it in that way, have framed women's participation in the institution of slavery, particularly the economic dimensions of the institution of slavery as an aborician. They were, in fact, quite common for women to own enslaved people. And I think the reason why it was quite common for women, particularly white women, to own enslaved people, is because this was an institution that bound this country together, bound the colonies together, both north and south together. It was an institution that undergirded, particularly the southern economy, but also the northern economy. And women were half of the population. And it was important to have that half of the

population buy into this system that bound Americans, white Americans together. So those men, primarily men who established the institution, who helped to sustain the institution and perpetuate the institution, look to women, look to white women to support and sustain that institution as well. So it was fundamental to them, through their eyes, to have women buy into this institution because it was absolutely fundamental to the nation. So we're talking about a kind of equality in an unequal society otherwise. I mean, there were laws passed that guaranteed this equality where enslavement was concerned. I'm thinking specifically of South Carolina, right? There was no difference between a male master and a female guaranteed rights. Why did they need to institutionalize

it like that? Why did they need to guarantee it? Well, I think what those laws show is that there was a kind of constant conscious thinking and rethinking and conceptualizing the institution, thinking about the fragility of the institution, the vulnerabilities of the institution. And one of the reasons why those laws were necessary was to construct that institution in a way that seemed unassailable, that made it seem like it was unassailable. By writing women into the laws, it basically shows us that women were, again, really fundamental to this institution and that those who passed the laws saw them that way. So I think in large part what you see is this working out of the institution through the laws and the vision that these all-male legislators saw women as part of that vision. They ensure that women were a part of that vision by writing them

into the laws. It's a distinction or an exception to the rule that I really want to underscore at the outset here. In every other regard, women are without agency. In this specific regard, they have full agency. That speaks to the consciousness of enslavement in the South, the design of it that a really strategic move was made to bring women under this umbrella of this institution. All of this flies in the face of anything that might be shrugged off about this particular period of time, you know, in this kind of behavior and this sort of system. It's really calculated. That's right.

And I think what's really important to recognize is that, you know, these male legislators that I mentioned who wrote these women into the laws in very, very particular ways that granted them rights and access to slave ownership and to enslaved property. They were being very selfish when they passed these laws. They weren't necessarily thinking about women's equality or women's legal rights. What they were really thinking about was the fact that, you know, as fathers, they were often passing this property and also land sometimes over to their daughters through inheritance at pivotal moments in their lives like marriage. And so what they are thinking of is these husbands, you know, getting their hands on this property and squandering this

property, losing this property, this family property. So these male legislators, they have that in mind first. But what I wanted to show in the book is that while male legislators were thinking selfishly about their property and they're passing this family property onto their daughters, their daughters had a particular vision of what they wanted to do with this property too. So they exploited those laws. They exploited those rights that access to enslaved property to benefit themselves. So, you know, there are two objectives here, one on the part of male male legislators who are often fathers and grandfathers and uncles passing property onto female relatives. And there are also those female relatives that have a vision for what they want to do with that property in mind. How interesting. I want to talk about exactly that in just a

moment, but I just want to drive this point home about the chess game that's being played. I mean, so commonly we hear correctly so about the fugitive slave law 1850. The way this institution is set up, they are looking at any way to preserve this right to continue this practice. And they're hoping into the Western states as well. But when they make these laws, when they pass these laws, it's all about protecting this incredibly important institution to them, this valuable labor force that they rely on to make this economy thrive. Your point that you're making just a moment ago is about the economic purchase that this gives to women, which is also incredibly rare and so interesting. It gives them a place in the economy that otherwise had excluded them.

But what was unique about this kind of ownership? Why does such an exception need to be made? Well, one of the reasons why this exception need to be made is because there were laws that constrained, significantly constrained women's ability to own property, particularly if they were married. There was a legal doctrine, a series of laws that are referred to as coverture. and under coverature when a woman who owned property or who earned wages got married, all of those wages, all of that property became her husband under this system of coverage.

And because of this, there were all of these legal constraints that made it almost impossible for women to own various forms of property and to retain possession of their wages. But what I show in the book is that there are all of these legal instruments, these loopholes that women learn about and use and exercise. exploit in order to circumvent the constraints of coverature, particularly amongst married women and widowed women who then decide to remarry. So they find ways around these laws that constrain them, these systems of law that constrain them. And those loopholes, and what I think is really interesting, is those loopholes are kind of built into the system, again, in order to get by in from this half of the population that seems, you know, in all other ways and all other aspects of their lives to be legally and economically constrained. It's a form of wealth. I mean, we're talking about

these plantations and these women would have owned dozens of enslaved people. I mean, when we're talking about these plantations specifically, we're talking about hundreds of enslaved people. That translates into massive amounts of wealth, which can then be passed on intergenerationalally. And if you're a woman who otherwise doesn't have any of that personal wealth accounted for elsewhere in her life. In a sense, this can be looked at in the way of a dowry and that kind of, you know, stuff that's done in those days. And this gives a lot of power. So we're not only talking about wealth, but we're also talking about power and sort of balancing out that relationship between men and women in the South. That's right. I mean, what I thought was really interesting that I wanted to foreground

in this book was the voices of formerly enslaved people and what they had to say about the white women who own them. But they would often say is that women were often the individuals who brought the majority, if not all of the property, into the marriage. So all of the enslaved people belonged to the wife. And the wife would bring those enslaved people into the marriage. And they would also own, of course, other forms of property. But their primary form of property ownership was an enslaved people. And so they used that property to exploit the circumstances that came with property ownership. They would be able to dictate how, their husbands would be able to engage with those enslaved people, whether they'd be able to punish

them or not, whether they could sell them or not, whether they could use them to till land that they may have owned. So women would often levy those enslaved people against the odds, you know, the constraints that they would ordinarily face if they didn't come into their marriages with property. And so what I also suggest in the book, too, is that when we talk about this system of American capitalism, and we talk about the growth of American capitalism, women are rarely a part of that story. But when we look at women who owned enslaved people, and we know that enslaved people were fundamental

to the growth of American capitalism in large part because of the fundamental role that they played in cotton cultivation, sugar cultivation, etc., we then have to center women in that story too because women are bringing these enslaved people into their marriages. They are the cultivators of the soil. They are fundamental to the expansion of slavery

and they are thus fundamental to the growth of American capitalism. So they are critical to a part of the American story that they've often been written out of or excluded from. Probably to their advantage, historically speaking, and suddenly your book is bringing that into the stark light. One very uncomfortable reality is our own founding father, George Washington, his wife, Martha, was the owner of a great deal of enslaved people. That's right. So Martha Washington owned many, many enslaved people. and towards the end of George Washington's life when he wrote his will, he had basically acquired the labor of those enslaved people through that legal doctrine of coverage that I referred to earlier in the podcast. So George Washington wrote into his will that upon Martha Washington's death, those enslaved people would be freed. And so there was this fear that Martha Washington had about the implications of that provision in the will, whether these enslaved people would accelerate the timeline for her death or not.

So there was concern about that. What was the nature of her fear exactly? What do you mean? Well, she feared that those enslaved people would cause her untimely death in order to accelerate the timeline for their own freedom. So there was fear about that. Interesting. George ends up dying before her. Am I right?

That's right. So all of his stipulations in his own state are not followed. That's one of the big interesting aftermaths of his otherwise proud life. Where did you first discover this? Because I'm a man of a certain age who has never heard this before, which is a great. extraordinary. Where did this reveal itself to you? So as a graduate student, I was, you know, in the throes of preparing for these major examinations where we have to read, you know, hundreds of books to prepare for it. And I was reading the scholarship in African American

history and I was reading this scholarship in white Southern women's history. And those bodies of scholarship seem to be saying something very different about white women's economic investments in the institution of slavery. By that I mean the buying and selling of enslaved people and the hiring of enslaved people. And so I was really interested in why they seemed to be saying something very different about white women's relationships to the institution of slavery and particularly their economic investments in the institution of slavery. And I noticed that they used different sources, largely different sources.

So those scholars who focused on the experiences of African Americans in slavery were using this wonderful collection, this very rich collection of interviews that the federal government had conducted with formal. enslaved people in the 1930s and 1940s. And so I took my cue from those scholars and wondered, you know, because what they were saying is that formerly enslaved people talked about white women owning them, white women selling them, buying them, hiring them out all the time. And so I thought that was really interesting because scholars of white Southern women were saying the complete opposite in large part. They were talking about white women's indirect relationships to the

institution of slavery, that they didn't, you know, buy and sell enslaved people, you know, in the same ways that white men did, et cetera, et cetera. So I took my cues from the scholars of African American history and I looked at those interviews more closely and found that they were, in fact, right, that in these interviews that the federal government conducted with formerly enslaved people, they talked about white slave-owning women all the time. They talked about how formerly enslaved women and men would talk about how slave-owning women would often inherit them when they were little girls, when they were even infants, and talked about these relationships that white women developed over time to the institution of slavery. So fundamental were these relationships,

they argued that white women's actual identities as Southern women were tied to the institution of slavery, to the possibility of slave ownership, to the promise of slave ownership, and to the eventuality of slave ownership. So I wanted to take those assertions seriously, that testimony seriously. And I wanted to center that testimony in this book. And so that's what I did. I took my cues from those formerly enslaved people and then kind of worked my way out from there and used other sources that historians traditionally use like legal records and financial documents, military correspondence, et cetera. It is such a subtle reality, but it's such a fundamental one, isn't it? I mean, it's really a deep part of the infrastructure of this institution and how it

maintains itself over hundreds of years. If you have the women of the house, in charge of this thing, then they're able to carry it on through the generation. They're calling the shots, essentially. And that just seals it up even more certainly than it's already been done, you know, if it was just men running the show. That's fascinating. Yeah, one of the things that I discovered through the book that I was most surprised by was, you know, there's conscientious effort on the part of women to invest in the institution of slavery.

They have to overcome more obstacles than white men do in order. to participate in this institution, to invest in this institution. And what that showed to me, what that underscored to me, was that sometimes these women were even more deeply invested in the institution of slavery than white men were. Because white men didn't have to jump through the hoops that white women did in order to own enslaved people and to keep that property in their hands. So what I showed in the book was that these women were often far more deeply invested in an institution of slavery than white men were. It's always shown, you know, in the quaint ways of a going with the wind or that sort of apologist media that the domestic side of all of this is relationships

and they're raised by enslaved people and it's all this sort of emotional quality to it all. This all flies in the face of that. There's a calculated measure to this that has to do with economics and finances, period. That's right. I mean, this is fundamental to the economic system of the nation, particularly of the South. Enslaved people are one of the primary forms of wealth, one of the most significant forms of wealth in the southern United States. And so women want a part of it. They want a piece of it. And they get it.

Not only do they get it, they hold on to it and they exploit it. Sometimes they're able to profit from the institution of slavery. They see it as a business. Some of them see it as a personal investment, but many others see it as a mode of profit means by which they can profit and augment their wealth. And they take every opportunity to do that. Stephanie, so are we talking about pre-19th century here, were these legalities in which female ownership of enslaved people existed legally on the books?

Does that predate the 19th century? Are we talking about 1700s here? Absolutely. So, you know, I've found women owning enslaved people in the 1600s as early as the 1600s. And the legal system greatly benefited those women as well. So those laws that are being implemented in the 1600s and especially the 1700s. The 1700s is when you actually see, you know, the term mistress appear in the law. the laws of colonies like Virginia and South Carolina. So the laws begin to support these women and sustain these women's economic investments in the institution quite early, well before the 19th century. It always amazes me, you know, the practice of slavery, this centuries-long institution happens for the most part on the domestic front. I mean, in homes and on plantations.

The intimacy of the system is folded into everyday life. But this makes me think of how strange that home must have been when you had a woman and a wife owning their own enslaved people. What a weird dynamic. You know, there's almost a one-upmanship going on here. It was quite unusual, quite interesting, quite bizarre at times, because particularly in households where wives owned their own slaves, so they brought enslaved people into the marriage and the husband also owned enslaved people because the forms of mastery, the ways in which they chose to discipline the enslaved people in their households varied and it kind of, they fell along a spectrum of different strategies and techniques and enslaved people talked about, for example, women who would discipline

their own slaves and husbands who would discipline theirs, wives who would discipline all of the female slaves or those that only worked in the household, the husbands would discipline all of the male slaves or those who worked in the fields. So there were all these ways that they worked out how they would engage with each others and the slaves that each other owned. I mean, they always worked them out in very interesting ways. And sometimes what I thought was really interesting is that, you know, there's this idea that masters are always the disciplinarians, that masters are always the individuals who are more violent. But there were households in which enslaved people, you know, talked about wives, mistresses that were the bosses in the household, that the husbands

were very hands-off when it came to discipline and punishment, and that it was the mistress of the household that would often be the one who discipline them. So I thought that was a really interesting election. And yet women, ironically, are forbidden from attending auctions, I understand. That was considered improper for the fairer sex to be part of this uglier business of it all. Well, some historians have argued that in the past, but what I show is that women did, in fact, attend auctions.

It was very difficult for them not to attend them because they were often on city streets, on local town streets. They took place in front of courthouses, local county court houses. So they would just simply walk down the street and be able to witness a slave auction. In fact, Mary Chestnut, who was descended from a very well-established political family in South Carolina, married a well-established South Carolinian slave owner. And she talks about, you know, walking down the streets of Charleston and witnessing slave auctions, seeing mothers and children being sold.

So others talk about, you know, seeing, women in the audience at auction. So this was something that was very difficult for women to avoid, even though historians have argued in the past that it was in polite, it was improper for women to be at these events. They did in fact attend them. I stand corrected for sure. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. How much of a tyrant really was Julius Caesar? Would we have ever stood a chance against the first dinosaurs? And did Helen of Troy really have the power to launch a thousand ships. Well, you can expect all of this and more from the ancients on History Hit.

Join us twice a week, every week, as we explore some of the greatest moments of our ancient past. Subscribe to the ancients wherever you get your podcasts. How were they traded? I mean, there was a lot of gifting involved. I mean, there was a way of using them to preserve wealth very intentionally, correct? That's right. So women would often inherit enslaved people. they would be given enslaved people as gifts. So sometimes as birthday gifts when they were young girls,

as wedding gifts, as Christmas gifts. And then, of course, upon marriage, they would often get, as a wedding gift, a number of enslaved people, you know, it was seen as a nest egg almost. These enslaved people would kind of be the financial support upon which women could rely in marriage. It is one of the idealized stories of Southern Plantation Life, thoroughly apocryphal, that domestic enslavement, the so-called house slave, was an easier road to hoe that they were part of the family. That's the Gone with the Wind version that I was speaking of. I suppose it might be preferable to working the fields all day, but this labor came with its own violence and a specific dangers, rape for one, rather a fact of life for the enslaved domestic, right? Indeed. I mean,

one of the things that I think enslaved people underscore time and again is the fact that, you know, when they worked in the household, they were under constant surveillance. They were under constant pressure to perform in the ways in which slave owners wanted. And women as, you know, managers of the domestic sphere in large part, they were often the individuals who were surveying enslaved people, who were the ones who punished those enslaved people who worked in the household. They also created what I argue in the book. At times created circumstances that made the sexual violence of those enslaved people possible within the household and beyond it. So yes, sexual violence was It permeated the southern household.

It was something that many enslaved women and some have argued enslaved men were subjected to in the household and, of course, beyond it. And white women played a role in those acts of sexual violence as well. So ugly. It's hard to even talk about this. You know, when you really push this all into the light and show how calculated and how nasty it really was, it's extraordinary. And it does bring to mind the other thing that is often spoken of, the divisions of families, you know, the breaking up of families, mothers and children, this would have been the purview of these women who were in charge of that process and that those decision making, because it was another form of

trading. It was another form of wealth exchange, wasn't it? Absolutely. And one way that I wanted to underscore that, to kind of highlight that, that their roles in those familial separations, was through my examination of their use of enslaved women as wet nurses for their own children, for their white infants. And so, you know, what I show is that white women, they wanted, of course, to nurse their own children, to breastfeed their own children, but were incapable of doing that because of illness, because of insufficient milk supply and a variety of other reasons, while others just didn't want the burden of that role, of that responsibility. And so they looked to enslaved women to serve as wet nurses for their children. And they created such a demand for those women's labor as wet nurses,

that entire market emerged in order to supply them with the laborers that they needed. One of the unfortunate results or outcomes of the creation of that demand and that labor market was the separation of enslaved mothers from their infants, from their children. And so this was routine throughout the South, although other historians have argued that it was a rare event. It was very uncommon for this to happen. Inslave people talked about this happening quite frequently. And what I found really kind of heartbreaking was that the individuals who often testified to how common it was for this to happen were the children who were left behind, those enslaved children whose mothers served in this capacity and were often separated from them when they were very young. When this whole insidious system comes to an end, when emancipation is declared and the civil war is fought over the issue, is there any evidence how women in the South generally felt about its end in any way that was unique from men?

I mean, is that recorded at all? You know, fit in with the ways in which white men were responding. So they initially were very resistant to the idea of slavery's end, of black freedom. They engaged in a variety of acts of economic preservation. You know, they would hide enslaved people. They would transport enslaved people from one state to another as the Union Army encroached upon their homes and households and communities. They often sold enslaved people away.

when they saw the writing on the wall, they would sell enslaved people away so they could try to recoup the investments in those enslaved people. And then once the writing was really on the wall, when emancipation was inevitable, they talked about wanting to die at the very prospect of Black freedom. And again, they talked about this well after the war was over and recreated again, they thought twice about it and then wrote these biographies and autobiographical. of, you know, themselves and their descendants, I mean, their ancestors, and they talked about, you know, these kind of very benevolent roles that they played in the institution of slavery. So they kind of recreated and rewrote the narrative once, once slavery was over and they, you know, had no choice but to embrace or accept that. It really sheds an important light, Stephanie, on something I've always misunderstood.

I mean, how would this engine be driven so energetically to, fight a war over this subject. And of course, we're well aware of all the traditional excuses for this and the issues involved. But now you're telling us about this entirely different dynamic that you have these women in the midst of this whole system who are also driving this machine. That's a whole different level of intensity. Absolutely. And at the time of the war, you know, these women who owned enslaved people often didn't own any other form of property or wealth. And so they were profound. And so they were profoundly invested in the institution of slavery's continuation. And so the war threatened that. They not only threatened the continuation of the institution of slavery, but the war threatened

to leave these women financially destitute. So they were fighting their own war, a war of their own making. They had their own reasons to support the Confederacy, to support its efforts, to preserve and protect the institution of slavery. Prepping for this interview, I ran across again this phenomenally important document, this diary of Grace Brown Elmore, this white woman in the South who writes all this as the civil wars going on. I mean, it was aside from the loss of the lifestyle and the personal wealth that represented, this is what the resistance, this, this attitude about the people that she says she's protecting, this paternalism towards the enslaved persons that she has, this notion that they can't take care of themselves if they

weren't under her care. This also permeated the female experience of this, didn't. Yeah, so you do see that all of a sudden there's a real concern with the well-being of enslaved people. I have a BA in psychology, so I often find myself thinking about, you know, what this experience must have been like for these women psychologically. And you can see them, you know, psychologically working through their own investments in the institution of slavery and trying to kind of reframe their investments in the institution of slavery to make it not about their personal interest, but about their benevolent interest in the well-being of enslaved. people. But in many respects, it's a farce. In many respects, you know, what they show, particularly when slavery is inevitably going to end is that it was all a facade, you know, that they really are most interested and most concerned about their own economic well-being. There was a retelling of the story right away. You know, they were working hard to frame this in the spirit of whatever

it could work to convince these northerners what they were really up to. It seems very diabolical. to me. Absolutely. I mean, almost immediately, you know, women who owned enslaved people or who were from households that where enslaved people were fundamental, began to write these narratives, these stories about their lives as slaveholders, their relationships with enslaved people from the time they were young girls until the time they grew up. In those stories, you know, they whitewashed the story of slavery. You know, they removed the violence. They removed the economic make calculations to make this a benevolent institution and that they were ordained by God to be in these roles. And so they immediately began to rewrite the history of slavery and their story,

their part in it. Well, that's the headline of the lost cause thing. That begins the whole, you know, 50 years down the road, why all the statues start going up and the whole recharacterization of the resistance of the rebellion, how it was about a lifestyle and all that stuff, you know. But this adds a whole other dimension to that. It's directly attached, right? Absolutely. I mean, I mean, women are fundamental to that process as well. They are the individuals who are funding, you know, the erection of these statues. They are petitioning school boards to, and this should sound really familiar, petitioning school boards to ensure that the southern perspective of the civil war and the southern perspective of, you know, slavery when it's mentioned, it appears in textbooks and their school textbooks. So they are fundamental to the kind of rewriting of the story, but also to the kind of framing, the kind of national framing of the war. after the war is over. It's endless. I mean, coming to a full comprehension of what enslavement really meant in our history. When I consider the immeasurable distance I have traveled as a white person in America, when I was a kid, assuming the civil war just ended the whole subject. And moving on,

no, you know, we have such historians as yourself who are getting us to a greater understanding, a more subtle or complicated understanding. I should mention to you that you are one of the recipients of the Dan David Prize of 2023. Congratulations. Thank you so much. That is a huge, huge deal. And a real statement on how important this work is, anybody who's confused, I don't want to embarrass you by what this really implies. It's an enormous award. It only goes to a few people every year. And it speaks to the importance of your work and what you've revealed that everyone needs to know. Thank you so much. Thank you, Professor. It's really an honor to meet you. The book is called They Were Her Property. White Women as Slave Owners in the American

South examines this whole system and how it really worked. Professor Stephanie Jones Rogers, thank you so much for being on American History Hit. It is an honor to meet you. Thank you so much for having me, Tom. Hey, folks, if you listen to the show on any kind of regular basis, maybe you'd like to have a say on what we do. Let us know what you'd like us to cover on American History Hit, and we'll look into finding an expert. We turn these shows around pretty fast, so send word to A-H-H-H at HistoryHit.com. Thanks for listening. See you next time.