San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Co-conspirators
In March 1846, Elizabeth Humphyville, who ran a boardinghouse in Mobile, Ala., placed an advertisement in the Pensacola (Fla.) Gazette, offering a $50 reward for the capture and return of her slave, Ann. The bondwoman had run away or possibly had been stolen by Elizabeth’s husband who, she noted, “pretends is ... her owner.” Elizabeth cautioned the public “not to trade for her as the titles to [Ann rested] in me alone.” Humphyville’s determination to capture Ann, and her relationship with her husband, is one of many telling stories in Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’ deeply researched, fast-paced first book, “They Were Her Property.” Jones-Rogers, who teaches at UC Berkeley, uncovers how throughout the antebellum period, married white women consistently asserted their rights to own, control and dispose black slaves as chattel property without their husbands’ interference. Her excellent book underscores the degree to which these women supported the enslavement of black persons because they held a “direct economic investment in slavery and their pecuniary interest in perpetuating it.” Jones-Rogers also alters our understanding of slave-
holding households. Historians have long recognized that some white women, usually wealthy single or widowed women, owned slaves, but could not be “true” masters. Rather, they supervised plantation household operations and functioned at best as what historian Kirsten E. Wood has termed “fictive masters.” “They could be ‘masterful.’ But they did not possess the strength of power to make a servile class submit to their will.”
Drawing heavily on formerslave oral history interviews conducted in the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project of the Work Progress Administration, Jones-Rogers documents how white women hired, purchased, disciplined, managed and sold enslaved people, including separating children from their parents, across the Old South. She argues that slave-owning women exercised all the rights that slave-owning men possessed — including what former bondman Charles W. Dickens termed doing their “own bossing.”
Female slave owners acquired their slaves as gifts and from bequests; they also procured them from slave traders and at auctions, including socalled “ladies auctions.” Women brought slaves with them into marriages and, when necessary, took “extra steps to secure their separate ownership and management of enslaved people, processes that were not required of men.” “For them,” Jones-Rogers writes, “slavery was their freedom. They created freedom for themselves by actively emerging and investing in the economy of slavery and keeping African Americans in captivity.”
Jones-Rogers thus challenges long-standing assumptions about the patriarchal order of 19th century Southern white households and the laws that bolstered them. Her evidence suggests that “married white women contended with husbands, male employees, community members, and officials about their ownership of slaves, as well as about how much control such men could exercise over their property and who else would be afforded the privilege of doing so.”
She insists that slave-owning women were no more “maternalistic” in their treatment of bond-people than slave-owning men were “paternalistic.” Female slaveholders were sophisticated economic actors, full participants in and beneficiaries from the Old South’s capitalistic marketplace. JonesRogers contends that slaveowning women’s slave management style differed little from that of slaveholding men’s — “and they rarely treated enslaved people like their children.” “Sometimes they were more effective at slave management or they used more brutal methods of discipline than their husbands did.”
In their oral history interviews, ex-slaves documented how slave-owning women were intimately aware of every detail of the South’s “peculiar institution.” They conducted business with slave dealers and hiring agents, oversaw overseers and participated “in economic activities that historians of slavery have either overlooked or alleged never happened. Time and again, with their slaves not far from hearing, white slave-owning women articulated their wish to remain invested in slavery and pass their financial legacies on to their children.”
Jones-Rogers pays special attention to the relationship between white slaveholding women, especially mothers and female slaves. They regularly sought out and obtained enslaved wet nurses to suckle their children, “creating a demand for the intimate labor that such nurses performed in southern homes.” Wet nurses “were crucial to the further commodification of enslaved women’s reproductive bodies, through the appropriation of their breast milk and the nutritive and maternal care they provided to white children.” In her opinion, “the demand among slave-owning women for enslaved wet nurses transformed the ability to suckle into a skilled form of labor, and created a largely invisible niche sector of the slave market that catered exclusively to white women.”
In 1865, as the Confederacy collapsed around them, white slaveholding women lamented the loss of their property and their civilization built atop white supremacy. Virginian Lucy Rebecca Buck spoke for many white Southerners when she complained, “Our dearest hopes [are] dashed — our fondest dreams [are] dispelled.” Jones-Rogers explains: “With slavery gone, and the bulk of their wealth along with it, slave-owning women found their material and social circumstances profoundly altered.” North Carolina diarist Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas summarized their fate: “The fact is our negroes are to be made free and a change, a very [great] change will be affected in our mode of living.” According to ex-slave Rhody Holsell, former slave-owning women found emancipation objectionable because “dey could not whip de slaves any longer.”
Jones-Rogers concludes that their investment, both figurative and literal, in antebellum slavery suggests why white women eagerly embraced the postwar South’s inimical system of Jim Crow segregation and its accompanying racial violence. “Southern white women’s roles in upholding and sustaining slavery form part of the much larger history of white supremacy and oppression,” she adds. “And through it all, they were not passive bystanders.” Southern ladies stood by their men. “They were co-conspirators.”