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

Chapter 4 focuses on the slave market. Jones-Rogers claims in this chapter that slave-owning women were not only familiar with but also actively a part of the slave markets. She redefines the slave market as an inclusive, widespread place that “was not contained within the slave pens, yards, or auction blocks housed within the commercial center of her community” (81). According to Jones-Rogers, the slave market was deeply connected to home. This is a stark departure from pervasive cultural depictions of slave markets, suggesting that slave trade transactions were far more informal and thus more open to women, who operated comfortably in domestic spheres. By redefining the slave market’s boundaries, Jones-Rogers offers a nuanced understanding of the various ways in which slave-owning women were able to operate.

Following the format of her earlier chapters, Jones-Rogers offers a counterargument that she then deconstructs. In this chapter, Jones-Rogers presents the depiction of the slave market “as a masculine place, a domain in which white women did not belong” (82). In response, Jones-Rogers emphasizes the testimonies “of both formerly enslaved people and white women” (82) as evidence to the contrary.

The slave market was often seen as too sexualized and violent for women. Such depictions of the slave market infantilized the slave-owning women who “could witness white men and women committing violent acts upon the nude and partially exposed bodies of enslaved people in their households and their fields” (83). Jones-Rogers argues that a slave-owning woman’s “lifelong exposure to every dimension of slavery” fortified her ability as a slave owner to navigate this economy with ease. Jones-Rogers provides multiple examples that convey the adaptability of white slave-owning women, as they took action to protect their families’ financial stability in the face of inept or deceased husbands or fathers.

Jones-Rogers also explores the ways in which the slave market impacted the enslaved people sold and bought there. She discusses how enslaved people grew well-versed in the ways of the slave-market economy and its multiple dimensions of “slave auctions and sales, inheritance or debt collection, and self-purchase” (97). From this experience, African Americans took advantage of “opportunities to learn about credit, debt, and contracts; allowed them to engage in financial negotiations; and taught them to develop strategies for fiscal management” (97). This knowledge empowered enslaved people to seek their own freedom despite the legal prohibitions that attempted to bar them from doing so. They applied their newly-attained knowledge cleverly to ascertain their value and “sometimes used that information to facilitate their own sale…[or] to find and secure kind masters, or to keep their families intact” (99). This too is a departure from some depictions of slavery which rob enslaved people of agency.

Jones-Rogers’s reference to the Dred Scott case depicts one example of an enslaved person exercising this financial knowledge. Dred Scott, an enslaved man, sought to purchase the freedom of himself and his family. When his mistress rejected his offer, he pursued his case in the courts in what would become a landmark case that denied citizenship to African Americans regardless of whether they were free or enslaved race. Although he lost his case, the Dred Scott decision inspired the continued growth of the abolitionist movement and contributed to the beginning of the Civil War. Today, it is considered one of the Supreme Court’s worst decisions, with Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes calling it the “Court’s greatest self-inflicted wound” (Schwartz, Bernard. A Book of Legal Lists: The Best and Worst in American Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1997.)