Madame Slave Owner

Nathan Connolly: Often seen as a movement circulating at the fringes of American society, white supremacy has been in the news recently.

Brian Balogh: Last month a House Oversight Joint Subcommittee held hearings on white supremacy, and the Department of Homeland Security announced it will now recognize white nationalism as a major threat to the United States.

Joanne Freeman: But the discussion of white supremacy in America rarely includes women. Despite that fact, they play an important, if overlooked, role in the movement.

Nathan Connolly: So today on BackStory, we’re digging into the little-known history behind the topic of women in white supremacy. You’ll find out why the issue has been overlooked by historians.

Brian Balogh: And you’ll learn about how white women use public education to further white supremacy, from the Jim Crow era and beyond.

Nathan Connolly: When you open up a history book to read about the period before the Civil War, there’s a good chance you’ll find slavery depicted as an institution powered by white men. This is a story Stephanie Jones-Rogers wants to change. She says historians have overlooked the role white female slave owners played in propping up slavery and promoting white supremacist values. The problem was coverture, the legal system that stripped women’s right to hold property. Many people have assumed coverture was absolute. In other words, they believe a white woman might inherit enslaved people from her father, but when she was married, her property became her husband’s. Turns out, though, coverture wasn’t absolute, and many white women found ways to circumvent the laws.

Nathan Connolly: To learn more, I caught up with Stephanie Jones-Rogers. She’s the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. I started by asking her how she came to the topic by using a well-known but underutilized source, narratives taken by formerly enslaved people in the 1930s, also known as the WPA Narratives.

Stephanie J-R: You know, when I started this project about 10 years ago as a graduate student, I was reading the scholarship produced around the African American experience, particularly in slavery, and also examining the scholarship around white women’s experiences in the South, and noticed that there was a disconnect around the question of whether white women were deeply and profoundly invested in the economy of American slavery, whether they bought and sold slaves and hired them, et cetera. I think the disconnect really revolved around the different types of sources that were being used.

Stephanie J-R: In the scholarship around the African American experience, many scholars were in fact looking at those interviews with formerly enslaved people, but they weren’t looking at them to answer the question, what did formerly enslaved people have to say about white women’s economic investments in their continued enslavement and captivity? And so by looking at those interviews and asking that different question of those sources, I was able to find out that formerly enslaved people talked about this all the time, and they answered this question in a variety of ways all the time.

Nathan Connolly: And that focus on economics, it really does allow you to explode a lot of kind of two-dimensional renderings of the plantation myth and who is the wicked slavemaster versus the kind of sympathetic mistress and these beleaguered African Americans who are just kind of milling around on the plantation looking for a kind eye from the mistress to alleviate these conditions. You’re describing white women slavemasters who are in some cases even more brutal than their white male counterparts, and again, driven by this economic imperative. What’s going on there?

Stephanie J-R: One of the things that became really clear to me as I looked at what formerly enslaved people had to say about white women’s economic investments in the institution is that these investments began when these women were actually young girls, sometimes even infants. What they show, what they talk about, is the fact that young girls were inheriting enslaved people as gifts, so they were given enslaved people as gifts when they were just infants, as Christmas gifts, as wedding presents, as birthday gifts. So they were showing how over the course of these young women’s lives, these white women’s lives, they were receiving enslaved people as property.

Stephanie J-R: If you start the story there, if you start the story in girlhood and in infancy, you realize that white women had every reason to hold tight to, and to invest in, the institution. And what that meant is that they were willing to enact violence and to perpetrate acts of violence and brutality to keep them submissive and to bend to their will.

Nathan Connolly: To the extent that you feel comfortable with the details, can you give us an example of the kinds of violence that you would see meted out at white women’s hands?

Stephanie J-R: One particularly powerful example that I talk about in the book is a young enslaved girl who had a mistress who essentially kept the enslaved people that worked in the household and that she owned in near starvation. This white woman decided one day to leave a piece of candy on a piece of furniture, and this young enslaved girl was tasked with cleaning that particular room. One day she gave into her temptation, she ate the piece of candy, and her mistress decided to punish her for that. She put the young enslaved girl’s head under the rocker of her rocking chair, and then she called upon her white daughter to inflict a whipping on the young enslaved girl.

Stephanie J-R: So as her daughter was whipping the young enslaved girl, she was rocking back and forth on the enslaved girl’s head. And she caused such physical damage that this young girl was never able to eat solid foods again. Until her elder years, she was deformed and disfigured in her face. So this is the kind of brutal violence that was enacted in these households, not by white men but by white women, as well as young white girls.

Nathan Connolly: I’m thinking about a book, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. There, Kathleen Brown describes a kind of anxiety of control that white men had over the entire plantation household. There was control over their wives, but also control over the slaves themselves, enslaved people. And I’m just curious about this question of anxiety. What are the kinds of concerns, in addition to the economic concerns, that might be driving the kinds of brutality that you’re describing in this work?

Stephanie J-R: Well, I think in large part white women had the same kind of anxieties around the control that they hoped that they had. These are women who are charging enslaved people with the most intimate forms of labor that we could possibly imagine. They charged enslaved mothers with wet nursing, breastfeeding their infants, their newborns and their infants. And when you think about the kind of intimacy, the level of intimacy that’s involved in that kind of labor, the fact that they are really putting the lives of their infants in the hands of women who they may come to own eventually, you also realize that these enslaved people had the power of life and death over the future of the white race in some cases.

Stephanie J-R: So I think what you see is that some of these white women are in fact kind of grappling with the contradictions, the paradoxes that were embedded in the institution of slavery, wherein you assume that these people are willingly doing this work, but they also know deep down that these individuals are only able to perform in this way, are performing in this way, because of the persistent threat of violence. And so I think these white women are also cognizant of the fact that at any moment these individuals could in fact take the lives of their children, as well as their own lives, cooking their food, et cetera.

Nathan Connolly: And intimacy and anxiety, I imagine, is deeply connected with the idea of marriage too. Many of these white women who, because of American laws of coverture, are coupling, but then concerned about their property basically being taken over by white male husbands. So again, there was a loss of a certain amount of autonomy that comes through an intimate relationship. I’m very curious about how marriage, again, impacted the way that many of these white women owned slaves, treated slaves, dealt with the passage of slaves from one generation to the next. I mean, was there a sense that white women’s status as owners would be compromised through the marriage contract?

Stephanie J-R: If you give a white woman or a white girl an enslaved person as a child, and they grow up with this person not simply as a playmate, thinking of them as a playmate, but also understanding that they are property too, once they become of marriageable age, they’re not willing to relinquish the profound and deep investments that they have in the ownership of that person. Before they even get married, they are thinking of ways to circumvent the laws of coverture. They are thinking of how to protect the property that they bring into marriage, and they do that by figuring out the loopholes, figuring out the ways in which the law allows them to do that.

Stephanie J-R: One of the ways that the law allows them to do that is through what are called marriage contracts or marital contracts or what we would today call prenuptial agreements.

Nathan Connolly: That’s what it sounded like, yeah.

Stephanie J-R: Yeah, so they enter into these prenuptial agreements where they sketch out what property they’re bringing into the marriage, what levels of control they hope to continue to have over that property, what control they will have over any property they may inherit in the future, that they may purchase in the future, all of the kind of legal constraints that they would confront. Through coverture, they’re able to kind of sketch out these loopholes, workarounds. So they work around the laws of coverture by protecting their slaves, by putting them in separate estates as well, so what we would consider to be a trust fund today. They work with parents in some cases to devise or to construct trust funds.

Stephanie J-R: And so through those two really important legal instruments, they’re able to do what formerly enslaved people said they did, which is to control in almost absolute fashion the enslaved people that they bring into their marriages, that they purchase after marriage, and that they may inherit during their marriages as well.

Nathan Connolly: Again, this just flies in the face of so many dominant narratives coming out of this period. I mean, many white women themselves who are of a particular class and, again, who are literate, they’re trying to fashion themselves in 19th century writings as being the quote-unquote “delicate sex” or that they’re somehow more virtuous or benevolent. How do you think any of this serves to conceal the brutality that is happening under white women’s ownership in the 19th century South?

Stephanie J-R: I am certainly not a literary scholar, but I do read what literary scholars have to say about the act of writing a diary, what’s going on behind the scene when diarists choose to write the things they do. And these are calculated writings. These are writings that the diarists are writing with an audience in mind sometimes.

Stephanie J-R: What I talk about at the end of the book is the ways in which after slavery is over, former slave-owning women and the descendants of former slave-owning women take up the pen to in fact do exactly what you say, to craft a narrative of slavery in which white women play simply benevolent roles, that they are divine creatures who are essentially, they’re born to slavery, so they are not actively engaged in the perpetuation of the institution. They are born to it, so they have no choice but to live in a culture, an environment in which slavery is fundamental. But they also whitewash and sanitize the roles that they play in the economy of American slavery, in the brutality of slavery and the terror of slavery.

Nathan Connolly: I’m just curious about how you would describe the impact or the legacy of white women’s storytelling around slavery in allowing white supremacy to remain a constant feature of what southern, and really American, life has to abide by in the late 19th and early 20th century?

Stephanie J-R: Karen Cox’s work, the wonderful work on the United Daughters of the Confederacy, shows that the construction of these narratives, of these very sanitized narratives, they’re all kind of connected, that we think of history as something that’s written by male victors, but in this case history is written by female victors as well. And what I mean by victors is that, while white southerners who were loyal to the Confederacy, that embraced secession, may have in fact lost the war, but they certainly did not lose the ideological war.

Stephanie J-R: Very important dimensions of the story of slavery have in large part been crafted at the end of their pens. When you erase many of the important roles that white women played in the economic dimensions of the institution, in the construction of a racially divided social order, the afterlife is that any time we see white women participating in these horrid acts of racial terror or racial violence, we scratch our heads and we’re shocked. And I think it’s in large part because of that very conscious act of narration, very conscious act of constructing a very sanitized narrative of slavery in which white women don’t play brutal, violent parts.

Nathan Connolly: Now, this is a way, I have to imagine, of not just concealing the ideological commitment that white women might have to white supremacy, but also about this property question. Just going right back and saying that there’s a form of wealth that’s created in human flesh that white women simply don’t want to be associated with. So how much of it do you think, not to quantify it, but to what degree would you suspect that a lot of this mythmaking is about concealing the ways in which white women are generating wealth out of slavery?

Stephanie J-R: Well, I should also say, one of the things that other historians have shown for the colonial period, which I’m finding to be true in the 19th century, is that white slave-owning parents typically gave their daughters more slaves than they did land. They did so with this idea that when a young couple married, that the daughter would bring the slaves and the son would bring the land, and they would have everything they needed to start. This is considered kind of a nest egg situation, or this is to get them started on these new lives that they were beginning.

Stephanie J-R: And when you think about the fact that white women are receiving upon marriage far more slaves than they are any other form of property, what that also suggests is that they have a deeper investment in the institution of slavery, and that investment is profoundly economic in large part because most if not all of their wealth is bound up in the bodies of enslaved people. We really do have a concept of wealth as heavily gendered, a gendered concept of wealth in which men possess wealth, women benefit from men’s wealth. And here what I show, and then what I’m going to show in the second project, is that women are bringing a substantial amount of wealth into their marriages, so much so that some husbands have nothing, and women are the ones who come in with the wealth. Women are the ones that are financing their husband’s speculative pursuits in cotton, for example, or in businesses or in the railroad.

Nathan Connolly: As a final point, I’m curious about what your research taught you about feminism in the late 19th century, if we feel comfortable even describing what’s happening in the plantation context as being part of this genealogy around feminism. Because you have, obviously, black women who are recounting their experiences being enslaved. We have white women who are imagining a vision of gender equality that is hinged to the property relationship. And after all of this gets undone by emancipation, there’s a need to still fight for women’s rights, however folks chose to define that. And so I’m just curious about this world torn apart. Is there anything that you see as new in our learning about feminism and how feminism gets fashioned out of the slave moment?

Stephanie J-R: Another reason why the story that I tell in this book hasn’t really factored into what we know about slavery and particularly white southern women’s investments in it is in large part because of the fact that the field of women’s history emerges during the same moment that the feminist movement of the 20th century is taking shape, is becoming a powerful force in our country. And so ultimately, the narratives that emerge out of that moment are triumphant narratives, are narratives of women being empowered in ways that empower those around them, that forge alliances and create alliances. This is a feminist story, but it’s not that feminist story. This is what I call a very ugly feminist story, and what it shows is that for these women, slavery was their freedom. Their freedom as women was really contingent upon their decision to embrace whiteness and white supremacy in a time when they were experiencing gender oppression.

Stephanie J-R: I think it serves as a lesson for us in the present, as we look at certain, for example, voting patterns among some white women in the country and we scratch our heads. What it shows is that there are moments in which white women have chosen to embrace white privilege and white supremacy, in spite of fighting against, struggling with gender oppression. Whiteness offers them privileges and benefits that their gender certainly does not.

Nathan Connolly: Stephanie Jones-Rogers is an Associate Professor of History at UC Berkeley. She’s also the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South.