Female Enslavers
- History Fix Podcast
- 2 days ago
- 15 min read
Episode 152: How White Women in the American South Played a Much More Active Role In Slavery Than We Thought
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Since the times of slavery, most historians have gotten at least one thing very very wrong. Historians long proposed that white women in the United States were simply passive enslavers. That they enslaved people because their husbands enslaved people. They pointed to legal structures at the time that prevented married women from owning property. Sure, white women managed enslaved people because they ruled over the domestic sphere as housekeepers. But, for far too long, historians cast away the idea of white women actively buying, selling, and punishing enslaved people. The idea of women as active enslavers was dismissed. They even went as far as to assume that white women were sympathetic to the enslaved, natural allies. Of course they were. Both groups, white women and enslaved Black people suffered under the dominance of white males. Of course they were allies. Wrong. In fact, when we dig into the evidence, when we pore through old letters and records, runaway slave ads, wills, and the interviews of the enslaved, they suggest something completely different. They suggest that white women were quite often active enslavers, playing a significant role in the American slave trade and the survival of slavery as an institution. Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and this is History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. This topic is the perfect way to wrap up Black History month and usher in Women’s History month because it deals with both subjects. I feel like a lot of times when we focus on Black history in February or we focus on women's history in March or we focus on white men’s history literally every single month, we tend to glorify it a bit. We tend to pull out of that history, why Black people were so amazing, why women were so amazing. And there are a lot of stories like that that need to be told. But there are also stories that go the other way. There are dark stories as well that need to be told. There are skeletons in the closet. Well, today we’re pulling out the skeletons of white female enslavers because they’ve been given a pass for far too long and it hasn’t done anyone, not even white women, any favors.
So, as I said in the intro, the consensus has long been that women did not play an active role in slavery. How could they have? Women in those days didn’t own property. They were essentially property themselves. Sure, they played a part in passively enslaving people as the keepers of the household but they weren’t intentionally making a business out of it, buying and selling and auctioning, and hiring out for money. Those weren’t things women did in the 18th and 19th centuries. This misconception prevailed, even among historians until quite recently. But there’s a disconnect, you see. Because if you look at the actual evidence, if you suspend your assumptions based on what you think you know about women in those days, and you look at the actual evidence, witness accounts and physical documents, it doesn’t add up. This disconnect caught the eye of Stephanie Jones-Rogers, a historian at the University of California as she conducted research for her 2019 book They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South.
Rachel L. Swarns writes about Jones-Rogers work in an article for the New York Times quote “Historians had long suggested that white women were passive enslavers, who inherited Black people, for instance, instead of actively buying and selling them, Dr. Jones-Rogers said. They pointed to common-law legal structures, which prevented married women from assuming property rights. Some also suggested that white women were natural allies of the enslaved since both groups suffered under white male domination. Dr. Jones-Rogers noticed a disconnect, though, between that scholarship and interviews conducted with formerly enslaved people who described female enslavers who actively bought and sold people. Intrigued, she mined those interviews along with the letters and writings of white men who described their business dealings with white women. She found that some of these women studied the fluctuations of the slave market, attended auctions and bargained to get the best prices. She also found that laws enacted in a number of Southern states explicitly granted married white women the right to own, enslave and whip Black people, independent of their husbands,” end quote.
When we dig further into the old records, statistics emerge. The largest market for enslaved people in the United States was in New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1830, according to documents detailing the purchase and sale of enslaved people there, white women accounted for around 16 percent of those purchases and sales. That number increases later. Between 1856 and 1861 white females were behind roughly one third or 33ish percent of purchase and sales of enslaved people in New Orleans. That percentage is slightly higher if you’re considering the purchase and sale of just Black women though. Records show that white women sold and purchased 40% of Black women during that same time period in New Orleans. According to Dr. Trevon D. Logan, professor of economics at Ohio State University, that was likely a strategic financial decision, white women mostly enslaving Black women. Swarns writes in that New York Times article quote “Black women could have children who would then also become the property of their enslavers, expanding the value of the initial investment,” end quote. So, not only does this evidence suggest that white women partook in the buying and selling of human beings, it suggests that they did it very strategically, that these women were not just victims themselves, docile domestic partners in a male centered world, they were crude businesswomen running their own empires.
This doesn’t mesh with what we think we know about women in the 1800s though. Women weren’t owning property and running businesses then. And for the most part, they weren’t, except, turns out, when it came to slavery. Slavery was a bit of a loophole when it came to a white woman’s chances of making a name for herself in the world. Because women were not entitled to own land, businesses, and other property, enslaving people was pretty much all they could do. People often bequeathed enslaved people to their daughters and female relatives in their wills for this very reason, so that she could have some form of financial security with or without a man, father, husband, whoever. We saw Harriet Jacobs write about this in her autobiography Incidents of the Life of a Slave Girl from last week’s episode. Harriet was bequeathed to a three year-old girl when she was just 12 years old herself. Why didn’t Margaret Horniblow, her now deceased previous enslaver bequeath Harriet to Dr. James Norcom to begin with? Why did she bequeath her instead to his three-year-old daughter? Because Norcom didn’t need Harriet. He was a well off physician in well-to-do Edenton, North Carolina enjoying high society and rubbing shoulders with good ol’ boys. His daughter, though? She was going to need all the help she could get simply being born a female in this world. And so, in this way, the conditions, at least in the American south, this power imbalance between men and women created the perfect environment for white women to assume the roles of enslavers. It was all they had in many ways to better themselves. Not saying that makes it right please don’t misconstrue that. But it was an option in a world without many options. In many cases, girls were trained from birth to one day become enslavers. Jones Rogers says quote “slave owning women not only witnessed the most brutal features of slavery, they took part in them, profited from them, and defended them,” end quote. What’s really unsettling about this is that, quite often these girls were trained up to one day take ownership of their own siblings. I ended last week’s episode with an excerpt from Harriet Jacobs’ book in which she writes about seeing two young girls playing together and embracing. The girls were sisters, well half sisters. One of them was white and the other was Black. They were sisters and playmates, and yet, the white girl was also the Black girl’s enslaver. This was more common than we ever believed.
So, let’s take a look at a few examples, shall we. I found an article written by the North Carolina State Capitol Historic Site. They have an ongoing research project there called From Naming to Knowing where they are trying to identify, name, and share the stories of the enslaved men and women who built and maintained North Carolina’s state capitol building in Raleigh. Amazing. So proud of North Carolina for this. But they have an article called “Women as Enslavers” that is linked in the description and it includes quite a few examples of, specifically Raleigh based women who took on active roles as enslavers that I want to share with you because it really illustrates how involved white women were in the perpetuation of slavery.
The first is the story of Martha Lane Brickell. Martha’s father Colonel Joel Lane sold 1,000 acres of land to the state of North Carolina in 1792. This was right around the time that North Carolina was trying to establish a new state capital. It had previously been in New Bern which is on the east coast. But the people wanted a more centrally located capital so that it would be easier to travel to from all parts of the state. So they picked some farm land smack dab in the middle of the state in Wake County. This would eventually become the city of Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina. But first the state had to actually acquire the land from the landowners who already owned it. Martha’s father was one of those landowners and he sold 1,000 acres to North Carolina in 1792 that is now part of Raleigh. There is a record of that. There is also a record of Colonel Joel Lane’s will, entered into Wake County records in 1798 in which he leaves his daughter Martha… well here’s what it says quote “Daughter Martha Lane, her heirs and assigns forever the following Negroes Sam, Phill, Sally Nansey and their future increase,” end quote. Martha was just 17 years old when her father died and she inherited those named enslaved people. Martha went on to marry twice but both of her husbands died young. According to the 1800 census, both men, both of her previous husbands, enslaved multiple people and it’s very likely that Martha also inherited these enslaved people upon the deaths of her husbands. Martha remained single after that and relied on the people she enslaved, the people she inherited, for money. She hired them out. That was her business. Sam will come do such and such a job for you and you’ll pay me to be able to use him. One man she enslaved named Junius Brickle we know worked to build the North Carolina capitol building. He is listed on a report from 1834 as a quote “laborer.” Also on that report it says that Junius was paid 50 cents per day. According to the research of the From Naming to Knowing project, we don’t know if Junius was able to personally claim any of that money or if it went straight to Martha. They do say quote “notes in the State Capitol Construction Records show his enslaver Martha Brickell requesting payment from the Capitol project for Junius’s labor. Martha also requests that Junius be able to pick up his payment,” end quote. So I don’t know if he’s actually getting any money or not. I know the whole point of a female enslaver hiring out an enslaved person was to personally profit, to get paid for hiring them out. So, if I had to guess, I’d say that money probably went to Martha and not Junius. Martha died in 1852 and in her will she left quote “a negro girl named Harriet about two years of age,” end quote to her daughter-in-law. Note that, not her son, her daughter-in-law. There is a clear throughline of females as enslavers here. This was a business that women could partake in, the buying, the selling, the hiring out of enslaved people.
Mary Wheaton was another Raleigh enslaver who hired out enslaved people to make a living. Her husband From Naming to Knowing says quote “Mary’s husband was dead and there is no indication that she had children of her own, a situation that made the financial benefit of hiring out enslaved people crucial,” end quote. One in particular, Alfred Wheaton, was hired out to work on the capitol building alongside Junius Brickle. When Mary died in 1863, she left 11 enslaved people to her niece, once again to yet another female enslaver. To this niece she leaves Alfred, Jacob, Moses, Jim, Martha, Leon, Patience, Adeline, Ellen, Antoinette, and Corinna.
Delia Haywood was a Raleigh area female enslaver on a much grander scale. With Martha Brickell and Mary Wheaton, we see them sort of doing this out of necessity. Their husbands are dead, this is how they make money, by hiring out the enslaved people they inherited. Delia’s situation is a bit different. Delia’s husband, Stephen Haywood, came from a very prominent family. He was wealthy. And when he died, she inherited that wealth and an estate that included probably hundreds of enslaved people. We know that she enslaved around 18 people in Raleigh and is listed as an absentee enslaver in other parts of Wake County suggesting that, even though she was personally living in the city, she had a plantation out in the sticks where she was enslaving probably a lot of people. We also have reason to believe that Delia was not a very kind enslaver. There 4 records of her or someone on her behalf placing runaway slave ads. So this tells us two things. Number one, the people she enslaved were clearly not happy, they were frequently trying to escape. And, number two, she regularly took action to try to hunt them down. From Naming to Knowing says quote “In an ad from 1828, Delia notes that Davy has run away and mentions “the mark of the cut of a knife on one of his cheeks, 2 or 3 inches long.” When Cato Haywood, who worked on the Capitol project, sought freedom in 1837, Delia stated that “Cato is of the ordinary size, very black complexion, and has also lost some of his front teeth; when spoken to, has rather an impertinent way of expressing himself.” In these instances Delia notes a physical abnormality (the cut in Davy’s cheek) and conduct (the way Cato was seemingly “impertinent” to her). Both suggest Delia was regularly acting with violence against her enslaved people. In another ad placed for Moses from 1844, the placer of the ad, Thomas Ormond notes that he hired out Moses from Delia for the year. The Capitol’s records indicate that Delia routinely hired out her enslaved people to generate income. Delia died in 1852 and her estate papers list many enslaved people including Charles, Miles, Becky, Sampson, Sam, Sally, Henry, Mary, Sarah, Amy, Jordan, Phil, Lotty, William, Lucy, John, and Tom,” end quote.
Sarah Stone has a similar story to that of Delia Haywood. Sarah was married to a North Carolina governor, David Stone. He served as governor of North Carolina from 1808 until 1810. When he died in 1818, Sarah made money by, like all of these other women, by hiring out the people she enslaved, including to the capitol building project. By the time Sarah Stone died in 1838, she enslaved 46 people who, in accordance with her will, were all sold at auction after her death.
Rachel L. Swarns, who wrote the New York Times article I’ve referenced a few times that is linked in the description, she delves into a whole nother seedy realm of female enslavers with the Georgetown Visitation sisters. So these were, supposedly, these were a group of Catholic nuns who championed for the education of girls in the 1800s. Sounds wonderful right? They founded Georgetown Preparatory School in Washington D.C., one of the oldest Catholic girls schools in the country. These nuns have gotten a lot of praise ever since for running a free school for girls and also for teaching enslaved girls, with what the school’s website called quote “generosity of spirit.” But, a few years ago, the school’s archivist and historian started digging in a little deeper into the archives and she found some surprising stuff.
First of all, she found no evidence that the nuns ever taught enslaved children to read and write which they had gotten credit for. However, she DID find evidence that the nuns actually enslaved at least 107 Black men, women, and children. So, great, not only are they not teaching enslaved children to read, they are actually the ones enslaving them. Swarns says quote “In a report released in 2018, the school reported that the sisters sold dozens of those people to pay debts and to help finance the expansion of their school and the construction of a new chapel,” end quote. Yes, these nuns were wheeling and dealing in human lives. This is exactly why Harriet Jacobs reported having a hard time with her faith, Christianity, because of the way people in the church behaved. People in the church enslaved people and treated Black people very badly. This is exactly what she was referring to. These nuns who are running a girls school, the oldest Catholic girls school in the country, they are funding that school through buying and selling human beings and we didn’t even realize this until 2018. Until very recently, their quote “generosity of spirit” was still proudly displayed on the school’s website. And the records were all there. All it took was for this archivist to actually read the records in the archives to figure this out. There, in a record in the archives, Mother Agnes Brent wrote in 1821 quote “Nothing else to do than to dispose of the family of Negroes,” end quote. She was referring to the sale of a family they enslaved, a mother, a father, and two children. Plus, the mother was due to give birth to her third child any day. Mother Superior sold them off to pay for this that or the other. Swarns says quote “In fact, nearly all of the orders of Catholic sisters established by the late 1820s enslaved people, historians say,” end quote.
So, we might like to think of women as passive bystanders in the horror that was slavery. We might like to think of people of the church, religious women, nuns as certainly not involved and even actively seeking to undermine the institution, teaching enslaved children to read and write “generosity of spirit.” But, when you look at the evidence, the records, the census, the wills, the letters, the testimonies, it just wasn’t that way. It becomes clear that women in the south, religious or not, played an active and often quite brutal role as enslavers in their own right. Michele Goodwin writes in an article for the Michigan Law Review quote “the common erasure of white women as slaveholders renders their culpability and complicity in human chattel slavery imperceptible. Simply put, they become blameless and guiltless in an enterprise in which their involvement was far more than proximate and was in fact, in many instances, dominant,” end quote.
So, now the question becomes why don’t we know this? Why does this misconception exist? Why has it existed for so long? Well, on the one hand, it probably exists because it’s hard to own up to shameful history, right? We’d rather brush this stuff under the rug, stuff these skeletons way back to the back of the closet. We weren’t talking about women’s roles as enslavers because we weren’t really talking about anyone’s roles as enslavers for a long time. And in this way, the white southern elite remained on top without judgement, without guilt, without blame. It was all just brushed under the rug. But Michele Goodwin proposes another theory as well. She writes quote “Scrubbing white women from the archives of antebellum history serves to deny not only their agency but also their capacities. In other words, removing white women as profiteers and commanders in slavery serves to erase the fact that some were successful, shrewd businesswomen, albeit in a horrid enterprise. Even those who “managed households” rather than large plantations wielded authority. In troubling ways, this erasure both served to recast white women as disinterested in work and business, which defined Supreme Court jurisprudence on sex for many years, and contributed to the stereotype of white women as fragile, disempowered, weak, and vulnerable to lingering effect. In recent decades, diligent efforts by historians correct inaccuracies in this record,” end quote.
So, in some ways this misconception worked in these women’s favor. They were free of guilt and blame, but in other ways, it hurt them tremendously for a very long time. In other ways this was a male dominated society downplaying women’s abilities as successful businesswomen. By casting women as only passive enslavers, they were erasing these abilities. Goodwin goes on quote “reading white women as passive or submissive participants in the business of antebellum slavery served to undermine their later employment attempts and business opportunities after slavery’s abolition and through the 1900s. Contrary to the Supreme Court’s patriarchal reading of women’s capacities and destinies in Hoyt v. Florida, Goesaert v. Cleary, or Bradwell v. Illinois, white women clearly were not wedded or destined to domestic duties but had experience in financial management and business,” end quote.
So, you know my mind spirals with theories here. Why would we hide this fact, why would we bury the idea of women as active enslavers deep in the archives and it’s really two fold, and neither of them are good. We bury it to preserve their innocence, their culpability, their participation in the blight that was slavery and we bury it to erase women’s potential as businesswomen, to portray them as disinterested in work and business and, frankly, unable to do it. To cast them as fragile, disempowered, weak, and vulnerable. To undermine their later employment attempts for well over a century. We hide the truth, we hide reality to manipulate our society into what we want it to be. We want fragile innocent housewives so we bury all of the facts to the contrary. But the cost of burying the truth is constructing an artificial reality based on lies. And an artificial reality based on lies is not going to last forever. Because the evidence is there, it’s in the archives, just waiting to be rediscovered. Rediscovered by Stephanie Jones-Rogers as she poured through old interviews writing her book. Rediscovered by the archivist at the Georgetown Preparatory School as she uncovered records of the nuns selling off the people they enslaved. At some point that facade will come down, those closets will be opened wide and the skeletons drug out into the daylight. And then what? We haven’t done ourselves any favors by delaying the inevitable. Embrace the truth. Spare yourself the trouble later on and embrace the truth.
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