Scholars Thought White Women Were Passive Enslavers. They Were Wrong.
"For generations, scholars argued that white women were rarely involved in the active buying and selling of Black people. A growing body of research says otherwise.
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The buyers flocked to the slave auctions held at the Georgia estate, eager to inspect the human property on display.
There were cooks, carriage drivers, washer women and ladies’ maids. The trader — a woman named Annie Poore — paraded the Black captives before the buyers, haggled over prices and pocketed the profits. She was working in a field dominated by men. But that did not dissuade her from pursuing a thriving business in Black bodies.
She “was all [the] time sellin’,” Tom Hawkins, one of the people enslaved by Ms. Poore, recalled decades later. “She made ’em stand up on a block she kept in de back yard, whilst she was a-auctionin’ ’em off.”
For generations, scholars argued that white women were rarely involved in the active buying and selling of Black people. But a growing body of research is challenging that narrative, documenting the significant role that white women played in the American slave trade.
Between 1856 and 1861, white women engaged in nearly a third of the sales and purchases of enslaved people in New Orleans, which was home to the nation’s largest slave market at the time, according to a working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research earlier this year.
In 1830, white women accounted for about 16 percent of the purchases and sales of enslaved people in New Orleans, the study found. Elsewhere, an analysis of runaway slave advertisements published between 1853 and 1860, which were compiled by the Black abolitionist William Still, found that white women were listed as owners in about 12 percent of the listings.
The findings demonstrate that active participation in slavery crossed gender lines, according to Trevon D. Logan, a professor of economics at Ohio State University, who was a co-author of the report with Benton Wishart, a student at the university who graduated in May.
“We’re talking about literally thousands of women being involved in this industry,” said Dr. Logan, who also serves as the director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s working group on race and stratification in the economy.
His report builds on extensive research conducted by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote about Ms. Poore and other white women enslavers, in her book, “They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South,” which was published by Yale University Press in 2019.
Dr. Jones-Rogers’s research found that female enslavers were ubiquitous and showed that their ability to buy and sell Black people brought them significant economic freedom in a patriarchal society that sharply curtailed female economic independence.
She hailed Dr. Logan’s research for taking the first steps to quantify the number of white women actively engaged in the enslavement of Black people.
“When I go to talk about the book,’’ she said, “one of the questions always is, ‘How many of these women were there?’”
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.
I stumbled across white women as active enslavers in my research when I was exploring the role of Catholic clergy in the American slave trade. That’s when I learned about the Georgetown Visitation sisters, an order of Catholic nuns who championed free education for girls in the 1800s.
The sisters founded Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington, D.C., one of the nation’s oldest Roman Catholic girls’ schools. For more than a decade, its founders were hailed on the school’s website for running a free institution and for their “generosity of spirit” for teaching enslaved girls.
But several years ago, the school’s archivist and historian began digging in the archives. She found no evidence that the nuns had taught enslaved children to read or write. Instead, she discovered that the sisters had enslaved at least 107 Black men, women and children, the records show. 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.
In fact, nearly all of the orders of Catholic sisters established by the late 1820s enslaved people, historians say.
“Nothing else to do than to dispose of the family of Negroes,” Mother Agnes Brent, the superior of the Georgetown Visitation sisters, wrote in 1821 as she approved the sale of a couple and their two young children. The enslaved woman was just days away from giving birth to her third child.
Dr. Logan’s and Mr. Wishart’s research, which relied on New Orleans’s slave sale and notary records along with the runaway newspaper advertisements, found that white female enslavers were particularly involved in the enslavement, purchase and sale of Black women.
In New Orleans, between 1856 and 1861, they participated in nearly 40 percent of the transactions involving Black women, the records show.
That was most likely a strategic financial decision, Dr. Logan said. Black women could have children who would then also become the property of their enslavers, expanding the value of the initial investment.
Joshua D. Rothman, a historian at the University of Alabama who studies the American slave trade, said that white women may have also enslaved a higher percentage of Black women because they wanted workers in the domestic realms that they controlled, laborers who could handle cooking, cleaning, child care, sewing and other household work.
Dr. Rothman said that the report wasn’t surprising, given the historical research conducted in recent years. “But it’s good to actually have numbers,” he said. “They help us to attach something resembling specifics to what we’re actually talking about.”
Dr. Jones-Rogers believes the research also helps to explain why many white Southern women romanticized slavery and supported the system of racial segregation that emerged after the Civil War, a system that helped ensure that their families could continue to benefit from a plentiful supply of low-cost Black labor.
They “choose white supremacy,” she said, “because they see it as economically advantageous.”
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Rachel L. Swarns is a journalist and author who covers race and race relations as a contributing writer for The Times. More about Rachel L. Swarns"
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