3

“MISSUS DONE HER OWN BOSSING”

In 1837, three years after Maria and Elisha Betts said their vows in Morgan County, Georgia, cotton fever swept over the state, catching up the couple. Like countless others, they moved west to try their hand at starting a plantation and established their new home in Macon County, Alabama. The honeymoon phase of their marriage had barely ended, however, when the Panic of 1837 caused Elisha’s mercantile business to fail. He became heavily indebted and lost much of what he owned. Just when he was down on his luck and needed Maria’s support the most, he saw a side of his wife that surprised him. As he reeled from his pecuniary losses, Maria “did not seem to sympathize with him as she should”; furthermore, she seemed unwilling to help him rebound financially.1

Over the next nine years of their marriage, the Bettses “never lived agree-ably together,” and by 1846 Maria and Elisha had reached a crisis. Much of the discord between them had to do with the fact that Maria owned slaves in her own right and possessed the legal authority to decide what to do with them. Almost a decade before Maria married Elisha, and while she was married to and separated from her first husband, Ambrose Nelson, her father, Moses Walker, had hired a lawyer to draw up a declaration of intention that stipulated three things. First, any property that Moses might give to Maria during his lifetime or at the time of his death was to be hers alone. This would be the case “whether [she was a feme] covert or not.” Moses Walker also stipulated that all the property he conveyed to her must be completely “free from the marital right of her then present or future husband.” Furthermore, the document empowered Maria to dispose of her property by will; if she died intestate, the property would descend to her children, rather than to her husband. At the same time he drew up the declaration of intention, Maria’s father gave her three of his slaves; he later gave her three more. As Maria prepared to marry Elisha on September 18, 1834, she told him about her father’s declaration of intention; she made sure that he understood the limits it would place upon his marital rights, and he “agreed . . . that she might hold as her separate estate the property she then had or might afterwards get of her father.” She even reiterated the terms of the legal document at their wedding reception.2

Elisha might have been willing to recognize Maria’s property rights, but he still expected to take charge of her slaves. Maria would have none of that. She refused to let Elisha exercise mastery over them—at least, not the kind he had in mind. Once they settled into their new home in Alabama, Maria was rarely pleased with Elisha’s treatment of her slaves. According to their neighbor Charles C. Mills, Elisha frequently complained about his wife and said that “much of their misunderstanding grew out of jealousy on her part of his treatment of the negroes given her by her father.” Elisha confessed to Mills that “he could never chastise one of them without his wife’s manifesting feeling and discontent.” Elisha was putting it mildly.³

In his conversations with Mills, Elisha admitted that Maria was an excellent housekeeper, though she was “inclined to be self willed and not obedient to his wishes.” In her own talks with Mills, Maria accepted her husband’s characterization of her disposition and tacitly accepted his other statements about her but countered that Elisha “had always sought to controle her too much in her domestick concerns,” even though she was perfectly capable of managing them for herself. By 1846, Elisha had decided that “nothing could induce him to return to his wife [or] to live with her again,” and acting on those sentiments, he abandoned Maria and moved to Louisiana. In light of Elisha’s abandonment, his looming debts, and the threats of his creditors, Maria filed suit against her husband and his creditors, requesting a divorce from Elisha, alimony for her support, and an injunction to prevent any of them from seizing and selling her separate property.⁴

Maria and Elisha had clearly approached their marriage with different ideas about how their relationship would work. But the most critical differences between them centered upon the way Maria expected Elisha and others to treat her slaves and what methods of slave discipline and management she would allow those individuals to employ. She envisioned a marriage in which her husband would grant her the liberty to express herself freely, to manage her household, and to determine how he and others would deal with the enslaved people she owned. And as Elisha’s candid statements to his neighbor show, he entered the marriage anticipating the opposite. Their differing expectations, especially concerning the management and discipline of Maria’s slaves, wreaked havoc in the Bettses’ marriage and ultimately drove Elisha to abandon Maria. But despite the costs, Maria stood firm in her resolve.

Maria’s views about marriage and her conduct toward Elisha were the likely outcome of being raised by parents, particularly a father, who nurtured her independence and ensured that she would continue to exercise a certain legal and economic autonomy during her marriage and throughout her lifetime. Although Moses Walker was a “plain farmer unversed in legal technicalities,”5 he understood the power southern laws granted white men over their wives, and their wives’ property, and he laid the legal groundwork that would ensure that Maria would not have to subject herself or her property to her husband’s dominion. Even still, while Walker’s declaration of intention and his subsequent deeds of gift gave Maria legal title to slaves, secured her separate property rights, and preserved her authority as a slave owner, Maria was ultimately responsible for deciding whether to exercise those rights and powers. It was her choice whether to delegate her powers to her husband or an overseer, to refuse to grant them any power at all, or to curtail or rescind any particular right of control at any time. When the men around her overstepped the bounds of what she considered their authority, she routinely intervened and reminded them that the power they exercised ultimately belonged to her and that this authority was grounded in her slave ownership. As Elisha’s long-time acquaintance and former overseer, Abram Greeson, recalled, Maria “was very cross and disagreeable with me and meddled with the out door business [the fieldwork] too much.”⁶

What Elisha described as Maria’s “feeling and discontent,” and what Abram Greeson called her “meddling,” were really the manifestations of far more than moodiness. During those moments when she freely expressed her feelings about their conduct toward her slaves, she was making her husband and Greeson aware of her particular vision of slave mastery. Maria never described how she herself dealt with the slaves she owned, and the legal record gives no specific details about the kinds of “chastisement” Elisha used or how Abram treated Maria’s slaves in the fields. But her response to their treatment makes it clear that she had conflicting ideas about proper methods of slave mastery, and as she observed and evaluated Elisha’s and Greeson’s disciplinary and management techniques, she determined that they were doing things the wrong way.

Despite their brief separation, Maria and Elisha Betts remained married and lived in the same household for more than two decades. During that time, Maria continued to own separate property, and her estate grew significantly. In 1850, Maria owned eight slaves, 100 acres of improved land, a farm worth $400, farming implements and machinery valued at $100, and livestock with an estimated value of $550. Ten years later, her personal estate was worth $16,000, her slaveholdings had doubled to sixteen, and she owned 320 acres of improved and unimproved land, and livestock worth $750. According to the censuses taken in these two decades, Elisha possessed no personal or real property to speak of. Had Maria relinquished control of her property to Elisha, he might well have treated the enslaved people she owned in ways that diminished their value and squandered her considerable assets. It would seem that her caution was well founded.7

The conflicts that arose between Maria and Elisha Betts over matters largely related to slave mastery bedeviled other households in the South. This was especially true in cases where husbands and wives each owned personal slaves or when women owned slaves over which their husbands had no legal authority. Formerly enslaved people routinely reflected upon encounters between slave-owning women, their spouses, their employees, and others. Although they rarely if ever used the term “master” to describe their female owners, formerly enslaved witnesses frequently characterized their mistresses as effective managers and disciplinarians and described their behavior with the same terms they used for slaveholding men. Harriet Collins spoke of her mistress as a “powerful manager” who “was sho’ good . . . iffen you work and do like she tell you.” Such a statement could be taken as referring simply to household management, but Collins also spoke of how her mistress managed her slaves beyond the household. Her mistress, recalled Collins, would “go round [the quarters] to see dat all was alright” each evening and was a “powerful good nuss” to boot. Collins’s female owner, in fact, did more than a master; she assumed the responsibilities that mistresses, masters, and plantation overseers typically handled. Formerly enslaved people also remembered their female owners as powerful disciplinarians who used a variety of techniques that resembled those of male slave owners. Addy Gill was enslaved in Millburnie, North Carolina, and she recalled that her mistress Louise Krenshaw “done the whuppin on Mr. Krenshaw’s plantation an she was mighty rough at times.” As we shall see, other enslaved men and women recalled mistresses who meted out calculated, systematic, and rationalized violence and discipline, not as masters’ subordinates and surrogates but as slave owners in their own right who possessed the authority to do so.⁸

But in their testimony formerly enslaved people emphasized that mastery did not always involve brute strength or physically violent methods of discipline. The (typically male) slaveholders who submitted commentary to the South’s most widely circulating agricultural journals, such as DeBow’s Review and the Southern Planter, generally agreed that the most skilled slave masters could command submission without resorting to brutality. By this argument, white women could also be masters of slaves without resorting to brutal methods of control.

Yet despite the recollections of formerly enslaved people concerning female owners who made sure they did their work, and despite contemporary recognition of white women as slave owners in their own right within southern communities and by courts, historians have contended that white women could not be true “masters” of slaves. They could be masters of household operations. They could be “fictive masters.” They could be “masterful.” But they did not possess the strength or power to make a servile class submit to their will. According to the historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, white women “could not exercise mastery of their own slaves, much less contribute to the control of the slaves in their communities” because “the law—not to mention the social emphasis placed on male governance of the household and its members—discouraged women from managing slaves.” These social and legal impediments, she contends, “sharply limited the practical and psychological effectiveness of [slaveholding women’s] discipline.” Furthermore, enslaved people associated physical violence and punishment with white men, be they slave owners or overseers, a situation that undercut any attempts by white women to acquire mastery over their slaves. A white woman, even if she owned slaves, “was no ‘massa.’” Yet Fox-Genovese admits that “as slaves would have been the first to insist, and as both male and female slaveholders well knew, mistresses could very well be the devil. A mean mistress stood second to no master in her cruelty, although her strength was less.” This was particularly characteristic of white women’s relationships with enslaved women in their household, for “on the grounds of physical strength they were less likely than men to kill them.”9

Some historians contest the idea that women could not manage or discipline enslaved people effectively; however, they too differentiate between white women and white men’s domination of enslaved people.¹⁰ William Foster, for example, contends that slave-owning women developed and engaged in a uniquely female form of mastery, in which they interacted with and disciplined enslaved people as they would their own children.¹¹ But if we look carefully at slave-owning women’s management styles, we find that these differed little from those used by slaveholding men—and they rarely treated enslaved people like their children.

Enslaved and formerly enslaved people recalled the ways their female owners exercised authority over them. They made it clear that white women did not subordinate their authority to white men nor did they confine themselves to operating at the “mid-levels of power,” in Foster’s phrase.¹² Their status as slave owners granted them access to a community that was predicated upon the ownership of human beings and afforded them rights they did not possess in other realms of their lives. White women embraced their role within this community, assumed positions of power over slaves within and outside their households, and challenged anyone who attempted to infringe upon that power. And local, state, and federal courts recognized, upheld, and protected them when they did so.

Mastery was an objective that male and female slave owners and their delegates aimed to acquire through techniques ranging from kindness to brutality. Their goal was to compel enslaved people to submit to their will and work efficiently and profitably. The system was malleable because it had to be; one strategy might be effective with one enslaved person yet ineffective with another. Even the specific circumstances under which an owner compelled an enslaved person to work—such as trying to force recently sold, relocated, and traumatized enslaved people to labor after being separated from their homes and loved ones—could affect the management and disciplinary techniques a slave owner used.13

Whether slave owners turned out to be effective managers of the enslaved people they owned depended on the broader communal, legislative, and judicial recognition of their power over the enslaved and a collective willingness to protect that power when it was called into question or when others threatened it. Southern communities, lawmakers, and courts recognized slave-owning women as individuals able to acquire and exercise mastery over enslaved people, as is evident from laws passed throughout the South. Laws dating back to the colonial period routinely recognized that mistresses owned enslaved people in their own right, and these same laws acknowledged the fact that these women were capable of exercising mastery over the enslaved people they owned.¹⁴ In fact, southern laws held the mistresses accountable for their slaves’ misconduct. For example, when an enslaved person in Louisiana was found “guilty of revolting, or of a plot to revolt against his or her . . . mistress . . . or of willfully and maliciously striking his or her . . . mistress, or the child or children of his or her . . . mistress, or any white overseer appointed by his or her owner to superintend said owner’s slaves, so as to cause a contusion or shedding of blood,” mistresses were required to report these acts to the state. If a mistress were to “wilfully and intentionally neglect to give information against, or refuse to give up . . . her slave or slaves . . . said . . . mistress shall, upon conviction thereof, forfeit and pay the sum of five hundred dollars, one half of which shall be given to the informer or informers, and the other half to and for the parish in which the offence shall have been committed, and imprisoned until the same is paid.”¹⁵ Furthermore, southern laws make it clear that legislators expected mistresses to discipline the enslaved people they owned, whether by proxy or by their own hand. In South Carolina, for example, if an enslaved person ran away for a period of twenty days or more, masters and mistresses were required to “publicly and severely” administer up to forty lashes with the whip for the first offense, and, if a slave owner failed to do so, the local constable would do it at the owner’s expense. With each offense, the punishment became more brutal, eventually calling for branding, dismemberment, and, after the fifth offense, death. While legislators probably saw this intensified brutality as a deterrent for enslaved people who hoped to escape bondage, these punishments also served to compel slave owners to comply with state law. An enslaved person’s value would diminish with each punishment, and paired with the state’s decision to impose greater fines upon masters and mistresses for failing to punish their slaves after subsequent offenses, those owners had good reason to aquiesce.16

The “management of negroes” advice columns that appeared in agricultural journals such as DeBow’s Review and the Southern Planter suggest that many southern white men coveted the role of slave master and yearned to rule over enslaved people, even those who were not their own. But this was not always the case. Rosalie Calvert found that her husband had no interest in being a master, and she had to assume the role herself. In 1818 and 1819, Calvert wrote several letters to her sister Isabelle complaining about her husband’s laziness and indifference to all matters related to plantation operations and slave management. Exasperated by all the work she had to do, she told her sister that her husband conducted himself “as if he were not the master—not giving any instructions, not worrying about anything.” As she became more heavily encumbered by the tasks that needed to be completed within and around her household, Calvert noticed how little her husband did. She confessed to Isabelle: “My husband takes care of nothing regarding the household or the servants. I must manage everything . . . all the arrangements fall on me.”¹⁷

But men who conducted themselves like Calvert’s husband occupied only one extreme on the behavioral spectrum. Far more frequently, spouses and overseers of slave-owning women, as well as public officials such as patrollers, gravitated toward the opposing end of this continuum. They often went too far when disciplining these women’s slaves, and they challenged these women’s authority to say how the enslaved people they owned would be managed or disciplined. In response, many women asserted their rights as property holders and used their legal authority as such to dictate how husbands and overseers might treat their slaves. They thereby protected the human beings they owned from the physical and psychic trauma brought about by the brutality of others and preserved the monetary value of the enslaved people they owned. Slave-owning women deemed it necessary to set parameters and establish rules for others, including their husbands, who might deal with their slaves. When these individuals did not appreciate or respect the boundaries slave-owning women set, these women found ways to enforce their decisions, and their examples offer unparalleled views of how married women understood, articulated, and asserted their power as slave owners and masters.

Shortly after Mary Homer married William Johnson, she made one thing clear: she would not tolerate him abusing the slaves who belonged to her, property that she had received from her father. According to her former slave Bill Homer, Mary insisted that “de treatment f’om de new Marster am jus’ lak f’om de ol’ Marster.” Mary held a vision of slave ownership and management that differed from her husband’s. Bill’s memories suggest that her father’s management style heavily influenced her own and helped determine the kind of relationship she would allow her husband to have toward her property. More important, her husband accepted and abided by her decisions when it came to her slaves. Mary’s insistence that her husband refrain from abuse did not apply to the slaves he owned, however; Bill remembered Mary telling her husband, “If you mus’ ’buse de nigger, ’buse your own.”18

Long after they married, slave-owning women continued to demarcate and enforce, in word and in deed, the boundaries of their husbands’ authority over their slaves. Generally they based their own authority on their ownership of the enslaved people in question. Frances Gray, a Scooba, Mississippi, woman who owned Lucy Galloway and her family, “didn’t ’low nobody to mistreat her slaves” because they “wuz her property and her living and she want goin’ to ’low nobody to whup’em.” Sarah Davis Parnell went farther. She owned a number of slaves, including Henry and Priscilla Parnell, and her husband would often beat them unmercifully when he was drunk. Whenever she caught him doing it, she would “come right out there and stop him. She would say, ‘I didn’t come all the way here from North Carolina to have my niggers beat up for nothin.’” She might even grab her husband’s whip mid-strike.¹⁹ A woman’s decision to intervene in a beating, even at the risk of her own safety, might have been an expression of her benevolence toward the enslaved people she owned. But it might equally have been an expression of her concern for her property interests and desire to preserve the value of her holdings.

Slave-owning women were equally adamant about making clear what constituted acceptable slave discipline to the men they employed as overseers. Ben Horry recalled that when “anybody steal rice and [the overseers] beat them,” his owner Miss Bessie would “cry and say, ‘Let ’em have rice! My rice—my nigger!’” One Carrydine, the overseer on the plantation where Rebecca Brown Hill grew up, was determined to whip her parents. When her mistress found out, she asked Carrydine to come see her so that they could “talk it over.” At the conclusion of their meeting, she told Hill’s parents to “give Mr. Carrydine his breakfast and let him go.” Hill recalled that her parents “never got no whippings” after that talk.20 The process of “talking it over” usually implies negotiation and compromise between equals. But Hill described this conversation as orders passed from employer to employee. Hill’s mistress was in the position of power, and as her employee Carrydine was obliged to obey.

Notwithstanding such agreements, overseers constantly overstepped the bounds of their authority, and their female employers retaliated by firing them or filing a legal suit against them.²¹ In 1826, James A. Williams served as Lucy Perrie’s overseer on her plantation, Tunica, in West Feliciana, Louisiana. She was an absentee owner who lived on a plantation approximately twenty-five or thirty miles away. Perrie tasked Williams with managing her slaves and tending to the cultivation of her crops. In Perrie’s estimation, Williams dramatically exceeded his authority: he and a neighbor, Arthur Adams, shot two of her slaves and “illegally, cruelly, unusually, and unnecessarily beat and whip[ped]” another. One of the men Williams shot eventually died of his wound, and the other two men sustained serious injuries. In addition Williams was reportedly so brutal toward Perrie’s slaves that some of them ran away. Perrie not only fired Williams, she filed an order of trespass against him and Adams and sought compensation for the slave she lost. In Adams’s answer to Perrie’s allegations and suit, he called her mastery into question. He argued that all the charges she lodged against him stemmed from the fact that her slaves were “badly fed and provided for,” and he suspected them of stealing and killing his cattle to augment their meager diets. A witness who testified on Perrie’s behalf said that she had numerous hogs and cattle on her plantation, although he did not say that she gave any of the meat to her slaves. In the end, the court granted Perrie’s request.²²

Perhaps it goes without saying that white women acted within their purview when they determined how their employees would treat the enslaved people they owned. Whether through letters, termination of employment, or lawsuits to recoup the value of slaves lost at their overseers’ hands, slave-owning women made it clear that the men in their employ merely exercised authority on their behalf and they, the mistresses, could rescind that power at any time. Mistresses also sought to establish the parameters of proper conduct for men whom the state empowered to punish their slaves. A woman named Mrs. Harris, for example, hired out an enslaved boy she owned to various men in her community. On one occasion, the boy clashed with the man who had hired him, and during their altercation the boy “knocked” his employer in the head. The injured man summoned the community squire and constable, the two men stripped the boy, and the squire whipped him. The boy began to make so much noise that Mrs. Harris heard him, “came out and told the squire to turn [him] loose.” She threatened to kill the squire if he struck her slave one more time and “she showed him her gun.” Appalled by her challenge to his authority, the squire reminded her that they were acting “within the law.” Mrs. Harris retorted that she did not “care nothing about the law” and warned the squire not to hit her slave again. In the face of her defiance, the men saw no choice but to comply. They released the boy. This stand-off between the neighborhood squire and Mrs. Harris suggests that communal custom may have shaped the operation of law at the local level far more than the state did, a phenomenon that the historian Laura Edwards refers to as “legal localism.” The larger community may have subscribed to certain forms of discipline that constrained the squire’s power to inflict punishment under certain circumstances. Perhaps the squire overstepped those boundaries, and he recognized that Mrs. Harris’s neighbors and friends would be more inclined to support her than him. No matter the underlying reason, he ultimately chose to respect her authority and her wishes.23

Not all slave-owning women sought to protect the enslaved people they owned from punishment. Some simply wanted to ensure that their delegates delivered the discipline they themselves thought was fair. Mrs. Rankin, the married woman who owned F. H. Brown’s mother, also owned all the enslaved people in her household. According to Brown, she would not permit her overseer to discipline the enslaved females she owned, but she did allow him to whip her male slaves. Even then, he was permitted to do so only “in her presence, so that she could see that it wasn’t brutal.” Brown recalled that “When an overseer got rough, she would fire him.” Peggy Sybert similarly fired the overseer who disobeyed her instructions about meting out discipline. Her slave, Arrie Binns, recounted how Sybert handled the patrollers who insisted upon whipping Binns’s brother, whom they had captured after he left the plantation without a pass. Initially, Sybert angrily refused to allow the patrollers to beat him. After they insisted upon doing so, however, she stated that she would allow them to punish him only if she could watch and decide when they had punished him enough. They agreed to her terms. After they whipped Binns’s brother three times, Sybert demanded that they stop, and they did.²⁴

White men were not the only members of southern communities who challenged or attempted to ignore slave-owning women’s power and control over their slaves. Other women did, too. When Ellen Campbell was fifteen, her mistress gave her to her daughter Eva, who subsequently hired her out to a woman who operated a local boardinghouse. While in this woman’s employ, Campbell was tasked with transporting food from the kitchen into the main part of the establishment. One day she tripped, fell, and dropped the tray, scattering the food across the ground. The boardinghouse operator grabbed a butcher knife and struck Campbell in the head with the blade. Bloody, wounded, and distraught, Campbell ran back to her mistress. After seeing Campbell’s condition, Eva wrote a letter to the woman notifying her that Campbell was her slave, whom she had inherited from her mother, that she would not tolerate Campbell’s being brutally treated, and that therefore she would no longer permit Campbell to work for the boardinghouse keeper. The circumstances surrounding the brutal assault of Ellen Campbell forced Eva to assert her power as a slave owner. Both Eva and the female boardinghouse operator possessed and exercised control over Campbell, one as owner and the other as employer. But their systems of slave discipline and management were strikingly different. Campbell spoke highly of her mistress and her mistress’s family, claiming that her mistress’s father rarely mistreated his slaves and that her mistress adopted a similar system of slave management. She found herself in the middle of a conflict between her mistress and the boardinghouse operator, but ultimately her legal owner determined how she would be treated, who would control her, and what disciplinary methods they could reasonably employ.25

The term possessed might suggest that southern law accorded the powers of slave mastery equally to a slave owner and an individual who hired an enslaved person. However, “possession” and the power associated with it did not apply equally to both parties in the eyes of the law. Possession was only temporarily vested in slave hirers, and it ended as soon as the terms of hire did.²⁶ Furthermore, the contracts drawn up between the slave owner and the slave hirer might delineate acceptable forms of discipline and management, and if hirers violated the terms of those contracts, the owners of the enslaved people could terminate the agreement and take their slaves out of the hirers’ possession. When enslaved people suffered injury or death due to hirers’ actions, slave owners had legal recourse and could sue hirers and seek damages in court.

When a female slave owner hired white servants to work alongside the enslaved people she owned, her management style could take a surprising turn. When Joe High was a young boy, he strolled through a potato patch, dug a spud out of the ground, and asked the white woman who served as his mistress’s cook to prepare it for him to eat. The woman marched the boy and the potato to his owner, Clara Griffin, and accused him of stealing it, telling Griffin, “Look here missus, Joe has been stealin’ taters. Here is the tater he stole.” She probably expected a different response from the one she received. Instead of punishing Joe High, Griffin replied, “Joe belongs to me, the tater belongs to me, take it back and cook it for him.” In approaching her employer and accusing the boy of theft, this white servant was claiming a distinction between herself and the slaves who worked alongside her. Griffin’s response to her actions suggests that Griffin may have thought the cook was placing herself on terms of equality with her mistress, and she found it necessary to reinforce the class and power distinctions between them. In the end, such differences tilted the outcome of the incident in Joe High’s favor.27

The similarities between men and women’s systems of management become clearer through the testimony of formerly enslaved people. According to Henry Watson, his “mistress had been brought up in Louisiana, and had witnessed punishment all her life, and had become hardened to it.” He had seen her “perpetrate some of the most cruel acts that a human being could, yet I never saw her in a passion when she was inflicting punishment.” Cecelia Chappel recalled that her mistress would give her slaves “sum wuk ter do, so she would kind ob git ober her mad spell ’fore she whup’d us.” This was not feminine weakness; southern agricultural journals carried advice from slave-owning men to other slave-owning men urging them to avoid getting “overexcited,” remain “dispassionate and detached,” and ensure that they “never inflicted punishment on slaves in anger.” One South Carolina planter went so far as to suggest that masters “allow 24 hours to elapse between the discovery of the offence and the punishment.” Other men echoed his advice when they suggested that punishment should never be administered while “in a passion.” And so far from indicating a womanly or ladylike gentleness, such calmness could accompany vicious cruelty: Henry Watson proclaimed of his mistress, “She seemed to take delight in torturing,—in fact, she made it a pastime; she inspired every one about her with terror.” The practice of waiting to become calm before punishing a slave was not a matter of gender but of good slave management.²⁸

Similarly, when slave-owning women delegated the task of discipline to others, typically men, it was not an indication of their discomfort as women with the brutality that so often characterized slave mastery, as some historians have claimed. According to the legal historian Ariela Gross, slave-owning men also “avoided administering whippings” themselves, leaving the task “to an overseer or to another. . . . Both owners and hirers sometimes sent slaves to the county jail, or to the Charleston Workhouse, for example, to be whipped for a fee rather than soiling themselves and their clothing with blood.” But beyond their aversion to blood-stained clothing, slave-owning men tried to distance themselves from the violence of slavery in order to maintain a particular esteem among enslaved people. A slave-owning man from Georgia declared, “I rarely punish myself but make a driver”—typically an enslaved man who assumed the responsibilities of an overseer—“virtually an executive officer to inflict punishment [so] that I may remove from the mind of the servant who commits a fault the unfavorable impression too apt to be indulged in, that it is for pleasure rather than for the purpose of enforcing obedience and establishing good order that punishments are inflicted.” By delegating brutal forms of mastery to subordinates, slave-owning men and women cleansed themselves of the dark taint that subsequently stained the men who carried out their orders. The alleged differences that scholars claim existed between men and women’s punishment of the enslaved people they owned probably have more to do with these historians’ own interpretations than with the evidence of the time.29

White women did face their share of resistance to their management of enslaved persons on plantation estates. After Letty Luke purchased an enslaved boy named Simon with the aid of her trustee, she found that she was “wholly unable to govern” him. Citing this as a reason to sell Simon, she petitioned the court for permission to buy an enslaved girl or woman to replace him, and the court granted her request. Letty Luke could easily have delegated Simon’s “governance” to the white men around her, but she wanted to assume this responsibility herself. When she found herself unable to exercise her power over Simon in the ways that she thought appropriate, she sold him rather than relinquish control to the men she knew.³⁰

Sometimes slave-owning women had good reason to delegate slave punishment to others, and their decision to do so aligned with the choices slave-owning men made in this regard. The white men in their families or those they hired generally proved to be willing participants. Yet slave-owning women also knew firsthand that slave management and discipline could pose difficulties that neither a master nor a mistress was capable of handling. Violent and resistant enslaved people might need more than the authority of a single man to keep them in line.³¹ Pauline Howell’s enslaved aunt, for example, killed two male overseers after she “grabbed [their] privates and pulled ’em out by the roots.” Afterward, her aunt was sold, along with all of her children, to a man who lived in Mobile, Alabama.³² A woman who could mutilate and kill two adult men in this way was not going to acknowledge the authority of a master because he was a man. And who knew what kind of damage she might inflict upon a mistress? Whether master or mistress, the owner was likely to seek reinforcement before attempting further punishment.

Enslaved people’s modes of resistance compelled both women and men to develop a variety of tactics to maintain order, not simply because of their gender but because these African Americans challenged their owners’ rights to their bodies and their labor. Sometimes owners found it easier to delegate the responsibility of slave discipline. It is also important to recognize that when men and women distanced themselves from violent forms of discipline, it allowed them to maintain their reputations as members of the southern gentility while preserving their authority as slave owners and employers of lower-class white southerners.

Yet some slave-owning men and women chose to handle slave discipline themselves. And when they did, men and women employed similar methods of control: some were careful of their slaves’ welfare, and others, both men and women, were brutal toward them. Analiza Foster told her WPA interviewer that her “mammy belonged ter a Mr. Cash an’ pappy belonged to Miss Betsy Woods. Both of dese owners wuz mean ter dere slaves an’ dey ain’t carin’ much if’en dey kills one, case dey’s got planty.” Claiborne Moss described how the slave patrollers “didn’t whip nobody” in the Arkansas community where he lived. He said that these white men “couldn’t whip nobody on our place . . . on Jesse Mills’ place . . . on Stephen Mills’ place . . . on Betsy Geesley’s place . . . on Nancy Mills’ place . . . on Potter Duggins’ place . . . Nobody run them peoples’ plantations but theirselves.”33 Regardless of what the formal laws said about slave patrollers’ rights to discipline slaves in their communities, and no matter how much authority the laws afforded to slave patrols, these slave owners—men and women alike—had created systems of management and control that denied power to these men. More important, Claiborne Moss’s testimony indicates that the slave patrollers recognized the power of female slave owners on the same basis as that of their male counterparts.

The regime of slavery could not have been sustained if the power, authority, and violence that characterized it had belonged to elite white men alone. It required modes of flexible power. Those who owned enslaved people wielded extraordinary authority, but so did overseers and enslaved drivers, as well as employers who hired enslaved people from their owners. There were even occasions when enslaved people exercised power over the lives and deaths of free people and other enslaved persons. They could, for example, implicate an enslaved or free person in a plan for revolt, and thereby seal that person’s fate. The hyper-surveillance the regime required was possible only if every white person—be it man, woman, child, slave owner, or non–slave owner—had the potential power to make an enslaved person obey him or her and submit to his or her will. And the law so empowered them. Such systems of shared power did not typically characterize hierarchical societies wherein white men sat at the apex; they existed in societies that could be considered “heterarchical” in nature.

Heterarchy allows power to be shared in a number of ways, not just vertically but also horizontally, and enslaved and formerly enslaved people spoke of slave-owning households that were structured in this way.34 Although in most studies of slavery the underlying assumption is that only male heads of household exercised mastery over enslaved people, formerly enslaved people forthrightly challenged this view. Formerly enslaved people spoke about households in which slave-owning couples owned enslaved people independent of each other—that is, in their own right. They spoke of households in which slave-owning couples exercised “double mastery.” Each spouse had his or her own style of slave management and discipline, styles that could be complementary or incompatible, and when their styles clashed, conflict was often the result. Some couples, for example, preferred one style of mastery for managing and disciplining their own slaves and another, perhaps more brutal, system to control those of their spouse. In other households slave-owning couples allocated discipline and management according to the enslaved person’s sex. Millie Evans’s master would “tend” to the enslaved men, and her mistress would tend to the women. Other couples, like Cecelia Chappel’s master and mistress, delegated management and discipline according to where the enslaved people labored—in the house versus the field, for example. The couple shared the responsibility of punishing the slaves who worked in the house, while they employed overseers to discipline those who worked in the fields.³⁵

Slave-owning couples also used different instruments to administer punishment, and this, too, was a reflection of their particular styles of achieving mastery and preserving the value of their human property. On the plantation where Anna Miller resided, her master punished the men with a cowhide whip and her mistress often whipped the women with nettleweed branches. At first glance, Miller’s emphasis on the different instruments of discipline that her master and mistress used might imply that her mistress chose a milder method of punishment, a choice that could support the contention that white women were more concerned about their slaves’ well-being. But this was not the case. When Miller’s mistress whipped with the nettleweed, Miller remembered, “de licks ain’ts so bad, but de stingin’ and de burnin’ after am sho’ misery. Dat jus’ plum runs me crazy.” The small hairs that cover the stems of the nettleweed, also known as “stinging nettle,” probably caused the sensation Miller described. These small hairs contain several chemicals that cause intense pain when they come into contact with the skin. When the affected area was rubbed, the motion would push the hairs, and the pain-inducing chemicals, deeper into the skin, prolonging the pain and irritation. Miller’s mistress’s weapon of choice had a long-lasting, increasingly painful effect on the bodies of the enslaved females living within her household.³⁶

Beyond achieving her disciplinary goals, this mistress’s use of nettleweed branches might have been an economically sound choice as well. Cowhide whips were notorious for cutting open the flesh, causing debilitating injuries that could lead to an enslaved person’s death; even when the victim lived, the whip left horrible scars that often decreased the price a prospective buyer was willing to pay for him or her. Slave owners who hoped to protect their slaves’ potential value in the market used instruments that would allow them to inflict pain without leaving permanent marks. In typical cases involving contact with nettleweed, the sufferer developed a skin rash that healed on its own and generally left no marks. Thus, by using the nettleweed branch, Miller’s mistress was able to punish her severely yet still preserve her value in the slave market.

Most commonly, when formerly enslaved people described households in which double mastery prevailed, they remarked upon a clear differentiation between the broader systems of management and discipline their masters and mistresses used, and frequently they reported that one of their owners would beat them while the other did not. While assumptions based on gender might suggest that women were the ones who refrained from beatings, this was not always the case. Husbands frequently disagreed with their wives’ chosen disciplinary strategies because they were too brutal, and they were not always willing to dole out punishment on their wives’ behalf. Julia Blanks recalled that her “marster was good” because “he wouldn’t whip any of his slaves. But his wife wasn’t good. If she got mad at the woman, when he would come home she would say: ‘John, I want you to whip Liza. Or Martha.’ And he would say, ‘Them are your slaves, You whip them.’” In these cases, slave-owning women had little choice but to assume the role of disciplinarian or to delegate the task to others.37 Slave-owning husbands sometimes found their wives’ violence toward enslaved people so disturbing that they could not ignore it and felt compelled to intervene. Penny Thompson’s master Calvin Ingram would fight with her mistress “lots of times ’bout de treatment” of the slaves they owned. He just “wouldn’t let her ’buse” them. George G. King, who lived six miles northeast of Lexington, South Carolina, recalled that “Master talked hard words, but Mistress whipped.” In fact, his mistress was “a great believer in the power of punishment,” and she would “whip his mammy ’til she was just a piece of living raw meat.” Even King, though only a child, frequently felt the cut of her lash. Her husband tried to intervene but was ultimately powerless to stop her. She was so cruel that her husband tried to sell George King to prevent his wife from abusing him further, but his mistress “owned the slaves and they couldn’t be sold without her say-so.” When King’s mistress discovered her husband’s plan, she prevented the sale and swiftly retaliated. As King and his master were forced to stand and watch, the mistress commanded the overseer to strip, bind, and whip his mother. The beating “left her laying, all a shiver, on the ground, like a wounded animal dying from the chase.” King remembered his mistress walking away “laughing, while his Mammy screamed and groaned.” His master had a remarkably different response; he stood there “looking sad and wretched, like he could feel the blows.” One woman’s violence toward her slaves was enough to drive her husband to abandon her. When he left, he took all the slaves he owned with him and left her with the three she had brought into their marriage.38

Beyond merely quarreling with their wives or surreptitiously selling their slaves, some white men felt the need to physically intervene on behalf of enslaved people when their wives acted brutally toward them. Jack Barbee would physically restrain his wife when her punishments became too much for him to bear. One woman who was enslaved by the couple remembered that Barbee “jerked her [mistress] off of [the slaves] many a time, and he’d say, ‘Plague take you, you trying to kill that little baby.’” When he would find one of the cowhide whips his wife used to beat their slaves, he would cut it up so she could not use it. Without a cowhide whip at her disposal, Jack Barbee’s wife resorted to beating her slaves with small, thorn-covered branches that pierced their skin with every strike. This, the formerly enslaved woman thought, was more brutal than the cowhide whips. Ria Sorrell claimed that her owner Elizabeth Sorrell “wus de pure debil” because “she jist joyed whuppin’ Negroes.” Elizabeth was so violent, in fact, that her husband would stop her from whipping her slaves in his presence; she would wait until he went into town to do so. She also refused to feed the slaves properly, and “when she had her way our food wus bad.” Ria remembered Elizabeth saying that the “underleaves of collards wus good enough for slaves.” Her husband had other ideas; he “took feedin’ in his hands an’ fed us plenty at times.” Ria Sorrell said that he did so because he believed “people couldn’t work widout eatin’.” Jack Barbee’s wife held similar ideas to Elizabeth Sorrell’s about the kind of food suitable for the enslaved people she and her husband owned. The enslaved children on their farm did not receive any meat because they did not work. Barbee’s wife exploited this fact, and her slaves’ near-starvation conditions, to develop a dastardly form of food-related torment. Her former slave remembered:

Once a man brought some old hog heads and pieces of fresh meat like that to old mistress in a barrel, to make soap with, and the things was just floating on top; and she got mad ’cause the grown folks (slaves) wouldn’t eat it. She give it to us chillen, and ’course we was glad to get it, ’cause it was meat, and we eat it till it made us sick, and they couldn’t give us any more. Mr. ___ (man who had given meat) came by and found out what she had done, and he said, “I just brought that meat here ’cause I thought you might want it to make soap. I didn’t know you was going to make nobody eat it. I wouldn’t give it to my dogs.”39

Women’s slave ownership influenced the character of their mastery as well as the methods of discipline they used to control their own slaves versus those their husbands owned. Silas Glenn remarked that his mistress “was good to the slaves that come into her from her daddy” but “was mean to some of the slaves that come from the Glenn side,” her husband’s family. Susan Merritt made the same distinction between her master’s kindness and her mistress’s meanness. On a number of occasions, her mistress would tie Merritt to “a stub in the yard and cowhide” her until she became too tired to continue. She would take a break, and after she was rested, resume her violence. Merritt believed that her mistress treated her this way because she was “massa nigger and she have her own niggers what come on her side” so “she never did like” her.⁴⁰

A formerly enslaved woman’s new mistress, who owned enslaved people in her own right, exhibited particular disdain for her husband’s slaves. Once she moved into their conjugal home she removed her husband’s female slave from the house, reassigned her to fieldwork, and replaced her with “one of the slaves her mother give her when she married.” On another occasion, a calf found its way under the house and “made water.” The mistress accused two young boys, who belonged to her husband, of relieving themselves under the house instead. She waited until her husband was away from the house, then bound the boys in the kitchen so they could not get away. She pulled up a chair, sat down, and ordered her slave to beat them. The beating became so brutal that “all of the slaves on the place was cryin’.” One of the enslaved men ran to his master and told him what the mistress was doing. The master returned home as quickly as he could, but discovered that his wife had locked the door. He demanded that she open it, and she refused. He eventually had to break the door down. By that time, too much damage had been done. The boys were so traumatized that they “couldn’t even cry when he got there.” One boy died two days later, and the other died within a month.⁴¹

Slave “mastery” involved more than corporal discipline and the spectacular scenes that often accompanied such brutality. Mastery and slave discipline were embedded in what literary scholar Saidiya Hartman calls “the quotidian routines of slavery.” Mastery and domination masqueraded as kindness and benevolence. Slave owners’ indulgences, allowances for “free time,” concern for preserving the integrity of enslaved couples and families, refusal to sell those they owned, and countless other behaviors and choices appeared to be acts of humanity but in reality were calculated decisions made to enforce submission or preserve an enslaved person’s value in slave markets.42 Underlying each of these choices was the implicit, looming danger of sale. Whether spoken or unspoken, threats of sale could sometimes be more effective than beatings. When enslaved people misbehaved, male and female slave owners would often threaten to “put them in their pockets”—sell them—recognizing that the mere threat of a sale could produce the submission they desired.

Formerly enslaved people did talk about kind and caring mistresses; but “kindness and caring” often meant that their female owners treated them like human beings and respected their dignity in basic ways: they did not starve the people they owned, did not sell them, compel them to bare their bodies in public for want of proper clothing, or flay their flesh for burning the biscuits. Enslaved people interpreted such acts of humanity as calculated choices along a spectrum of many others. They knew, for example, that a variety of reasons might explain why a slave owner decided not to sell them. Something as simple as the time of year could affect their value in the market and influence the owner’s decisions to sell or keep them. If we wish to understand how a slave owner’s behavior adversely affected the lives of enslaved people, even when their actions appear to be kind or benevolent, we must approach all these behaviors with a critical eye and take our cues from the enslaved people who described them.

Nonetheless, the advice, suggestions, and examples submitted to the “Management of Negroes” columns in agricultural journals like DeBow’s Review and the Southern Planter make it clear that many members of the master class assumed that their compatriots did consider violence a tool that helped them achieve mastery over enslaved people. In many pieces it was assumed that readers used or knew others who used brutal forms of discipline on a consistent basis, and many slave-owning authors felt it necessary to caution subscribers and fellow slaveholders against using brutality too often. Writers advised their fellow slave owners to punish in moderation and not with “severity” and reminded them that “in the infliction of punishment it should ever be borne in mind that the object is correction.” Such cautionary advice suggests that brutal discipline as such was not perceived to be the problem, but rather the unceasing use of such violence. These authors instructed subscribers to use brutality only when necessary; they did not advise them to refrain from it altogether.⁴³

In the third installment of the 1843 issue of the Southern Planter, “Cecilia” published an article titled “Management of Servants.” In her short essay, Cecilia offered guidance to women who might be experiencing trouble managing their slaves. Cecilia recognized that women were capable of possessing and exercising the power to make enslaved people submit to their will, and she instructed them to mete out punishment themselves. She advised, “Never scold when a servant neglects his duty, but always punish him, no matter how mildly, for mild treatment is the best; severity hardens them. Be firm in this, that no neglect go unpunished. Never let a servant say to you, ‘I forgot it.’ . . . Finally, let regularity mark every action, and the consequence will be, that everything will be done in its right place and at its right time; and the comforts and happiness of the family will be secured.” Cecilia not only advised her female readers to inflict punishment, she also recommended that they develop a system by which they could do so with “regularity.” She advised them against impulsive and sporadic acts of violence and suggested inflicting discipline in a systematic and calculated way.44

Cecilia’s article was somewhat unusual for two reasons: the author was a woman and she directed her advice to female readers, even though the periodical had a primarily male readership. If Cecilia wrote this article with a female readership in mind, it suggests that she assumed that such a readership existed.⁴⁵ Such an assumption also suggests that the similarities between the women’s and men’s systems of slave management and discipline could have been the result of women reading such periodicals.

Southern laws did not offer a clear or universal definition of what constituted cruelty in the context of slavery. Phillipe Toca, the justice of the peace for Saint Bernard Parish, Louisiana, argued that it was not possible to craft a single legal definition of what constituted cruelty in all cases. In Walker v. Cucullu, a case involving the rescission of a slave sale, Toca argued that “however severe the chastisement may appear to certain persons,” it was acceptable if it “was done within the limits prescribed by law.” Moreover, he opined, punishment “must necessarily depend on the circumstances of each case in particular,” and if the case was “a grave one, the chastisement will probably be severe”: for example, if “the slave is of a robust constitution, the chastisement may be increased in proportion to his strength compared with the gravity of his faults.” “Everything depends upon circumstances,” of which “the owner is the judge.” The law alone “prescribes to him the instruments of punishment to be made use of, and forbids him the right to punish, so as to maim, mutilate, disable or put in jeopardy and peril his life; if the law was otherwise, the right of discipline would be illusory.”⁴⁶

Most states were in agreement. As long as the punishment did not maim, mutilate, or imperil the life of an enslaved person, brutality was legal. There were, however, exceptions that allowed whites to kill enslaved people with impunity. South Carolina declared it “lawful for any white person to beat, maim or assault” a black person, and “if such negro or slave cannot otherwise be taken, to kill him, who shall refuse to shew his ticket, or, by running away or resistance, shall endeavor to avoid being apprehended or taken.”47 When slave owners’ methods of punishment did maim or kill, the laws in states like Mississippi and South Carolina included provisions that absolved them of wrongdoing. If Mississippi slave owners swore an oath that they had not intended to cause their slaves’ deaths or claimed that a death was caused “by accident and misfortune, in lawfully correcting a . . . servant” or “in heat of passion, upon any sudden and sufficient provocation,” courts would typically acquit them. If the slaves they owned inflicted punishment on their owners’ behalf, they, too, would be acquitted.⁴⁸ The murder trial of Eliza Rowand and her husband’s slave Richard offers a powerful example of how these laws condoned brutal acts that led to enslaved people’s deaths and absolved their owners of responsibility, even when the owners were women.

In 1847, Eliza Rowand became the first woman in the state of South Carolina to be put on trial for the murder of a slave. She was accused of commanding her husband’s slave, Richard, to strike an enslaved woman named Maria multiple times on the head with a block of wood, a beating that eventually led to Maria’s death. South Carolina law stipulated that if a slave died as a result of a master’s punishment and no other white persons were present to witness the incident, the slave owner could exculpate him- or herself by claiming that the violence had not been inflicted maliciously.⁴⁹ Eliza Rowand told the court that Maria had misbehaved that morning and she had ordered Richard to take her to “Mr. Rowand’s” (her husband’s) “house, to be corrected.” She did this knowing that “Mr. Rowand was absent from the city.” She also claimed that Richard never punished Maria on her command and that no beating took place in her chambers. In fact, Rowand claimed that she had no idea who inflicted the blows that killed Maria. Even so, she, “as law permits, by calling on God, exculpated herself.” No white witnesses came forward to challenge her claims. Considering her oath alone to be good, the jury found her not guilty. Richard was tried around the same time as Rowand and was subsequently found not guilty as well. The freeholders who adjudicated the case exonerated Richard because he was “merely the instrument of his mistress’s cruelty.” In another case, the fugitive slave turned abolitionist William Wells Brown told a London audience that a “woman was recently tried for causing the death of a negro girl; she was acquitted, on the ground that it was her slave-woman who actually committed the deed. The slave-woman was afterwards tried and acquitted, on the ground that she committed the murder on the authority of her mistress!”⁵⁰

Similar incidents went unnoticed by the southern press and have escaped scholarly attention for a number of reasons. The majority of these women’s crimes against their slaves remained confined within their households, and more often than not enslaved people were the only witnesses. Since southern laws forbade them to testify against white people, their testimony was inadmissible.51 In some court cases, a woman’s violent action caused an enslaved person’s death and served as the underlying cause of a legal suit, but the woman herself was never named as a defendant or punished for her crime. On January 1, 1824, Marshall Mann hired an enslaved girl named Fanny from Charles C. Trabue with the proviso that he could purchase her once the contract for her hire expired. When the time came to return Fanny or pay Trabue for her hire, Mann refused to do either because Fanny had died shortly after he hired her. Mann stood trial for Fanny’s death, and the jury acquitted him. Undaunted by their decision, Trabue sued Mann for breach of contract. In his own defense, Mann told the court that he was not obligated to pay Trabue because, although Fanny died in his possession, her death was the consequence of an “act of God,” something that dissolved Mann’s liability. The court disagreed and ruled in Trabue’s favor, and Mann appealed, citing his acquittal in the case of Fanny’s death in the lower court. The Missouri Supreme Court dismissed Mann’s appeal and upheld the lower court’s ruling. One thing remained unsaid in all of Mann’s cases; his wife was responsible for Fanny’s death. Even members of their community knew it. One Missouri man recounted in precise detail how Mann’s wife had brutalized Fanny, and claimed that the day after Mann’s wife had tortured Fanny, she was found dead. Fanny was “silently and quickly buried, but rumor was not so easily stopped. . . . The murdered slave was disinterred, and an inquest held; her back was a mass of jellied muscle; and the coroner brought in a verdict of death by the ‘six pound paddle.’” Mrs. Mann fled the district for a few months, but no action was taken against her.⁵²

By some accounts, white slave owners concealed their most brutalized slaves from observers who might object to their violence, even going so far as to borrow healthy slaves from neighbors when they entertained visitors. When slave owners inflicted punishments that resulted in a slave’s death, some rid themselves of the body or told inquisitive people that the slave in question had died of disease. Enslaved people’s deaths were not complete financial losses to their owners. Medical schools across the nation bought the bodies of deceased enslaved people from southern slave owners for dissection and research and thereby offered slave owners a profitable way to make such bodies disappear.⁵³

The brutality of some slave-owning women, especially when it led to disfigurement or death, might strike us as “irrational destruction” that was counterproductive, in large part because it seemed to be in direct conflict with their financial investment in the people they owned. After all, such violence impaired enslaved people’s ability to work and decreased or obliterated their value in the market.54 But a slave-owning woman’s decisions to abuse, maim, or kill her slaves was simply an “extreme version” of her “right to exclude” others from reaping the benefits of having access to the slaves she herself abused or destroyed. Moreover, there were “benefits” that accrued from such actions, and they served an important purpose for slave-owning women and their communities. The abuse and murder of enslaved people had “expressive value” that affirmed a slave-owning woman’s power.⁵⁵ It was also expressive because some slave-owning women enacted this violence in ritualized performances and forced enslaved men, women, and children to watch as a way of further convincing them of that power.

Broader social order was another important benefit. By evoking terror in enslaved populations, slave owners and their communities increased the likelihood that they could exact submission from enslaved people. When enslaved people fled beyond their owners’ reach, southern laws endowed members of militias, community patrols, and ordinary white southerners with the power to destroy them and display their remains, such as the heads of decapitated rebels, in public.⁵⁶ A number of factors help explain different outcomes in cases involving slave abuse or homicide. First, a slave owner had to have a reason for killing a slave. An owner could not kill a slave “without cause” or out of cruelty, “wilfulness, wantoness, or bloody mindedness.”⁵⁷ In reality, owners could easily manufacture justifications that satisfied the court and could not be disputed because enslaved witnesses were barred from testifying against them. Second, community norms could shape a court’s decision to convict or acquit a slave owner who killed.⁵⁸ If white members of the community found a slave owner’s abuse or murder of an enslaved person so reprehensible as to compel them to alert authorities and testify in subsequent legal cases, their disapproval might influence the court’s judgment. Far more often, however, communities sought to sanction slave owners who refused to punish their slaves or who allowed their slaves too much freedom.⁵⁹ Finally, legislators did not impose legal constraints upon slave owners’ powers to abuse, punish, and kill their slaves out of concern for enslaved people’s well-being. They did so in order to preserve the interests of relatives who would inherit their estates and would suffer if the property was squandered. If abuse and destruction did not threaten to deprive heirs of their rightful inheritances, courts might acquit a slave owner who killed.⁶⁰

Some of the cases discussed here might appear to suggest that when slave-owning women brutalized and killed enslaved people, southern judges and jurors exonerated them because of gendered ideas about women or an assumption that a woman’s violence toward enslaved people was somehow different from a man’s. But judges and juries were consistent in their leniency toward slave-owning men and women, and southern laws generally allowed most white southerners, not just women, who killed, dismembered, or maimed enslaved people (even those who did not belong to them) to do so with impunity. Most southern judges and members of southern juries were slave owners themselves and could sympathize with the defendants before them. Even if they did not, their decision to exonerate a defendant might have been influenced by the thought that they might eventually find themselves before a jury of their slave-owning peers, from whom they would hope for similar consideration. Judges and jurors generally adjudicated their cases according to precedent, building upon other decisions in cases involving an owner’s murder of an enslaved person. With the exception of the most egregious cases, slave-owning and non-slaveholding white men and women were not held accountable for such crimes beyond a possible fine—say, the estimated value of the deceased slave if she or he belonged to someone else—though their actions would have been punishable by death if their victims had been free and white. White women were members of slave-owning communities built on a system of white supremacy and the subjugation of African-descended people. The laws governing these communities gave slave-owning women the right to make enslaved people submit to their will and they routinely exercised that right.