©2012 Stephanie Elizabeth Jones-Rogers ALL RIGHTS RESERVED “NOBODY COULDN’T SELL’EM BUT HER”: SLAVEOWNING WOMEN, MASTERY, AND THE GENDERED POLITICS OF THE ANTEBELLUM SLAVE MARKET. By STEPHANIE ELIZABETH JONES-ROGERS, B.A., M.A. A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History written under the direction of Deborah Gray White and approved by Deborah Gray White________________________ Nancy Hewitt_______________________________ Mia Bay___________________________________ Thavolia Glymph___________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2012 Abstract of the Dissertation “NOBODY COULDN’T SELL’EM BUT HER”: SLAVEOWNING WOMEN, MASTERY, AND THE GENDERED POLITICS OF THE ANTEBELLUM SLAVE MARKET. By Stephanie Elizabeth Jones-Rogers Dissertation Director: Deborah Gray White Historians richly document white women’s social, ideological, and cultural roles within nineteenth-century slaveholding households and communities, yet they rarely consider their economic relationships to slavery. Scholars also recognize enslaved people’s understandings of how profoundly male slaveowners’ economic decisions affected their lives, but they neglect enslaved people’s knowledge about how female slaveownership—not just domestic management—shaped their experiences in bondage as well. Drawing upon slaveowners’ correspondence, slave trader’s papers, ex-slave narratives, travel writing, illustrations, newspapers, city and business directories, financial records, as well as legal and military documents, my dissertation examines the ways that gender shaped white married women’s experiences of slaveownership in the nineteenth century, it demonstrates how slaveownership afforded them particular kinds of power that pivoted upon the right to enslave and own human beings, and it sees white slaveowning women and their economic activities through the eyes of the enslaved African-Americans who served them. ii Table of Contents Introduction: Shedding Light on the Invisible: Constructing a History of White Slaveowning Women, their Slaves, and the Antebellum Slave Market---------------------------------------------1 Chapter One: “Missus done her own bossing”: Reconstructing White Slaveowning Women’s Narratives of Power in the Post-Revolutionary South.----------------------------------------------16 Chapter Two: “She thought she could find a better marketÓ: White Slaveowning Women, Enslaved People’s Quests for Freedom and the Convergence of the Slave Market and the Antebellum Household.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------73 Chapter Three: Black Milk: Maternal Bodies, Wet Nursing, and Black Women’s Invisible Labor in the Antebellum Slave Market-----------------------------------------------------------------------114 Chapter Four: “That ‘oman took delight in sellin’ slaves”: White Women and the Re-Gendering of the Slave-Trading Community.--------------------------------------------------------------------147 Chapter Five: “These negroes are all the property she has”: The Pecuniary Destruction of Civil War--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------209 Epilogue: A Feminist Nightmare: Slaveowning Women and their Precarious Empowerment -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------262 Bibliography---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------270 iii List of Tables Table 1: Female Claimants in the Civil War Slave Compensation Claims by Former Slave Owners' Names for the 4th, 7th, 18th, and 19th U.S. Colored Infantry, 18th U.S. Colored Infantry, 5th and 6th U.S. Colored Cavalry, and the 1st, 4th, 8th, 12th, and 13th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery---------------------------------231 iv List of Illustrations Figure 1.1: Photo of young girl with scarred back, enclosed in Letter from John Oliver to Wendell Phillips, July 6, 1866.-----------------------------------------------------69 Figure 3.1: “Wanted to Purchase.” Orleans Gazette, and Commercial Advertiser, (New Orleans, LA) August 24, 1819.----------------------------------------------------128 Figure 3.2: “Private Sales: Healthy Young Wet Nurse.” The Charleston Mercury, (Charleston, SC) June 07, 1856.---------------------------------------------------129 Figure 3.3: “Wanted to Purchase or Hire: Wet Nurse.” The Charleston Mercury, (Charleston, SC) January 12, 1859. .----------------------------------------------129 Figure 3.4: “A Wet Nurse.” Louisiana Advertiser, (New Orleans, LA) September 17, 1827. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------129 Figure 3.5: “For Sale or to Hire.” New-Orleans Commercial Bulletin, (New Orleans, LA) April 26, 1836.-----------------------------------------------------------------------131 Figure 3.6: “Wet Nurse.” Louisiana Advertiser, (New Orleans, LA) July 11, 1827.----132 Figure 3.7: “Wanted.” Daily Morning News, (Savannah, GA) May 18, 1858.-----------132 Figure 3.8: “HAVE YOU GOT NEGROES FOR HIRE?” Charleston Mercury, (Charleston, SC) August 03, 1857.------------------------------------------------133 Figure 3.9: “Servant to Hire.” The Daily South Carolinian, (Columbia, SC) July 31, 1856.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------134 Figure 3.10: “WANTED,--A COLORED WET NURSE.” The Charleston Mercury, (Charleston, SC) April 20, 1858.--------------------------------------------------134 Figure 3.11: “WANTED,--A WET NURSE, (white or colored) without a child.” The Charleston Mercury, (Charleston, SC) Tuesday, June 17, 1856.-------------135 Figure 3.12: “WANTED,--A GOOD WET NURSE—white preferred.” Daily Chronicle & Sentinel, (Augusta, GA) October 23, 1855.----------------------------------135 Figure 4.1. “Sale of Estates, Pictures and Slaves in the Rotunda, New Orleans,” James Silk Buckingham, The Slave States of America, Volume 1.--------------------198 Figure 4.2. “Auction at Richmond.” From: George Bourne, Picture of slavery in the United States of America. Middleton: Edwin Hunt, 1834, 111.---------------200 Figure 4.3. “Slaves for Sale: A Scene in New Orleans.” From The Illustrated London News, Volume 38, 107. ------------------------------------------------------------201 v 1 INTRODUCTION Shedding Light on the Invisible: Constructing a History of White Slaveowning Women, their Slaves, and the Antebellum Slave Market When journalist and New York Tribune editor James Redpath penned his account of what he observed as he toured the antebellum South, he claimed that white women rarely saw slavery’s “most obnoxious features; never attend auctions; never witness ‘examinations;’ seldom, if ever, see the negroes lashed. They do not know negro slavery as it is…They do not know that the inter-State trade in slaves is a gigantic commerce.”1 Although recent scholarship has begun to dismantle some of Redpath’s contentions, little has changed in the ways we envision white women’s relationships to, investments in, and understandings of economies of slavery since he wrote them in the mid-nineteenth century.2 Studies of American slavery richly document white women’s social, ideological, and cultural roles within nineteenth-century southern communities and their astute management of slaveholding households, but historians rarely consider their profound economic relationships to 1 James Redpath, The Roving Editor: or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968 [1859], 184. 2 When discussing white southern women’s commitment to slavery scholars such as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese do not deny that white women were ideologically, socially and psychologically invested in slavery, nor do they ignore white women’s power to brutalize and sometimes kill enslaved people, particularly those within the plantation household.2 However, because many of them seek to understand white women’s experiences within plantation households that were dominated by white men, their analyses ignore a number of economic dimensions underlying many white women’s commitments to slavery. For example, scholars acknowledge that white women owned their own slaves, but few contemplate how personal slaveownership may have shaped white women’s understanding of, or commitment to, chattel slavery. They also neglect to contemplate how white women’s slaveownership could have affected gender relations within plantation households. Their tendency to ignore these questions is due in part to the general assumption that marriage in the nineteenth century resulted in white women’s “civil death” vis-à-vis the common law and coverture. See also Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982 and Merli Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-80. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Historians such as Kirsten Wood, Linda Sturtz and Thavolia Glymph are exceptions to this cadre of scholars. See Kirsten Wood, Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War. Chapel Hill; London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, Linda Sturtz, Within Her Power: Propertied Women in Colonial Virginia, Routledge, 2002, and Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University