White men weren’t the only ones who profited from slavery

The traditional historical view that white women were rarely involved in buying and selling enslaved people in the United States is not accurate, a new study shows.

 

Researchers analyzed records from the time and found that white women were involved in more than 30% of the transactions in the largest market for enslaved people in the antebellum era.

 

White women were especially likely to be involved in buying and selling of enslaved women, where they were listed as owners in nearly 40% of transactions.

 

The findings should change the view about the role of white women in slavery, said Trevon Logan, co-author of the study and professor of economics at The Ohio State University.

 

“White women were assumed to not be active owners and to have only limited involvement in transactions,” Logan said.

 

“Women were thought to be blind to the darker side of slavery, but these findings suggest otherwise.”

 

Logan conducted the research with Benton Wishart, who did the work as an undergraduate student at Ohio State. Their study is published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

 

Logan said the project began when he read the work of Stephanie Jones-Rogers, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, who uncovered narrative evidence of white women buying and selling enslaved people.

 

But when he looked for data, he found that no one had analyzed the records to see how often women were involved in these transactions.

 

One reason was that transaction records didn’t make it easy, Wishart said.

 

“The data had the gender assigned to the slaves in the transaction but not to the buyers and sellers, so I had to go through and assign gender based on their given names,” Wishart said.

 

In order to properly assign gender, Wishart used U.S. Census records of the times to determine which given names could reliably be listed as women.

 

One source for the study was New Orleans sales data from 1856 to 1861, which includes all transactions as recorded in the largest market at the time in the United States.  The researchers also used notary statements showing buyers and sellers from a time earlier in the antebellum era and runaway newspaper advertisements to see who was listed as the owner of the runaway slaves.

 

In New Orleans, white women were involved in 30.2% of all transactions as either the buyer or the seller of enslaved people. In the 1830 notary records they are involved in 15.8% of all transactions, and in runaway advertisements they are listed as the owner in 11.5% of the notices.

 

“That is a significant level of involvement for a group that the historical narrative has claimed were passive about the institution of slavery,” Logan said.

 

Just as important: Women were equally likely to be buyers as sellers.

 

“It wasn’t just women who had to sell their enslaved people because their husbands died,” Wishart said. “They were involved in buying, as well.”

 

White women were especially involved in buying Black women, whom they would use to work around the house while the men worked in the fields. Women were listed as owners in nearly 40% of transactions involving enslaved women.

 

For white women in the South, owning enslaved people was a ticket to financial independence.

 

Coverture laws generally forced women to give their money and property to their husbands when they married, but an exception was made for enslaved people.

 

“Women in the South couldn’t own real estate or financial assets, but they could own enslaved people,” Logan said.  “These laws allowed women in the antebellum South to have much more economic independence than a woman in the North.”

 

Not all states in the South gave the same level of protection to women who owned enslaved people, and the study found that women were more likely to be involved in transactions in states where they had more ownership rights, he said.

 

The findings should lead to a new view about the role of women in slavery, Logan said.

 

“We need to think about the implications of this gender story.  We’re not talking about just women owning people.  The class of people who were enslavers had disproportionate amounts of political power and we now know that includes women,” Logan said.

 

“So even without direct political participation, women became very important in the continuation of slavery as an institution.”

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