They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

Chapter 1 begins with a testimony about a young white slave owner’s daughter. Despite her “intense bond” with the enslaved woman named Fanny who cares for her, three-year-old Lizzie Anna Burwell grows displeased with her caregiver and demands her father cut the woman’s ears off and acquire a new maid. Jones-Rogers uses this testimony to discuss the ways in which young children like Lizzie learned how to be slave owners by closely observing and imitating the actions of their parents.

Jones-Rogers details how young daughters received enslaved men, women, and children from their parents as gifts on birthdays and other occasions, like baptisms and holidays, or often for no special reason. Many of these women also inherited enslaved people. Jones-Rogers argues that this common practice led women to “value the crucial ties between slave ownership and autonomous, stable financial futures” (2). These various factors led slave ownership to become a part of their identity.

Jones-Rogers explains the concept of primogeniture, in which all of a family’s property is left to the oldest son. Americans rejected primogeniture as a rebuke to the practices of the British aristocracy which they fought to escape during the American Revolution. This rejection of primogeniture often resulted in the transfer of slave ownership to the daughters of slave-owning families.