They were her property

This being the title of the book at reference 1, probably brought to me by review or mention in either the TLS or the NYRB. A nicely produced paperback from the Yale University Press with around 200 pages of text and 100 pages of notes and so forth. No pictures and no statistics. The author is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.

The book is not intended as a guide to slavery in the southern states in general - although this reader could have done with a bit more such background - rather to demonstrate that white women were not just passive and mainly benevolent bystanders to the institution of slavery, they were fully part of it. And they could, at times, behave just as badly as some of the men.

Jones-Rogers starts by showing that laws about husbands' rights over their wives property did not stop white women being economically active on their own account. Husbands' seeming rights were regularly and routinely evaded. Women could indeed buy, manage and sell slaves.

Along the way she tells us about the use of slave women as wet nurses by their white owners. Or hirers, there being a considerable trade in hiring out one's slaves to work for others.

I learn of the enormous amount of distress and damage caused by the selling of slaves away from their families and communities. Of this threat hanging over their lives; of the selling of children away from their mothers, fathers away from their wives and children. Of the brutal treatment all too often meted out to slaves who did not conform or otherwise perform as expected. Of the trade of slave dealing, by no mean confined to towns and cities, but brought out into the country and onto plantations by itinerants. Conducted on much the same lines as horse dealing, sometimes by the same dealers.

I learn something of the messy aftermath of emancipation in the mid 1860's, of the abuse of the apprenticeship laws to keep many children and young people in what amounted to slavery. Of the difficulties freed people encountered in trying to put their families back together again.

In which connection, I would have liked to have known more about the land settlement. What land, if any, was given to freed people?

But I did learn that slaves were expensive, with prices starting at almost nothing for a young child, some years off being able to work, and ranging up to around $2,000 for a well-trained adult. I got the impression that the slaves constituted a large proportion of the wealth of planters, both large and small, perhaps more than half. I would have liked to have known more about this.

The book closes by telling us about the sanitised accounts of slavery written up by white women, former slave owners, after the event. Accounts which are full of the loving and mutually beneficial relations between owners and their slaves. 

So what I need now is a general introduction to the subject - this readable book having been as good a place as any to start.

References

Reference 1: They were her property: White women as slave owners in the American South - Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers - 2019.

Reference 2: https://www.stephaniejonesrogers.com/.