Written by Lipton Matthews.
Beliefs about female involvement in slavery have been shaped by a particular narrative. Women are seen as secondary figures, kept distant from the buying and selling of humans by patriarchal norms and their own feminine delicacy. In some historical writings, this narrative has been reinforced by an exclusive focus on women’s subordination, removing their agency from the historical record. The issue, of course, is that evidence paints a very different picture. When historians examine transaction records, probate wills, slave legislation and “runaway” advertisements, they find that women were not mere onlookers, but buyers, sellers and enforcers of the slave trade.
Understanding how the idea of the “passive mistress” initially took root is key. Its intellectual foundation was the legal doctrine of coverture, which stipulated that married women could not independently own property. Since over 90% of white Southern women were married, one might assume that few exercised genuine authority over enslaved individuals. The “nasty and unseemly business of transacting for human beings,” as one historian described it, must surely have been a male domain?
In fact, no. Quite early on, Southern legislatures deliberately created exceptions within coverture, particularly regarding enslaved property. Mississippi’s Married Women’s Property Law of 1839 was remarkably clear: a woman’s ownership of slaves “shall continue to her, notwithstanding her coverture,” and this applied equally to enslaved people acquired after marriage, along with their descendants. Alabama soon followed suit in 1841. These were not minor legal footnotes; they were instruments specifically designed to safeguard a form of wealth that was routinely passed down through generations, often along distinctly female lines.
When one actually quantifies the extent of women’s participation in slavery, the narrative of female passivity unravels rather quickly. A study analyzing over 15,000 sale records from the New Orleans slave market between 1856 and 1861 (the largest such market in the antebellum US) revealed that women appeared as either buyers or sellers in 30.2% of all transactions. Even more telling is that women were not disproportionately concentrated on one side of the market. They were listed as sellers in 16.5% of transactions and as buyers in 17.2%, a near-perfect balance that directly challenges the notion that these were widows merely liquidating inherited property.
If women’s involvement in the slave market were simply a consequence of inheriting property after a husband’s death, one would expect to observe significantly more female sellers than buyers. The nearly equal distribution is therefore “inconsistent with White women being passive owners from, say, the death of a spouse.” Rather, it suggests they were actively acquiring enslaved people as property.
This phenomenon was not confined to the late antebellum period. Even in notary records from the 1830s, before legislative acts formalized married women’s property rights, women still appeared in 15.8% of all transactions. “Runaway” advertisements, another source of data on slave ownership, listed women as owners in 11.5% of all notices.
And when researchers cross-referenced census records with transaction data, they found that the women identified were no older, on average, than the general female population, and that their marriage rate was over 40%. This confirms that these were not primarily widows reluctantly forced into the market by circumstance. They were women of various ages, many of them married, engaging in the slave economy as a regular aspect of their economic lives.
One striking aspect of women’s involvement in the slave trade is the inheritance patterns — enslaved people, particularly enslaved women, were preferentially transferred to female family members across the generations. This was not accidental. It was a discernible cultural pattern that contributed to female wealth in both the Caribbean and the American South.
This becomes particularly evident in studies of colonial Jamaica, where probate wills and inventories shed light on the mechanisms of female inheritance. Analysing over 1,200 wills, researchers discovered that approximately three-quarters of all women who made them during the first century of British settlement in Jamaica owned slaves. Moreover, these women overwhelmingly chose to bequeath those slaves to other women, thereby “consolidating the possession of enslaved people within families along female lines.”
Individual examples help to illustrate this pattern. Mercy Bars left only five slaves to her son, while granting her daughter Sarah Ricketts “several large families of enslaved people.” Catherine Byndloss, in disposing of slaves she held explicitly “in my own right,” gave one man to her son Henry and four women to her daughter Jane. This preference was common. In Britain, women traditionally inherited personal or “moveable” property, rather than real estate. In Jamaica, enslaved people were frequently categorized as personal property, which “identified them, like clothing, furniture, and jewelry, as feminine possessions.” Hence for propertied women in colonial Jamaica, an enslaved person was as natural an inheritance as a set of silver candlesticks.
Daughters were also introduced to the slave market from a young age. Parents routinely earmarked funds specifically for them to purchase slaves. For example, one widow instructed that eighty pounds be “laid out in negroes” for her granddaughter, while one father directed his executors to acquire “choice new negroes two men and two women” as well as “a new negro girl to wait on” his daughter. Participation in slavery was not something women stumbled into; it was nurtured and normalized in the wider society.
The legal evidence confirms that female mastery was intentionally woven into the statutory framework of colonial slave management. In South Carolina’s earliest slave laws, which were modeled on Caribbean precedents, “mistresses were explicitly named alongside masters or incorporated into the gender-neutral rubric of owner, reflecting a common understanding that absolute ownership and authority over enslaved people was as much rooted in female mastery as male.”
The slave law of 1691 mandated that every “master, mistress, overseer” conduct monthly searches of enslaved quarters for weapons and punish enslaved people found without passes. It also recognized that female slave owners were “just as capable of killing or maiming their slaves as their male counterparts,” stipulating that if any person “out of wilfulness, wantoness, or bloody mindedness, shall kill a slave, he or she, upon due conviction thereof, shall suffer three months imprisonment.”
Gender was thus irrelevant to culpability; what mattered was the act itself. The slave code of 1740 went further, classifying enslaved people as chattel property — a designation with significant implications for women, as widows in South Carolina were granted absolute ownership of chattel as part of their dower. The same code required women who owned more than ten slaves to take part in slave patrols on equal footing with men, stating that “all persons, as well women as men, who are or shall be owners of settled plantations in any district, ought to contribute.”
The “runaway” advertisements placed by female slave owners in South Carolina’s colonial newspapers offer some of the most direct evidence we have regarding how women treated their slaves, and they make for stark reading. Rebecca Massey instructed that whoever captured her runaway slave Ruth should give her “50 good Lashes, and deliver her to me.” Mary Ellis went so far as demanding that her runaway slave Catharina be seized “dead or alive.” These were not the directives of women thrust into an unfamiliar role by widowhood. They reflected their authors’ precise understanding of their legal rights over enslaved people, including with respect to the use of lethal force.
The account book of one female slave owner in Jamaica records payments for “whipping Tom, whipping Adam, ditto Darby, catching Chaplin, and whipping him, catching, imprisoning and whipping four negroes” as well as “prison fees for six negroes.” Another woman ordered her executors to place an enslaved man “in irons till the first opportunity serves to send him off to be sold.” Mary Elbridge, who managed a Jamaican plantation for decades after her husband’s death, spoke of enslaved people in cold, utilitarian terms. To her, they were assets with depreciating values, “not valued at anything” once too old or sick to work.
The comforting image of the “passive mistress” — graciously presiding over a household, perhaps somewhat oblivious to the harsher aspects of slavery — is not merely incomplete, but actually wrong. Women bought and sold slaves, served on slave patrols, and meted out punishments. It is fashionable nowadays to blame everything on white men. Yet just as blacks took an active role in the slave trade, so did women.
Lipton Matthews is a researcher and YouTuber. His work has been featured by the Mises Institute and Chronicles. He is the author of The Corporate Myth. You can reach him at: lo_matthews@yahoo.com
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