Mistresses in the Making: White Girls, Mastery, and the Practice of Slave Ownership in the Nineteenth-Century South

In spite of the fact that white women inherited slaves, hired them out, bought, sold and bequeathed them; in spite of using a spectrum of management and disciplinary strategies to get them to work; and despite the courts’ general recognition of white women’s rights as slaveowners with the power and authority to dispose of slaves as they wished, scholars argue that they could not be “masters” of enslaved people.

This paper challenges this understanding of slave mastery by showing that many white southern parents taught their daughters how to be slaveowners who were capable of exercising mastery over slaves. It shows how inheritance practices among slaveowning families played a formative role in how white girls conceptualized their personal relationships to human property, imagined the powers they would possess once they became slaveowners, and shaped their techniques of slave control.

Slaveowning parents gave enslaved people to their young daughters as gifts on special occasions or for no reason at all. They also bequeathed enslaved people to their daughters in their wills. When they did so, their daughters came to value the crucial ties between slaveownership and autonomous and stable financial futures. Coupled with this, parents offered their daughters vicarious lessons on how to own and control enslaved people through their words and deeds. As young girls watched their parents interact with the enslaved people, they observed different models of slave mastery, and through a process of trial and error, they were able to develop styles of their own.

By tracing white females’ ideological development as slaveowners from girlhood to adulthood, this paper reveals that many white women did not feel compelled to relinquish control over their slaves to men later in their lives. Instead, many of them sought to manage and “master” their slaves just as they always had done.