Her new book. Jonesrogers uses an impressive assortment of records to piece together the stories of the slave holders and the enslaved. Histories of. Legal documents, court records, and more. Two weeks ago here we displayed the dc immans pax act. Among the records generated youll find several references to women owners. They sought compensation with freed slaved. They claimed in a a gift from her sister was only 1500. They said it had is a corrective that examines how historians have misunderstood and misrepresented white women. And they say there is an analysis of american slavery. One that is a new standard on the subject. She is an associate proefrs where she specializes in africanAmerican History, womens and gender history, and the history of american slavery. The prize for the best doctoral dissertation in 2013. Thank you so much for that invitation thank you all for coming this afternoon and spending your lunchtime with me. It is truly a pleasure to be with you here today. This is james red path. He attempted to explain for his readers why white southern women opposed southern immans passion. He believed it was under the shad do oh of constitution. And in most of the publications. They were easily pa verted the red path argued. With the result that they saw no reason to change their views, they assumed that did not know they shielded them from the institutions horrific societies. White women seldom saw slaveries most on knock sus features. They never attend auctions. Never witness what is called examinations. They did not know that the interstate trade in slaves was a commerce. They showed only the south side view and if the women of the south knew slavery as it is, they were convinced they would join in the paths against it. But narrative sources and government correspondence make it clear that wiet southern women knew the most obnoxious features of slavery all too well. They not only witnessed the most brutal features of slavery, but they took part in them, profited from them, and defended them. After hearing what James Redpath said, we might think that white women were invisible in southern slave markets. They are most notably absent from this painting from 1854 that depicts a very public slave action in charles tob, South Carolina. Or we might think of them as distanced from the horrors of the market from the sales, and also from the traumatic celebrations that came off those sales were finalized. We might think that white women and their children were passive observers of all of this. And more so that they were stopping the horrors and the traumatic celebrations. This image is a depiction of the trauma and the violence of the separations that occurred after a slave auction took place and an enslaved person was should away from their family. Highlighted in the yellow box you can see a white woman and a child distanced from that celebration. From that horror and that trauma, separated from an indirectly witness to but experiencing that but not directly implicated in the violence and the trauma of the market. But this is not how enslaved and formally enslaved people remembered things at all. First they made it clear that white southern womens economic relationships to slavely started in childhood and in some cases in invan fancy. Not just in adulthood. One interview fillmore said that his grandmother was given to his, to her mistress, when she was only one. One year old. Enslaved people and formally enslaved people talk about the lifelong process seiof socialization. And the rituals that drove this point them for enslaved and free people align. White owning slave girls also made it clear they had the power to claim other africanamericans as their property when they selected specific children to serve them. One masters daughter, ella, was a little girl but thee claimed betty cougher as her slave. They played together and grew up together. Betty became ellas personal servant. Waiting on her, standing behind her, and sleeping beside her on the bedroom floor. More profoundly, formally enslaved people tell us that the process of socialization was effective. White girls made claims of ownership in their conversations with enslaved people. A formerly enslaved woman says her mistress would say when i get married to a prince you come with me and take care of all of my childrens. And she in fact did do that. Young white women thought about how enslaved people would fit into their lives. Not just as playmates or companions, but as property. When theyre old enough they turned their imaginings into reality. Formally enslaved people remarked on how this process of socialization also involved lessons about slave management and discipline. What we would typically refer to as slave mastery. Nancy thomas says she was the special little girl for her mistresss daughter, and even during those days she would sew and knit. Palonia would watch her while she knitted. If she did something wrong, she would pinch her ear and say you dropped a stitch. She was, what i refer to, as a mistress in the making. Responsible for overseeing the production of the enslaved girl she would come to own and disciplining her when it did not meet her requirements. So serving as the metaphor kal flies on the walls, they talk about some of the most traumatic and intimate dimensions of those bound and those that were free. They heard and saw things that typically remained obscured from view. Details that white slave owning couples a often left out when they were able to write at all. Many of the slave owning women in this book contended with some form of illiteracy. They were able to write and reed or possess the ability to do one but not the other. Enslaved and formally enslaved peoples recollections suv as some of the only ar chi value records to archival records. No one spoke about it more than the enslaved people subjected to their open and control. They were the people whose lives were forever changed when a mistress sold someone so she could buy a new dress. When they return from theirer rands to discover their children were gone and their mistresses were counting piles of money they received from the slave traders who bought them. Only enslaved people could speak about their female owners profound economic contributions to their continued enslavement with such astonishing precision. So what did formally enslaved people have to say about white females economic relationships to the institution of slavery . They offer insight into the most intimate workings of white households as well. Formally enslaved people like you see pictured here tell us that in some households Breast Feeding constituted another form of labor that slave owners required enslaved women to perform. Nursing white children was one of her primary jobs. But for enslaved mothers, nursing white children was the only work they performed in slavery. These recollections make it clear that they didnt use enslaved mothers to just breastfebreas breastfeed their chuld and it resulted adequate milk supply, or as a last resort, but they compelled the mothers to perform this has a matter of course in some households. For enslaved women to snev this capacity they had to give birth or lactate on a routine basis. What often remains unexplore Second Degree what lead to these constant conceptions in the first place. Enslaved women performed the most argo grkarguous jobs. Some of the enslaved peoples children were con sleeved within relationships of love, but others were undoubtedly the result of sexual assault. So how widespread was this phenomenon . A niche market, a small corner, but never the less a kigt corner of the slave market emerged to full mitt demands for yet nurses. The market was primarily a hiring one. But these adds reveal that some of the enslaved women and mothers were offered for sale and their capacity was a selling point. So these are three examples of some of the newspaper advertisementings that i collected for the research in this book that reflect a number of things. One that white mothers were creating such a demand for enslaved mothers, services, and labor as wet nurses that they were not only placing these adds in southern newspapers, but what you also dont see is that white women were also some of the individuals supplying these white mothers with the enslaved mothers and wet nurses that they wanted, that they were seeking. Here these three are examples of enslaved wet nurses to purchase. And i found there was an important intersection. So most of the men and individuals who were offering enslaved women. So we attend very closer to what enslaved people had to say about white womens economic investments in slavery. It becomes clear they had so much to tell us about the institution of slavery and the roles that white women played in the economy and their continued captivity. We learned that when they said they belonged to white women they meant belonged to them by law. Sally nightengale owned a mother and daughter. So what you see here is what is referred to as a lost friends act. Also typically they were referred to as information wanted adds. And these are very unique in large part because they emerge right as the civil war is coming to an end and in the years at the end of the civil war. So all of those individuals who belonged to their families and communities that had been sold away from them, that they wanted to reconnect with for children, mothers, fathers, brothers, and uncles that they lost contact with. They placed the adds to reconnect and to reconstitute their families. So these advertisements also show more than simply their attempts to reconnect with their families. But they also show how those celebrations occurred in the first place. And they highlight in many of them they highlight the owners who are responsible not simply for their sale, but their separation. Here what im showing is an advertisement placed by car line mason seeking information about her family members. So what she says here is that she was owned by betsy mason, a white woman, and sold by her as well. So she doesnt seemly say that she, you know, was inadvertently sold by a man related to bet si, she identifies betsy as her owner. This is another advertisement which goes a little bit further and deeper. It shows more complex elements or dprengss on slaimensions on. Not just white women, their fames, but their business practices. So he identifies his owner in the advertisement. He also described the conflicts within her family over her property and her Property Rights. He argues and tells us that his mother and siblings were stolen. He is not willing to recognize the kind of inviability of the Property Rights in this particular case. He also says that while she was his owner, that she would hire him out. So in the top element he talks about jackson sim Santa Monicas decision to steal his family away from him, and also talks about her business practices, meaning she would hire him out and receive his wages in return for the labor that he performed in this particular case. And here, it is really getting at some of the more complexion dimensions of slavery that dont enter into the kind of popular understanding of the institution of the ways in which enslaved people were passed between people what guy smith is tells us is hi and his wife were separated, and that they were drawn. Being drawn by different members of his owners family. Some of who were women, but in doing so he talks about the Legal Process by which the separations took please. He doesnt use all of the terms that we would think to look for, but he tells us that while the separations didnt take place in the slave mark, he tells us that the process of being dawn and falling to someone refers to the process that happens in the administration of a deceased persons es tatateestate. So his owner dies and after that owner died, all of his property was then, they would, in fact, have a drawing like a lottery. They would put the names of the individual airs into a bag and a hat. And the name would also be wring alongside a group of enslaved people. So they would draw their names out of a hat and that person would be told what property they received or they would draw out a piece of paper. They did draw enslaved people as part of this state division process. So that is what he is referring to here. So this is not just something they talk about in term thats are necessarily proper legalese, but these recollections are also reflected in documents that appear in dlexs throughout the south. What you see here is a handwritten document that shows exactly what guy smith is refers to. An estate where it lists the individual enslaved people that are part of that deseated persons estate. Also the ages of those people, it shows the values, the estimated values of those people and at the bottom, the very bottom of this document, it shows which heirs drew which enslaved people. So what i think this is shows, is that elizabeth henry, the very top line there, she drew more enslaved people than the other air did. And why is this important . What i show in the bookt is that historians that look at slavery in the kahnian period in the country have shown that slave owner parents would give them more than any other type of property. They would give their daughters more enslaved form than other forms property. So when they got together they would have everything they needed to get a start. To get a start on that new life that they would be living. And in the 19th century you see parents also giving their daughters more enslaved people than land. This is also reflective, even if they did not receive lapd you see that practice play out. And that she got more slaves than the other air, which might suggest also that he received land in addition to receiving those enslaved people. And so i think that these sources are really important to showing kind of the process by which i wrote the book. Because i centered the acts of the formally enslaved people to lead me in more productive situations. So by just looking at fragmentings of institution data, scientists in the room, by using the data that formally enslaved people provided i was able to piece together some of the details of the lives of the feel owners that they identify. So this is a really important, really interesting example of that process for me. So James Skinner lived in mississippi, and on november 20th, he placed this lost friends add in the south western christian advocate. He was looking for his brother, edward, the last time he saw his brother was in 1860 in georgetown. So then john and his family were forced to leave edward behind when his owner was refugeed. So he refugeed them to mississippi and compelled them to leave edward behind. And one year after john placed his first advertisement, he still had not found edward. So he placed another this Time Offering more detail. So each of those advertisements made one thing clear. He spells angelica chu has the owner of his family. So initially it was difficult for me to find angelica. In large part because of the variations in spelling. He refers to her as miss an ann jelica chu. And then i was like he is saying something totally different the second time. So you see he refers to her as mrs. Angelo chu. Sometimes when a woman is married, or even widowed, she may be referred to as misses by her husbands first and last name. We know that he is in mississippi now. We know that he was in georgetown, because he says that, and her last name is chu. Spelled with a u or an e, and well figure it out. I started to enter that information into, as luck would have it, ancestry. Com. You can find many of the really extraordinary documents. So i was able to find frisbee. I said wait, there he is, i found Frisby Freeland chew. Not only does it obituaries are interesting. Theyre very dark and dpresdsing pieces of fragmentings if you want to call them that, but they give rich descriptions of these peoples lives of the deseated persons life, and you can see migrations, you can see all of the things apparent in his obituary. It says he was married to mrs. Chew. He refers to the county where he is at the time. He placed his lost friends advertisements. We have that, that is one corroborati corroboration. Then he talks about his children, about the fact that he was on his way to the government at washington. That he had been appointed to a governmental position that would not only corroborate what he is talking about, or placing him and edward and his family in dc, but why they were in dc and where the yex between them and mississippi came from. So it tells us why they were in washington, and also how he died. This corroborates what james is saying and it gives some details about angelicas life. How she is moving around parts of the country at this moment. Im about to have a super nerdy moment on you. Then i found that her fathers will. For those into genealogy, those into history, this is like ar chi value gold. So it underscored not simply these parental relationships between parents and daughters, the ways their inheritance practices almost ensured that a white woman who received enslaved people would be deeply and profoundly invested in the institution, perpetuation, and after they receive inheritance is such as this but. But also how they were able to maintain control over and exercise control other the enslaved people they inherited. So how does do that . This this yellow box, what it says and i will tread to you, it is not immediately apparent to a lot of you what it says. Im going to say it in the way i think George Washington bisco might sound like. Having made advancements to my daughter and desiring to make my daughters state share equal to my other daughters. He describes the servants that emma will receive. So why is this important . Why did i get excited about this . It tells us that anjelica, before her father died, he gave her her portion of her estate. That is torrent for me to understand. We think about slavery and inheritances, we think that happens just when a person dies, and that when they leave a particular property in their will. And this shows an argument that im manging in book. Parents didnt just leave their daughters enslaved people as property in their wills. They gave them enslaved people over the course of their lives even from infancy as birthday gifts, christmas presents, and especially as wedding gifts. They would often give them a group of enslaved people as i mentioned earlier upon notification that they would get married. So they would have a reception, they would essentially line up and then there would be an announcement made at the wedding reception that essentially granted, the daughter, of the newlywed daughter, her wedding present would entail a group of enslaved people. So what what they are saying here is that he already gave angelica her share, and that likely means she got those enslaved people at the time of her wedding or over the course of time, that shows that we can look elsewhere to make these kepgss that wills are important but theyre not the end all be all for property transfers between white southeasterners or any folks that had the ability to own property and to transfer property to someone else. It also shows an important legal clause that many slave holding parents not only built into their wills as we see her, but also entrust the state, so they would be like a trust fund that is accomplished for wealthy folks these days. So what slay would often do is if they gave their daughters property before they married or before they died in their wills welcome like we see here, they would do so by creating a trust and they would put it in a trust, appoint a trustee. Sometimes the husband, sometimes the father or a male family member. George appoints his wife as emmas trustee. He creates a separate trust estate and he puts an in charge of that until she comes of age. He states here the under lined glauz. He puts in that really important clause to entrust for the sole and ep rate use of daughter. This has so much power. What it is making clear is that George Washington did not want emmas future husband to have any control over the property that he was giving to emma. So by saying trust for the hole and separate use, he is telling her husband you thought you were going to get your hands on this property, and you arent. So theyre working together before they get to the point in which women might be fearful that their husbands might dispose of their property in ways they dont agree with. You might wonder why that would be necessary. You may know that when a woman, a single woman, or a widow ud woman would get married, it says that upon marriage, any of the property the woman brings into marriage, anything they might have inherited, would automatically become her husbands. After that she would not be able to into into contracts in her own name, not able to go into court and sue on her own behalf into what this plaintiff cause does is circumvents some of those constraints. It circumvents the property and the wealth so if allows emma to maintain control of any property she brings into the marriage. He would have to have this will entered in the court or recognized by the courts, and this is something he certainly did because we have the record here. So this is a really important way not only that slave owning parents would ensure that their gaurs would not be at the will of husbands that might not have their best interests in mind, but how they would maintain control over them. Even when the law on the books likes like they should not have that ability and that hour and that control. So this is a document that got me really excited. I was also able to find this extraordinary document. So at the beginning of my comments, during the introduction, you wr told about the dc emancipation act. They did pass the act in the district of columbia that provided compensation for any slave holders that were willing to accept the emancipation of enslaved people in the district. And if they were willing to do that, and to submit an application for them listing who they had on their own, they could receive a sum of money from the federal government to pay them for the enslaved peo e people. This is angelica chews emancipation pr emancipation proclamation for compensation. And it is detailing some of the same details that they provided in his lost friends ad into it shows the names of ann bisco, ang angelica, and emmas name. So it goes back to the details in t in the advertisements, but it lists some of his siblings and his mother in the box. At that time they were gray. So he state thats. These are some of the ways that i operated as i wrote this book using those interesting and disconnected fragments of information that james provided. As well as civil war era documents. Documenting some of the information and tracing and trying to reconstruct some of the elements of angelicas life, too. It wasnt just formally enslaved people talking about white womens economic investments in the institution, but there is a host of other individuals and entities that similarly described or documented white slave owning womens. So at the very top, the federal government did, in fact, document white womens slave ownership. In the census. So it is really interesting about the census, you can have ample access to. It is that in 1840 the census looks very different. So it looks very much like the household that we envisioned. So if there was a female head out household, it would af that individual by name. All of the other inhabitants would be checked off in these categories. So women, white women, so you could not tell who owned property in that household, whether or not women owned enslaved people in that household, it bunched it all together, but in 1850 and 1860, people i guess thought it was important to say hey, we have all of these enslaved People Living in the country and it is probably a good idea to know how many there are. They knew in the 1850 census, but what they did start to do is name the residents of the white households. Gathering that information, they also started to enumerate slave holdings. So we have a page of the identifying of the person that owns the slaves for the first time. And she is claiming more as her own. As you see she had a sizable slave oholding. So the typical slave older was not the person that owned 1,000 slaves. There was slave owners that owned thousands, particularly in louisiana. But the typical slave owner owned ten or less. Women typically owned five or less. These women that we talk about in the book are part of the majority of slave olders. Im not arging in any way in this book, they are not all southerners, they were a small percentage of all southerners, but women were among majority of slave owners meaning they typically had ten or less. Sarah has a few more than ten. She is on the edge of becomes, you know, what would be considered an elite slave holder here. But this is making it impossible now to be able to say not simply that there were slave owning women, but to tell us just how many there may have been. Concrete numbers for those hungry for numbers. So by looking at census data, i have been looking at it for several years now. Looking at slave Holding Women in the census data, i have been able to see or show in some rebeyonds that women may have constituted up to 40 of slave holders. So by looking at the rich sources and it is really important for us to know as a nation and in particular for us to not simply invested economically and the institution of slavery. And racially divided social order that characterizes our nation and continues to shape our encounters today. That was at the state level. On one hand, you know i talked about the legal doctrines, i talked about how the law of curvature says that women should not have the ability to own property after they get married exercising all of these legal and economic activities. At the same time you have state laws like this one from missouri that identify women and recognize this. So this is reflective of black code. Laws that were specifically pertaining to the actions of enslaved people. But what you see here is constant references to the mistress. Of not belonging to him or her. Not to be her own. But the laws on the books of our states in this moment are not simply saying she may exercise a certain kind of hour, or if there are no men around, the law is saying she is equally empowered, equally emboldened by the law to engage each other. The law holds the slave owning women accountable for enslaved peoples misdeeds. So that is huge. The laws at the state level are recognizing the importance that womens ownership, the importance to maintaining a system of surveillance. Cities like new orleans, they need laborers. They would contract with others. And this is a receipt issued by the city of new orleans for roses work on the public works. So she received 1. 50 for roses labor. So the citys are documenting the property ownership, and the slave ownership, of white women in the south. This document probably looks really funky to you guys out there, but it shows the way the city municipal officials recognize women as slave owners. So in new orleans, this is if you have never been i highly recommend it. It is an extraordinary city characterized by a vibrant small merchant, small merchantile city. There are vendors that immerse you in all kinds of things. White women were part of that culture. So the city is really interested in finding who all of these merchants are. Theyre issuing licenses and they want to know who needs a license. So theyre creating a census of the merchants in the city. This is a page out of that census. What you see here the first red arrow is madame harriett. She is operating an oistuyster restaurant. Not far from her are two slave traders, cf hatcher as well as david wshleiss. There are ideas that the slave market was a vice. That it was centered, you know, put in a little dark corner of the city. You only went there like a red light district. People think of the slave market as operating in red light districts. What this reflects is that this kind of commerce, the slave trade, was central tro the commercial districts of new orleans and that women were part of those commercial districts. So even if they never bought a slave they could not avoid encountering the slave market and in some cases benefitting from offering their goods or their services to those individuals invested in and involved in the slave trade. That is not how that is supposed to work. So i apologize for that. Essentially there were i can tell you what it is supposed to look like. This had been, if it behaved itself, was a snupd advertisement placed by a local jailer. So when an enslaved person ran away and was captured, they would take those to their local trailer, and they would interdate that local person. And they would take that information and they would post it in the newspaper. And they would say this person says they belong to you. So in this particular advertisement there was an enslaved man that ran away and the local jailer asked who he belonged to and he identified a female owner. So there are all kinds of ways at the municipal, at the federal level, the state level and you see people invested in slavery into what you see here is a slave traders account book. When they purchase enslaved people they would identify the enslaved person, sometimes by name, most often not by name. By age, they would say what they paid for that person, and who they sold that person to and for what amount. And this page out of john whites slave trade account book it reflects the fact that he sold enslaved people four times. So it reflects also the profit margin for the enslaved people that he sold to her as well. When they were finalized, places like South Carolina had preprinted bills of sale. In this particular case, Elizabeth Morrison sold and enslaved women to a notorious slave trader for 410. It sounds like a very small amount, but there is a website that you can use called measuring worth. You can put in the amount of money that the person was bought or sold for and it will tell you, it will calculate how much purchasing power that amount of money today. So it would have been the equivalent of 13,000 in 2018. So this reflects the fact that women not on owned enslaved people but they engaged in the selling and the purchase of enslaved people and did so and connected and interacted with slave traders. Something they suggested they did not do on a regular basis. Looking at these documents reflects the fact that they did so on a regular basis. I think what is interesting here is that he is really interesting to see in a city like new orleans that slavery is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. So he is trying to hunt lucy down. Lucy ran away from him. He is trying to find lucy. And what is interesting is he identifies three of lucys previous owners. He says cape tan wellly, then mrs. Toogood, and then mrs. Clark. By doing so he creates a chain of ownership that alouses for us to see not only the violence of the market, the ways in which they were passed from person to person to person, but also the Important Role that white women played in that chain as well. Their location on those chains, but also that they were come police sit in involved in creating the separations through the process of sale as well. And you probably cant see this very clearly from where you are, but during the civil war the confederacy needed fortifications to protect themselves as did federal troops. And they would often impressive slaved people from local slave owners to commondeer that work. They would keep track of the payments they issued to the slave holders. And this was called a slave payro payroll, a document housed here and there are thousands and thousands and thousands of them. And what it shows is that women were counted among the slave holders who were impressed and also that they were some of those paid for the work that those enslaved men typically did. So you have ilieliza simms and son listed there. Mary simms. And even though her name is that there are initials here, this is ella crosby. So i corroborated that in additional documents. But what it also shows again is that one of the things that is really interesting when i ask about the numbers is they say how many are there. I talk about the difficulties with coming to a precise quantitity because of things like this so the fact that ella is listed as ev crosby makes it sometimes difficult to know that all over, the complete number of enslaved people because they are referred to only by their initials. So that makes it difficult to come to a con crease number, but it shows that women, even into the civil war era are benefitting from the labor of enslaved people. And even into the civil war era you see that slave owning women are hunting enslaved people. Even when the jig is up, theyre still hunting down enslaved people. So ultimately these are the kinds of documents that i used. So e worked on this book for ten years and this is what the this is what i hope the book does. It takes a picture, this image, you can find it in hundreds and thousands of books, and rarely is anyone interested in what i highlight here. There are many women, many children that are at the auction even though it is a pictorial illustration, that it may be based on fact, it may not be, but women were everywhere. They were hides in plain sight. It just takes a little closer perspective upon which, a lens to show their presence and their roles and their importance in this the institution more broadly, so thank you so much, everybody. For listening and for being here. Weeknights this month were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan 3, and tonight we look at president john f. Kennedys assassination. A week after his death, president Lyndon Johnson appointed earl warren to lead a commission to investigation. Author phillip sheenan takes us to the original warrant Conference Room on capitol hill to discuss key art facts and lingering controversy surrounding the report. And enjoy American History tv every weekend on cspan 3. History professor and author, Ellen Carol Dubois discusses her book, suffrage, womens long battle for the vote. An overview of the movement from the beginning of the 1840s when suffra suffrage leaders were also abolitionists. The world conference of Dallas Fort Worth hosted this online event. Im jim falk, thank you so much for being with us this afternoon. Joining us is dr. Ellen carol, dubois, im so pleased that the conversation will be be lee cullum, a dear friend and special friend and supporters of the World Affairs council. Let me remind you that you can purchase a copy of suffrage by going to dallass independent