Gift from her sister, was worth 1,500, they were her property has received a number of highlily favorable reviews. Its called a stunning new book. Paris of the New York Times says its a cogent corrective that examines how historians have misunderstood and misrepresented white women as reluctant actors. In the Washington Post elizabeth bar ren writes jonesrogers has an one that sets a new standard for scholarship on the subject. Stephanie jonesrogers is an associate professor of history at the university of california berkeley, specializing in africanAmerican History, gender history. They were her property won a learner scott prize for the best doctoral dissertation in u. S. Womens history in 2013. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome stephanie jonesrogers. [ applause ] hnch. Thank you so much that are that invitation, and the introduction, david, and thank you for coming this afternoon and spending your lunchtime with me. Its truly a pleasure to be here with you today. So this is James Redpath. In 1859, after touring the antebellum south he attempted to explain to readers why white southern women opposed southern emancipation. He believed their sentiments were tied to a lifetime of indoctrination, eared as they were under the shadow of the peculiar institution. Slavery was incessantly praised and defended everywhere they want and by everyone they knew and in most of the publications they read. Their consciences were easily perverted, redpath argued, were never afterwards appealed to, with a result that they saw no reason to change their views. Redpath assumed that white southern women did not know negro slavery as it is because their society shielded them from the institutions horrific realities. Insulated by southern patriarchs, he argued, white women seldom saw slaverys, quote, most obnoxious features, never attend auctions, end quote, never witnessed what were called examinations, seldom if ever, saw, quote, the negros lashed. More profoundly they did not know the trade in slaves was a gigantic commerce. Southern men revealed only the south side view of slavery, redpath surmised and if the women of the south knew slavery as it is he was convinced they would join in the protests against it. Redpaths assumptions represent a commonly held patriarchal view yet narrative sources, legal and financial documents and military and government correspondence make it clear that white southern women knew the most obnoxious features of slavery all too well. Slaveowning women not only witnessed the most brutal features of slavery, they took part in them, profited from them, and defended them. After hearing what James Redpath said about white womens relationship to slavery we might think that white women were invisible in southern slave markets. They are most notably absent from this painting from 1854, which depicts a very public slave auction in the city of charleston, South Carolina. Or we might think of them as distanced from the horrors of the market, from the sales. But also from the traumatic separations that came after those sales were finalized. We might think that white women and their children were merely passive observers of all this. And more profoundly, that they were powerless to stop these horrors and traumatic separations like what you see in this image. This image is a depiction of the kind of trauma and the violence of those separations that occurred after a slave auction took place and an enslaved person was sold away from their family. And highlighted in the yellow box towards the lefthand side of the image you can see a white woman and a child distanced from that separation, distanced from that horror and that trauma, separated from and indirectly kind of 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 formerly enslaved people remembered things at all. First, they made it clear that white southern womens economic relationships to slavery began in childhood. And in some cases during infancy. Not just in adulthood. Fillmore hancock told his interviewer has grandmother was given to the missus as her own on the day she was born. Remarkably Fillmore Hancock recalled that old missus was only a year old then, so his grandmother was given to her mistress when she was only 1, 1yearold. Enslaved people and formerly enslaved people talked about the lifelong processes of socialization by which white girls came to understand themselves as markedly different than enslaved people. And the rituals that drove these things home. It was made clear they had the power to claim other africanamericans as their property when they selected specific enslaved children to serve them. When betty coffer was born her masters daughter ella was only a little girl but she nevertheless claimed betty coffer as her slave shortly after betty was born. They played together and grew up together, betty recalled, eventually betty became ellas personal servant, waiting on her, standing behind her chair during meal times and sleeping beside her on the bedroom floor. More profoundly, formerly enslaved people tell us this process of socialization was effective. White girls often made claims of ownership in their conversations with enslaved people. A formerly enslaved woman melinda recalled her young mistress would frequently tell her when i get big and marry a prince you come with me and take care of all of my children. When she did get married she took them as part of her household. As southern girls young white women thought about how enslaved people would fit into their lives, not just as play mates or companions, but as property. When they were old enough they turned their imaginings into reality. Formerly enslaved people remarked upon how this process of socialization also involved lessons about slave management and discipline, what we would typically refer to as slave mastery. Nancy thomas recalled that she was the special little girl for her mistress harriets daughter pelonia and that even during them days she would sew and knit. She had a little threelegged stool and shed set it between the girls legs while she was sitting down then palonia would watch her while she knitted. If she did something wrong she would pinch nancys ear a little and say you dropped a stitch, nanny. As her testimony shows 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 hone and disciplining her when it did not meet her requirements. So serving as the metaphor call flies on the walls of southern households, formerly enslaved people talked about some of the most violent, traumatic, and intimate dimensions of life for those who were bound and those who were free. They heard and saw things that typically remained obscured from view, details that white slaveowning couples often left out of their personal correspondence or public communications, when they were able to write at all. Many of the slaveowning women i discuss in this book contended with some form of illiteracy. They were either unable to write and read, or possess the ability to do one but not the other. Enslaved and formerly enslaved peoples recollections about their female owners thus serve as some of the only archival records about these women to survive. This book takes its cue from formerly enslaved people. No group spoke about white womens investments in slavery more often or more powerfully than the enslaved people subjected to their ownership and control. They were the people whose lives were forever changed when a mistress sold someone just so that she could buy a new dress. They were best equipped to describe the agony that shook their bodies and souls when they returned from their errands to discover that their children were gone and their mistresses were counting piles of money they had received from the slave traders whod 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 formerly enslaved people have to say about white females economic relationships to the institution of slavery . Formerly enslaved peoples interviews offer insight into the most intimate workings of white households as well. This former enslaved person tells us that in some households breastfeeding 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 like mary edwards nursing white children was the only work they performed during slavery. These recollections make it clear that white mothers didnt simply use enslaved mothers to breastfeed their children because of physiological elements that resulted in inadequate milk supply, an inability to produce milk at all or as a last resort but they compelled enslaved mothers to perform this labor as a matter of course in some households. Moreover, in order for enslaved women to serve in this capacity consistently they also had to give birth or at the very least lactate on a routine basis. But what often remains unexplored is what led to these constant conceptions in the first place. While enslaved women performed the most arduous forms of labor in their own owners fields and in their households they also had to conceive, carry a pregnancy to full term, give birth and lactate in order to be able to serve as wet nurses in the first place and sources suggest this is precisely what happened. Some of the enslaved womens children were undoubtedly conceived within relationships of love, but others were undoubtedly the result of sexual assault. So how widespread was this phenomenon . Wide spread enough that a in each market, significant corner of the slave market emerged to fulfill white womens demands to enslave wet nurses. The market in enslaved wet nurses was primarily a hiring one but these ads reveal that some of the enslaved women and mothers were offered for sale and that their capacity to serve as wet nurses was a selling point. So these are three just three examples of some of the newspaper advertisements that i collected as part of the research for this book, which reflect a number of things. One, that white mothers were creating such a demand for enslaved mothers services and labor as wet nurses that there were not they were not only putting these ads, placing these ads in southern newspapers, but that also what you dont see in these, but in others, what also becomes clear is that white women were also some of the individuals who were 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 seeking enslaved wet nurses either to purchase or to hire. And what i found also is that there was a really important intersection and connection between the market in enslaved wet nurses and the slave market proper. So most of the men and individuals who were offering enslaved women for sale to serve in this capacity were also slave traders who made their living buying and selling enslaved people. So in addition to that when we attend very closely to what enslaved and formerly enslaved people had to say about white womens Economic Investments in slavery it becomes clear that they had so much to tell us about the institution of slavery and the roles that white women played in the slave market economy and in their continued captivity. We learn that when they said that they belonged to white women they meant belonged to by law. Sally nightingale owned Alice Marshall and her mother, for example, and she claimed her mistresss husband jack had nothing to do with me and my mother because they belonged to the missus by law and not her husband. This is referred to as a lost friends ad, also typically they were referred to as information wanted ads. And these are very unique in large part because they emerge right as the civil war is coming to an end, and also in the years following the civil war. And what they reflect is formerly enslaved peoples attempts to reconstitute their families. 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, family members that children and mothers and fathers, and even brothers and uncles, who they had lost contact with because of sale and separation, they placed these ads in order to try to reconnect with those individuals, to find those people, and to reconstitute their families. And so these advertisements also show more than simply their attempts to reconnect with their families. But they also show how those separations occurred in the first place. And they highlight, in many of them they highlight the owners who were responsible not simply for their sale, but their separation. Here what you show here what im showing is an advertisement placed by caroline mason, seeking information about her family members. And so what she says here is that she was owned by betsy mason, a white woman, and was sold by her as well. So she doesnt simply say, you know, that she inadvertently was sold by some man who was related to betsy. She identifies betsy as her legal owner. But also the person who was ultimately responsible for the separations that occurred after those sales took place. This is another advertisement which goes a little bit farther, more deeper and shows more complex elements or dimensions of slavery. William mays advertisement highlights several things, not only about slave owning women and their families but also their business practices. He not only identifies his female owner telalee stokes in this advertisement he also described the conflicts within her family over her property and her property rights. He argues, or he tells us that jack stampson, his owners grandson stole his mother and siblings from telalise, a grandston and a grandmother, he is not willing to recognize the kind of inviability of telalise stokes property rights. While she held legal title to him, while she was his owner, that she would hire him out. He refers to this process of hiring out as living with at the time. In the top element he talks about Jack Simpsons decision to sell him away from his family, to steal his family away from him, and also talks about telalises business practices, meaning she would hire him out and then receive his wages in return for the labor that he performed for jimson in this particular case. These sources really get at some of the kind of, again, these more complex dimensions of slavery that often dont enter into the kind of popular understanding of the institution and of the ways in which enslaved people were passed between people, how those separations occurred, et cetera. So here, what guy smith is telling us is that his wife, he and his wife were separated from their children and that his children were drawn, refers to a process called being drawn by different members of his owners family, some of whom were women. But in doing so he also talks about the Legal Process by which these separations took place. He doesnt use all the terms that we would like to so that we would think to look for, but he very plainly tells us that while these separations of family members didnt take place in the slave market, they nonetheless brought about the same kinds of traumatic severances from loved ones. What he tells us is that this process of being drawn and falling to someone, refers to the process that happens during an estate the administration of a deceased persons estate, in this particular context. So his owner dies. And then after that owner died, all of his property was then they would, in fact, have a drawing. So very much like a lottery. They would put the names of the individual heirs into a bag, or hat. And that individual heir would also the name would also be written alongside a group of enslaved people, or that person would draw. So they would draw either their names out of a hat and then that person would then be told what property they received or they would draw out a piece of paper that had a list of property that they would receive. So there were a variety of ways that this ritual took place. And so they literally did, in fact, draw enslaved people as a part of this Estate Division process. And so that is what thats what guy is referring to here. And so this is not simply something that enslaved people talked about in legal in terms that arent necessarily proper legalese, but these recollections are also reflected in documents that appear in archival collections throughout the south. What you see here is a handwritten document that shows exactly what guy smith is referring to, an Estate Division in which it lists the individual enslaved people that are a part of that deceased persons estate and it also shows the ages of those enslaved people. It shows the values, the estimated values of those enslaved people. And then towards the bottom, at the very bottom of this document it shows which heirs drew which enslaved people. And so what i thought was really remarkable about this document, and in relationship to what guy shows, in his lost friends ad is that Elizabeth Henry, the very top line there, Elizabeth Henry drew more enslaved people than the other heir, Richard Henry did. Why is this important . What i show in the book is that colonial historians who look at slavery in the colonial period in the country have shown that slaveowning parents would typically give their daughters more slaves than any other form of property. They would give them other property and they would give them money and they would give them in some cases stocks and bonds that were given to daughters but they would often give their daughters far more enslaved people than other forms of property, particularly land. And they would give their sons the land. So that when those two when that couple got together they would have everything they needed to get a start. To get a start on that new life that they were going to be living. I see the same thing happen in the 19th century. Throughout the 19th century you see similar patterns where slaveholding parents would also give their daughters more enslaved people than land. And this is this is reflective of the fact that even if richard did not receive land, he actually you can see that kind of inheritance practice play out here in this document by showing that she received elizabeth received more slaves than her than the other heir, which might suggest also that he received land in addition to receiving those enslaved people. And so i think these sources are really important to showing kind of the process by which i wrote the book because i centered and foregrounded the experiences of the accounts and reflections of formerly enslaved people in order to lead me in more productive directions, and additional directions in r