ABSTRACT
The traditional historical narrative claims that White women were rarely involved in market transactions for enslaved people in the antebellum United States. Using transaction records, notary statements, and runaway advertisements, we provide the first quantitative estimates of the extent of White women’s involvement in antebellum slave transactions as owners of record.
Contrary to the narrative, we find that White women were quite frequently noted as owners of record in transactions as both buyers and sellers. White women participated in more than 30% of the transactions in the largest market for enslaved people in the antebellum era. We also find that White women were especially likely to be owners involved in transactions with enslaved women, where they were listed as owners in nearly 40% of transactions. Linking transaction participants to the census, we find that White women owners were not more likely to be widows nor were they older than women in the general population. Overall, our results are consistent with the new historical narrative that White women were ubiquitous in enslavement transactions and this was a critical part of White women’s economic activity in the antebellum era.
Introduction
The gender dynamics of American enslavement remain an active area of historical interest. The historiography has typically asserted that White women had limited involvement with enslavement as a business enterprise. While some single women were known to be active enslavers, and other women assumed the role upon widowhood or advanced age, the presumption is that coverture, the common law legal structure where married women were prevented from assuming property rights, and patriarchal social conventions shielded White women from intimate knowledge of the economics of enslavement. While White women certainly interacted with the enslaved in household management and day-to-day tasks, they are assumed not to be active owners and are also assumed to have only limited involvement in transactions. This patriarchal view was commonly thought of as a reason why Southern White women supported the institution—they were assumed to be blind to its darker side. Jones-Rogers (2019) notes that: “in the view of more than a few historians of American slavery and the domestic slave trade, this [limited involvement of White women] was especially the case when it came to the business of buying, selling, and even hiring enslaved people. These scholars claim that the nasty and unseemly business of transacting for human beings was considered ill-suited to white ladies” (p. xii).
Historians now acknowledge that “slave-owning women rarely talked about their economic investments in slavery, and they wrote about them even less” (Jones-Rogers 2019, p. xx), making it difficult to estimate the extent of their total involvement in various aspects of the enterprise. Traditional historical sources do establish the role of White women at the extensive margin of enslavement. That is, we know they were sometimes owners and exercised “sole and exclusive use” of enslaved people within marriage. What is not known is the level of involvement at the intensive margin—the rate or proportion at which women were engaged in the normal, everyday market transactions for enslaved people that were the core of enslavement as a business. Knowing some women were involved in the market as owners does not establish that White women were unremarkable as owners of record in typical transactions that occurred in the market. In fact, the narrative of White women as reluctant and relatively uninvolved participants remains the most dominant in the literature, even new scholarship in the history of capitalism (Baptist 2014, Faust 1992, Fox-Genovese 1988, Sturtz 2002, Wood 2004).
This narrative has recently been challenged in the historical literature, most prominently
by Jones-Rogers (2019). Through an innovative use of court documents, enslaved narratives,
newspaper reports, Civil War administrative records, and other historical sources, she documents
how regularly White women were seen in all aspects of American enslavement, in direct
opposition to the passive role assumed by other historians. The specific condition of ownership
of enslaved people necessitated unique institutional and legal structures to allow married women
independent property rights in enslaved people which would be recognized formally. While
several sources of enslaved transactions exist in the literature and have been used by economic
historians, these sources have not been used to estimate the rate of White women’s involvement
in the business of enslavement. In particular, what is not known is the rate at which White
women were participants relative to men, and additional demographic and socioeconomic
characteristics of women active in the market.
This project adds a quantitative understanding of White women’s role as enslavers in one
important dimension: their active participation in transactions. We use three data sources to
provide the first estimates of how frequently White women appear as owners of record of
enslaved people. The first source, New Orleans sales data (1856-1861), uses all transactions as
2recorded in the largest market at the time in the United States. The second, notary statements
(from 1830 “certificates of good character”), shows buyers and sellers from a time earlier in the
antebellum era, allowing us to see some time dimensions of the transactions. Lastly, we use
runaway newspaper advertisements to see who is listed as the owner of a self-manumitted slave.
Each source has the given name of the parties involved (buyer/seller), and we use a conservative
gender-name matching to determine the gender of those involved in the transactions.
Specifically, any ambiguous name is assigned male, leading to an undercount of the extent of
White women’s involvement in the transactions inherent to the enterprise. We then use these
data sources to estimate the rate at which White women were active in the buying, selling, or
public announcement of enslaved ownership.
We find White women were quite prominent in market transactions. In New Orleans,
White women were involved in 30.2% of all transactions as either the buyer or the seller of
enslaved people. In the 1830 notary records they are involved in 15.8% of all transactions, and in
runaway advertisements they are listed as the owner in 11.5% of the notices. This is a significant
level of involvement for a group the narrative has claimed were passive about the institution.
Also important, White women were equally likely to be buyers as sellers in the transaction data,
so it is not the case that their involvement was disproportionately on one side of the market.
Being equally as active as buyers or sellers is also inconsistent with White women being passive
owners from, say, the death of a spouse, which would imply disproportionate rates of selling
versus buying in the market if ownership was primarily transferred upon death of a spouse.
We also find that the involvement of White women in the market was itself highly
gendered. White women were most likely to be involved in transactions of enslaved Black
women. In New Orleans, White women were involved in 37.57% of transactions involving
3enslaved women. In notaries from more than twenty years earlier, they are involved in 23.33%
of transactions. In runaway advertisements, they are listed as the owners of enslaved Black
women in more than a quarter, 25.44%, of notices. While the market for enslaved people was
concentrated on prime-aged enslaved men, we find here that the market for enslaved women was
one where White women played a significant, outsized role. To our knowledge, this is the first
quantitative evidence of the role that White women played in transactions involving enslaved
women.
We further match the transaction records to census records to see if White women in
enslaved transactions were more likely to be widows than women in the general population.
After matching the women in our transaction data to the census, we further analyze them by birth
cohort and compared the population marriage rates by age for White women in the South. The
marriage rates from our matches show a similar age pattern, with only slightly more unmarried
women as the cohorts age. The marriage rates for young and middle age women are only
marginally different. Moreover, comparisons of the overall age distribution do not show that
women in the transaction data are on average older than women in the population. Both the
marriage rate and age distribution comparisons suggest that women matched to the census were
not more likely to be involved in the markets due to being widowed. Overall, our results are
consistent with several conclusions. First, the involvement of White women in transactions was
not limited nor rare. Second, White women were more likely to be involved in transactions with
enslaved women, a finding that has not been noted in the literature. Third, we find little evidence
that White women were “incidental” or “ascribed” enslavers due to being widowed or of
advanced age. In contrast, our findings are consistent with the ubiquitous nature of White
women as active enslavers in the antebellum South.
4White Women as Enslavers
The historical literature has long noted the legal structure of coverture implies that Southern
White women did not exercise an active and independent role as enslavers. Since coverture
under common law disallowed married women independent property rights, it would follow
directly that any enslaved people granted to them would revert in ownership to their husbands.
Coverture assumed that women were under the control of their families of birth (more accurately,
their fathers) until the time of marriage, when they would be subsumed with that of her husband,
making her a feme covert.
1 All rights of ownership of any property transferred to the husband at
the time of marriage. A natural extension of this is that any property in enslaved people would
be treated the same way, giving White women a subordinate and indirect economic interest in the
institution. Given the very high rates of marriage in the antebellum South—well above 90%
(Hacker et al. 2010)— it would be reasonable to assume that very few women held independent
authority over enslaved people.
Since the legal structure of coverture was not overturned until the late 19th century, many
social science historians have paid little attention to women’s property rights during
enslavement. For example, Alshaikhmubarak, et al. (2019) note that coverture statutes passed
before the Civil War were “known as debt statutes, merely granted a married woman a separate
estate insulated from her husband’s debts. They did not grant her the right to manage and control
that estate. Debt statutes thus do not meet our definition of property acts” (p. 96). As such,
social science historians have reified the claims of narrative historians that coverture left White
women outside the machinery of American enslavement, since any antebellum establishment of
property rights only concerned the narrow focus on debts.
1 A feme sole was the legal status of an adult unmarried women. In 1850 the mean age at first marriage for Southern
White women was 22.4, only 6.3% of White women were unmarried by the age of 45 (Hacker, et al. 2010).
5While this may seem reasonable for a comprehensive measure of married women’s
access to property, claims about statutes being “debt shields only” ignores the fact that the
earliest acts were passed in Southern states and were specifically about empowering the marital
rights of White women over enslaved individuals.
2 For example, the earliest act passed in the
United States was the Mississippi Married Women's Property Law of 1839. This law was explicit
in awarding married White women ownership status over enslaved individuals. Section 2 of the
act states “that hereafter when any woman possessed of a property in slaves, shall marry, her
property in such slaves and their natural increase shall continue to her, notwithstanding her
coverture; and she shall have, hold, and possess the same, as her separate property, exempt from
any liability for the debts or contracts of the husband” and further noted additional property
rights after marriage by stipulating “That when any woman, during coverture, shall become
entitled to, or possessed of, slaves by conveyance, gift, inheritance, distribution, or otherwise,
such slaves, together with their natural increase, shall ensure and belong to the wife, in like
manner as is above provided as to slaves which she may possess at the time of marriage”
(emphasis added). Similar acts were passed by Southern states in the antebellum era to shield
married women from collectors of their husband’s debts and also to allow independent asset
accumulation during marriage.
3
It is important to note that this act not only shields enslaved people owned by the wife
from creditors, but it also creates a legal structure of independent ownership outside of coverture
2 This contrasts with laws passed in New England which granted married women property rights if they had been
abandoned or deserted by their husbands. Maine passed the first such act in 1823. These acts are different from
Mississippi’s and other Southern states because Mississippi’s law applied to women who were married and currently
living with their husbands in an intact marriage.
3 See Priest (2021) for a legal history of credit and debt. Additionally, we highlight the features of property rights
under common law, while some Southern states (particularly Louisiana) operated under civil law which allowed
greater freedom when interpreting property rights. The review of the legal cases in Jones-Rogers (2019) establishes
that in both systems the property rights of married women regularly defied the strictures of coverture.
6by design.4 Indeed, the coverture “notwithstanding” in this act is specific to the ownership of
enslaved people. Moreover, the act does not simply allow married women independent
ownership of enslaved people she had rights to before marriage, it applies the same independent
ownership to enslaved people acquired after marriage, a further restriction on the application of
coverture that was exclusive to enslaved people as outlined by the act. Finally, not only are the
enslaved people themselves independently owned by the wife, but their natural increase accrue to
her alone as well. The law further stipulates that a married woman’s enslaved people transfer to
her children, not her husband, upon her death. In each instance, this act not only shields
enslaved people from creditors, but it also creates and codifies a distinct economic interest that
White married women would have in enslavement as a means of economic independence.
The traditional social science history coding of “property acts” granting married women
the ability to own property independently (and therefore undoing coverture), claims that
Mississippi granted that right to married women in 1880, while the statute mentioned above
specifies rights in enslaved people more than 40 years earlier. As another example, Alabama is
considered to have never passed a property act for married women, but a statute relating to
married women’s right to own enslaved people independently was passed in 1841. This, indeed,
is intentional—while married women were granted rights to property in the antebellum era, they
were specific property rights in enslaved people. This was intended to protect them in a specific
way that was related to the transfer of enslaved people that was common amongst wealthy White
Southerners at the time. It is not the case that all property rights were intended to be protected,
but the rights to enslaved people were specifically guarded as they were a specified wealth
4 Breaks with common law in American legal history often concerned enslavement. For example, in 1662 Virginia
colonial law established a matrilineal determination of enslaved status. This was done specifically to address the
question “whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free.”
7transfer intended to be shielded from coverture. These acts worked to create a specified interest
in a particular asset, as opposed to protecting married women’s general property rights. At a time
when credit and debt were increasing in their economic importance, and where the legal
institutions around debt were in flux, this designation of the enslaved as a special asset in terms
of coverture is remarkable (Priest 2021).
Why was this important? To understand why legal maneuvers to undue coverture were
specific to enslavement, one must understand the nature of wealth transfers at the time. Jones-
Rogers (2019) documents how parents used enslaved individuals as bequests to their daughters at
the time of marriage. In this way, ownership of enslaved people uniquely empowered White
women in the South, granting them access to an asset that was transportable and relatively liquid
given the national market in enslaved individuals. Indeed, parents constructed legal documents
stipulating that enslaved individuals gifted to their daughters were for “their sole and exclusive
use” during marriage, a stipulation that would be further legitimated by court decisions and
legislative acts such as Mississippi’s Married Woman’s Property Law.
Southern states would have reason to move to create a legal apparatus to protect the
property rights of married women specifically for the purposes of rights to property in people.
First, wealth in enslaved people was significant. Dray, Landais, and Stantcheva (2023) estimate
that wealth in enslaved people was nearly half of all wealth in the South, noting that wealth in
enslaved people was personal property. Second, transfers of wealth in enslaved people were
highly liquid and mobile, and therefore a common form of intergenerational wealth transfers.
Enslaved people were one type of wealth that could move with the recipient to a new location
and one that could be liquidated with fewer transaction costs relative to other forms of property
such as real estate held in a distant location or other state. The mobility of enslaved people was
8particularly important in a neolocal or virilocal culture, which was common in the South at the
time. Third, the South had fewer and less developed financial institutions, and holding enslaved
people as a source of wealth was less risky than bonds, stocks, bank notes, and other financial
instruments that would have large discounts due to the immaturity of capital markets at the time.
5
This created not only a desire to use enslaved people as a source of wealth transfers, but also for
creditors to target enslaved people as a source of payment for debts, creating the need to
specifically protect them from potential creditors of the husband.
The passage of Mississippi’s Married Woman’s Property Law was preceded by a legal
case involving Betsy Love Allen, a mixed-race daughter of a Chickasaw chief, who married
James Allen under Chickasaw custom. James Allen had accrued debts and one of his creditors,
John Fisher, sought to claim the enslaved man Toney as payment of the debt. Toney had been
bequeathed to Betsy Love Allen by her father, and she subsequently deeded him to her daughter
in 1829. Fisher sued for his rights to Toney as payment of James Allen’s debt under coverture.
The Mississippi Supreme Court decided the case in 1837, specifying that two questions sat
before them. First, did James Allen have interest in the enslaved man Toney, such that he could
be transferred to Fisher for the payment of his debt? Second, did Betsy Love Allen have legal
standing to transfer Toney to her daughter, which would also imply that she held independent
property rights in Toney? The court declared that since the Allens had married under Chickasaw
tribal custom, Mr. Fisher had no rights at all in Toney and could not claim him. Further, since
James Allen had no rights to an enslaved person owned by his wife, the second question of the
validity of the transfer to Allen’s daughter was moot—James Allen had no interest in the
property and any legal transfer made by his wife was therefore valid.
5 This is not to say that there were no risks in holding enslaved people as assets, only that they could be easily
collateralized and transferred with fewer transaction costs and frictions relative to other assets.
9The confluence of tribal relations and indigenous customs for marital property is
important. While Mississippi was a state in 1817, it was not until 1830 that state laws were
applicable to the indigenous population. At the time of this extension of Mississippi law over
the indigenous population, the legislature declared that all marriages performed under tribal
custom were valid as if they had been performed under Mississippi state law. This included
explicit concessions to and acknowledgement of tribal custom regarding property ownership. In
Chickasaw marriages, husbands were not granted any rights to the wife’s property at the time of
marriage. Mississippi’s Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. Allen affirmed the independent
ownership for women who were married under tribal custom, but this right would not hold for
others. Mrs. Allen had bequeathed the enslaved man in question, Toney, to her infant daughter
and the court held that she had the legal right to do so. (Note that bequeathing her independently
owned property to another meets the definition of “managing and controlling an estate,” making
the legal distinction between debt statues and property acts tenuous at best.) Allen had
performed the transfer independent of her husband and the court affirmed its legality.
6
The implications of the Fisher v. Allen decision were acute in Mississippi and other
Southern states that had large indigenous and mixed-race populations. The relatively common
intermarriage of White and Chickasaw at the time posed a problem in creating a class of married
women with independent property rights in enslaved people and another who did not. As such,
Mississippi’s legislature enacted Chickasaw tribal custom as state law in the 1839 statute,
6 The final section of Mississippi’s 1839 Act formally stipulated that "the slaves owned by a feme covert under the
provisions of this act, may be sold by the joint deed of husband and wife, executed, proved, and recorded, agreeably
to the laws now in force in regard to the conveyance of the real estate of feme coverts, and not otherwise,” which
leads to some confusion as the second section of the act formally establishes slaves as “her separate property.” In
practice, the legal and economic independence of married women with respect to enslaved people was enforced. For
example, Jones-Rogers (2019) notes that parents frequently used contracts granting enslaved people to their
daughters for their “sole and exclusive use,” and courts interpreted this to be independent ownership with rights to
purchase and sell enslaved people independent of the husband. Regardless of its legal interpretation, the
requirement that sales be jointly deeded established property rights for married women specific to enslavement.
10granting all White women some of the property ownership rights that Chickasaw women
enjoyed, but legislatively restricting these rights to enslaved persons, and thereby creating a legal
framework ending coverture as it pertained to enslaved people.
While both court practice and legislative act moved to codify the rights of married
women to independent slave ownership, additional narrative evidence shows the commonality of
the practice. As a compliment to the legal history, the enslaved themselves noted how the gender
of ownership in marriage was affirmed in daily practice and norms. For example, enslaved
people themselves understood their ownership to particular members of the married couple,
belonging to the “mister” or “mistress” and noting as such in narratives. Similarly, married
women understood the independence of their ownership as well, in such acts as disciplining
enslaved people they owned and threatening them with sale for misbehavior by “putting them in
their pocket” (sale and conversion of the enslaved into cash). These types of statements and
threats reveal not only a tacit acknowledgement of ownership, but also an ability to act upon that
ownership in the market by making transactions in one’s own name.7
Legal ownership is one matter, and the practical matters of acts of ownership are another.
The traditional historiography has maintained that irrespective of whatever role women played in
day-to-day management or technical legal ownership status, married women were largely absent
from the domestic slave trade. The selling, buying, and hiring-in or -out of enslaved people is
seen as the purview of men alone (Johnson 1999, Schermerhorn 2015, Gudmestad 2003, Martin
2004). This presents us with a question: if women were not involved in transactions for enslaved
people, why would the legal record and legislative acts uniquely concern themselves with
7 Some state acts required the consent of the husband for the sale of an enslaved person owned by the wife, but case
law shows that in instances of dispute about the right of title or approval of sale, the property rights of the married
women to her enslaved property took precedence over the interest of her husband (Jones-Rogers 2019).
11granting married women ownership rights in enslaved people? If the practical matters of
ownership were rarely pursued by women, why was securing their legal access so important?
The answer to this question hinges on whether the claims of the infrequent appearance of women
in the transaction market is empirically justified.
What remains unexplored is the regularity of White women’s appearance as owners in the
transaction records that have been used by historians to describe the enslavement experience.
Beginning with the earliest economic histories of American enslavement (Phillips 1918),
historians and economists have used data on transaction prices to describe the market in
numerous ways. Data from traders, markets, and administrative records have been used for
decades by economic historians to describe pricing, selection, interregional trade, westward
expansion, and the impact of political events. The data have not explored dimensions of gender
and ownership in any large extent, perhaps owing to the historiography that has assumed the
answer to the question. Given the new evidence from the narrative record, this paper uses this
existing data to explore the extent to which White women are featured as primary agents in
transactions. In doing so, we seek to add a necessary quantitative dimension to the arguments
based on the narrative record.
Data
We use several sources to estimate the rate of White women’s involvement in enslavement as
owners of record. Our sources come from the existing historical evidence, as we consider this
work the first stage in establishing the basic descriptive facts surrounding White women’s
involvement with enslavement. Below, we describe our data sources and the key information
they contain allowing us to analyze gender and enslavement.
12New Orleans Slave Sale Data:
The New Orleans Slave Sale (NOLA) Data is a compilation of sale records of 15,654
transactions in the New Orleans slave trade and auction sites.8 This data is looked upon as a
representation of the national slave trade data, as New Orleans contained the largest slave market
in the United States in the late antebellum era (Fogel and Engerman 1974). The New Orleans
slave sales data were compiled by Pritchett and described in Calomiris and Pritchett (2016).
Those authors collected data on over 15,000 enslaved people sold between 1856 and 1861.9
Unlike states with a common law tradition, Louisiana treated the enslaved like real estate, and
slave sales had to be recorded and notarized in order to establish title (Louisiana 1806, section
10). As stated by Calomiris and Pritchett (2016), this data represents the national prices because
slave traders brought slaves to auction in New Orleans from relatively distant locations. Another
important part of this data is that it contains the first and last names of the buyers and sellers
separately. This gives us the opportunity to assign gender based on given name and calculate the
rates of transactions for buyers and sellers of different genders.
This dataset is organized in a way that shows data from each individual sale, with 49
specific pieces of information on each sale (or purchase). This includes notary name, sale date,
seller name, county of seller, state of seller, agent for seller (if applicable), buyer name, county
of buyer, state of buyer, agent for buyer (if applicable), slave name, slave sex, slave age, slaves’
children (if applicable), price, and payment method.10
8 The data is individualized to every unit sold. For the purposes of calculating the rate of women in transactions, this
biases downward the estimate as males were more likely to participate in multiparty sales.
9 The unit of observation is the enslaved individual enslaved person. Under Louisiana law, children aged ten years or
less were to be sold with their mothers. These mother/children bundles are recorded as a single observation as they
were bundled by law.
10 In rare cases, multiple parties were involved in transactions, and we analyze only the first buyer and seller here.
This will lead to an undercounting of the prevalence of women if women are party to multigroup sales and they are
not listed as the first buyer or seller. The same would apply to men acting on their spouse’s behalf. Similarly, some
13This dataset is by far the most in depth to analyze gender of enslavers on both sides of
sales transactions. Within the dataset, the slave sex was already listed, but the sex of the buyer or
seller was not, so the key addition of our work is to add gender assignment to buyers and sellers.
The methodology behind denoting male or female sex is listed in the methodology section. Once
gender was determined for all individuals, the relationship between gender of buyers (sellers)
and the gender of the enslaved could be determined.
Notary Data: 1830 “Certificates of Good Character”
The Notary Data comes from information in certificates of good character from 1830, as
described in Pritchett and Smith (2013). In 1829, Louisiana legislature passed a law which
required an out-of-state slave to have a “certificate of good character.” This dataset is built from
those certificates, which came with additional information on the notary statement itself. This
data is similar to the NOLA data in that it shows the sellers name, buyers name, and slaves name
and gender. Again, interpretation of the buyer and seller names was required to determine the
gender, and this methodology was the same as for the NOLA data. Other useful information in
data includes the county of seller, state of seller, county of buyer, state of buyer, price of the
slave, and age of the slave. Once gender analysis of the buyer and seller of each transaction was
completed, the relationship between all individuals included could be completed.
Many of the slaves listed in this data were purchased from farms and plantations by slave
traders, who would eventually bring the slaves to Louisiana to resell them. Therefore, much of
the buyer side is dominated by slave traders, in the business of reselling slaves for profit, but
much of the seller side was owners of farms and plantations. This is exemplified by the fact that
sellers used agents to handle their transactions, and these agents were exclusively men. This will also lead to an
undercount of the number of women involved in transactions.
14185 separate slave traders purchased slaves from 1,698 different slaveholders and shipped them
to New Orleans for their eventual sale. Most of the slaves purchased by slave traders (for their
eventual resale in New Orleans) were teenagers or young adults, and less than 10% of the adult
females were sold with a child.
Runaway Advertisements:
The Runaway slave data was compiled by the abolitionist William Still before 1872. This data
had 995 runaway listings and it includes names and aliases of runaway slaves, the slaves’ gender,
age, date of escape (or date of runaway slave listing), city of escape, county of escape, and state
of escape. Also included in the data were indicators for if the slave ran away with a child, if the
slave was literate, and if the slave was armed. Further, the data included enslaver information,
although this did not include the enslaver’s gender, and the reward for the slave, if one was
offered.
This dataset was different from the two previously described in that some of the enslaver
names were left blank.11 In keeping with a desire to have a conservative estimate, empty names
were assumed to be male (274) but through matching information about the runaway slave, such
as date of escape (or date of runaway listing), name, and location, some missing enslaver
information was linked to the owner. The final number of missing enslaver names was 261. Once
the possible missing enslaver names were determined to the greatest possible extent, gender was
assigned.
11 Jones-Rogers (2019) notes that advertisements of this sort may understate the rate at which White women were
owners due to missing owner information. For this reason, we focus on the rate of ownership for those who have
owner information in the advertisement.
15Methodology: Determining Gender from Given Names
While the gender of the person transacted is recorded, the gender of the buyer and seller are not.
As such, we adopted a method to determine female names that is equal parts general knowledge
of name demographics, research on the origins of names in the nineteenth century, and historical
records of names and name demographics. We defined common female names as names that are
included in the Hacker report of the top 100 female forenames of native-born women by birth
cohort, where 100% of the time these names were assigned to women. Similarly, common male
names were 100% of the time coded as male—these names were from the 1850 and 1860
censuses for those born between 1801 and 1840. If the gender of a name in question was not
represented on the list of most common female or male names from the census it was initially
determined to be gender neutral and the name underwent further investigation. An important
caveat is that some names were represented on both the list of most common male names and
most common female names. These names were researched to find out if there were common
discrepancies in spelling. An example of this was Francis and Frances-- Francis being commonly
male, and Frances being the common female spelling. These names were assigned gender as
specified by the spellings in the transaction record. If gender was still indeterminant after noting
spelling variations by gender, the name was assumed male to give us the conservative estimate of
females’ involvement in enslavement.
For uncommon names, defined as names that have no common historical record or
known contemporaneous gender assignments, having very few occurrences, or names from
different languages which belong to immigrants and did not have a well-established historical
gender assignment, the name was searched in the 1860 census record to determine if owners of
said name commonly self-reported as being male or female. If a name was heavily self-reported
16as female (as it would be assigned in the Hacker table), the name was assumed female in the
data. If the name had any significant variation in the rate of self-assignment the name was
assumed to be male to ensure the estimated rates remained conservative. If no high-quality
demographic data or origin information was found, or a name was not spelled closely to a known
or common female name, the name was assumed male. There were several examples of names
being spelled differently than the common female spelling—these were assumed to be female.
Examples of this include Aime, Aimee, and Aimie for the common spelling of Amy or Bridgett,
Bridgette, and Brigitte for the common spelling of Bridget.
Any forename was not marked female unless it was, within conservative reason, shown
to belong to a woman. With these high expectations of proof for a name to be marked as female,
the estimates of female involvement discussed here are conservative by construction, and a lower
bound of the rate of true female involvement in transactions as owner of record. The NOLA data
allowed straightforward differentiation between buyer and seller and use of an agent in the
transaction. Since the transaction data identifies buyers, sellers, and the use of agents, once
gender of those involved in the transactions is known we can determine the respective roles
played.
Estimating the Rate of Female Ownership in Transactions
We begin with the New Orleans Slave Transaction Data in Table 1. This data series has the
largest number of transactions available. Of the more than 15,000 transactions recorded, women
were listed as the buyer or seller in 30.19% of all transactions. For transactions that included
only enslaved women, women were listed as the buyer and/or seller in 37.57% of the
transactions. This contrasts with the fact that women are listed as the buyer or seller in less than
17a quarter (22.24%) of the transactions involving male slaves alone. As such, White women were
nearly 68% more likely to be involved in transaction for females as for males. It is important to
note that we found no evidence that women were more likely to be involved in one side of the
market than the other. For the New Orleans Slave Transaction Data, women took part in 16.51%
of transactions as sellers and 17.22% of transactions as buyers.12
Turning to the Certificate of Good Character (“Notary”) Data in Table 2, which comes
from more than 20 years before the New Orleans Data, we have a relatively smaller number of
transactions due to the data originating from a single year. It is also important to note that the
legislative acts protecting women’s property rights had yet to be passed, so we would expect
fewer women owners given ill-defined property rights. Nevertheless, women are involved as
buyers or sellers in 15.81% of all transaction. Even more, the gender disproportionality remains,
with women being involved in 23.33% of transactions involving enslaved women, but only
around 10% of the transactions involving enslaved men (10.27%). Women were more than 40%
as likely to be involved in transaction for females as for males.
Like the New Orleans Slave Transaction Data, the Certificate of Good Character Data
showed that women were not significantly more likely to take a passive role in the market. In the
Certificate of Good Character Data, women took part in 4.94% of all slave sales and 11.74% of
all slave purchases. In the Certificate of Good Character Data, women were more likely to be
buyers than sellers in the data, similar to the New Orleans sales data. If women were the
“passive” or “fictive” owners that the traditional narrative has asserted, they would be less likely
to be buyers in transactions, as this reflects the direct accumulation of property. We find no
12 From this we also see that women were rarely involved in transactions on both sides of the market simultaneously.
That is, while women were buying and selling in roughly equal rates, they were not especially likely to be
purchasing from or selling to other women.
18evidence that women were passive participants in the market through only appearing on one side
of transactions.
The data from the Runaway Slave Advertisements is not transaction data, but it does
allow us to infer the gender of the owner of record since the advertisement identifies the
ownership of the runaway. Looking over all advertisements in Table 3, women are listed as the
owners more than 10% of the time (11.46%). As with the transaction data, women are
disproportionately listed as owners of enslaved women. Nearly a quarter of all female slaves
from this data are owned by women (23.27%). Women are listed as owners of enslaved women
at twice the rate of their overall ownership. The general pattern of gender disproportionality of
ownership is seen in all three data sources.
Geography of Ownership
Earlier, we noted that some states moved to protect the economic interest of married women
during enslavement. This should result in greater involvement of women in the market from
those states given such explicit legal protection. The home state of buyers and sellers are noted in
the transactions, and we used this to see if the location of buyers and sellers differed
geographically between men and women. Since men had legal protection in every state by
default, differences in gender proportion could reflect the role of legal institutions in the market
transactions above and beyond differences in a states’ residents' likelihood to participate in the
market generally.
13
In Table 4 we estimate the proportion of total transactions originating with residents of
each state. The proportions for males and females are reported as a ratio. There are stark
13To eliminate noise in the data we excluded transactions from Louisiana, as the markets were in Louisiana, yielding
a majority of buyers and sellers residing in this state per those records.
19geographic differences in where men and women from outside of the local area were located. As
the table shows, the rate of female involvement as sellers in the New Orleans slave trade (Panel
A) was much higher than males for those from California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, New
York, and Texas. For buyers in the New Orleans slave trade, females were more involved than
males in Alabama, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania. The data also shows that women were
particularly underrepresented in states that did not explicitly protect female involvement in
enslavement, such as South Carolina, while states such as Mississippi and Alabama, which did
protect legal interest for married women, saw a larger share of transactions. While it is certainly
true that women in South Carolina would have easier access to markets in places such as
Charleston, the gender difference between the involvement of men as sellers from South
Carolina versus women from South Carolina makes it doubtful that distance from the market is
the only factor involved in explaining this difference.
Similarly, in the Notary data (Panel B) women were more active sellers than men from
the states Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri. Women buyers were more active than male
buyers from Mississippi. It is important to note that the Notary data comes from a time before
any legal protections of married women’s property rights, so changes from the Notary data to the
New Orleans transactions reflects not only the passage of time and changes in the market for
enslaved people, but also changes in the legal protections that married women, in certain states,
enjoyed.
Overall, the results by geography show that the legal environment protecting married
White women’s property rights in enslaved people appears to be related to the presence of
women from states which granted protection. We believe that the results here should spur further
work into the relationship between the legal institutions protecting rights in enslaved people
20outside of coverture and the gender dynamics of enslaved ownership. In particular, the
geographic variation is most acute for buyers, which is consistent with legal protections being
associated with a larger number of White women in the market procuring enslaved people as
their own property.
Evidence from Census Links: Age and Marriage
Once gender was assigned to each name in the New Orleans Slave Sale data and the Notary data,
we matched the data to the census (either 1850/1860 for the New Orleans data or 1830 for the
Notary data) to determine the age at the time of the transaction of record in addition to marital
status. While census links are far from complete and are prone to error, this matching is the first
attempt to investigate an issue related to the narrative of passive ownership: that women involved
in the market were either older women acting out of necessity or women who were unmarried. If
women in the market were more likely to be single and/or aged, it would imply that their
involvement was more likely due to the absence of a male household head to partake in the
transactions.
In this analysis we retained the earliest transaction record for a name that was matched,
giving us the earliest age of a woman being active in the market. In the case of multiple potential
matches, we kept the highest possible age to bias our results to find the oldest possible match to
census records. For example, if multiple potential matches were found but one match listed the
woman as 36 years old and the other listed the woman as 10 years old, we retained the 36-year-
old as the matched record. After matching, we built an age distribution and estimated the
marriage rates by age.
21Names were matched to the census by searching the names and hometowns as noted in
transaction records. If a match was returned, then the information in the census file was analyzed
to assess if the match was probable or not. This included age, net income, and race. Another set
of distinctions were made using household reported income. To bias our results again in terms of
wealthier owners, who would be more likely to be older and household heads, we also chose the
wealthiest of possible matches in the instances where multiple matches occurred. Since we were
matching to women with higher net worths this also means that we are more likely to get an
older sample of women for our matches.
The overall match rate goal, given the temporal nature of the data and the problems with
duplicate matches, was 10% and a match rate of 10.47% was accomplished. This is a relatively
high match rate considering the complications of matching on gender historically (Ager et al.
2021, Olivetti and Paserman 2015). From these matches we were able to find the age
distribution and the marriage rate for those who could be matched to census data. The age was
measured from the date of the reported transaction. As stated earlier, the date used for any unique
woman was the earliest recorded transaction date we found for that name and location in the
data. The age distribution of the matched sample and the total population is shown below in
Figure 1. The average age of all census links is 36 years old, while the average age of white
females from the South is 34 years old. The youngest woman in the transaction data was 14 years
old and the oldest was 72 years old. In terms of summary, it is not the case that women in the
transaction data were significantly older than women in the population.
Determining marital status is more difficult. We do not assume that women without
husbands are widows, we code them only as currently unmarried. We determined if a woman
was married by viewing her location on the household roster, the ages of other members of her
22household, and if the order of names on the census document would make her the head of
household. We assume that a name first on the census roster implies that person is the head of
household. If a woman’s name we are attempting to match is first and there is no other male
name within a similar age range, it is assumed the woman is not married since she is not listed as
such and no husband is present. If the woman is the only person listed for the household, it is
also assumed the woman is not married. Men with the same last names and an age in a similar
range are assumed to be the woman's husband as long as there is no older male with the same last
name in the household list, as this would give evidence that the female and male are siblings.
Using this, we determined a marriage rate of 41.82% for the matched women in the transaction
data. Given our methodology, this is a conservative, lower bound estimate of the marriage rate of
White women active in the market for enslaved people. This rate of marriage is lower than the
overall marriage rate for Southern women in 1860 as noted by in Hacker (2010), but consistent
with the relatively young age distribution of women in the transaction records compared to the
overall population.14 Moreover, a marriage rate of this level is inconsistent with the argument
that White women were involved in the market due to their being widowed or single—a
considerable share of the women actively participating in the market were married while
partaking in transactions. A conservative marriage rate over 40% is inconsistent with the
assertion that women were fictive or passive owners whose involvement was necessitated by
circumstance. These findings are, in general, consistent with Jones-Rogers (2019)’s claim that
women were active participants in the market for enslaved people.
14 Hacker (2010) estimates that the Southern marriage rate for women up to age 40 was around 85%, and the median
age at marriage was in the early to mid 20s in the last decade of the antebellum era.
23Conclusion
We used a simple, transparent, and conservative gender assignment approach to identify the rate
of women’s involvement in the market for enslaved people in the antebellum era using existing
transaction-level data. This work builds on the counting approach revived by Cook, Logan, and
Parman (2014, 2022), which was used to identify historical Black names. Their approach
followed an earlier research agenda economic history, particularly the economics of
enslavement, in establishing new facts to alter the antebellum historiography. Fogel (1975) noted
that such methods form the backbone of rigorous quantitative historical work: “The most
common method of direct measurement in history is counting. My reference to counting as a
rigorous method of measurement is not to be taken derisively. I use portentous language for what
appears to be an elementary operation partly because I want to emphasize the dramatic change in
interpretation that may result merely by moving from an impression to an actual count” (p. 337).
This paper adds to the narrative evidence on the extensive involvement of women in the
transaction market for enslaved people, a market the previous literature had said that women
were largely absent from. The narrative of passive, fictive ownership among women has been
codified, with few attempts to verify it empirically. The actual counts show a large and active
involvement among women in the market for enslaved people. Far from being passive, women
were a significant fraction of those active in market transactions for the enslaved, participating in
buying and selling in roughly equal proportion.
Not only do we discover that women were quite active in the market, but we also find
that their activity in the market was itself gendered. The high rate of involvement of women in
transactions with enslaved women could reflect a number of features of enslavement and
gendered ownership in the past. First, women were more likely to be gifted female slaves, who
24could provide personal services and other forms of production. While this would explain the
high rate of female ownership, it would not explain the rate of women appearing as buyers in
transactions. Another possibility is that women were involved in enslaved trades that were
specific to enslaved women, such as wet nursing services. Jones-Rogers (2019) establishes that
enslaving women traded in wet-nursing services, which would make them more active in the
market for women relative to others. A third possibility is the structure of inheritance, where
legal institutions gave women not only rights of ownership but also the increase of those she
owned. Since enslaved status of children was contingent on the mother’s status and maternity is
easier to define than paternity, owners of enslaved women had fewer problems securing their
rights to the progeny of those they enslaved. While not as valuable as men in the spot market,
enslaved women were able to produce additional enslaved people who would have value into the
future. In this way, owning enslaved women was a means of engaging in the intergenerational
transmission of wealth in the antebellum era. Economists have established that rights to enslaved
progeny were independently valuable assets as birthrights (Bergstrom 1971). The data here,
being transaction records, does not allow us to test these possibilities, but the disproportionate
role of women in transactions involving enslaved women would be consistent with several
hypotheses.
In contrast to the large and well-established literature on enslaved demography (e.g.,
Steckel 1979, Steckel 1980, Trussel and Steckel 1978), there has been significantly less attention
to the demographic characteristics of enslavers.15 There has been analysis of the extent and
15 While the popular consensus is that a small fraction of White households in the South were enslavers as of 1860,
new research highlights that inequality in ownership was increasing in the late antebellum era, whereas six-in-ten
southerners lived in slave-holding households in 1830, far fewer did so as of 1860. Merritt (2017) attributes some of
this inequality to the panic of 1837, which resulted in significant land and slave consolidation in the South. Brown
(2020) notes that in states such as Mississippi and South Carolina well over 50% of all White households owned
slaves in 1860, suggesting significant variation over the South as well.
25inequality of slaveholding in the antebellum era and its political and economic effects, but this
has been at the household level as opposed to individual-level analysis. The focus on aggregates
has allowed narratives to form about who was and was not prominent in America’s peculiar
institution. Given legal customs and inferences about gendered social norms concerning
business, economic independence, and family relations, the narrative has developed to assume a
passive role for White women in American slavery. Similarly, work in social science history has
investigated the long-term effects of enslavement on racial inequality and focuses on aggregate
institutional features (Acharaya, et al. 2018, Althoff and Reichardt 2024, Baker 2022, Sacerdote
2005). The role of gender equity in property rights has not been featured as a potential
mechanism for the persistence and continued explanatory power of these institutions. The
political and social support for racially unequal policy from White women postbellum could be
better understood as a continuation of racial antebellum institutions that were relatively
egalitarian with respect to women’s economic interests (Carruthers and Wannamaker 2015).
We note that the acceptance of the previous narrative of women being absent from the
market obviated the need to consider how they entered the market. The gender disproportionality
of women’s involvement should stimulate new scholarship to uncover the mechanisms behind
this fact. Similarly, the fact that women were equally active on both sides of the market implies
another corrective to the idea that women were fictive or reluctant owners, as they appeared in
the market as both buyers and sellers in equal proportion. That is, women were as likely to
acquire enslaved people through purchases as they were to sell enslaved people, which is
inconsistent with the historiography that women mainly assumed ownership via passive means
such as inheritance. At a minimum, the findings here trouble the linear narrative of women’s
economic gains from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, concentrating in gains in the middle
26of the twentieth century as women moved into professional occupations (Goldin 2023). They
also further enhance histories of the persistence of the Southern elite, which has traditionally
followed men in intergenerational transmission of wealth, and not women who were granted
access to wealth via enslavement (Ager et al. 2021). The elimination of wealth in enslaved
people would, therefore, had a specific effect on the wealth of White women relative to White
men after the Civil War.
Our goal has been to establish the rate of women’s participation in the market for
enslaved people using the existing data that historians and social scientists have used to analyze
the market. We consider this a baseline, establishing the importance of seriously considering
gender in the business of enslavement in the antebellum era. Future work should seek out and
incorporate additional data to uncover the full dimensions of the role of women in transactions
for enslaved people. First, the market value of transactions should be analyzed, determining
whether women bought and sold at prices similar to men. Estimates of total market value by
gender of owner would be an important addition to the literature. Second, some conveyance
records, such as those in the New Orleans data, include information on spousal consent to a sale
in some cases. This would allow researchers not only to note the role of women in the market,
but to more accurately estimate the marital status of women in transactions.16 Unfortunately, this
information has not been systematically collected for quantitative analysis, but doing so would
16 Conveyance in Louisiana required noting the marital status of women if she was party to the transaction. As one
example of the additional conveyance data: “Nicolas Adolph Rinck, of Orleans parish, sold Mimi alia Prescilla, a
griff of about 25 years old. And by the said act Mrs. Marguerite Mohr, the wife of said Vendor, has renounced to all
her rights and privileges.” From this, we can deduce that Rinck and Mohr are married to each other and the wife has
consented to the sale. Further, the wife’s rights in the enslaved person are explicitly noted and renounced for the
purpose of sale. We thank Jonathan Pritchett for bringing this example (and the possibilities of fully-transcribed
conveyance records to shed additional light on this issue) to our attention. Another advantage of this data would be
to check against the results from census linkages to estimate the rate at which census links give accurate estimates of
marital status. For example, the data could be used to estimate the degree to which men and women were accurately
noted as married in the conveyance records and whether or not spousal consent from men versus women was
systematically required for sales.
27allow for additional estimates of the nature of women’s involvement in transactions above and
beyond being the owner or purchaser of record and how that activity related to socioeconomic
factors.
The relatively high rate of involvement in transactions shows that the narrative of passive
or fictive ownership does not imply lack of experience in the market and intimate knowledge of
buying and selling. Women obtained greater and institutionally equal rights with respect to
enslavement and exercised those rights regularly in their transactions. In addition to the
narrative evidence in Jones-Rogers (2019), these quantitative findings call for a renewed focus
on enslavement as a means of White women’s economic independence. Despite the appearance
of significant institutional barriers, women played a prominent and regular role in the market.
The motivations, incentives, and returns to their involvement in enslavement should merit
renewed interest among historians, economists, sociologists, and scholars of gender more
generally.
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