Money  /  Study

Her Property Transactions: White Women and the Frequency of Female Ownership in the Antebellum Era

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.

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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