Enslaved women and the law: Paradoxes of subordination in the post-Revolutionary Carolinas

Women in western systems of slavery: Introduction

“…Edwards contrasts the personalism of local communities in the post-Revolutionary U.S. South that could recognize such individuals, even in slavery, at the same time as the national courts proceeded to categorize all 'blacks' as 'property' subject to the most brutal manifestations of absolute ownership by whites. 54 On the other hand, as Morton shows, in the South African Republic, where public revelation of co-habitation of a white owner and his female slave could create a scandal and ruin a white man's career, girls captured in childhood and brought up in Dutch society, theoretically as apprentices to be 'freed' on reaching maturity, were actually transferred out of the household. This disposition was to avoid tempting white owners and their sons to take them as concubines.…”

“…15 Laura Edwards demonstrates how in small towns in the American South as late as the ante-bellum era, local personal standing and respectability overrode legal categorization as 'black' and 'white,' as well as 'slave' and 'free.' 16 Colour, in short, might describe people but it did not operate as a blanket political and economic mechanism of exclusion or even of individual condemnation.…”

“…Some even developed ways to influence the practice of local law in their own favour. 41 Other examples of slave involvement in slave-owning society, essentially a 'fifthcolumn' strategy, has been caricatured as the Southern plantation 'Mammy' devoted to her master's household, a woman characterized by 'rectitude, meekness, loyalty, unselfishness, a profound and sincere faith, devotion to the point of sacrifice, and a Slavery and Abolition 167 love of the family and children.' 42 The ideal domestic slave was one who had prior experience of work within a slave-owning household and came with a recommendation from her former master.…”

“…For example, Laura Edwards notes the role of female slaves in the American South initiating rumours about white slave owners that could be manipulated not only to damage that person's reputation in white society but also indirectly undermine their prosperity as the value of slaves in part reflected their owner's reputation. 25 Another 'alternative' form of female resistance that some Caribbeanist scholars have seen as widespread and often costly to the slave owner was the refusal of bondswomen to bear children. The reasons for the generally low rate of slave reproduction in the West Indies were multiple.…”

“…50 Edwards shows, without quite pointing to the obvious possibility, how Violet confronted the son and his wife in an extended white South Carolina planter family on the basis of highly personal privileges that she had evidently enjoyed in the household of the father. 51 In societies governed by western legal systems, unlike those dominated by the Islamic Sharia, the children of a slave woman and slave owner were not automatically freed if legally acknowledged by their father. Richard Allen, writing about Mauritius, shows that many slave women became concubines of their owners and that the most fortunate were freed, sometimes with their children, and also given property.…”