American slavery has always been associated with wealthy white men as its beneficiaries and the group that created and sustained the institution. This has left two distinct populations outside of the economic analysis of slavery. First, the role of white women in slavery has been seen as tertiary. Legally, white women were removed from slave ownership due to coverture. Socially, white women were kept apart from the brutal aspects of the Peculiar Institution. They were not active in the slave trade, were unlikely to presume the traditional roles of slave owners unless their husband’s or other men were absent, did not directly discipline or punish slaves, and were ambivalent towards the institution in general. Second, poor whites in the antebellum South have been neglected as well. Being both landless and slaveless, poor whites had no direct investment in the institution except for its racial hierarchy. Since the political economy of the South was tilted decidedly in slaveholders’ interests, there was little, if any, role poor whites could play in its expansion.

Two new works in history aim to expand the scope of the study of slavery. Each takes a group formerly considered outside of the institution’s reach and moves them front and center into the heart of slavery as an economic and political institution. In doing so, they raise new questions about how the historiography of slavery has shaped the economic history of slavery. More important, they open new and exciting lines of research for economic historians interested in the antebellum era and beyond.

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers meticulously shatters a number of gender myths in her groundbreaking book, They Were Her Property. In a major contribution to the historiography of the antebellum era, Jones-Rogers shows how white women were direct, primary beneficiaries of the chattel slavery system in the United States. Based on a thorough review of primary sources ranging from court documents, diaries, newspaper reports, and WPA slave narratives, Jones-Rogers finds white women intimately involved in every aspect of the slave economy. Jones-Rogers concentrates her analysis on white women who were “small scale” slave owners, not the elite white women who have been the focus of previous scholarship. Her overwhelming evidence shows that the traditional narrative of white women’s involvement in slavery is based on a fiction stemming from a conflation of gender norms in the antebellum South, an overreliance on wealthy women as spokeswomen, and postbellum mythology created by Southern apologists.

She begins the analysis by tackling the trickiest issue—how could white women be intimately involved in slave ownership if, upon marriage, their ownership of property transferred to their husbands? Coverture has been a key in the traditional historiography of gender in slavery. Jones-Rogers shows that white women were groomed in slave ownership practices from birth. They were taught about slave value, slave management, and the economic function of slavery. This, by itself, would lead one to question why parents would expend such energy in this education if direct slave ownership would be uncommon after marriage. Parents were creating legal contracts to bequeath slaves to their daughters over which they would have full and total control. This took numerous steps within the legal system to ensure that coverture would not apply, and court cases attest to these slave transfers as falling outside of coverture. They took these steps in legal systems which made breaking the tradition of coverture especially difficult, such as in Louisiana. There was an economic reason for this: white women were not as likely to receive land, and bequests of slaves functioned as economic security, particularly as female slaves could beget further slaves who would also belong to women “for their sole and exclusive use” after marriage. This also protected the wealth of white women from their husband’s creditors, who were keen to seize a wife’s slave assets for payment on a husband’s debt.

Next, Jones-Rogers moves to slave management. Jones-Rogers shows that married women were quite active in the management of their slaves, and had control over their provisions, work, discipline, and hiring out. When their slaves ran away they placed ads for their return in their own names. The voices of the enslaved, in particular, attest to who their owners and managers were, and there is little doubt that white women viewed themselves, and were viewed by others, as the owners and managers of slaves. The previous belief that white women were not present in the slave yard is refuted both through analysis of where traders were located and a carefully researched argument that the slave trade was also in the household itself. At no time were white women viewed by white men as absent from trading, buying, and selling slaves for their own use. Even more, women were not using men as their agents, they were doing the trading themselves.

One chapter of the book is devoted to the sale of enslaved women as wet nurses. Here, the biological products of enslaved women were particularly dear to white women, both as buyers and sellers of wet nurse services. In this instance, Jones-Rogers argues that white women were actively involved in a brutal and market-oriented assault on enslaved women and the children of enslaved women. Wet nursing by enslaved women was not only overseen by white women, but it came at the expense of a relationship that an enslaved woman would have with her own children. White women, Jones-Rogers shows, were keenly aware of its value and capitalized on it.

What is most remarkable is how unremarkable the activity of white women in the slave market was. At no point does a trader, judge, layperson, military officer, or anyone else note that there is anything unusual about white women being so active in the market, shielding their property from creditors, buying and selling slaves, filing suit against those who have allegedly defrauded them, seeking their escaped slaves, bringing their slaves to be punished, punishing slaves themselves, threatening slaves with sale, or any other feature commonly attributed to white men in the slave economy. In JonesRogers narrative this is the point, it was so commonplace that it need not merit any special acknowledgment.

While Jones-Rogers shows that white women were intimately related to every aspect of the slave economy, Keri Leigh Merritt shows that those outside of the slave system were deeply affected by it as well. In Masterless Men, Merritt shows that the ascension of the cotton South was contemporaneous to the descent of poor whites into landless poverty. Drawing on an extensive range of sources (like Jones-Rogers, the relatively high level of illiteracy among the group makes the detective work particularly difficult) including court records, newspaper advertisements, Civil War Veteran’s Questionnaires, state statues, slave narratives, and other sources, Merritt shows how slavery ensnared those who were never active in the market for slaves.

First, she is one of the few historians of the “history of capitalism” to precisely name the capitalism she is describing. The antebellum South was, to Merritt, a merchant capitalist system because workers were too isolated to unite together against capitalists. The role of the Panic of 1837 and the Specie Circular Act of 1836, in particular, merit renewed attention. In Merritt’s narrative, these events forced poor whites from their land via bankruptcy and further increased the cost of land ownership, dramatically increasing the number of poor whites in the South. The further expansion of the slave economy put whites in labor competition with enslaved workers, lowering their wages. Merritt documents the high degree of mobility of poor whites, who frequently moved in search of work opportunities and high wages. But westward movement meant moving to places with an even larger share of slaves in the population. For those remaining in the Old South, the increasing prevalence of hiring out forced those who were skilled to compete with enslaved labor.

One key contribution of Merritt’s book is an excellent chapter on the material living conditions of poor whites. Merritt uses the dramatic distinctions in diet, housing, family structure, and religion to show that poor whites were highly class conscious as a result of their material well-being. This is one of the most exciting contributions to political economy in antebellum history in recent years. When she turns to politics and public policy, it is a careful case laid out over three chapters detailing the ways that Southern slave owners sought to penalize (white) poverty in the region. The lack of investment in education had a political purpose, to keep poor whites uninformed about labor movements and reform. Political redress was difficult through the ballot box, and the extensive criminal justice system of the antebellum South was designed, in Merritt’s narrative, to police poor whites. While the history of slavery has focused on slave punishments, Merritt details the ways that the state handed out some of the exact same punishments to poor whites. The dual aims of a class and race based Southern social world were difficult to maintain, and the violence of the system was matched with political censorship and extrajudicial means of social control. The threat of Republicanism was not only due to their advocacy of abolition, but also free labor and agrarian reform. Merritt argues that by the late antebellum era poor whites were discontent with Southern slave owners, and their lack of any true allegiance to the slave system would lead to high rates of desertion during the Civil War.

As emancipation loomed, white women sought to resist freedom by escaping further South, hiding their slaves, and submitting petitions for compensation. On both sides of the conflict, white women were quite forward in making their claims of personal ownership of slaves and asking both the Confederacy and Union for consideration for their destruction or use of their property. While white women were losing their investments in the slave system, poor whites were being freed by the establishment of a more rigid racial hierarchy that was more punishing to blacks than it had ever been to poor whites. The same political and social tactics used against poor whites now had a new source, the formerly enslaved, who would now be placed even further down the lowest rung of Southern society. At the same time, land ownership became a true possibility for poor whites after the Civil War, and proto-Republicanism grafted them fully into the white supremacist system.

There are a number of questions raised in these books that should motivate a new round of research by economic historians. As Jones-Rogers notes, economic historians have paid little attention to the gender of slave owners, and most of the data used by economic historians has not carefully considered ownership beyond identifying plantations. By taking account of these gender dynamics, questions about the role of slavery as a gender-property transfer would allow renewed analysis of white antebellum marriage patterns. How did marriage depend on the specifics of a bride’s property transfer? Similarly, the use of slaves as credit would now have to reconsider the assumptions made about coverture and its institutional validity (judges frequently found that slaves held for “sole and separate use” belonged outside of coverture). Were creditors regularly duped by husbands who would later claim that slaves were their wife’s possessions? The role of wet nursing reconsiders the value of young mothers in the slave market based on who they were sold to, and the market for hiring out for wet nurse services. Gender and the use of apprenticeship to bind black children to their former owners also deserves a new gender analysis given Jones-Rogers’ narrative.

The class dimensions highlighted by Merritt also open new avenues of research. While economic history has paid attention to Jim Crow’s penal system, its roots in the antebellum era and class suppression have been unexplored. Economic historians have claimed that the economy grew after 1838, but significant heterogeneity in growth and changes in Southern landownership would be particularly important. How much were land prices depressed, which Merritt argues led to land purchases by wealthy whites which would fuel the slave economy for the rest of the antebellum era? This extends to land policy as well—the Southern Homestead Act is not an expansion of land ownership, but rather a reclamation project for poor whites removed from their land decades before. How did emancipation and homesteads obviate the labor demands of poor whites after the Civil War, who did not gravitate toward Republican ideas in post Reconstruction era? Southern mobility and meager investments in public education appear to have begun with the social control of poor whites. How has this shaped public institutions in the South and in the United States in an era of increasing inequality?

Economic historians have a great deal of work to do—slavery as a wealthy white man’s institution is less than half of the story.