“Whoever Takes Her Up, Gives Her 50 Good Lashes, and Deliver Her to Me”

Abstract

Abstract This study establishes that women slave-owners were specifically inscribed into South Carolina’s laws on slave management from the first decades of English colonization. Mistresses were explicitly named alongside masters or incorporated into the gender-neutral rubric of owner in a common understanding that absolute ownership and authority over enslaved people was as much rooted in female mastery as male. Remarkably, neither the scholarship on women slave-owners nor the far more voluminous scholarship on American slave laws and slave management have explored, or even acknowledged, how gender influenced the formulation of American slave laws, and how mistresses, in particular, featured in the roles and duties assigned to slave-owners in the management of slaves. This study seeks to redress this by examining how South Carolina’s lawmakers incorporated women slave-owners into the colony’s slave laws, culminating with an assessment of the 1740 slave code, which marked a key turning point both in the colony’s laws governing the management of slaves and in an evolving ideology of female mastery.