Female Slavery - Antebellum Period

Antebellum Period

As historian Deborah Gray White explains, "Black in a white society, slave in a free society, woman in a society ruled by men, female slaves had the least formal power and were perhaps the most vulnerable group of Americans.” Enslaved women in every state of the antebellum union considered freedom, but it was a livelier hope in the North than in most of the South. Many slaves sought their freedom through self-purchase, the legal system, and as runaways, sometimes resulting in the separation of children and parents. "Unfinished childhoods and brutal separations punctuated the lives of most African American girls, and mothers dreamed of freedom that would not impose more losses on their daughters." The mother-daughter relationship was often the most enduring and cherished within the African American complex of relations. Relatively few women were runaways and when they did run they sometimes did so with children. Historian Martha Saxton i writes about enslaved mothers' experiences in St. Louis in the antebellum period: "In Marion County, north of St. Louis, a slave trader bought three small children from an owner, but the children's mother killed them all and herself rather than let them be taken away. A St. Louis trader took a crying baby from its mother, both on their way to be sold, and made a gift of it to a white woman standing nearby because its noise was bothering him." Little girls as young as seven were frequently sold away from their mothers: "Mary Bell was hired out by the year to take care of three children starting when she was seven. John Mullanphy noted that he had living with him a four-year-old mulatto girl, whom he willed to the Sisters of Charity in the event of his death. George Morton sold his daughter Ellen 'a certain Mulatto girl a slave about fourteen years of age named Sally, being the child of a certain Negro woman named Ann'." In 1854 Georgia was the first and only state to pass a law that put conditions of sales that separated mothers and their children. Children under five could not be sold away from their mothers, "unless such division cannot in any wise be ffected without such separation.'" Slave girls in the West often worked within the domestic sphere, providing household help. White families sought the help of a "girl", an "all-purpose tool" in family life. Although the word "girl" applied to any working female without children, slaves were preferred because in the long run they cost less. These young enslaved girls were usually very young, anywhere from nine years of age to their mid-teens. Heavy household work was assigned to the "girl" and was therefore stigmatized as "negroes’" work. A "girl" was an essential source of help to white families, rural and urban, middle class and aspiring. She provided freedom for daughters to devote themselves to their self-development and relieved mothers from exhausting labor, while requiring no financial or emotional maintenance, "no empathy." In antebellum America, as in the past (in fact, from the initial African-European contact in North America), black women were deemed to be governed by their libidos and portrayed as "Jezebel character...in every way the counterimage of the mid-nineteenth-century ideal of the Victorian lady."