"She is a very smart woman and a great trader": Enslaved and Free Women's Economic Strategies and Gendered Geographies of Credit in the Nineteenth-Century South
- Viglini, Nicole
- Advisor(s): Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E.
Abstract
This project examines antebellum southern women’s economic lives by foregrounding enslaved and free Black women’s skills, knowledge, and survival strategies. Contrary to prevailing studies that suggest enslaved women who performed domestic labor knew little about the geographies beyond the boundaries of their enslavers’ households, white women’s diaries, local court records, and fugitive slave advertisements show that enslaved domestic laborers often served as household agents in both rural and urban marketplaces at the behest of their mistresses, which afforded slaveowning women significant social and economic capital. Enslaved women’s movement within and across southern communities occasionally enabled them to cultivate connections that they sought to leverage to create more secure circumstances for themselves and their loved ones in an expanding slave society. Putting legal records such as case files and petitions in conversation with financial documents and Black women’s claims before the Southern Claims Commission, a federal commission formed in the Reconstruction era, this project goes on to reveal that Black women possessed considerable property before the Civil War and that they used credit as a survival strategy. A small but significant number of enslaved and free Black women in the antebellum cotton region transformed their households into institutionalized business hubs, helping them to assert they had a secure place within southern communities, even if these communities were defined by Black bondage and white capital accumulation. This project thus posits enslaved women as skilled and financially literate actors in the history of slavery and capitalism, critically examines southern white women’s roles in the perpetuation and expansion of slavery, and speaks to the adaptability of the institution of slavery to accommodate an expanding credit-based economy. It shows how antebellum southern Black women navigated various dependent statuses to stake claims to credit and to define their belonging within southern communities.