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“Historians who explore slavery's relationship to capitalism generally focus on the roles that men played in the development of both. But if we considered the very real possibility that some of the enslaved people these men compelled to work in southern cotton fields actually belonged to their wives, the narrative about American slavery and capitalism would be strikingly different. And when we consider that the enslaved people women owned before they married or acquired afterward helped make the nineteenth-century scale of southern cotton cultivation possible, the narrative of slavery, nineteenth-century markets, and capitalism as the domain of men becomes untenable.” — Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Historians who explore slavery's relationship to capitalism generally focus on the roles that men played in the development of both. But if we considered the very real possibility that some of the enslaved people these men compelled to work in southern cotton fields actually belonged to their wives, the narrative about American slavery and capitalism would be strikingly different. And when we consider that the enslaved people women owned before they married or acquired afterward helped make the nineteenth-century scale of southern cotton cultivation possible, the narrative of slavery, nineteenth-century markets, and capitalism as the domain of men becomes untenable.