People as a Commodity
Advertisement for enslaved black woman, a wet nurse alongside other advertisements offering people for sale.
A Girl's Life in Virginia Before the War is a memoir written by Letitia M. Burwell, a wealthy white woman who grew up in antebellum Virginia. In it she chronicles her daily experiences including her interactions with the people she owned, she writes, "I think I have written enough to show the mutual affection existing between the white and black races..." this was a common rhetoric used by white slave owner to downgrade the abuse existing when one person owns another. She goes on to mention, "...the abundant provision generally made for the wants of those whom God has mysteriously placed under our care".1 The word "mysteriously" drives home the theme of benevolence white slave owners casted on their activities and how "God" had somehow bestowed these people onto them instead of these masters going out to specifically buy, sell, and use black people.
The language Burwell uses in this book is indicative of the desire of white masters to distance themselves from the violence they enacted on these people whom they lived alongside day in and day out. It is also important to note that this memoir was written decades after the period described, after the Confederacy lost the Civil War. Time and denial had painted this cruel picture in a hazy layer of innocence in order to absolve the writer of her sins by invoking God into the reasons behind slavery.
By comparing A Girl’s Life in Virginia Before the War with an advertisement for a black wet nurse from Alexandria Gazette,2 the line between religion and the culture of ownership can be made. As Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers explains in her book They Were Her Property,3 a woman’s body (and her breast milk) became a commodity, later justified by white slave owning women using religion; in doing this they retroactively play out the role of the Anglican housewife, casting themselves as benevolent instead of as master. This language is not new to post-Civil War however, that kind of rhetoric was commonly used to justify the subjugation of people of color, which is why it was so effectively integrated into the American story.
1Letitia M. Burwell, A Girl’s Life in Virginia before the War (New York, F. A. Stokes Company, 1895), http://archive.org/details/girlslifeinvirgiburw.
2National Endowment for the Humanities, “Alexandria Daily Gazette, Commercial & Political. [Volume] (Alexandria [Va.]) 1808-1812, January 06, 1812, Image 3,” January 6, 1812, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024013/1812-01-06/ed-1/seq-3/.
3Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven London: Yale University Press, 2019).