Southern Women and Slavery, Part II

The opinions of slavery that were held after the Civil War and in the period of Reconstruction—or even later—differ considerably from the attitudes recorded earlier. The ante-bellum diaries, while viewing slavery from the narrow white interest, had seen it as a system primarily negative in its influence.

But rather often the post-war memoirs saw slavery as a positive good for the Negroes, though a great hardship to whites, particularly white women. Bound up in the hardship were certain pleasures that were missed in the new order.

The memoirs admitted that slavery was not questioned by the women of the South. Women were involved in the system as children; almost before they knew it, they had become mistresses of large numbers of slaves. Slave property increased gradually, through the birth of new slave children and the purchase of new adult slaves.

At the end of each year, it was common for a beginning planter to invest what money he had saved during the year. One woman wrote that her husband ‘was naturally disposed to invest in slaves as being the most available and profitable property in our section of the country’. Her case was not unusual.