Here you go. Tomorrow is the US federal holiday for the day they ended slavery. Probably why these guys would write this article.

New research exposes the role of women in America’s slave trade

In the bondage of others they saw their freedom

Jun 18th 2024 | Washington, DC

They didn’t know how bad it was. That was how James Redpath, a northern journalist who toured the South in the 1850s, explained white southern women’s support for slavery to his readers. He reckoned that women were shielded from the “most obnoxious features” of the trade—rarely witnessing the auctions and the lashes doled out as punishments on plantations—and were oblivious to the “gigantic commerce” that it had become. Over time historians came to agree that slavery was the business of men.

Research published last month shatters that narrative. Economists at Ohio State University analysed data from the New Orleans slave market, the biggest of them all, to quantify women’s involvement. They found that women were buyers or sellers in 30% of all transactions and 38% of those that involved female slaves. By matching names to census records they show that it was not just single or widowed women who dealt in slaves because they lacked husbands; married ones did, too.

These are the first hard numbers building on a growing body of qualitative work by Stephanie Jones-Rogers, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley, showing just how instrumental women were to the slave economy. In the travel logs of foreigners she uncovered descriptions of southern belles bidding at the slave markets dressed in their finest silks and “glittering in precious jewels”. And in interviews conducted by the federal government in the 1930s she found that former slaves frequently reported belonging to the “mistis” and told stories of being beaten by her with stinging nettles or coming home to find their child missing and the mistress counting a “heap of bills”.

For the ladies of the antebellum South, slavery was more than business—it was their ticket to economic freedom. Coverture laws compelled women to relinquish property and money to men when they married, but exceptions were made for slaves. As with furniture and clothing, a bride could hold on to the humans she owned and take them with her to her new husband’s estate. Fathers hoping to secure their daughters’ futures gave them slaves at baptisms, birthdays and engagements.

As grown-ups, women used slaves to establish financial independence. In cities like Charleston and New Orleans they put them to work selling cakes or dresses and pocketed the profits in secret. Some ran slave brothels. The mistresses then used the cash to reinvest in the slave market. But unlike their husbands, who often bought fit men to work the fields, women bought more women, who were cheaper but paid dividends later on when they reproduced.

On the eve of the civil war Southern women came to understand that the Union army threatened to strip them not just of their material wealth but of their independence. As men went off to battle and Congress passed the Confiscation Acts of the early 1860s, which authorised the government to seize slaves, women panicked. Before the war, half of the South’s wealth was in slaves. The fall of the Confederacy left many Southerners destitute. Freed slaves later recounted giving their former mistresses grits and potatoes to subsist on after emancipation.