Owner? Yes. Enslaver? Certainly.
Another Chance to Examine the Terms We Use and Why They Matter.
If we reproduce the language found in sources created by early modern White men and women we risk inadvertently echoing the racist assumptions of those who created and perpetuated racial slavery while dehumanising the people who were enslaved. - Simon P. Newman, author of Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London
A follower recently pointed out that our Hard Histories website uses the term “owner” when referring to Johns Hopkins. As was the case some months back when we looked at the use of “slave” versus “enslaved person,” this gave us the chance to examine how the term “owner” has its own history, one that differed in everyday use, in law, and in scholarship. Today, “owner” soon may be overtaken by the term enslaver when referring to those who enslaved people in early America.
A reminder for those of you new here. Hard Histories at Hopkins launched in 2020 when Johns Hopkins University announced that the US Census recorded enslaved people in the household of its founder and namesake Johns Hopkins. In 1850, the population census recorded one enslaved person, a male between 10 and 24 years. There, Mr. Hopkins was named as head of a household, with unnamed others, including one enslaved person, as its members. In 1850, the census slave schedule recorded four enslaved people, all men ranging in age from 18 to 45. The census forms changed after 1840 such that Mr. Hopkins’ name was recorded as head of a household and also, on a separate form, in a column marked “Name of Slave Owner,” which listed four men by age, color, and sex, though not by name.1
For 1850 census administrators, Mr. Hopkins was a slave owner. A closer look puts use of the designation owner in context. “The person in whose family, or on whose plantation, the slave is found to be employed, is to be considered the owner.” These instructions guided census Marshals and Assistant Marshals in their listing of slave owners. Of course, owner had an ordinary meaning in 1850, as it does today. But it was also a term of art. To be designated a slave “owner” on the 1850 US Census was akin to being deemed a person with dominion over the enslaved people in a household.2
In 1850, this broad definition of the term owner was consistent with law. In the 1829 case of State v. Mann, North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Thomas Ruffin ruled that the power of those who rented enslaved people was equivalent to those who held them as property by deed. John Mann rented an enslaved woman, Lydia, and later shot her in the back when he tried to escape from his home. Lydia survived, and Ruffin explained that Mann was not guilty of battery because his authority even as someone who rented Lydia was unlimited, infamously declaring, “The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.” Mann, though he merely rented Lydia, committed no crime when he shot her.3 When it came to dominion over a household’s enslaved people, Ruffin thereby erased distinctions between those who held deeds of ownership and those who rented, borrowed, or otherwise kept enslaved people in their households.
Today, many scholars of slavery avoid the term “owner” altogether, this in an effort to distinguish their thinking from that of men like Thomas Ruffin. The term owner carries along with it vestiges of Ruffin’s view of slaveholders’ power as absolute, so much so that it is perhaps better to avoid it altogether. This is especially true for researchers whose findings evidence how enslaved people, despite pronouncements of men like Ruffin, resisted, negotiated and otherwise exercised power in their dealings with slaveholders. Many nineteenth century lawmakers imagined and even desired that slaveholders’ power be absolute, and imposed that view in their courtrooms. Still, the record of lived experience demonstrates how enslaved people seized power when they could, as they could. And in doing often compromised Ruffin’s vision.4
The term “enslaver” is today an increasingly preferred term for men such as Mr. Hopkins, John Mann and even Justice Ruffin, who also enslaved people. The word enslaver, scholars suggest, better conveys how those who held persons as property actively did so by will, by volition, out of self-interest, and for gain. Dr. Daina Ramey Berry and Dr. P. Gabrielle Foreman crowdsourced a primer, “Writing About “Slavery”? This Might Help,” that shares recommended terminology. For example, they explain: “The term “master” transmits the aspirations and values of the enslaving class without naming the practices they engaged [in.]” The same can be said of the term owner.5
Thank you to our follower for noting our use of the term owner and leading us to consider the value of adopting enslaver as an alternative. By the terms of the 1850 census, Mr. Hopkins was an “owner” of enslaved people. While that word reveals a great deal about the authority Mr. Hopkins held over those enslaved in his household, it does not acknowledge how those whom census enumerators dubbed “slaves” may have exercised their own power in everyday dealings with him.
— MSJ
The census documents are chilling. Primarily, they assessed the US population for purposes of reapportioning representation in Congress. Still, reviewing the manuscript returns reminds us how counting enslaved people enhanced the political power of white men in states such as Maryland by inflating their representation (slaves counted as 3/5’s of a person,) even as they excluded enslaved people from the vote and office holding. At the same time, the Census denied the full humanity of enslaved people, reporting them as nameless individuals when all others enumerated were recorded by name. For more on the US Census, see Paul Schor’s Counting Americans: How the US Census Classified the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
United States Congress. Senate, Census Committee, The History and Growth of the U.S. Census (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900): 150-153.
State v. Mann, 13 N.C. 263 (1829). In 1858, Thomas R.R. Cobb, a lawyer and law professor reiterated Ruffin’s view in his influential 1858 book, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery, explaining that natural law imposed no limits on the authority of enslavers with one exception: murder.
The literature here is vast, but we’ll recommend among the latest work to make this point that multi-award winning book of our colleague Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). For those interested in these same dynamics closer to home in Maryland, tune into our March 2021 Hard Histories talk with Dr. Jessica Millward about her book Finding Charity’s Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015).
Historian Simon P. Newman includes an illuminating discussion of the language we use in the research and writing of enslavement which opens with the fascinating example of Rev. William E. Walker who, in drafting a post-Civil War statement, urged striking the word “masters” and replacing it with “oppressors.” Simon P. Newman, Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London (London: University of London Press, 2022): xi.