“Whoever Takes Her Up, Gives Her 50 Good Lashes, and Deliver Her to Me”

Abstract This study establishes that women slave-owners were specifically inscribed into South Carolina’s laws on slave management from the first decades of English colonization. Mistresses explicitly named alongside masters or incorporated gender-neutral rubric owner in a common understanding absolute ownership and authority over enslaved people was as much rooted female mastery male. Remarkably, neither scholarship nor far more voluminous American have explored, even acknowledged, how gender influenced formulation laws, mistresses, particular, featured roles duties assigned to slaves. seeks redress this by examining lawmakers colony’s culminating with an assessment 1740 code, which marked key turning point both governing slaves evolving ideology mastery.