How many Black women owned slaves in the United States by state and decade?
Executive summary
Clear, comprehensive state-by-decade counts of Black women who owned enslaved people do not exist in the surviving published datasets; historians can point to overall counts of free Black slaveowners and to evidence that women participated in buying and selling, but the records are fragmentary and often undercount female owners [1] [2] [3]. The best available aggregate figures — notably Carter G. Woodson’s 1830 tabulation and later scholarly estimates — show thousands of Black slaveholders overall, with a small fraction plausibly being women, concentrated in a handful of Southern states [1] [4] [5].
1. What the question asks and the documentary reality
The user asks for a quantitative breakdown — by state and decade — of Black women who owned enslaved people; surviving sources do provide partial counts of free Black slaveowners at certain moments and documentary traces of female transactions, but they do not deliver a reliable, systematic state-by-decade matrix of Black female owners because census, tax and bill-of-sale practices unevenly recorded gender, race and ownership status [2] [6].
2. What historians can say about Black slaveowners in aggregate
Census-based and archival work gives a clearer picture of Black slaveowners overall: Woodson’s 1830 study found 3,776 free Black slaveholders who owned 12,907 enslaved people in the United States, a very small fraction of the nation’s roughly two million enslaved persons then [1]. Later scholarship and fact-checking acknowledge that Black-owned enslaved people remained a tiny proportion of the total slave population and that some estimates suggest perhaps up to ~20,000 enslaved persons might have been held by Black owners by 1860 — still a small share of the four million enslaved people on the eve of the Civil War [4] [7].
3. Where those Black owners were concentrated
Available state-level evidence points to concentrations in parts of the Deep South and especially in places with substantial free Black populations and Creole communities: studies cite very high proportions of free Black household heads owning enslaved people in South Carolina (about 43% of free Black heads of families), Louisiana (40%), Mississippi (26%), Alabama (25%) and Georgia (20%), meaning that within the free Black population in some states ownership was relatively common even as it remained rare compared with white ownership [5] [1].
4. Female ownership: documented presence but sparse enumeration
Women appear in sale and tax records: for example, bills of sale in South Carolina include female buyers or sellers in about 40% of cases across long-ranging samples, and archival projects list named Black women who appear as owners in county records [3] [8]. Historians warn, however, that many female owners — especially those who “owned” relatives to protect them — were often omitted from census returns or recorded in ways that mask gendered ownership (husbands, overseers, or white intermediaries listed instead), complicating any attempt to count Black women owners precisely [2] [6].
5. Why a state-by-decade count for Black women is not supportable by the sources
Because original censuses, tax lists and bills of sale were inconsistent about gender, because owners sometimes held relatives on paper for legal reasons, and because later scholarship documents systematic underreporting and local archival gaps, it is not possible from the sources provided to deliver a defensible numerical table of “Black women owners by state and decade”; scholars therefore rely on case studies, tax records and probate rolls rather than an authoritative nationwide, decade-by-decade breakdown [2] [6] [1].
6. Conclusion and the responsible answer
The responsible historical answer is that Black women did own enslaved people and appear in bills of sale and local tax rolls — sometimes in significant numbers within free-Black communities in states like South Carolina and Louisiana — but surviving published data do not allow a reliable, state-by-decade tally; aggregate benchmarks (Woodson’s 1830 totals, later estimates toward 1860) and state concentration figures are the strongest evidence available, while precise female-specific counts remain an open archival research task [1] [4] [5] [3] [2]. Researchers seeking finer resolution must consult county-level probate, tax and bill-of-sale archives and accept that underreporting and legal artifice will limit certainty [6].