VoE - Trevon Logan - Benton Wishart 01.23.2025_mixdown
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Trevon Logan: And so, one of the reasons why this has such impact is because it moves us from an impression of white women being infrequent owners to the fact that they were, in fact, quite frequently involved in transactions. And so, it really is a contemporary example of what Vogel talked about, about the beauty of quantifying something and that counting is actually rigorous research and rigorous quantitative research 

Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. 

David Staley: I'm pleased to be [00:01:00] joined today in the ASC Marketing and Communication Studio by Trevon Logan, the ENGIE-Axium Endowed Professor of Economics, and Benton Wishart, Dr. Logan's research assistant, who is an economics major and graduate of The Ohio State University. Their research has been posted to the National Bureau of Economic Research as a working paper and has been featured in _The Economist_ and _The New York Times_.

Dr. Logan, Mr. Wishart, welcome to Voices. 

Benton Wishart: Thank you. 

Trevon Logan: Thank you. 

David Staley: Well, and that research, let me give the title of it first. I want to hear about your findings. So the paper was called _Her Property Transactions, White Women and the Frequency of Female Ownership in the Antebellum Era_. 

Tell us about this paper. What were the main arguments? 

Trevon Logan: So, the paper is deceptively simple, but gets at a question that has plagued historians for some time. And the question is, literally as simple as how active were women in the market for enslaved people in the antebellum era. So, it seems like a question we would have a very good [00:02:00] answer and sort of settled answer to, but very quickly we found that there has been very little written about that particular side of the topic.

So, it bridges this gap between narrative history, which has now established the frequency of white women's involvement in enslavement, I would call it at the intensive margin, so we know that they were managing households, dealing with enslaved individuals as owners or at least as co owners with their husbands, and that they were groomed, socialized to think about enslaved people and the prospects for enslavement.

But, economically we haven't done very much or quantitatively we haven't really done much to sort of gauge the extent to which women were involved, and that really is one of the missing parts of economic history more generally. We know a lot about women's home production, we know very much less about women's market production, particularly before industrialization.

So, we know that those rates are actually quite low, so women [00:03:00] owned, for example, maybe 1 percent or 2 percent of all the manufacturing businesses in the United States, circa 1850 or 1860. So, we have good reason to believe that women just weren't very active in what we will call the formal market, and that's really carried over to what we might think about in terms of enslavement, but enslavement is a bit different, and it's different from owning a business and it's different from land ownership historically, right? Enslaved people are highly mobile. You can't move land, but you can certainly move enslaved people.

You can bequeath enslaved people. One of the benefits of being an enslaver historically is that you had exclusive property rights to any children born from the enslaved people that you owned. So, you could think about that as an intergenerational investment if your enslaved people, in fact, gave birth to additional enslaved people that you would also own.

Benton Wishart: Yeah. This project was very interesting because we had several series of data sets that had been used in the field for decades at this point, thousands and thousands of names in these [00:04:00] data sets and various variables, including actually gender on the slave side of the data set, but there is no gender attached to any of the buy side or the sell side in the data set.

My job was to assign gender based on the forename or the given name of the buyer or the seller, and then count how many were on the buy side and how many were female and then how many were female on the sell side. So, that's why I kind of talk a bit about simplicity because it's not necessarily hard to explain the data in our findings.

It was definitely complex to assign gender to thirty thousand names, but once we actually got those results and the gender was assigned, it's not a hard number to share of. We found 30 percent of the transactions involved women in the data set from 1856 to 1861. 

David Staley: Say a little more about that process, the assigning gender. You said there were thirty thousand names. Tell us a little bit about that process. 

Benton Wishart: Yeah, so there were several different data sets, one was thirty thousand names, another was around ten [00:05:00] thousand names, and then there was another data set with just under a thousand names.

They had listed forenames and last names, and then I had several good data sets from Dr. Hacker, an economist out of Tulane, I believe, and he had compiled lists of the most common names of male and female gender from the 1800s. So, what I was first able to do is compare our list of names from the datasets with his list of the most common names on the male side or the female side. And then, what I was able to do from there was assign those genders based on that and then just dive into the names that weren't common. One good resource that we had for that was Ancestry Data. If I found a name that I didn't necessarily know what gender it might belong to, I was able to look it up on the Ancestry data, and it gave me a really good set of information on what people with that forename self assigned their gender as in census reports.

I knew from there if 95 or more percent of the names were self reported as female, it was very easy for me to back [00:06:00] up with this data that this is a female name from this time period. And there's several instances where the changing of time periods might confuse you on what a gendered name might be and also spellings of names.

So, Francis can be spelled with an "es" or an "is", and the ending changes the common gender of the name. Another thing that I often talk about is the literacy rates at this time weren't necessarily great, so with one person spelling their own name on a census document and that name being transcribed over to Ancestry and also in the slave records them saying their name to someone who's writing it down: there's a lot of opportunity for the name to be misspelled, so I found many cases of a common female name being spelled in several different ways. I joke, I've never seen Amy spelled that many ways, but it does hold true that, it's pretty easy when you see the name Amy, no matter how it's spelled, you know, it's probably a female name. 

David Staley: Well, you've answered my next question, which is, I assumed that this could be automated, first of all, you didn't, this was done by [00:07:00] hand, and maybe it can't be automated, maybe a human being needs to be doing this by hand. 

Benton Wishart: Yeah. I would think the only way I could automate it is like using Dr. Hacker's data set. And that was, I mean, it wasn't automated, but I knew when Bridget was listed on Dr. Hacker's data set, I could go through and when I'm sorting by spelling, all of the Bridget's are going to be next to each other.

I can just assign that as female and go down, but then I get into misspells or a bunch of names that are spelled very similarly but are generally different names and I have to go through each one of those, and that's just simple, look it up and find out what people were self reporting as. 

David Staley: So, how active were women in the slave trade. 

Trevon Logan: Yeah, so well, two things. One, we're deriving a sort of very conservative estimate, given what Benton was just describing, because in addition to there being potential misspellings or names that it's not clear that you can assign gender to, which we always assume those names to be male, there are other people in the records who simply use their [00:08:00] initials, and of course, therefore, we don't know any gender for them at all.

So we do sort of take them out of the numerator and denominator in some circumstances, because we have no gender assignment for those people, but we're trying to get essentially the lowest estimate that we can get for the sort of rate of involvement of women in these transactions using that methodology.

And the key to Benton doing it so carefully is that we have much more confidence in the numbers than if we were going to use something like artificial intelligence or some sort of language learning model to automate that sort of process. So every single name has been looked at, and some of them you can do in batches, thankfully, you know, Johns are very, very common at the time and other sorts of names like that, but in general, we're able to sort of get a really good assignment, and I have more confidence in this than I would have had an automated result. The baseline to answer your question is that it's 30%, and what's more important, I think, about that is that we find that women were equally active as buyers and sellers, and that's incredibly important.

So they're about 15 percent of buyers, 15 percent of sellers. They're very rarely buying and selling to each other, so [00:09:00] they comprise 30 percent of the total number of transactions involving a female owner or someone who is becoming an owner through the transaction. It's 30 percent of the transactions overall.

David Staley: Alongside their husbands? Not in all related to their husband's activities?

Trevon Logan: Yeah, these records are showing women as the active owners, right? They are the purchasers and they are the sellers. So if they were using an agent, that is separately identified in the data, right? So that happens in markets for enslaved people historically is someone else is doing your business for you, but you are the active owner, and so that's a really important consideration when people are talking about whether women are sort of acting on their own or acting with their husband's help. A big piece that's sort of looming over the entire project is this issue of coverture, which was a practice in the 19th century and earlier where women had no legal personhood of their own. So, you would go from being covered by your father [00:10:00] to being covered by your husband, and what this meant technically, legally, is that women had no property rights. So, when you married a husband, your property became his property, and importantly, your property, which legally wasn't your property, could be used to satisfy your husband's debts.

And that was an important restriction, which has led a lot of historians to believe that women had very little involvement in enslaved transactions because even if they brought an enslaved person into a marriage that had, say, been bequeathed to them by their parents, it would, under coverture, belong to her husband, and so, therefore, women should not have very much access to enslaved people, and they shouldn't be very active in transactions. But we find, in fact quite the opposite. 

David Staley: Hm. So, how active were women, why were women active in the slave trade. 

Trevon Logan: Well, this is, I think, where the story gets most interesting, is [00:11:00] that they had a carve out from coverture, specifically for enslaved people.

And the story of that, I think this is a fascinating story, and so it's just a reason to want to do research is to learn new things that just sort of blow your mind about history. And so, the very first state to allow women to have private property rights as married women in enslaved people is the state of Mississippi, which passes the Married Women's Property Act in 1839, I believe.

And this act is passed after a very famous legal case in the state of Mississippi ,Fisher v. Allen. And so this involves Betsy Love Allen, she's the defendant in this case. She is the daughter of an indigenous chief and a white mother, and she is of mixed race. And a little bit of American history here, we all remember the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and so for those who remained in the state of Mississippi, who did not go to Indian territory, they [00:12:00] became citizens of the United States and residents of their state of residence, and so Betsy Love's Allen case, that would have been the state of Mississippi.

She owned enslaved people and had brought into her marriage enslaved people. Her husband subsequently became indebted to a Mr. Fisher, and for payment of his debts, he sought which he would traditionally do under coverture, her property. He wanted the enslaved man, Tony, for payment of her husband's debts.

And so he sued for Tony under Mississippi's common law structure, and Betsy Love Allen said not so fast. First, she is indigenous and she married under tribal custom, and if I'm recalling this correctly, she was a Chickasaw, and in Chickasaw custom, women had property rights within marriage. Since the state of Mississippi, at the time in which they became a state, acknowledged that they would, with the full force of the laws [00:13:00] of this state, acknowledge and enforce those tribal customs, she would therefore have private property rights as a married woman to this enslaved individual.

Her second defense was that Tony no longer belonged to her, she had in fact bequeathed Tony to her daughter. So, when this case reached the Mississippi Supreme Court, they had two questions that they needed to answer. The first is, who does Tony belong to? Who is he an enslaved person of? Does Mr. Allen have any legal interest, in Tony? And the second, does Betsy Love Allen have the right to, in fact, bequeath Tony to someone else, which you wouldn't have under coverture? And so, the Supreme Court of the state of Mississippi ruled that Betsy Love Allen was the exclusive owner of Tony, and therefore the second question wasn't even something that they had to consider because she can do with her property what she will.

Now this created in the state of Mississippi [00:14:00] a deep legal inequality. If you were an indigenous woman or you were a mixed race indigenous woman, you would have access to property rights in marriage that a white woman in the state of Mississippi would not have, and so Mississippi enacts the Married Woman's Property Law, and four parts of the five parts of this act are exclusive to enslaved people, it is totally about enslaved people. It is about a woman's ability, and they literally say, notwithstanding her coverture, right, they're getting around coverture to allow women to bring enslaved people into marriages, more importantly, to continue to accumulate enslaved people while they are married that are their property to dispose of as they will.

What we have found in our research is that many historians have said, Oh, this was a protective measure for women and that it really wasn't about women's economic independence, it was about credit markets and liquidity. But when you find that women are involved in 30 percent of the transactions and that women who [00:15:00] live in states that have these property acts are much more active in transactions than women who live in states that do not have them, I think it actually troubles that sort of notion that these laws had no effect on economic incentives for women to have property rights within marriage. So, one thing I'm commonly saying at this stage when I talk about this is that if you were a married white woman, you had more legal rights to private property in terms of enslavement in particular in Mississippi than you would have had in Ohio.

Benton Wishart: Yeah, when reading about that story, it was truly fascinating. I think it's so interesting that in our data, when we started matching these names to people and finding their age, finding if they were married or not, and finding which states they're from, it absolutely checks off on each of these robustness checks.

Women who are from states with married women's property rights were more involved. Women were incredibly involved whether they were married or unmarried, and we did not find many cases of women only being on the sell side because [00:16:00] they had inherited these slaves and they wanted to sell them.

And that was, I think, a very common misconception before we did this research that, oh, if women were involved, it was because they inherited a slave and they were selling the slave. Well, they were more involved on the buy side of the market. So, yeah, I mean, this has truly changed our perspective and I'm sure many other people's perspectives in the field ~ ~on this information.

David Staley: So why are we only understanding this now, today? 

Trevon Logan: So this is actually an interesting piece of this, which is that, as Benton mentioned earlier, these records have been around for quite some time. So, this is not new data~ and, ~and what I mean by that is this data in terms of even it being available in, I would say, a non archival form, and that just means someone sort of going to the archive, recording these records, precedes my life, right?

So, this has been, since the early 1970s, people have digitized, or mechanized or something like this, these sorts of records in some sort of computer format that would be descriptive of the time period, and use them to analyze the market for enslaved people.

From the very earliest work, in the early parts of [00:17:00] the 20th century, people have been using transaction prices for enslaved people to talk about the market for enslaved people, and in those records, consistently, you have the names of owners, you have the names of buyers and sellers. In particular, in the New Orleans records that we use, you know, enslaved people are title property, so it would be like if today you sell a car, right? You would know exactly who the owner is and you would know exactly who's selling the car, those are both identified on the data set. So this has always been in the historical record, right? So it's not something that new archival research needed to uncover.

And nobody has asked the question of this rate of frequency, given that they thought that coverture meant that women weren't there. So, I think about this as being hidden in plain sight, right? So it is painstaking work, you're going to have to look through thirty thousand names if you actually want to find an answer to this question, but you don't have to dig through the dusty archives to find it.

It's literally always been [00:18:00] there, and it's been there ever since we've been interested in these economic or quantitative features about the market for enslaved people and transactions involving enslaved people. 

David Staley: Why did you ask the question? What drew your interest or what was the genesis of the question?

Trevon Logan: Oh, so the genesis of this certainly was Stephanie Jones-Rogers' book, _They Were Her Property_, which is a book I cannot recommend enough for being sort of earth shattering and understanding this topic, and so she really is the first and most popular work. Glymph also has written _Out of the House of Bondage,_ another excellent history of household relationships between white women and enslaved people.

And so, there is this burgeoning literature certainly that Jones-Rogers goes into in more depth about the ways that white women were active in markets for enslaved people, and as a narrative historian, she does a terrific job in that book. It's very beautiful to read and the argument that she constructs is about how women are socialized to be enslavers and the various ways in which they independently act on their ownership.

And so, the follow on question to that for an [00:19:00] economic historian is how frequent were these transactions? And so, being inspired by her work and having used enslaved transactions records for other research that I've done about black names and antebellum naming practices among ~ ~the enslaved to lead us to racial naming in the present led me to realize that these names of our buyers and sellers were there and simply people had not ever assigned gender to them to look at these sorts of rates.

David Staley: I was struck, Benton, by something that you said before we started recording: "I think that the most impressive part of our research is the simplicity in how we can describe the research and the results." Would you say a little more? 

Benton Wishart: Absolutely. So, although like Dr. Logan just mentioned, it was painstaking work looking at these names and assigning gender to them and looking up each variation in records, once we got our data and once we found the results, is quite easy to convey this message and to convey these results to any group of people. I gave several talks at various [00:20:00] conferences in rooms full of PhDs, economic PhDs, ~ ~I could take the very same presentation and go to a middle school classroom and I'm confident they would come away with a very deep understanding of the research. And I think that's just impressive in any sort of research. It's easy when you're doing novel work to, I mean, you're one of the leading experts on that exact topic in the world, it's easy to take the research down a complex path. But, for us to just have these results and to be able to show them so clearly and with ease I think is, impressive. 

David Staley: You are, I noticed as I was looking at the article that you're listed as first author. 

Benton Wishart: Yeah.

David Staley: Tell us how that happened. How does the research assistant uh, get the first authorship? 

Benton Wishart: Yeah. When I started this work, we didn't really know what the numbers were. So we had to wait to get data and to actually do the work, and when we got these numbers back, we knew that there was definitely a project here.

And at that point, I was expecting a nice mention in the acknowledgement section of the paper, and then I see the first [00:21:00] draft and I see my name as one of the authors and I see that it's also first and I was surprised and very excited. So, I'm not exactly sure what led the decision.

I do know that I was the one in the data like doing the assigning, so when people come with questions about the data, it's easy for them to just reach out to me rather than go through Dr Logan, and then he sends them to me because I was the one doing the methodology. But yeah, I'm not entirely sure, but I am very grateful.

David Staley: How did you get involved in the first place with this project? 

Benton Wishart: Yeah, this started, my uncle is an economist at Wittenberg and in my freshman year, I was telling him about my classes and he told me to make sure to take a class with Dr. Logan, and that was, I happened to be signing up for classes that next week and I reached out to Dr. Logan and I saw that he had this 5000 level class with open enrollment. I didn't have any of the prerequisites and I emailed him and said I hadn't taken any economic classes at Ohio State yet, and he said, that's fine, just take the class, and I did.

I think I was the youngest one there by probably two years, and it went very well and I was [00:22:00] incredibly interested in all the topics that we covered. And then I ended up taking another class with Dr. Logan, and from there, I was still very interested in the work and economic history and just asked if he had any research assistant spots open and he did and it ended up being this project.

David Staley: Trevon, you are director of the National Bureau of Economic Research's working group on race and stratification in the economy. Would you say a little more about this working group? 

Trevon Logan: Yeah, so this working group was created in 2020 to really have a focus on questions of race and stratification in the economy because they appear to be particularly acute, but also areas where a lot of different sub fields of economics have sort of coalesced around thinking about issues of racial inequality.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, which is a large private nonpartisan economic research organization. Probably they're most famous for being the group that names business cycles, so they're the ones who officially tell us when we're in recession and when we are in recovery.

I do not have a role in declaring business cycles, but I'm part of other research [00:23:00] groups at the NBER, which is organized into programs and working groups. My area would be American economic history, and that's called the development of the American economy. They have a labor studies group, they have a group that focuses on children, a group that focuses on education, a group that focuses, of course, on finance, industrial organization, other areas of economics. And those areas of economics all, in some way, sort of touch on, in various aspects, racial inequality and stratification in the American economy, but there really wasn't a place for all of those people in those various fields to come together. And so creating that group, I was asked by the NBER President Jim Poterba to lead that working group, and I've been leading it since that time. So we have an annual meeting that we hold in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we're currently working on several other projects related to race and stratification. 

David Staley: Can you tell us about some of those projects that you're overseeing? 

Trevon Logan: The one that I'm hoping will be coming online soon, and if this is wood, I would knock on it, is a handbook of the economics of race and stratification.

That would be a publication from the NBER, [00:24:00] so that would be really a first for the economics profession to have a single volume devoted to economic analysis of race and stratification that we hope would be really a launching pad for people who are interested in the field.

Race and stratification are not sub areas of economics, the way that, say, macroeconomics is a sub area, or public economics is a sub area where people would go to graduate school and specialize in it per se. Although there are people interested in it, it really hasn't been collectively mainstreamed as a field.

And so, having some intellectual source that people can turn to is incredibly important. 

David Staley: I'm curious about that. You say race and stratification is not a sub field. Why not? 

Trevon Logan: Well, there are lots of reasons for it. I think the lack of racial diversity in the profession is probably one of the key reasons for it, and the relatively small number of avowed practitioners in a department, right? So when a field really develops, even economic history being one of these, you need a number of people who are practitioners, but also are practitioners in variety of educational settings so that they can train additional students in that area.

So, there are some very prominent scholars in race and [00:25:00] stratification, but coalescing around a field and also having the intellectual and administrative resources to really carry a field out have really been lacking. And so, there now is a major push to establish race and stratification as a field, so it's certainly a field, say, a subfield in sociology or a subfield in political science, but not yet in economics. And so, this working group is actually part of that and mainstreaming that and allowing scholars an avenue to sort of present the research at the highest levels of the profession.

David Staley: ~ ~What's next for your research? 

Benton Wishart: Yeah, we're currently seeking publication a scientific journal. So, I had actually thought we would hear back quicker, but we're going to wait for an email back from them to see if they've accepted our submission. 

Trevon Logan: I think the next step is for Benton to learn how slow the publication process is for scientific reasons. 

David Staley: Reviewer two.

Trevon Logan: Yeah. I did tell him, if you think the research process is slow, wait until you actually try to get the work actually published, so that will be even slower, so but it will be very exciting to have this in doing that.

[00:26:00] So I was very pleased to have Benton as the first author on this work. So, I don't have any motive other than saying one of my father's best expressions is, you know, at the end of your life, no one is going to say that you were too generous, right? So there's absolutely no fault in being generous.

I didn't look through all of those records. And so, in fact, when he then came to me, I said, if you really want to do something that I think would be quite interesting, it's tedious, but I think it would actually be quite interesting to look through these records, and it was a time consuming process. I think it took several months before you had the estimates perfected.

But it's worth it, and so that the laborious part of that and the intense part of that was on his part, and so I certainly thought he was deserving of being the first author for the publication. 

David Staley: Well, I introduced your work as being featured in both _The Economist_ and _The New York Times_. Do you have a sense of how your research has been received outside the university, outside the academy? 

Trevon Logan: Well, I know we've been tweeted about on the New York Times website. It stayed for a couple of days as one of the top five read pieces. So, it really did have a huge impact.

I'm forgetting who it [00:27:00] was, and it might actually have been Ben, but I know it's been, it's appeared on Instagram. I'm not as tuned into these sorts of things as younger people are, so apparently it's... 

David Staley: Well, _The Economist_ and _The__ New York Times_. 

Trevon Logan: I'm more attuned to _The Economist_ and _The New York Times,_ but it's also made its way into a viral sphere, and some people have blogged about it and also talked about the research explained it to the broader public in a way that I think, as has been argued earlier, is related to its simplicity, right?

When you tell people 30 percent of transactions and you see how transparent that estimate is, it's a really easy piece to transport to other people. 

David Staley: Does that matter to you, as a scholar, as a researcher? Does that sort of public reception matter, or is it really getting in this scientific journal that's paramount? 

Trevon Logan: I think both are equally important.

I think, you know, the scientific publication puts it into a scholarly literature that is something that will engage in and feature the way that people think about this process as professional researchers in an area. But moving to the public, I also think is important and goes back to something that Benton probably would remember as being a student that I'm [00:28:00] a really big advocate for counting, particularly in history.

And so Robert Fogel, who's now deceased, but was a Nobel Prize winner, economic historian, has a great piece that I teach that's quite old now, but still quite relevant, and he says the most rigorous method in quantitative historical analysis is counting, because counting is what takes us from an impression to a fact.

And so, one of the reasons why this has such impact is because it moves us from an impression of white women being infrequent owners to the fact that they were, in fact, quite frequently involved in transactions. And so, it really is a contemporary example of what Vogel talked about, about the beauty of quantifying something and that counting is actually rigorous research and rigorous quantitative research.

David Staley: Trevon Logan, Benton Wishart. 

Thank you, gentlemen. 

Benton Wishart: Thank you. 

Trevon Logan: Thank you. 

Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio.

More information [00:29:00] about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Produced by Doug Dangler, I'm Jen Farmer.