slaveholder

noun

slave·​hold·​er ˈslāv-ˌhōl-dər 

variants or less commonly slave holder

plural slaveholders also slave holders

: someone who holds one or more people involuntarily and under threat of violence within a system of chattel slavery

In the teaching of American history, perhaps the most difficult lesson to convey is that slavery once held the entire country in its grip. It was not just the business of enslaved black people, slaveholders, or the South.

—Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

Each slaveholder's inventoried listing of the number of human beings claimed as owned … was associated with their specific census data, and has, in this age of trillions of pages of digitized historic records, become a lamp shining light on the painful lost family history of many Black Americans.

—J. W. Sayles

By allowing Southern states to count their slaves … for purposes of representation, while denying those slaves all other civil or human rights, the Constitution granted slave holders magnified political power, while creating an incentive to acquire more slaves.

—Peter Sagal

called also slave owner

slaveholding

ˈslāv-ˌhōl-diŋ 

adjective or noun

plural slaveholdings

Examples of slaveholder in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Several scholars and students think that slave owners freed their slaves out of pure generosity, embracing the idea that enslaved people were part of the family of slaveholders, and that the color line didn’t exist in countries such as Brazil. —Ana Lucia Araujo / Made By History, TIME, 4 Nov. 2024

Southern slaveholders and their allies won the White House until Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 victory. —Doug Melville, Forbes, 30 Oct. 2024

Connecting the wealth of a slaveholder in the 1860s to today’s economic conditions is not easy. —Ashwini Sehgal, The Conversation, 23 Oct. 2024

Legislators whose ancestors were large slaveholders – defined in our study as owning 16 or more slaves– have a current median net worth five times larger than their peers whose ancestors were not slaveholders: $5.6 million vs. $1.1 million. —Ashwini Sehgal, The Conversation, 23 Oct. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1769, in the meaning defined above

Kids Definition

slaveholder

noun

slave·​hold·​er ˈslāv-ˌhōl-dər 

: someone who holds one or more people in forced servitude

slaveholding

-diŋ 

adjective or noun