noun
- people who own slaves; masters of enslaved persons
Usage: historical
Examples
- Many slaveholders in the antebellum South owned large plantations.
- The Civil War divided families between slaveholders and abolitionists.
- Some slaveholders freed their slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation.
- Wealthy slaveholders often owned hundreds of enslaved people.
- The Underground Railroad helped slaves escape from their slaveholders.
- After the war, former slaveholders had to adapt to a new economic system.