Celia, a Slave Read online

  Celia, A Slave

  CELIA A SLAVE

  MELTON A. McLAURIN

  To Sandra

  in admiration of her courage and conviction

  © 1991 by the University of Georgia Press

  Athens, Georgia 30602

  www.ugapress.org

  All rights reserved

  Designed by Barbara Henry

  Set in 10 on 12 Caledonia by Tseng Information Systems with hand-set

  display provided by Browne & Co., Stationers

  Printed digitally in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  LCCN Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/90023045

  McLaurin, Melton Alonza.

  Celia, a slave / Melton A. McLaurin.

  xi, 148 p. ; 24 cm.

  ISBN 0-8203-1352-1 (alk. paper)

  Includes bibliographical references (p. 137–143) and index.

  1. Celia, d. 1855—Trials, litigation, etc. 2. Trials (Murder)—Missouri—

  Callaway County. 3. Slavery—Southern States.

  4. Southern States—

  Moral conditions. I. Title.

  KF223.C43M34 1991

  345.73′02523

  347.3052523 20

  90-23045

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  Jacket design and illustration by

  Barbara Henry, Bowne & Co., Stationers,

  South Street Seaport Museum, New York

  ISBN for this electronic edition: 978-0-8203-4159-0

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  BEGINNINGS

  Chapter Two

  THE CRIME

  Chapter Three

  INQUISITION

  Chapter Four

  BACKDROP

  Chapter Five

  THE TRIAL

  Chapter Six

  THE VERDICT

  Chapter Seven

  FINAL DISPOSITION

  Chapter Eight

  CONCLUSIONS

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  As an academic discipline, history possesses an inherent tension, one that every historian confronts. On the one hand, history is the study of the recorded past, of data, of facts. At times the record is dry and dull, at others, as with the case examined in this work, the record holds the power to captivate. History is also the search for the meaning of the recorded past, an interpretation of data, an exploration of the significance of facts. It is the effort to interpret, to explain, that distinguishes the historian from the storyteller. Yet historians ignore their role as storytellers to their peril, if they wish to address an audience beyond the academy, to enter into a meaningful dialogue with the larger society.

  This work represents an attempt to resolve that tension, or at least to bring it to bear upon the effort to know and to understand a portion of the American past. Several colleagues graciously offered advice about how to do this most effectively. Comments from Robert Hall of Northeastern University; Jacqueline Goggin of Clark University; Peter Stead of Swansea College, University of Wales; Gary Kremer of the Missouri State Archives; and Kathleen Berkeley of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington were especially helpful. So, too, were the comments of readers for the University of Georgia Press. For the advice received, and for the time and energy devoted to reading the work in manuscript, I am truly grateful.

  Introduction

  THE lives of public figures, those whom society comes to regard as great men and women, are often used by historians and biographers to exemplify or define an issue or era from the past. In the mid-nineteenth century, for example, Elizabeth Cady Stanton came to represent the women’s movement; Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison the abolitionists; Dorothea Dix reform in the treatment of the criminal and the insane; Edmund Ruffin and William Loundes Yancey a fierce southern nationalism based upon the defense and perpetuation of the institution of slavery. Yet the lives of lesser figures, men and women who lived and died in virtual anonymity, often better illustrate certain aspects of the major issues of a particular period than do the lives of those who, through significant achievement, the appeal of the orator, or the skill of the polemicist, achieve national prominence.

  Such is the case with the life of Celia, a slave who lived and died in Callaway County, Missouri. On October 9, 1855, Celia entered the circuit court of Callaway County, where she stood accused of murder. Approximately nineteen years of age and already the mother of two children, the accused was defended by a team of three lawyers. The most prominent of her defense attorneys was a popular figure in the county seat of Fulton, a man who had been three times elected to serve his constituents in the United States Congress. Celia’s trial, its causes and consequences, confront us with the hard daily realities of slavery rather than with the abstract theories about the workings of that institution so carefully developed and explored by historians in the last quarter-century.

  Celia’s life, like any life, cannot give us a complete understanding of an institution so complex as slavery. Its ability to inform us is limited by the fact that the record of Celia’s life, like that of most lives judged inconsequential, is incomplete. Since the significance of Celia’s story rests in large part upon the manner in which others responded to her, the gaps in the historical record only underscore the historian’s difficulty in assessing the motives of those individuals, of determining intent. Assumptions are employed to fill these gaps. Such assumptions are based upon a careful consideration of the record extant, of the historical backdrop against which the events of Celia’s life played out, and of the past quarter-century of scholarship on slavery. Celia’s life also informs us little about certain aspects of slavery, for example the political economy of slavery, or the structure and activities of the slave community. Nor does it inform us about the complex political and constitutional issues to which slavery gave rise, and which ultimately disrupted the union.

  Rather, the life of Celia, a slave, presents us with a detailed case study of what the historian Charles Sellers referred to as “the fundamental moral anxiety” that slavery produced. This fundamental moral anxiety, and the moral dilemmas that produced it, were at the very heart of the institution of slavery. Until recently they have received little attention from historians, who concentrated instead upon the economic and social aspects of slavery, and upon the political issues it created. For many antebellum southerners, including the large majority who held no slaves, the moral dilemmas of slavery were hardly abstractions to be debated. They were instead among the inescapable realities of daily life, a significant aspect of the society. And as such southerners, slaveholders or not, were forced to cope with them in terms of the concrete, rather than the theoretical. These same moral dilemmas, and the moral anxiety they produced, were equally crucial to, and unavoidable in, the political struggles that eventually led to the Civil War.1

  The life of Celia demonstrates how slavery placed individuals, black and white, in specific situations that forced them to make and to act upon personal decisions of a fundamentally moral nature. Such decisions involved, and inevitably affected, the lives of both the decision maker and the individuals caught in the moral dilemma about which decisions were made. Ultimately, each of these individual decisions was also a judgment about the morality of the institution of slavery itself. The events of Celia’s life, and the decisions they forced upon others, also forcefully remind us that personal decisions about the morality of slavery were never made in a social and political vacuum. Individual responses to the moral dilemmas posed by slavery were inevitably linked to the political issue of slavery within the la
rger society, especially during periods when the peculiar institution was under attack.2

  Celia’s story derives much of its significance, as well as its narrative power, from the nature of the specific issues and moral dilemmas it forced individuals to confront. Her case starkly reveals the relationships of race, gender, and power in the antebellum South, in addition to illustrating the manner in which the law was employed to assuage the moral anxiety slavery produced. Finally, because race and gender are issues with which our society continues to grapple, and because both remain major factors in the distribution of power within modern society, the case of Celia, a slave, reminds us that the personal and the political are never totally separate entities.

  Chapter One

  BEGINNINGS

  ROBERT NEWSOM seemed the ideal representative of the family farmers who in 1850 composed the majority of the citizens of Callaway County, Missouri. His life experiences, family relationships, and economic status made him seem so. Indeed, nothing in the public record indicated that Robert Newsom was anything other than what he seemed—a man who had labored hard and endured much for the measure of prosperity he had achieved; a good father who continued to contribute to the welfare of his children, all now themselves adults; a man who had gained the respect of his neighbors. In many respects he was the fulfillment of the Jeffersonian dream, the personification of the ideals that had led to the purchase of the territory in which he settled. He was, as were so many of his fellow Missourians, the self-sufficient yeoman farmer, secure because of the abundance that came from the land he owned, and which he helped to till.

  The journey of Robert Newsom and his family to Missouri had been typical of that undertaken by many of his fellow citizens of Callaway County. His was among the many families to abandon Virginia in the second decade of the nineteenth century and trek westward to the newly created territories of the transmontane southwest. The promise of a better life took the Newsoms to Missouri sometime between 1819 and 1822. Like thousands of others who were fleeing the overcropped lands of the east, the Newsoms recognized the potential of the rich river bottom lands of the most recent addition to the Union. Robert had made his westward journey with his wife, whose name we do not know, and son Harry and daughter Virginia, both of whom were born in Virginia. The method by which they traveled is unknown, but however they traveled it would have been an arduous journey for the family, and not without danger, especially for the children. Virginia would have been an infant, at most not more than two years of age; Harry would have been no more than seven. The rigors of travel on the western frontier would have exposed both children to accident and disease, whether the family journeyed overland through Kentucky or took the more likely route by flatboat down the Ohio and Mississippi to the burgeoning river port of St. Louis.1

  If they entered the territory from St. Louis, it is probable that Robert Newsom took his young family up the Missouri, a notoriously difficult river to navigate. Although European and American settlers had used the river for decades, until the second decade of the nineteenth century such traffic was haphazardly organized and risky in the extreme. Canoes and pirogues, often rafted in pairs, were frequently used on the river, as were mackinaws, flat-bottomed, high-prowed craft capable of only downriver voyages, and skinboats, flimsy, unstable craft made of buffalo hide that deteriorated rapidly. Keelboats were introduced to the Big Muddy only in 1811, when rival fur-trading companies launched expeditions on a race upstream on high spring waters. Not until 1819, two years after they appeared in St. Louis on the Mississippi, did steamboats ascend the Missouri.

  At the time the Newsom family arrived in Missouri, all of these craft were still used on the river. If the family went inland on its waters, their financial situation would have determined the craft in which they traveled. Quite possibly the family ascended the river by steamboat, although such travel would have been expensive, as the fur company boats remained the only such vessels on the river. Chances are that the family traveled by keelboat, their vessel powered by muscular rivermen, some of whom may have plied their trade since the great race that inaugurated keelboat service on the Missouri. Although less likely, the Newsoms may have come upriver in a solid, serviceable pirogue, hewn from a single walnut or cottonwood log, their provisions strewn about its bottom, protected from hungry river rats by a cat or two.2

  Regardless of their mode of travel, by the fall of 1822 Robert Newsom and his family had settled in southern Callaway County, in a section that would eventually become Fulton Township. The Newsom family was but one of many to immigrate to the region after lands there were opened for sale to the public in December 1818. Like many early settlers, Robert Newsom selected land along the timbered shores of a river or creek, a site that provided rich alluvial soils for crops, wood for building and for fuel, and an inexpensive means of transporting the crops he planned to raise and the products he hoped to purchase from the profits his sale of the harvest would bring. The site Newsom purchased was located on the Middle River, a minor tributary of the Missouri, some nine miles south of the locality that would eventually become the town of Fulton.3

  The Newsoms and their neighbors, who settled the farmlands along the banks of the Middle River, had come to Missouri in pursuit of prosperity and the more rewarding life they hoped prosperity would bring. Theirs was a dream both unique and common, individual and communal. Most, like the Newsoms, came from Virginia and North Carolina, a few from New York, Pennsylvania, and other northern states of the eastern seaboard. A surprising number came from Kentucky and Tennessee, the first of the transmontane states to send their restless citizenry further west in the relentless American pursuit of happiness. They had come on the rivers by keel and flatboat, in canoes and dugouts, on rafts of rough-sawed planking nailed across fresh-cut logs. Overland they had come by cart and wagon, astride horses and mules. Many journeyed by foot, plodding mile after mile along widened footpaths that hardly deserved to be called roads. Seekers and dreamers all, they hoped to reach the western promised land, a land said to flow with milk and honey, a land such as their God had promised, and delivered, to the ancient Israelites.

  They arrived in a land still untamed, an unbroken wilderness filled with opportunity and danger. Early settlers of south Callaway County found the first years hard, despite the fertility of the land. Even basic supplies proved difficult to obtain, and the county’s new residents imported bread and other staples from Fort Cooper in Howard County, a supply depot upriver that could be reached only after a journey of several days. Salt, an essential item, was transported overland from Boone’s Lick, a distance of forty miles. Basic rations had to be supplemented with game killed in the woodlands. Luckily, the territory’s virgin forest teemed with game large and small—elk and deer, wild turkeys, ducks, and squirrels. While some forest creatures supplied meat for the settlers’ tables, others threatened the newcomers’ efforts to tame the land. Poisonous snakes, especially rattlesnakes, were abundant, posing a serious danger to settlers. Snakebite, a constant threat during warm weather, inevitably resulted in serious illness and sometimes death. The swine, cattle, and sheep brought into the region by settlers faced a different threat as they foraged in the woodlands. Bears, wolves, and panthers that prowled the forests took a heavy toll on the county’s early livestock herds. So numerous and threatening were these predators that in 1824 some Callaway settlers created a common fund, agreeing to pay a bushel of corn for each animal scalp or pelt hunters presented. The frontiersmen responded to the challenge, killing hundreds of animals. On the day appointed they surrendered their furs and received their payment. It was, according to an early settler of the region, a memorable event, and only after “indulging in a great fandango of fun and frolic” did the hunters and their families, perhaps including the family of Robert Newsom, return to their homes.4

  Gradually the people of south Callaway County subdued the wilderness, claiming by the sweat of their brows their individual piece of the Canaan President Jefferson had purchased for them,
keeping faith with his dream. They cleared the forest with broadax and fire. They broke the newly cleared ground, littered with roots and stumps, with wooden “Bull plows.” Once the land was cleared and prepared, they planted and cultivated their crops, and began to reap the fruits of their labor in the fields they had created. As their herds of livestock grew and their cleared land expanded, Callaway’s pioneering residents began the business of establishing the institutions of a settled society, of replicating the older communities of the east which they had so recently abandoned. Religious congregations were among the first institutions formed, and they would first meet in private homes: Baptists, Methodists, Cumberland Presbyterians. Militia units were organized and twice yearly general musters quickly became gala social events, a time for horse-racing, fistfighting, hard drinking and the telling of tall tales. School teachers arrived and set about the task of educating the youngest of the region’s new citizens. The people, or rather the men, of the community also began the task of self-government and political organization, of creating a body politic from a collection of individuals of varied origins, all of whom shared a common vision of the future. Robert Newsom was one of those who accepted the duties of citizenship in this emerging society, casting his first ballot in his adopted state in the 1822 elections.5

  The large majority of those who settled central Missouri, like Robert Newsom, made their living from the land. Most were small farmers, growing a variety of grain crops, with most of their acreage devoted to the production of oats and corn, although some grew substantial amounts of wheat and rye. Grains were supplemented by several other food crops, especially Irish potatoes. Callaway County farmers also soon established large livestock herds, as would Robert Newsom. By 1840, the county’s farmers raised herds of swine totaling over 30,000 animals and tended more than 11,000 head of cattle. They tended their farms with the labor of some 7,000 mules and horses and sold the wool produced by nearly 14,000 sheep.6