Celia, a Slave Read online

  Although the settlers of Callaway County found the prosperity they sought, theirs was the prosperity of the common man. Their settlements were representative of both the biblical ideal of every man in his own vineyard, beneath his own fig tree, and the economic democracy of the American frontier, which would soon find a national symbol in Andrew Jackson. Their original homes were log cabins, ribbed with poles and covered with boards split from trees, floored with rough-hewn planks, with holes two-feet square cut into the walls to serve as windows. Callaway was never a land of huge plantations and grand manors. A pattern of a diversified subsistence agriculture conducted on small family farms rapidly emerged in Callaway County. This pattern, of which the Newsom farm would become representative, discouraged the development of large plantations and the production of cash crops. In 1840, Callaway farmers produced less than 300 tons of hemp, no cotton, and only about 195 tons of tobacco. Although tobacco was by far the county’s most important cash crop, it seemed almost insignificant when compared to the 1840 production of more than 1,700,000 pounds in Boone County, which also bordered the Missouri and was Callaway’s neighbor to the west. The wool produced by the county’s large herds of sheep contributed to the subsistence economy, and provided local farmers with their other source of cash income. The herds also represented an additional source of meat for the settlers’ tables. The pattern of small, subsistence family farms so evident in the 1840 census remained unchanged a decade later, as did the agricultural commodities these farms produced.7

  One historian’s examination of a random sample of land-owners selected from the county’s 1850 census records provides perhaps the best available overview of the economic and social setting in which the family of Robert Newsom lived and worked. The results of this examination reveal a portrait of the “typical” Callaway County farm. The sample was comprised of 179 slaveholders and 120 nonslaveholders, for slaveholding, more than any other factor, distinguished between the county’s landholders. The average slaveholder’s farm was valued at $1,720, the average nonslaveholder’s was valued at less than a third of that figure at $500. The differential between slaveholders and nonslaveholders also is strikingly evident in the productivity of their farms in practically every other category measured, including value of farm implements, livestock, and homemade manufactures. Slaveholders produced on average three times the wheat produced by nonslaveholders, and twice as much corn. Slaveowners held twice as many horses and sheep as did nonslaveholders, and three times as many cattle.

  While this differential in productivity between farmers who held slaves and those who did not is evident throughout the sample, even more apparent is the small size of all farms, those of slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike. On average, slaveholders owned slightly more than three hundred acres, of which less than a hundred acres was tended. Nonslave-holders held on average slightly more than a hundred acres, of which but 33 were tended. Thus throughout the antebellum era, while Callaway County’s promise to settlers such as Robert Newsom of a better life in a relatively egalitarian white society was fulfilled, it would have been obvious to Newsom and others that the promise was more amply fulfilled for those who held slaves than for those who did not.8

  The promise and its fulfillment drew a steady stream of seekers to join the Newsom family in their search for prosperity in Callaway County. By 1830 some 6,159 souls were settled on the land—4,702 whites, 1,456 black slaves, and a lone free black. Within the next decade the county’s population practically doubled as settlers in ever-increasing numbers fled the overcropped and eroded lands of the eastern seaboard states. In 1840 the county’s population totaled 11,765, of whom 8,601 were white and 3,142 were black slaves. Ten years later the county contained 13,827 people, 9,895 of whom were white.9

  As the county’s population increased, as its agricultural productivity quickened and its governmental institutions were put into place, the need for a town to serve as a commercial and political center became apparent. And so, in 1825, at a location some nine miles north of the Newsom farm, a new town was laid out in a wilderness clearing. Men dressed in buckskin pants, shirts, and moccasins traveled distances of up to ten miles on foot to help create the town. In a single day they erected its first building, a log cabin in which they danced that very night. Fulton, the newly created county seat, developed even more rapidly than did the farmland that surrounded it. Before the end of the decade it boasted grocers and saloonkeepers, saddlers and tailors, blacksmiths and merchants, laborers and lawyers. In addition to its county governmental offices and its commercial enterprises, Fulton witnessed the founding of its first religious institution, a Baptist church. In 1827 the fledgling congregation welcomed a new minister, Theodorick Boulware. Boulware, a hard-driving young Virginian like Robert Newsom, was determined to advance both the Baptist version of Christianity and his own personal fortune.10

  The passing decades were as kind to Robert Newsom. As the summer of 1855 approached, Newsom had reason to be pleased with his decision to make his home in Callaway County. He had become a prosperous man, the owner of some eight hundred acres, almost half of which was improved land, worth some thirty-five hundred dollars according to the 1850 census. His prosperity could also be measured by the crops he produced: wheat, rye, corn and oats, more than twelve hundred bushels of grain per year. The herds of livestock that grazed his pastures, too, gave evidence of his prosperity: eighteen horses, six milch cows, twenty-seven beef cattle, seventy swine, twenty-five sheep and two oxen, with a combined value of approximately one thousand dollars. Although he was not among the county’s elite, Newsom’s holdings placed him solidly amid the ranks of Callaway’s residents who were comfortably well-off.11

  Included in the goods and property of Robert Newsom in 1850 were five male slaves, for he, like many of his Callaway neighbors, had invested in human chattel. While it is impossible to determine whether he suffered any misgivings, any pangs of conscience over this form of property, it is unlikely that he was greatly troubled by a sense of guilt. He had grown to adulthood in the slaveholding society of Virginia, where slave ownership had long been a mark of social position. The laws of the land condoned the practice, and those of his adopted state encouraged it. Many of his fellow Missourians, especially those who resided in counties such as Callaway that bordered the Missouri River, held slaves. Many such slaveholders believed the institution was justified by the laws of man and of God. While it is possible that Newsom harbored some moral ambiguity about slave ownership, it is far more likely that he regarded it as a fitting reward for his years of labor, an indication of the social status he had achieved through his own efforts.12

  Robert Newsom’s family, too, had prospered. Harry, forty-two in 1855, had acquired a farm of his own, nearly 250 acres, just down the road from his father’s place. Despite his prosperity, Harry had encountered personal hardship. His first wife, Jenina Caldwell, had died in 1842, at a time when he was still living with his father. A decade later Harry remarried, taking Miranda Griggs as his wife and leaving his father’s household. David, the youngest son, who turned twenty-two in 1855, had married Marry Ann Durham in April of that year. He, too, had moved to his own farm, probably obtained with help from Robert. Like that of his father and brother, David’s farm was located in Callaway’s Fulton Township.13

  In 1855, Robert’s older daughter, the thirty-six-year-old Virginia, still lived with her father, for what reasons we do not know. She had been married and retained her husband’s family name, Waynescot. She had been living with her father at least since 1850, when she appears on the census rolls as a resident in his household. The most logical conclusion is that her husband had died and Virginia had returned with her children to live with her father. In fact, Virginia functioned as the mistress of the Newsom home, for her mother had died sometime in 1849.14

  Virginia brought her three children from her marriage to Waynescot to reside with their grandfather. James Coffee, the oldest, was approximately twelve years old in the summer of 1855. A
melia, the sole Waynescot girl, was approximately six years old, and Thomas, about nine. A younger child, Billy, was four years old, and presents something of a puzzle since his birth came after a husbandless Virginia moved into her father’s home sometime prior to 1850. Rounding out the Robert Newsom household was Mary, Robert’s youngest, who at nineteen would have been regarded as an adult in what remained an essentially frontier society.15

  There was, however, another resident on the Newsom farm, one whose presence reflected the growing prosperity of Robert Newsom. She was the slave Celia, who, when she arrived in 1850, was approximately fourteen years old, about the same age as Newsom’s daughter Mary. Practically nothing is known about Celia’s life before her arrival at the Newsom farm. Immediately prior to her arrival, she had lived in Audrain County, which borders Callaway to the north. Whether she had been the property of a farmer or planter, or of a resident of Mexico or one of the county’s other small towns, is not known, nor is it known if she were born in Audrain County, or how many masters she had before becoming the property of Robert Newsom. Perhaps she had received some training as a cook, for that is one of the duties she performed for the Newsom household.16

  The prosperity enjoyed by the Newsom family was typical of the booming agricultural economy of Callaway County in 1855. Located on the northern banks of the Missouri River almost exactly in the center of the state, Callaway had by the 1850s become one of Missouri’s most prosperous counties. Because it had remained a land of family farms, rather than large plantations, and produced such a wide variety of food crops, its economy was less subject to yearly fluctuations than were the economies of those regions of the state that depended on the major cash crops of hemp, cotton, and tobacco. The large herds of sheep and swine that grazed its pastures and foraged in its woodlands, combined with the county’s beef cattle, the second largest herd among the state’s counties, further contributed to Callaway’s economic stability. While tobacco remained the county’s most important nonfood cash crop, a few farmers raised small quantities of flax and hemp.17

  Fulton, the seat of Callaway County and its largest town, enjoyed the benefits of the agricultural productivity of the surrounding countryside. The community experienced rapid growth in its first decade, and by 1840 boasted a variety of merchants and artisans who maintained thriving businesses, in addition to several small-scale manufacturing firms that produced for the local market, among them two carriage shops, two wagon factories, a tannery, and a wool-carding mill. By the early 1850s, the town had become a major regional market and had developed regular means of transportation to and communication with other Missouri towns and cities. Its trade had fostered the development often mercantile houses and three hotels, and Fulton served as the main depot for several stagecoach routes, all operated by a company that maintained in the town stables and a wagon and blacksmith’s shop at which repairs were made on the firm’s coaches.18

  By the mid 1850s Fulton had also begun to develop a number of institutions that lent some prestige to the young community, in addition to the county courthouse, the center of local government and politics. In 1850, the Rev. William W. Robertson, pastor of the Fulton Presbyterian Church and a man filled with the educational zeal typical of ministers of his denomination, founded the Fulton Female Seminary, the town’s first institution of higher learning. A year later the Reverend Robertson was instrumental in the founding of Fulton College, which in 1853 became Westminster College. By the end of the 1840s, Fulton and Callaway County had also attracted the attention of the state legislature, and in 1847 that body chartered the State Lunatic Asylum, to be built in Fulton. That institution opened its doors in 1851, as did the Missouri School for the Deaf, which the legislature had also placed in Fulton.19

  In 1855 a Fulton resident writing to the Missouri Republican, a St. Louis newspaper, boasted of his town’s seminary and college, the State Lunatic Asylum, the State School for the Deaf, the town’s five churches, its twenty stores, and its growing legal community attracted to Fulton by the county courthouse. Fulton, a town of 1,200, despite its youth was a place where, the correspondent continued, “an elevated tone of morals pervades the community.” It was a town “located in rich farming country, peopled with some of the choicest society (numbering among it many old Kentucky and some Virginia families) blessed with literary institutions of a high order and the great charities of the state, and the scene of scarcely any intemperance.” If this correspondent’s vision of the community was typical of that held by most residents, then in the mid-1850s we infer that the people of Fulton were extremely pleased with and proud of their accomplishments.20

  Among those citizens benefiting from, and contributing to, the growth of Fulton was John Jameson, who arrived in the recently created town in 1825 from Montgomery County, Kentucky. A man in his early twenties with a common school education obtained in his native state, Jameson first sought to earn a livelihood as a miller. He built a mill, probably a combination grist and sawmill, soon after his arrival. A personable fellow, Jameson quickly earned the trust and respect of his fellow townspeople. In the summer of 1825 he was selected to a committee to plan a “grand barbecue and celebration of the 4th of July.” At this celebration, attended by some four hundred men and women, the young Jameson delivered his first address, performed well, and “was warmly congratulated by his friends on his first and successful effort before a promiscuous body.” Whether because this venture instilled in him the desire for a political career or because his mill proved economically unsatisfactory, Jameson began to read law in the same year under one of Fulton’s first attorneys, William Lucas. He completed his studies of the law the following year, was admitted to the Missouri bar, and immediately opened his own practice. With his practice, which was successful from the start, he managed to support himself, his wife Susan, and a growing family that would eventually include four children—one boy and three girls. By 1830 his practice was secure enough to allow Jameson to venture into politics, and he stood for and was elected to a seat in the Missouri General Assembly on the Democratic ticket. His election launched a successful political career, which in turn enhanced his reputation as one of Fulton’s leading attorneys.21

  Just as Robert Newsom had amassed a sizable estate in rural Callaway County by the mid-1850s, John Jameson had become one of Fulton’s more prosperous residents. By 1850 his success at the bar had provided him the means to acquire real property valued at $3,200, almost precisely the value of Newsom’s farm. And like Robert Newsom, Jameson had invested in human property. Unlike the farmer Newsom, however, Jameson had little need of an all-male labor force. Rather, as a professional, indeed, as a prominent public figure and family man residing in the town of Fulton, he required domestic servants to help attend to the running of a large household. Thus, the 1850 slave schedules show that Jameson owned four slaves, at least some of whom, if not all, would have been employed as domestics. The age and sex of the slaves suggest that Jameson probably owned two couples, a pair composed of a male age 48 and a female age 35, and a second pair containing a male age 22 and female age 16.22

  Jameson had also become one of Fulton and Callaway County’s most respected citizens. After his initial term in the General Assembly, Jameson was twice reelected, serving as speaker of the house from 1834 to 1836, and thus significantly increasing Fulton’s influence within the legislature. In 1839 he was elected to fill a seat in the House of Representatives left vacant by the death of Congressman Albert Harrison. He chose not to run for reelection in 1840. Whether his decision was based on personal reasons or internal party politics is not known, but it established a rather curious pattern in Jameson’s developing political career. His decision might also have been influenced by the fact that Congressional seats were contested on a general, statewide ticket, rather than by district. He successfully stood for reelection to the House in 1842 and served in the twenty-eighth Congress. In 1844 he once again declined a reelection bid, only to enter the congressional campaign in 1846 and reclai
m his old seat for a final term, returning to Fulton and his law practice for good in the spring of 1849.23

  Thus in 1855, Jameson, now 53, had a flourishing law practice, a pleasant home in Fulton, and what appeared to be the perfect family. Like Robert Newsom, he was not a wealthy man but enjoyed considerable financial security. No longer active in politics, he enjoyed additional time to devote to Susan, his wife; John H., his only son, age sixteen; and daughters Elizabeth, fourteen; Sarah, twelve; and Malinda, ten. Since his political retirement he had also developed a second professional interest, one which could only enhance his status in the community—the ministry. Jameson had become a divinity student, obtaining ordination as a minister in the Christian church. Like Robert Newsom, John Jameson seemed to be the ideal family man, a successful, respected citizen, and a pillar of the community.24 Of the two men, however, only one was what he seemed.

  Chapter Two

  THE CRIME

  CONTROVERSY over slavery was nothing new for Missouri. The very creation of the state launched a national debate about the institution, the country’s first serious effort to probe the moral implications of slavery for a free and increasingly democratic society. At precisely the time that Robert Newsom was beginning his struggle to create a new life for his family in the Missouri wilderness, the nation was determining whether, and under what conditions, Missouri could be admitted to the Union. Since the conclusion of the War of 1812, several economic and social factors had contributed to an influx of settlers from the east, swelling Missouri’s territorial population to the point that statehood seemed inevitable. However, Missouri’s formal request for statehood in 1819 was to meet with unexpected resistance in Congress. For the first time since ratification of the Constitution, members of Congress seriously debated forcing a territory to abandon slavery as the price for admission into the Union.