Celia, a Slave Page 7
Lingering concerns within the community about the manner in which Newsom met his death finally led some to seek more definitive answers to questions suggested by Celia’s confession. Several Callaway citizens eventually prevailed upon William T. Snell, the county sheriff, to allow Celia to be questioned further about possible accomplices. Snell, elected in 1854, had served less than a year in office and undoubtedly wished to do everything possible to enhance his chances of reelection the following year.20 He agreed that Celia could be examined by two individuals, Thomas Shoatman and Jefferson Jones, “to ascertain whether she had any accomplices in the crime.”21
Jones was by far the more significant of Celia’s new inquisitors. The 1850 census records portray Thomas Shoatman as a man of few means. Then thirty-nine years old, Shoatman, a wagoner, owned neither real property nor slaves. He had moved from Virginia with wife and child sometime after 1836. By 1850, he had fathered six children, ranging in age from two to fourteen. Jones, on the other hand, was an up and coming young lawyer. By marriage the nephew of John Jameson, Jones had moved to Callaway County from Kentucky with his father in 1840. Three years later he began to practice law in Fulton and soon became one of the town’s leading attorneys. Active in politics, he stumped for Jameson in the 1844 congressional campaign, an act of family loyalty since Jones was a Whig. In 1848 he served as a Whig elector from Missouri and was offered and declined the Whig nomination for a legislative seat in 1852. In 1855 he was a man of some wealth, and had two children, a son eight and a daughter six. It is also highly probable that in 1855 Jones owned several slaves, including a female slave of approximately Celia’s age, since in 1850 he held three slaves, one a female twenty-two years of age, and in 1860 he held ten slaves, including females age twenty-six and twenty-four.22Thus Jones, like Celia’s earlier inquisitors, would have had a keen personal interest in the responses he received.
Like others who had questioned Celia, Jones used a rather direct approach. He first asked Celia “whether she thought she would be hung for what she had done.” Upon receiving a positive reply, Jones “then told her she should tell the whole truth.” From Jones’s testimony it appears that Celia fully complied with his request, and that once she began her story, she required no prompting by additional questions. She gave a detailed account of her original confrontation with Newsom, his insistence upon continued sexual favors, her striking and killing her master, and the manner in which she disposed of the body. At no point, however, did Celia implicate George or any other slave in the crime. Not satisfied with her response, Jones resumed his questioning, specifically inquiring about the possibility that others were involved in Newsom’s death. He asked her “whether she had told anyone that she intended to kill the old man.” Celia replied that she never had.
Disappointed once again with Celia’s reply, Jones adopted a new tactic. He informed Celia “that George had run off.” By delivering this piece of information, Jones clearly sought to break Celia’s spirit, to impress upon her that, whatever her relationship with George had been in the past, she was now abandoned by him and totally alone. Having informed Celia of George’s escape, Jones then told her “that she might as well tell if he had anything to do with killing the old man.” Despite Jones’s news, which must have come as a psychological blow even though Celia knew George had previously implicated her in the murder, once again Celia denied that George had had any involvement in Newsom’s death. Jones continued to press the issue. He asked Celia “if George had advised her to kill the old man.” For the third time Celia denied that George had in any way influenced her actions. Still not satisfied, Jones suggested that Celia could not possibly have killed Newsom in the manner she described. Instead, he contended, what actually occurred was that George had “struck the old man from behind” and killed him. To this suggestion Celia’s response was even more emphatic. George, she replied, had not struck the old man, knew nothing of Newsom’s death, and was not at her cabin at any time of the night on which Newsom was killed.23 The most logical conclusion to be drawn from the evidence is that Celia told Jones the truth, despite the circumstantial evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, if Celia’s categorical denial of George’s involvement was untrue, it was a remarkable expression of her devotion to him.
Whether Celia’s fourth, and emphatic, denial convinced Jefferson Jones that neither George nor anyone else had helped her kill Newsom cannot be ascertained from the evidence. What is clear is that Jones stopped his questioning at this point, probably convinced either that Celia was telling the truth or that it was unlikely that she would implicate George or anyone else under any circumstances. The “several citizens” who had insisted upon his “convening” with Celia would simply have to be content with the results of his interrogation. The lack of additional stories from Fulton and Callaway County about Celia and the Newsom murder in the papers of nearby Boonville and Jefferson City, or in the Columbia and St. Louis press, suggests that those who had prompted Jones’s interrogation were satisfied with the results. Since copies of the Fulton Telegraph for 1855 are no longer extant, the degree to which members of the community continued to express concern about Newsom’s death also cannot be documented.
The rather curious response of Harry Newsom to press reports of his father’s murder, on the other hand, is a matter of record. The account of his father’s death carried by the Missouri Republican of St. Louis, which inaccurately reported that the crime had been committed in the kitchen of the Newsom home, greatly disturbed Harry Newsom. The reporter had probably assumed that the kitchen had been the scene of the crime because the body had been destroyed in a fireplace. This lack of accuracy prompted an angry letter to the Republican from Harry. He carefully explained that the murder had occurred in Celia’s cabin, “some fifty yards from the house,” not in the kitchen of the family home. He expressed the hope that the Republican would correct this error, “injustice to the family.” He accepted as correct, however, the Republicans assertion that Robert Newsom had been murdered “without any sufficient cause.”24 Harry Newsom’s reasons for failing to correct the Republicans inaccurate statement about Celia’s motive are readily apparent. After all, he was unlikely to wish the general public to know that his father routinely sexually exploited his young female slave. His insistence that the erroneous identification of the crime scene be corrected is also understandable, although it posed some problems. What Harry seems to have wished to accomplish was to make clear that no other family members were involved in the incident, hence his appeal for “justice to the family.” Yet by calling attention to the fact that his father was killed not in his home but in Celia’s cabin, he also raised the issue of why Robert Newsom was in a slave cabin on the night of his murder, an issue that Harry chose to ignore. Whatever his reasons, Harry Newsom’s response to the Republican, with its emphasis upon facts and its total disregard for motive, anticipated the approach the prosecuting attorney would adopt during Celia’s trial.
Chapter Four
BACKDROP
INDICTED for Newsom’s murder on June 25, Celia would spend the remainder of the summer in the Callaway County jail awaiting her October trial. As she waited through the summer heat, the citizens of Callaway and Missouri who would conduct her trial and determine her fate were being drawn into yet another emotionally charged debate over slavery and its future in the neighboring Kansas Territory. As in 1820 and 1850, the debate raged across the nation, its volume and intensity reaching levels that frightened many who had previously paid scant attention to the morality of slavery. In Missouri the debate acquired an even more strident, threatening tone, and eventually plunged the state into violence that threatened its citizens with civil war. Slavery captured the interest of the state’s press, as papers in St. Louis, Columbia, Jefferson City, and other communities devoted column after column to the escalating clash of opinions about slavery within state and nation. As the year progressed, news accounts and editorials alike presented little hope that the debate would remain peace
ful in either Missouri or the country. The pages of the Fulton Telegraph reflected this increasing concern over the issue of slavery, indicating that the citizens of Fulton and Callaway County were fully aware of the mounting seriousness of the controversy. Coverage of the slavery issue in the Telegraph and other local Missouri papers indicates that the white population of Callaway County, including those individuals who would eventually compose the jury impaneled for Celia’s October trial, were themselves caught up in the emotional fervor of the slavery debates.1
Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois had insured that the people of Callaway County would be more than ordinarily concerned about slavery in the summer in which Celia was tried for her life. He had not intended to plunge the nation into a wrenching examination of the morality of slavery, or to throw the people of Missouri into a dither about the nature of the institution and its future prospects. Through the Kansas-Nebraska Act of the previous year, he sought only to organize additional territories that lay west of Missouri in the old Louisiana Purchase so that the nation could proceed with the business of constructing a transcontinental railroad, preferably one with its eastern terminus in Chicago. To enhance its chance of adoption, Douglas championed a bill that repealed the old Missouri Compromise and allowed the possibility of the expansion of slavery into the new federal territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which the proposed legislation would create. Douglas also proposed this legislation in part to bolster his chances of capturing the Democratic presidental nomination, which would have required strong support from the South. Like other northern Democrats who did not view slavery as an essentially moral issue, Douglas woefully underestimated the opposition to the bill among average northern citizens, most of whom had reached the conclusion that slavery was neither morally acceptable nor in their economic interest. While most were willing to allow their white southern brethren to continue the practice, they were not prepared to see the institution spread into territories from which it had been barred by an agreement accepted by southerners for some three decades.
Northern anger over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the role of Democrats in securing its passage launched the Republican party in the congressional elections of 1854. To many northerners, abolitionists and nonabolitionists alike, the bill’s enactment represented a challenge from the slave-holding South, one to which they were determined to respond. On the Senate floor William Seward expressed the thoughts of millions of his fellow citizens when he accepted the perceived challenge from the South “in behalf of the cause of freedom.” The citizenry of the free states, he promised, stood ready to “engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in the right.”2
Seward’s words were no idle threat. Even before the Kansas-Nebraska bill won Congressional approval, Eli Thayer and others had organized the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company. Capitalized at $5 million, the company, which later became the New England Emigrant Aid Company, sought “to aid and protect emigrants from New England or from the Old World in settling in the West.” Thayer and other company leaders sought to insure that Kansas be peopled by free soilers, emigrants dedicated to the family farm and the exclusion of slavery. The concept was not limited to New England, and other emigrant aid associations quickly sprang up in New York and Ohio. Thayer and his associates lost no time implementing their settlement plans, although their fundraising efforts fell far short of expectations. Settlers financed by the New England Emigrant Aid Company began to arrive in Kansas as early as August 1854, less than three months after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.3
Predictably, southerners were outraged by the efforts of the Emigrant Aid Company to see Kansas settled by Free-Soilers. As another slave state, Kansas would continue the balance of slave and free state representation in the Senate so vital to the South’s ability to protect its peculiar institution. Sentiments against the “diabolical schemes” and “fanatical army” of the New England Emigrant Aid Company ran high in Missouri, encouraged by the demagogic oratory of David R. Atchinson. Locked in a struggle for control of the state’s Democratic party with congressman and former senator Thomas Hart Benton, who personally opposed any further expansion of slavery into the territories, Atchinson saw the Kansas issue as an opportunity to consolidate Missouri’s proslavery Democrats and retain his Senate seat, which Benton sought to recapture.
A Kentucky native and graduate of Transylvania University, in 1830 the flamboyant Atchinson arrived in Liberty, Missouri, soon after being admitted to the bar. In 1840 he moved to Platte City in Platte County, where he became the ardent champion of the proslavery forces in western Missouri. As early as the summer of 1854 Atchinson had written Jefferson Davis that within six months there would be “the Devil to pay in Kansas and in this State. We are organizing to meet [New England’s] organization. We will be compelled to shoot, burn and hang, but the thing will soon be over.” True to his word, Atchinson, aided by such prominent Missouri Democrats as Benjamin F. Stringfellow, began to convert rhetoric into action. Stringfellow, also a lawyer, migrated to Missouri in 1838, and soon became active in politics as an anti-Benton Democrat. Moving to Weston in Platte County in 1853, he surpassed even Atchinson in the rashness of his verbal assaults upon the abolitionist enemy. Throughout 1854, Atchinson and Stringfellow labored to create an organized resistance to the perceived abolitionist threat in both Kansas and Missouri, forming “self protection” socities throughout southern and western Missouri. Given such colorful names as the “Blue Lodges” and “Sons of the South,” these organizations were composed of members eager to follow Atchinson’s call to action. Meanwhile, Benton, whose support was strongest in the St. Louis region, sought to counter Atchinson’s emotional appeals.4
Throughout 1855, Atchinson continued his crusade to make Kansas a slave state and to retain control of Missouri’s Democratic party in the process. The year began with a donnybrook in the state legislature over Atchinson’s expiring Senate seat. The candidacy of a proslavery Whig, Alexander W. Doniphan, denied a majority to either Benton or Atchinson. After forty-one ballots and weeks of furious political infighting, the deadlock persisted. The legislature decided to leave the seat vacant, and after passing motions to meet again in November, adjourned on March 5.5
Determined to retain his Senate seat, Atchinson immediately set about to enhance his reputation as Missouri’s leading proslavery advocate by using his supporters to control territorial elections in Kansas. Border ruffians from Missouri had streamed into Kansas in November of 1854 for the election of the territory’s congressional delegate. Their votes had elected John W. Whitfield, Indian agent and Atchinson’s old friend. Atchinson’s supporters once again crossed over into Kansas for the territory’s legislative elections, held March 30, 1855. The Missourians swept proslavery legislators into power in Kansas, bullying at the polls suspected Free-Soil voters with curses, threats of violence and occasional rifle fire. Atchinson boasted: “We had at least seven thousand men in the territory … and one third of them will remain there…. The pro-slavery ticket prevailed everywhere…. Now let the Southern men come on with their slaves…. We are playing for a mighty stake; if we win we carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean.”6
Within weeks after the Kansas legislative elections, and at approximately the same time that Celia conceived her third child, Atchinson’s followers brought their campaign of violence to bear against their opponents in Missouri. On April 14, Blue Lodge members rode into Parkville, located in Platte County across the Missouri River from Leavenworth. They came to silence the Parkville Industrial Luminary, a paper highly critical of the border ruffians’ vigilante tactics. A body of armed men entered the paper’s office, seized the press and type and carried them into the street. Members of the mob read resolutions declaring the paper’s editors, George S. Park and W. J. Patterson, traitors to the South and proclaiming that if found, they would be tarred, feathered, and shot. Mob leaders issued a warning that Park and Patterson were to leave
town within three weeks. Should the editors flee to Kansas, the mob pledged “our honor as men to follow and hang them wherever we can take them.” Its warning delivered, the mob marched to the Missouri River under a “Boston Aid” banner and threw the press into its waters. Warned of the impending attack by a friend, Park watched from hiding the destruction of his press. Not so fortunate, Patterson was discovered by the mob, which sent up a cry to drown him in the river. Only the fact of his Canadian citizenship persuaded the mob that his life should be spared. Its destruction of the press complete, the mob spared Patterson’s life and released the editor with a stern warning to abandon his abolitionist views, depart town, or face a decidedly bleak future. The Parkville raid created something of a furor when reports of it reached the northern press, and the ruffians who had participated in it were roundly denounced by Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune and other editors.7
During the exact period in which Celia contemplated what to do about her pregnancy and George’s resulting ultimatum, from early April until the end of June, the public furor in Missouri over slavery and Kansas seemed to subside. Yet tensions remained just beneath the surface, and the proslavery Missouri press periodically issued warnings of the abolitionist threat in Kansas. On June 21, just two days before Celia killed Robert Newsom, for example, Boonville’s Dollar Missouri Journal reported “an informant’s” view that abolitionists in Lawrence planned to organize, steal slaves in Kansas, then invade and colonize Missouri with a black army. Meanwhile, the continued plotting of Atchinson and others to insure both his return to the Senate and the spread of slavery into Kansas embroiled Missourians in yet another round of furious debates over slavery, one which lasted throughout the summer months during which Celia sat in a Fulton jail waiting to be tried for her life.8