Celia, a Slave

by Melton A. McLaurin

  Outside Lawrence, a proslavery army assembled in two camps, answering Atchinson’s call issued December 1 at Platte City, Missouri, urging his fellow Missourians to march on Lawrence to “sustain the Law and put down the Rebellion and Insurrection.” Atchinson joined an encampment on Wakarusa Creek of approximately 750 armed men, perhaps more, for reporters favoring free state forces estimated their number at 1,500. Another 700 armed proslavery men were at Lecompton Camp, some three miles to the west. The proslavery forces also possessed at least three cannons, obtained by Clay County, Missouri, ruffians during a raid on the federal arsenal at Liberty. The army of Missourians and their Kansas allies, according to the correspondent of the proslavery Missouri Republican, “presents an appearance of daring, bravery, intelligence, high character, and determination which I venture to say was never before seen in the ranks of regulars or militia, in any country, in any age.”10

  Faced with well-armed, determined defenders behind heavily fortified positions, the proslavery forces delayed an attack upon Lawrence, but remained encamped outside the town. The delay allowed for communications between Governor Shannon and leaders of the Free Soil party in Lawrence, and on December 6 Shannon rode from Shawnee Mission to the Wakarusa encampment, where he found the Missourians determined to attack Lawrence, burn the Emigrant Aid Company hotel, and destroy the press of the town’s militantly free state paper. Skirmishes on December 7 resulting in casualties on both sides threatened to place events beyond Shannon’s control, but a fierce thunderstorm, with hail and high winds, helped cool the ardor of the border ruffians while Shannon and Colonel A. G. Boone of Westport, Missouri, negotiated with representatives of Lane and Robinson.

  By the morning of the ninth, the Treaty of Lawrence was agreed upon. The Free Soil men denied any organized resistance to the law and promised to support “proper authority” in the future. Shannon assured the citizens of Lawrence that he had not requested the aid of the border ruffians, and promised to see that the law was enforced without the help of outside forces in the future. The agreement was essentially a face-saving device for both sides, but by preventing violence it avoided the national crisis an attack upon Lawrence almost certainly would have triggered. Even Atchinson and Boone, aware of the political damage to the proslavery cause that might have resulted from an attack on Lawrence, urged the border ruffians to accept the treaty. Despite the grumblings of some hotheads, the proslavery forces, their provisions low and their supplies of whiskey exhausted, decided to accept their leaders’ advice and go home.11

  The Wakarusa War was not the only political crisis fueled by the slavery issue which confronted the people of Missouri and Callaway County in early December, as the recently reimprisoned Celia sat awaiting her newly determined execution date. In the Missouri legislature, which had reconvened in November, Democrats Atchinson and Benton and the Whig Alexander Doniphan had rejoined the senatorial race. At the height of the legislative battle over the contested seat, Atchinson was deeply involved in events in Kansas. On December 1 in Platte City he had delivered a blistering denunciation of the Kansas Free Soilers, calling upon the men of western Missouri to rush to the aid of Governor Shannon in suppressing Free Soilers’ threats of rebellion and insurrection. Indeed, the fact that Atchinson was in Kansas, attempting to prevent open warfare at Lawrence, a possibility his demagogic oratory had helped create, may have diminished his chances of retaining his Senate seat. Whatever the exact politics of the situation, once again, despite Atchinson’s efforts to use his spirited defense of slavery and its expansion into Kansas to retain his Senate seat, no man could obtain a majority. On December 15 the legislature adjourned, leaving the disputed seat vacant.12

  It was in this heated political atmosphere that the Missouri Supreme Court met in St. Louis for the fall term. The three justices of the court to whom Celia’s defense counsel appealed certainly were well apprised of and understood the significance of the slavery issue in their state. They would have been well informed about the bitter Senate race then occurring in Missouri’s legislative chambers and the impact of the slavery issue upon the political infighting. They would also have known of the events in Kansas, and of their relationship to the political and social turmoil experienced in recent months by the people of Missouri.

  Whether these events influenced the decision of the court’s members in the case of Celia can never be determined. All the record reveals is that the three justices, William Scott, John F. Ryland and Abiel Leonard, were fully aware of the facts of the case. They had copies of the trial record, which set forth the testimony of the witnesses and provided copies of all jury instructions requested and given. They also had the personal letter from Celia’s defense counsel, which specifically raised the moral issues involved in her case. The performance of Scott and Ryland in the Dred Scott case, however, did not bode well for the appellant. Both had ruled that Scott remained a slave despite his sojourn in free territory. Their decision reversed precedent set by earlier Missouri courts and indicated a decided shift to a proslavery stance by a majority of the court.13

  Given Jameson’s political experience and contacts, it seems likely that Celia’s defense counsel knew of Scott and Ryland’s increasingly proslavery inclinations. Perhaps her defense counsel addressed their personal appeal of December 6 to the recently elected justice Abiel Leonard rather than to his more experienced colleagues on the Court because they believed him the most favorably disposed toward their client. This interpretation is supported by Leonard’s political record, which would have been known by Jameson. A lifelong Whig, Leonard hoped that both the institution of slavery and the Union could be preserved. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, he had attempted to arrange a loose alliance between Unionist Whigs and Bentonite Democrats to counter the policies and ambitions of David Atchinson and other proslavery Democrats. In fact, Leonard’s efforts contributed substantially to Atchinson’s failure to recapture his Senate seat in 1855. If Celia’s counsel hoped that a more compassionate, more flexible Leonard could convince his less sympathetic senior fellows on the bench of the merits of their client’s case, of the need to consider carefully its essentially moral nature, they hoped in vain.14

  On December 14, one day before free state voters in Kansas overwhelmingly endorsed the Topeka constitution, the Missouri Supreme Court finally ruled on Celia’s appeal and request for the issuance of a stay of execution order. The court’s ruling was brief and to the point. After a paragraph summary of the nature of the appeal, the ruling announced: “Upon an examination of the record and proceedings of the Circuit Court of Callaway County in the above case, it is thought proper to refuse the prayer of the petitioner:— there being seen upon inspection of the record aforesaid no probable cause for such appeal; nor so much doubt as to render it expedient to take the judgement of the Supreme Court thereon. It is therefore ordered by the Court, that an order for the stay of the execution in this case be refused.” Whether this was the opinion of the full court, or that of a majority composed of Scott and Ryland, is unknown. Perhaps Leonard had argued for Celia, perhaps not. Whatever Leonard’s personal stance, it did not save Celia. The court agreed with the trial judge. The moral issues in the case of Celia, a Slave, were judged irrelevant. There was no doubt that she had killed Newsom; the guilty verdict was valid and the death sentence deserved. The court’s ruling was received and filed by George Bartey, clerk of the Callaway Circuit Court, on December 18, 1855, three days before Celia’s scheduled execution.15

  With the supreme court’s ruling, all appeals were exhausted. Jameson, Boulware, and Kouns lacked any legal means to prevent Celia’s execution. This time, no one in Fulton or Callaway County undertook heroic measures to keep Celia from the gallows. Defense counsel, having waged a prolonged and tenacious fight to save Celia, accepted the inevitable, as did those parties unknown who had engineered her “escape” from jail only a month earlier. Whatever Jameson’s private thoughts about the impending execution of the nineteen-year-old slave girl, there is no ev
idence that he, Kouns, or Boulware took further actions to halt Celia’s execution. The evidence clearly indicates that Jameson, Kouns, and Boulware saw Celia’s conviction and sentence as travesties of justice. Yet neither they nor others in the community who opposed Celia’s execution staged a public protest or took additional extralegal measures to save her. This time the sentence of the court would be imposed, the laws of the state of Missouri upheld, the ultimate moral dilemma posed by Celia’s case confronted.

  During the night of December 20, the eve of her newly designated date of execution, Celia was once again interrogated in her cell. Her interrogators are unknown but probably included officers of the court. Her final interrogation was recorded by a writer for the Fulton Telegraph, and once again the issue was whether she had help in the slaying of Robert Newsom. For the last time Celia denied that “anyone assisted her, or aided or abetted her in any way.” She once more related her account of Newsom’s death, claiming that she had first struck Newsom without intending to kill him. But, she continued, “as soon as I struck him the Devil got into me, and I struck him with the stick until he was dead, and then rolled him in the fire and burnt him up.” This confession on the eve of her execution is probably accurate. Even Celia’s insistence that the devil prompted her to strike the blows that killed Newsom seems an apt description of the rage she must have felt on that night. The reporter, however, does not mention Newsom’s sexual exploitation of Celia, nor the children that resulted from his abuse.

  On the following day, Celia was marched to the gallows. At 2:30 on a Friday afternoon, the trap was sprung and Celia fell to her death. The names of those who participated in or witnessed her death are not recorded, but given the time of execution, it is likely that many of Fulton and Callaway County’s citizens stood at the foot of the gallows. One of the witnesses was the unidentified Telegraph reporter, in all probability the man who edited the paper throughout the decade of the 1850s, John B. Williams. With unintentional irony, that witness precisely characterized Celia’s death: “Thus closed one of the most horrible tragedies ever enacted in our county.”16

  AFTER Celia’s death, the Callaway County Circuit Court processed the paper associated with her case, the documents required to see that the cost of administering justice was met. George Bartey, clerk of the court, was paid $14.80 for a variety of tasks, including copying the indictment, issuing subpoenas, swearing in the jury and witnesses, entering an appeal to the supreme court, and completing a record of the case for the supreme court. Sheriff William Snell received $104.50 for summoning witnesses, the expenses of boarding the prisoner, determined at forty cents per day, and for executing Celia’s death warrant. D. M. White, justice of the peace, received $2.00 for recording testimony, issuing a subpoena, and taking the oaths of three witnesses. D. S. Whaley was paid $12.00 for providing meals to the jurors, who each received $1.50 for their services. Witnesses at the trial, some of whom were not called to testify, obtained a total of $39.30 for expenses. Robert Prewitt, the prosecuting attorney, earned a fee of $20.00. Celia’s trial cost the State of Missouri a grand total of $210.85. On April 18, 1856, Judge William Hall and circuit court attorney Robert Prewitt examined the bill of cash in Celia’s case and ordered it “to be certified to the auditor of Public records for payment.”17 The trial record does not reveal the monetary compensation received by counsel for the defense.

  Where Celia’s remains were interred, much like the events of her life before her fatal confrontation with her master, was not recorded. Just as Celia’s final resting place is unknown, there are no records of what became of her children, also the children of Robert Newsom. Although they almost certainly became for a time the property of Newsom’s legal heirs, their half brothers and sisters, it is unlikely that they remained with the Newsom family, for their presence would have been a constant and bitter reminder of the events of the summer of 1855. There is, however, the possibility that the nine-year-old female slave Harry Newsom owned in 1860 was Celia’s daughter, and his half sister.18 John Jameson survived Celia by little more than a year. He died suddenly on January 24, 1857, and was buried in the family cemetery in Fulton. Robert Newsom was also interred in a family cemetery, beside his wife, on the farm that they had carved from the Missouri wilderness. His gravestone still stands in a field just off a Callaway County road, some nine miles south of Fulton.

  Chapter Eight

  CONCLUSIONS

  IN a recent essay, historian Darlene Clark Hine observes that “one of the most remarked upon but least analyzed themes in Black women’s history” is their “sexual vulnerability and powerlessness as victims of rape and domestic violence.” Hine suggests that this theme, so discernible in slave narratives, is accompanied by yet another—“these captive women’s efforts to resist the misappropriation and to maintain the integrity of their own sexuality.”1 Although the brief and tragic life of Celia, a slave, cannot provide a comprehensive theory with which to evaluate the manner and degree to which the sexual exploitation of female slaves influenced the routine operations of the institution of slavery, it can and does clearly define the issues that must be analyzed if such a theory is to be developed.

  Celia’s relationship with Robert Newsom provides a compelling, if hardly unique, example of the power of the white patriarch. Her experience suggests, as does the experience of so many other slave women, that Stanley Elkins’s contention that slaves were powerless to protect their most basic humanity from the predations of the master is more accurate than recent scholarship, with its emphasis on agency, cares to admit.2 In her recent study of plantation women, both slave and free, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, unlike Elkins, concludes that slave women resisted their masters “in all the ways available to them.” Yet the women she describes carried on essentially personal struggles against the practically unlimited power of the master. Slave women could not rely on a fellow slave for protection without placing his life in danger. Nor could they turn to the mistress of the household, who, Fox-Genovese contends, supported slavery. If they lived in a town, as did Harriet Jacobs (whose account of her defense of her virtue is perhaps the best known among slave narratives), they might have obtained support from free blacks or sympathetic whites. But, as Fox-Genovese observes, in 1860 more than half of America’s slaves, like Celia, lived on farms with fewer than twenty slaves. Under such conditions it was inevitable that “slave women’s resistance was likely to be individual rather than collective.” Celia’s challenge to her master’s power over her sexual integrity was personal, violent, extreme, and unacceptable to a slaveholding society. It was unacceptable because gender mattered in both the social conventions and in the laws that upheld slavery. To have empowered slave women in the domestic arena, to have recognized their right to control their sexuality, would have undercut the power of the master to a degree that would have threatened the very survival of the institution.3

  Celia’s experience also frames the issue of the relationship of slave women to white women in the antebellum South. According to most historians of slavery, considerations of race and class prevented any challenge to patriarchal power by women of both races. Rather, white women chose to support slavery, and to accept, or at least acquiesce to, the abuse of black women it produced. This denial of sisterhood occurred despite the fact that both white and black women were denied their sexual integrity. Married white women were the sexual property of their husbands, with no legal right to refuse their husbands’ sexual demands. While Virginia Waynescot and Mary Newsom were not in a marital relationship with Celia’s master, they were economically dependent upon their father, just as most farm and plantation wives were economically dependent upon their husbands. Whatever their personal views about slavery, or the abuse of slave women, white women were in no position, legally or economically, to challenge the power of the master effectively. Within such a society, cooperation between black and white women based upon gender-specific issues was a practical impossibility.

  The furor over Alice Walker’s The
Color Purple suggests that relationships between black men and women remains an emotionally explosive issue.4 The basic issues in such relationships are also addressed by Celia’s case. Perhaps the most fundamental issue is the extent to which slave men were able to protect the slave women to whom they were attached. Again, the experience of Celia and George, who had no support outside the farm on which they lived, reinforces the bleak assessment of Elkins, and of Fox-Genovese, rather than the more optimistic views of such scholars as Vernon Burton or Stanley Engerman and Robert Fogel.5 George was unable to prevent Newsom’s sexual abuse of Celia, yet he was also unable to deal with it emotionally. It was George’s male ego that placed Celia in the quandary that led to Newsom’s death and her arrest, conviction, and execution. Yet when faced with a choice between protecting Celia or protecting his own life, George unhesitatingly chose the latter. What the case of Celia documents is the powerlessness of a male slave to protect a loved one, a male slave’s smoldering resentment toward his loved one when she was forced into a sexual relationship with her master, and the male slave’s natural and understandable act of self-preservation brought about by his equally natural and understandable jealousy. If the conditions that produced the case of Celia were common on the small farms and plantations on which most slaves lived, then tension between black men and women was an inevitable product of slavery.