Celia, a Slave
Page 15
Celia’s case also raises fundamental issues about the role of law in a slave society. Antebellum southerners viewed their slaves as both chattels and persons, a paradox reflected in the legal systems of the slave states. Southern society insisted that the law uphold the master’s property rights, while recognizing that as human beings slaves possessed certain rights, including an inviolable right to life. Although historians such as Eugene Genovese have shown that through their responses to the law, slaves, too, helped to shape it, the fact remains that the inevitable conflicts between the recognized human rights of the slaves and the property rights of masters were, with rare exceptions, settled in favor of the masters. It is also true that while the slave codes of the southern states imposed some restrictions on slaveholders, the codes were designed primarily to restrain the behavior of slaves, not their masters.6
In his study of slave law, Mark Tushnet contends that one of its major purposes was “to allocate control over slaves to the sentiment of the master class.” It could not do so totally, however, for “complete allocation … would have removed the regulation of slavery from the sphere of law.” Faced with this dilemma, Tushnet suggests, southerners chose to regulate “market transactions” with slave law, leaving “other relationships to be regulated by sentiment.” Celia’s case demonstrates how difficult an undertaking this was, as long as southerners continued to insist that slaves possessed legal rights. The female slave’s lack of a legal protection against rape illustrates the society’s preference for sentiment rather than law, but only for women. The sexual activities of black men were not left to sentiment, but rigidly controlled by law, since sexual relations between black men and white women challenged the power of the white man. The law was also used to create the illusion that slaves possessed certain human rights, and thus to assuage the conscience of white society. Procedurally, Celia’s trial was correct, yet the substantive, gender-related issues of the case could not be addressed, despite the best efforts of her defense counsel. Thus Celia’s trial demonstrates that gender, as well as what Tushnet calls “market transactions,” was a significant factor in shaping slave law. Ulrich B. Phillips noted this over seventy years ago when he observed that in the matter of the rape of slave women, “such offences appear to have been left largely to the private cognizance of the masters.”7
Celia’s case also underscores an essential problem faced by those antebellum southerners who hoped to use the law to reform slavery. Such reformers sought to counter abolitionist attacks and make slavery more acceptable to the public of the nonslaveholding states, thus enhancing the institution’s chances for survival. Because of the racism that permeated American culture, southern reformers could undertake such efforts with some hope of success. Also, antebellum reformers, especially those with religious backgrounds, genuinely hoped to alleviate slavery’s most odious features for humanitarian reasons. Among the reforms most often proposed was recognition of the slave family. Proposals to forbid the sale of slave children and to place slave marriages under the protection of the law were among the most popular. Yet, as Celia’s case demonstrates, the nature of slavery in the South would have made the effectiveness of such reforms doubtful, even had such legislation been enacted. So long as slaves remained unable to testify against whites, the owner’s power remained virtually unchecked. This was especially the case on farms and plantations, where most southern slaves resided. The physical isolation of the region’s farms and plantations made it unlikely that whites other than members of the slaveholding family would witness the abuse of slaves. Yet granting slaves the right to testify against their masters, as opposed to other whites, would have unleashed an avalanche of charges by slaves against their owners, thus compromising the ability of the masters to control their slave labor force. While the sale of slave children could have been halted by legislation, a law recognizing the validity of slave marriages, including the right of female slaves to resist the advances of masters, would have been difficult to enforce without allowing slaves to testify against whites. Such a law, however, might have reduced the incidence of sexual exploitation of slave women by reinforcing the notion that such behavior was socially unacceptable. In any event, such reform legislation was never enacted in the antebellum South, primarily because whites refused to see the states impose any but minor restrictions upon their conduct toward their human property.8
Finally, the case of Celia directly addresses one of the central issues in the abolitionist attack upon slavery. Slavery, many of its critics contended, was morally abhorrent, and maintained by slaveholders who, because of their personal knowledge of the institution, understood perfectly well its evils. Slavery was inherently evil, its critics argued, because, as a recent historian notes, it “permitted one group of people unrestrained personal domination over another group of people.” Therefore, “the extreme degree of domination required by the system, and not percentages of masters who were cruel or benevolent in their operation of the system, was and is the essential crime.”9 What Celia’s case demonstrates is that antebellum southerners, slaveholders and nonslaveholders alike, at some point in their lives were very likely to be confronted with a personal moral dilemma that resulted because slavery granted one group of people such power over another group. These intensely personal decisions, however, as in Celia’s case, were made within the context of the larger society and against a backdrop of the continuing debate over slavery. In Missouri, because of the Kansas situation, that debate escalated into political violence at precisely the time at which white Missourians were deciding Celia’s fate. The South’s retention and spirited defense of the institution suggests that most whites found ways of reconciling slavery, including its denial of the essential humanity of those enslaved, with their personal moral values, as happened in Celia’s case.10 What is unknown, and perhaps ultimately unknowable, is the psychic energy required, both individually and collectively, to facilitate that reconciliation. The events in the last year of Celia’s life, although extraordinarily dramatic, demonstrate the nature of the moral choices individuals faced and indicate that some individuals had great difficulty making them. Those events also suggest that the psychic cost to whites of the defense of slavery, though paid, was high, just as they suggest that the psychic cost to blacks, though paid, was incalculable and enduring.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Charles G. Sellers, Jr., “The Travail of Slavery,” in The Southerner as American, ed. Charles G. Sellers, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 40-71, especially 69.
2. For an excellent discussion of the moral dilemmas posed by slavery to both nineteenth-century abolitionists and modern historians, see Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton, 1989), 388-411.
CHAPTER ONE: BEGINNINGS
1. 1850Federal Census for Callaway County, Missouri, Abstract, compiled by Elizabeth P. Ellsberry, Missouri Department of Archives and History, Jefferson City, Mo., 393 (hereinafter cited as 1850 Callaway Census).
2. Stanley Vestal, The Missouri (New York & Toronto: Farrar & Rinehart, 1945), 11-58.
3. History of Callaway County, Missouri, 1984 (Fulton, Mo.: Kingdom of Callaway Historical Society, 1983), 32-33 (hereinafter cited as Callaway, 1984); History of Callaway County, Missouri, Illustrated (St. Louis: National Historical Company, 1884), 94 (hereinafter cited as Callaway, 1884).
4. Callaway, 1884, 100-112, 159-60.
5. Ibid., 160, 413.
6. Compendium of the Enumeration of the Inhabitants and Statistics of the United States as Obtained from Returns of the Sixth Census (1841; rpt., New York: Arno Press, 1976), 311-13.
7. Ibid.; Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, An Appendix (1853; rpt., New York: Arno Press, 1976), 675-82 (hereinafter cited as Appendix, 1850 Census).
8. Phillip V. Scarpino, “Slavery in Callaway County, Missouri, 1845-1855,” Part 1, Missouri Historical Review 71 (October 1976): 27.
9. Ibi
d., 29.
10. Callaway, 1884, 187-90.
11. Agricultural Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Missouri. A to C (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1963, microfilm), p. 343, roll 1 (hereinafter cited as Agricultural Census, 1850).
12. Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Missouri Slave Schedules, Adair County through Franklin County (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1963, microfilm), p. 230, roll 422 (hereinafter cited as 1850 Slave Census).
13. 1850 Callaway Census, 393; 1876 Atlas of Missouri; Marriage Records of Callaway County, Missouri, Fulton Public Library, Fulton, Mo..
14. 1850 Callaway Census, 393; Hugh P. Williamson, “Document: The State of Missouri Against Celia, A Slave,” Midwest Journal 8 (Spring/Fall 1956): 409.
15. 1850 Callaway Census, 393; Testimony of James Coffee Waynescot in “State of Missouri Versus Celia, a Slave,” Callaway County Court, October term, 1855, Callaway County courthouse, Fulton, Mo., file 4496 (hereinafter cited as Celia File 4496).
16. Testimony of Jefferson Jones, Celia File 4496.
17. Appendix, 1850Census, 675-82; Scarpino, “Slavery in Callaway County,” 26-29.
18. Callaway, 1884, 189, 190-94.
19. Ovid Bell, A Short History of Callaway County (N.p. 1933), 22-27.
20. Missouri Republican (St. Louis), August 15, 1855.
21. Callaway, 1884, 278-79, 437-38; Bell, A Short History of Callaway County, 19-20.
22. 1850 Slave Census, 263; Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850, Missouri. Buchanan, Butler, Caldwell and Callaway Counties (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1963, microfilm), p. 249, roll 393 (hereinafter cited as 1850 Census Population Schedules).
23. Callaway, 1884, 278, 417-19; Bell, A Short History of Callaway County, 19-20.
24. 1850Census Population Schedules, 249; Callaway, 1884, 279; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774-1989, Bicentennial Edition (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1989), 1255.
CHAPTER TWO: THE CRIME
1. Glover Moore, The Missouri Controversy, 1819-1821 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1953), 339; also see Charles S. Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 1810-1848 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948), 131. Moore’s work remains the best survey of the Missouri crisis.
2. Moore, The Missouri Controversy, 258-73; Benjamin G. Merkel, “The Abolition Aspects of Missouri’s Anti-Slavery Controversy, 1819-1865,” Missouri Historical Review 44 (1950): 232-45.
3. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The South and Three Sectional Crises (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 9-23.
4. Harrison A. Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 1804–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1914), 13-17; Phillip V. Scarpino, “Slavery in Callaway County, Missouri.”
5. 1850Slave Census, 230.
6. Appendix, 1850 Census, 655.
7. Merkel, “Missouri’s Anti-Slavery Controversy,” 232-45; Hamilton Holman, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1964), 108-19; Avery O. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848–1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953), 177.
8. Testimony of Jefferson Jones, Celia File 4496; Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14 (Summer 1989): 912; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 325-26; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985), 26-46. Catherine Clinton’s essay, “Caught in the Web of the Big House: Women and Slavery,” in The Web of Southern Relations: Women, Family and Education, Walter J. Fraser, Jr., R. Frank Saunders, Jr., and Jon L. Wakelyn, eds. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 19-34, provides an excellent brief summary of the manner in which historians have dealt with the sexual exploitation of female slaves. Also see Angela Davis, “Introduction,” Black Scholar 3 (December 1971): 3-15.
9. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 180-81; Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 135-39; Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 52-53; John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-bellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 77-103.
10. See Ann W. Burgess and Lynda L. Holmstrom, Rape, Crisis and Recovery (Bowie, Md.: Robert J. Brady, 1979), 35-65; and Thomas W. McCahill, Linda C. Meyer, and Arthur M. Fischman, The Aftermath of Rape (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1979), 23-79.
11. Two of the more recent works on the subject are Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress (New York: Pantheon, 1982); and White, Ar’n’t I a Woman, especially 27-46. Also see Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 24-28; Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 325-26. Some black male slaves also evidently believed black females to “have a good deal of sexual passion,” as indicated by the 1863 testimony of Robert Smalls to the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, in John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 374-77.
12. Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 185-89. For additional information on Hammond’s sexual exploitation of his slaves, see Carol Bleser, Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 17-21, 212-13.
13. Escott, Slavery Remembered, 50-54; Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York: Vintage, 1977), 267-303; Blassingame, The Slave Community, 87-89.
14. Jones, Labor of Love, 350-51; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman, 152-53.
15. Letter of Harvey Newsom dated July 29, 1855, in Missouri Republican, August 2, 1855; testimony of William Powell and Virginia Waynescot, Celia File 4496.
16. Testimony of Jefferson Jones and William Powell, Celia File 4496; see also Clinton, The Plantation Mistress, chapter 11.
17. Blassingame, The Slave Community, 88-89; Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 326-27.
18. Testimony of Jefferson Jones, Celia File 4496.
19. For discussions of female slave resistance, see Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 290-333; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman, 62-90.
20. Testimony of William Powell, Celia File 4496.
21. See Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, especially chaps. 5 and 7.
22. Testimony of William Powell and Virginia Waynescot, Celia File 4496; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman, 27-46; Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 242-89.
23. Testimony of Jefferson Jones, Celia File 4496. The complexity of a rapist’s view of his victim is suggested by several studies. For example, in A. Nicholas Groth’s Men Who Rape: The Psychology of the Offender (New York: Plenum Press, 1979), the author observes that a certain type of rapist, classified as a “power rapist,” denies the forcible nature of his sexual encounter and “needs to feel that his victim needed and wanted and enjoyed it” (25-31). Another study of rapists finds that “protestations of love [for the victim] are quite common”; Lorenne M. G. Clark and Debra J. Lewis, Rape: The Price of Coercive Sexuality (Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1977), 100-106.
24. Testimony of Jefferson Jones, Celia File 4496.
25. Testimony of Virginia and Coffee Waynescot, Celia File 4496.
26. Testimony of William Powell, Jefferson Jones, and Thomas Shoatman, Celia File 4496.
27. Ibid.
28. Testimony of Coffee Waynescot, Celia File 4496.
CHAPTER THREE: INQUISITION
1. Testimony of Virginia Waynesc
ot, Harry Newsom, and William Powell, Celia File 4496; Callaway, 1884, 697-98.
2. Agricultural Census, 1850, 345; 1850 Slave Census, 230.
3. Inquest and trial testimony of William Powell, Celia File 4496.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Testimony of William Powell, Harry Newsom, and Virginia Waynescot, Celia File 4496.
8. Testimony of Virginia Waynescot, Celia File 4496.
9. Callaway, 1884, 159; Agricultural Census, 1850, 343; 1850 Census Population Schedules, 197; Celia File 4496; Scarpino, “Slavery in Callaway County,” part 1, 25.
10. Celia File 4496.
11. 1850 Slave Census, 236; 1850 Census Population Schedules, 202, 203, 212, 232, 239.
12. Inquest testimony of William Powell, Coffee Waynescot, and Celia, Celia File 4496; affidavits and summons, Celia File 4496.
13. Ibid.; inquest transcript, Celia File 4496.
14. Whyte and Howe to county court, June 25, 1855, Celia File 4496; various inquest documents, Celia File 4496.
15. Boonville Weekly Observer, July 7, 1855; Missouri Republican, June 28, 1855. While issues of the Fulton Telegraph for this period are not extant, other newspaper editors on occasion clipped and ran items from its pages.
16. Testimony of Jefferson Jones, Celia File 4496.
17. The most thorough account of the impact of the Haitian revolt upon the psyche of the white South is contained in Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), especially 114-39; Scarpino, “Slavery in Callaway County,” part 2, 273. For a general overview of slave rebellions, Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), despite its faults, remains the place to start.