18. Of the many accounts of the Turner rebellion, perhaps the best, and certainly the most readable, is Stephen B. Gates’s The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).
19. Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 341-42; Liberator, August 24, 1855; Missouri Republican, June 27, July 17, 1855; Dollar Missouri Journal, June 21, 1855.
20. Callaway, 1884, 420-21.
21. Testimony of Jefferson Jones and Thomas Shoatman, Celia File 4496.
22. William S. Bryan and Robert Rose, A History of Pioneer Families of Missouri (St. Louis: Bryan, Brand, 1876), 426-28; 1850 Slave Census, 263; Population Schedules of the Eighth Census of the United States, 1860. Missouri Slave Schedules, Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1967, microfilm), p. 111, roll 653 (hereinafter cited as 1860 Slave Census).
23. Testimony of Jefferson Jones, Celia File 4496.
24. Missouri Republican, August 2, 1855.
CHAPTER FOUR: BACKDROP
1. For an example of the Telegraph’s coverage of these events see the Dollar Missouri Journal, July 5, 1855.
2. Samuel A. Johnson, The Battle Cry of Freedom: The New England Emigrant Aid Company in the Kansas Crusade (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1954), 7.
3. Ibid., 16-17, 65-71, 74-75.
4. Duane G. Meyer, The Heritage of Missouri, 3d ed. (St. Louis: River City, 1982), 336-39; Elmer L. Craik, Southern Interest in Territorial Kansas, 1854-1858 (N.p., N.d. [rpt. from the Collections of the Kansas Historical Society, xv]), 345-47, 352-61; Lester B. Baltimore, “Benjamin F. Stringfellow: The Fight for Slavery on the Missouri Border,” Missouri Historical Review 62 (October 1967): 14-29; Theodore C. Atchinson, “David R. Atchinson,” Missouri Historical Review 24 (July 1930): 502-15.
5. Johnson, The Battle Cry of Freedom, 98; Perry McCandless, A History of Missouri, Vol. 2, 1820-1860 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1972), 264-68.
6. Meyer, The Heritage of Missouri, 337; Richard O. Boyer, The Legend of John Brown: A Biography and History (New York: Knopf, 1973), 496-97.
7. Roy V. Mayers, “The Raid on the Parkville Industrial Luminary,” Missouri Historical Review 30 (October 1935): 39-46; David D. March, The History of Missouri, Vol. 2 (New York: Lewis, 1967), 843-45.
8. Dollar Missouri Journal, June 21, 1855.
9. Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 199-202; Missouri Republican, June 27, July 2, 5, 9, 1855; Daily Democrat, July 7, 9, 1855. In general, St. Louis papers opposed the convention, as did the Intelligencer and the Democrat. So, too, did the Columbia Statesman. The Missouri Republican, on the other hand, was supportive.
10. David E. Harrell, Jr., “James Shannon: Preacher, Educator and Fire Eater,” Missouri Historical Review 63 (January 1969): 135-70.
11. Dollar Missouri Journal, July 12, 19, 1855.
12. Ibid., July 27, 1855.
13. Floyd C. Shoemaker, “Missouri’s Fight for Kansas, 1854-1855,” Missouri Historical Review 48 (July 1954): 335-38; Daily Democrat, July 19, 1855; Missouri Republican, July 16, 17, 1855.
14. Harrell, “James Shannon,” 161-62.
15. Missouri Republican, July 17, 1855.
16. Ibid., July 16, 17, 19, 1855; Dollar Missouri Journal, July 19, 1855; Daily Democrat, July 19, 1855.
17. Harrell, “James Shannon,” 161-62; Walter B. Davis and Daniel S. Durrie, An Illustrated History of Missouri (St. Louis: A. J. Hall, 1876), 142-43.
18. Dollar Missouri Journal, August 2, 1855.
19. New YorK National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 28, 1855; Missouri Republican, October 9, 1855; Dollar Missouri Journal, August 23, 1855; Liberator, July 6, 1855.
20. Johnson, The Battle Cry of Freedom, 102-3; James A. Rawley, Race and Politics: “Bleeding Kansas” and the Coming of the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), 86-94; Lynda L. Crist, ed., The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Vol. 5, 1853-1855 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 446.
21. Johnson, The Battle Cry of Freedom, 106; Boyer, The Legend of John Brown, 504.
22. Rawley, Race and Politics, 94-95; Johnson, The Battle Cry of Freedom, 107-8; D. W. Wilder, The Annals of Kansas, 1541-1885 (1886; rpt., New York: Arno Press, 1975), 75-77.
23. Wilder, Annals of Kansas, 78; Boyer, The Legend of John Brown, 557-71; Johnson, The Battle Cry of Freedom, 107-8; Rawley, Race and Politics, 94-96.
24. Missouri Republican, July 21, 1855.
CHAPTER FIVE: THE TRIAL
1. Biographical Directory of Congress, 1116.
2. Liberator, October 19, 1855.
3. Bell, A Short History of Callaway County, 19-20; Callaway, 1884, 278.
4. Congressional Globe, 30th Cong., 1st sess., 1848, vol. 19, pp. 189-90, 1037; Callaway, 1884, 278-79; Bell, A Short History of Callaway County, 19-20.
5. Callaway, 1884, 279.
6. Ibid.
7. 1850 Census Population Schedules, 539; Callaway, 1884, 188-90; 1850 Slave Census, 184; Robert Walker, “Nathan Chapman Kouns,” Missouri Historical Review 24 (July 1930), 516-20.
8. 1850 Census Population Schedules, 438; Agricultural Census, 1850, 359; Callaway, 1884, 172.
9. Callaway, 1884, 627.
10. Ibid., 279; Biographical Directory of Congress, 1255.
11. David E. Harrell, Jr., A Social History of the Disciples of Christ, vol. I, Quest for a Christian America: The Disciples of Christ and American Society to 1866 (Nashville: Disciples of Christ Historical Society, 1966), 91-138, 106.
12. Bryan and Rose, Pioneer Families of Missouri, 184; Callaway, 1884, 113; Trial record, Celia File 4496.
13. Agricultural Census, 1850, 361; Callaway, 1884, 255.
14. Williamson, “Document,” 415.
15. Trial testimony, Celia File 4496; 1850 Slave Census, 106, 232, 241, 250; 1850 Census Population Schedules, 200, 211, 216-17, 222-27, 283, 299
16. Trial testimony, Celia File 4496.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.; “Jury Instructions” (Document O), Celia File 4496.
20. Callaway, 1884, 404; 1850 Slave Census, 93.
21. Trial testimony, Celia File 4496.
22. Mark V. Tushnet, The American Law of Slavery, 1810-1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 108-39. Successful use of the argument of self-defense by slaves was rare, however. See Philip J. Schwarz, Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 240-41.
23. Trial testimony, Celia File 4496.
CHAPTER SIX: THE VERDICT
1. “Jury Instructions” (Document O), Celia File 4496.
2. Revised Statutes of the State of Missouri, 1845 (St. Louis: Chambers and Knapp, 1845), art-2, sec-22, 573 (hereinafter cited as Missouri Statutes, 1845). Also, see Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 75-77.
3. “Jury Instructions” (Document O), Celia File 4496.
4. Missouri Statutes, 1845, art. 2, sec. 4, 180.
5. Even historians who refute charges that slaveholders systematically bred slaves note the economic significance of slave reproduction. Rather than directly interfering with their slaves’ sexual lives, they contend, planters used “positive economic incentives” to “influence fertility patterns.” Ironically, they use James Hammond’s advice to an overseer to make their point. See Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 78-86. For less favorable views of slaveholders’ efforts to influence fertility patterns, see Escott, Slavery Remembered, 44-45; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman, 98-110.
6. “Jury Instructions” (Document O), Celia File 4496. The prosecution’s insistence that the master’s power could be resisted only if a slave’s life were threatened had ample precedent in southern courts. For example, see the discussion of the North Carolina cases State v. Mann and State v. Hoover and the Mississippi case State v. Isaac Jones in Paul Finkelman, The Law of Freedom and Bondage: A Casebook (New York: Oceana, 1986), 217-30, 248-50.
7. “Jury Instructions” (Document O), Celia File 4496.
8. Ib
id.
9. Lorenzo J. Greene, Gary Kremer, and Anthony F. Holland, Missouri’s Black Heritage (St. Louis: Forum Press, 1980), 30; Eugene P. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 33. Phillips also acknowledged both that slave women were sexually assaulted and that such assaults were not considered rape, American Negro Slavery (New York: D. Appleton, 1918), 458.
10. Tushnet, The American Law of Slavery, 37-43.
11. Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 250-65, 322-34. For a thorough consideration of the manner in which slavery influenced concepts of comity within the American federal system, see Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, Federalism and Comity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).
12. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, 252-56, 392-93.
13. Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 326-27.
14. Tushnet, The American Law of Slavery, 85-86; Finkelman, The Law of Freedom and Bondage, 260-61; Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 73.
15. Helen T. Caterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro, 5 vols. (1926; rpt., New York: Negro University Press, 1968). For representative state studies see Orville Taylor, Negro Slavery in Arkansas (Durham: Duke University Press, 1958), 232-35; James B. Sellers, Slavery in Alabama (University: University of Alabama Press, 1950), 215-65; and Trexler, Slavery in Missouri, 73. Also see the Missouri section of George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, vol. 11, Arkansas Narratives, Part 7 and Missouri Narratives (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1972). Yet another study to fail to consider the rape of slave women is Robert W. Duffner, “Slavery in Missouri River Counties, 1820-1865” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Missouri, 1974), 64-67, 110-112.
16. Schwarz, Twice Condemned, 159-61.
17. Ibid. Other recent historians, including women, continue to ignore the problem of the rape of slave women. For an example, see Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 235-41. This omission is accounted for in part by Fox-Genovese’s contention that in a system that gave white males absolute power slave women “sought, not virtue, but triumph.” Virtue could be defended only after freedom had been achieved, 396.
18. See, for example, Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1984), 18-31; Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women,” 912; Jean Fagan Yellin, “The Text and Contexts of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself” in Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Slave’s Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 262-82.
19. William K. Scarborough, The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 75-77. Scarborough observes that planters “universally discouraged” their overseers from having sexual relations with female slaves. Yet in language that implies that female slaves were responsible for such relationships, he notes that some overseers ignored instructions and entered into sexual relationships “with sirens of the slave quarter.”
20. For a good brief summary of the way in which historians have dealt with the sexual exploitation of female slaves, see Clinton, “Caught in the Web of the Big House,” 19-34. On the subject in the WPA slave narratives, see Escott, Slavery Remembered, 46. David Bradley, The Chaneysville Incident (New York: Harper & Row, 1981) illustrates the use of the theme in the work of current black male fiction writers. Toni Morrison, Beloved: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 1987), is a powerful treatment of the theme by one of the United States’ foremost novelists. Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose (New York: Morrow, 1986), also explores the theme of interracial sex in the Old South. The character Dessa Rose resembles Celia, although based on another incident, and meets a happier, if historically inaccurate, fate. Also, for an exploration of the theme in a memoir, see Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), 33-44.
21. Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, chaps. 4 and 5, especially pages 195 and 241.
22. The definitive study of the southern code of honor is Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), especially 117-49, 226-92. Also see Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 63–64, 101-2. For an excellent planter’s summary of his role as patriarch, see James O. Breeden, ed., Advice Among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management in the Old South (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 1980), 59.
23. Trial record and jury verdict, Celia File 4496.
24. Trial record, Celia File 4496.
25. Ibid.
26. Testimony of William Powell and Virginia Waynescot, Celia File 4496; “Bill of Cash in the Case of Celia, a Slave” (Document G-i), Celia File 4496; Missouri Statutes, 1845, art. 6, sec. 18, 463.
27. Williamson, “Document,” 418; Trial record, Celia File 4496.
CHAPTER SEVEN: FINAL DISPOSITION
1. Jameson, Boulware, and Kouns to Abiel Leonard, December 6, 1855, Celia File 4496.
2. Dollar Missouri Journal, November 17, 1855.
3. Jameson, Boulware, and Kouns to Abiel Leonard, December 6, 1855, Celia File 4496.
4. Ibid.
5. Rawley, Race and Politics, 95-96; Johnson, The Battle Cry of Freedom, 108-9; Wilder, Annals of Kansas, 84-86, 91-106.
6. For examples, see Daily Missouri Democrat, November 13, 17, 1855; Missouri Republican, November 1, 1855.
7. Johnson, The Battle Cry of Freedom, 109-10; Rawley, Race and Politics, 96; Daily Democrat, November 28, December 5, 1855.
8. Wilder, Annals of Kansas, 87; Rawley, Race and Politics, 96-97.
9. Daily Democrat, December 25, 1855; Dollar Missouri Journal, December 13, 1855; Wilder, Annals of Kansas, 87.
10. Missouri Republican, December 25, 1855; Dollar Missouri Journal, December 13, 1855; Daily Democrat, December 24, 25, 1855.
11. Wilder, Annals of Kansas, 87-88; Johnson, The Battle Cry of Freedom, 138-43; Daily Democrat, December 20, 22, 24, 25, 1855; Missouri Republican, December 1, 4, 19, 21, 24, 1855.
12. Davis and Durrie, An Illustrated History of Missouri, 142-43; McCandless, A History of Missouri, 2: 267-68.
13. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, 263-65.
14. Frederick A. Culmer, “Abiel Leonard,” parts 4, 5, Missouri Historical Review 28 (October 1933, January 1934), 17-37, 103-24.
15. Document II-1, Celia File 4496.
16. Fulton Telegraph, January 4, 1856, as quoted in the New York Times, January 16, 1856.
17. Document G-1, “Bill of Cash,” Celia File 4496.
18. 1860 Slave Census, 104.
CHAPTER EIGHT: CONCLUSIONS
1. Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women,” 912-13.
2. Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Originally published in 1959, Elkins’s work, which compares slavery to the Nazi death camps, drew spirited criticism and prompted historians to examine more thoroughly the social organization of the slave community. See, for example, Blassingame, The Slave Community. However, it must be noted that even though Blassingame contends that the “typical slave … preserved his manhood in the quarters,” he also notes that “the most serious impediment to the [slave] man’s acquisition of status in his family was his inability to protect his wife from the sexual advances of whites and the physical abuse of his master,” (216, 82-88).
3. Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 308-33, 372–96; Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, edited by Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
4. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982).
5. Most recent studies of slavery reflect the work of Blassingame and Gutman, and stress the ability of slaves to resist the constraints of slavery and devel
op their own social institutions. Among them are Burton, In My Fathers House Are Many Mansions, especially chapter 4; and Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 126-44, 242-43. Fogel notes the many factors that have led historians to disagree about the nature of the slave family in Without Consent or Contract and places additional stress on the moral problems of slavery (162-86, 394-95).
6. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 25-49. Also see Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage, 1956), 192-237. Alan Watson’s Slave Law in the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989) contends that racism and the fact that the southern states did not base their slave codes upon Roman law combined to make slave law more stringent in the United States, especially in the area that Watson calls “public law” (65-82). Of special interest is Watson’s contention that in the South “fixed penalties to be inflicted on slaves by the owners had to be laid down simply because the state did not trust the owner to punish some slaves to the extent that the legislature considered sufficient” (128).
7. Tushnet, The American Law of Slavery, 30-37; Phillips, American Negro Slavery, 458. Schwarz, in Twice Condemned, 315-18, presents a non-Marxist interpretation that sees racism and fear of black violence as the more significant factors underlying slave law. Watson’s Slave Law, on the other hand, stresses the role of the judiciary in shaping slave law, though he also emphasizes the role of racism, especially in the United States.
8. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 25-70; Clarence L. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), summarizes reformers’ efforts in antebellum Georgia (235-71).
9. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, 394.
10. For an excellent review of the historiographical debate over the degree to which southerners were troubled by the morality of slavery, see Gaines M. Foster, “Guilt Over Slavery: An Historiographical Analysis,” Journal of Southern History 56 (November 1990), 665-94. Foster concludes that it is impossible to prove or disprove the “guilt thesis,” that southerners felt guilty because of slavery. He contends that recent historians have noted that southerners’ “doubt and confusion” about slavery resulted from “contradictions inherent in the institution….” This approach, Foster contends, “does minimize the psychological turmoil with which southern modernists invested the Old South, and reduces their sense of the region’s uniqueness rooted in guilt,” 692-94. Foster, however, does not explore the moral nature of the intensely personal decisions slavery forced southerners to make, as the case of Celia demonstrates. Nor does he explain why, if southerners were convinced that slavery was morally acceptable, they feared their slaves and took seriously the potential for slave revolts.
Celia, a Slave Page 16