Celia, a Slave

By Melton A. McLaurin, Daina Ramey Berry and Jennifer L Morgan

Originally published in 1991, Celia, a Slave illuminates the moral dilemmas that lie at the heart of a slaveholding society by telling the story of a young slave who was sexually exploited by her enslaver and ultimately executed for his murder. Melton A. McLaurin uses Celia’s story to reveal the tensions that strained the fabric of antebellum southern society by focusing on the role of gender and the manner in which the legal system was used to justify slavery. An important addition to our understanding of the pre–Civil War era, Celia, a Slave is also an intensely compelling narrative of one woman pushed beyond the limits of her endurance by a system that denied her humanity at the most basic level.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780820362502

Melton A. McLaurin

MELTON A. McLAURIN is history professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington. He is writer and director of the video documentary The Marines of Montford Point: Fighting for Freedom and the author of The Marines of Montford Point: America’s First Black Marines.

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Celia, A Slave

CELIA

A SLAVE

MELTON A. McLAURIN

Paperback reissue published in 2021

New material © 2021 by the University of Georgia Press

© 1991 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Designed by Barbara Henry

Set in 10 on 12 Caledonia by Tseng Information Systems with hand-set display provided by Browne & Co., Stationers Printed and bound by Sheridan Books, Inc.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Most University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e-book vendors.

Printed in the United States of America

21 22 23 24 25 P 5 4 3 2 1

The Library of Congress has cataloged the previous edition of this book as follows:

LCCN Permalink: http://lccn.loc.gov/90023045 McLaurin, Melton Alonza.

Celia, a slave / Melton A. McLaurin.

xi, 148 p. ; 24 cm.

ISBN 0-8203-1352-1 (alk. paper)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 137–143) and index. 1. Celia, d. 1855—Trials, litigation, etc. 2. Trials (Murder)—Missouri—Callaway County. 3. Slavery—Southern States. 4. Southern States—Moral conditions. I. Title.

KF223.C43M34 1991

345.73'02523

347.3052523 20

90-23045

Paperback Reissue ISBN 978-0-8203-6096-6

ISBN 978-0-8203-6250-2 (ebook)

To Sandra

in admiration of her

courage and conviction

Contents

Foreword to the 2021 Edition

Preface to the 2021 Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter One: BEGINNINGS

Chapter Two: THE CRIME

Chapter Three: INQUISITION

Chapter Four: BACKDROP

Chapter Five: THE TRIAL

Chapter Six: THE VERDICT

Chapter Seven: FINAL DISPOSITION

Chapter Eight: CONCLUSIONS

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword to the 2021 Edition

Thirty years ago, the University of Georgia Press published Melton McLaurin’s Celia, A Slave. It was an original study in that it explored the experience of a young, fourteen-year-old enslaved girl and her life on a small Missouri farm. We know nothing of her early life, her birth, parentage, siblings, or where she lived prior to her sale on an auction block in Callaway County, Missouri, in 1850. As a result of a court case (State of Missouri v. Celia, 1855), however, we know that she experienced sexual exploitation and became the mother of two children in a state that would become famous for another nineteenth-century case that went all the way to the Supreme Court (Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1857). In 1991, Celia, A Slave offered its readers something that was entirely new at the time and that remains rare—an account of an enslaved woman’s life written so as to capture her own perspective.

The scholarship on enslaved women grew exponentially since the publication of this book, and we now know so much more about women’s experiences with captivity and enslavement. From first-person narratives and biographies of individual women like Sojourner Truth, Mary Prince, Luisa Piquet, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Keckley, and Ona Judge to anthologies of women in various regions, the literature is vast and growing.¹ Nearly every year since Celia was published, we witnessed the addition of new work on women and slavery addressing such topics as labor, family, community, resistance, and freedom. In addition to an increasing body of literature, the field of scholars producing this work has also changed as more women entered the profession. Now that there are dozens of established and early career scholars interested in the intersections of gender, sexuality, and slavery, publishing this anniversary edition in our series makes perfect sense. But understanding this critical mass of gender and slavery scholarship—and how it frames Celia in today’s historiography—requires a brief exploration of the current state of the field.

The 1990s

If the 1980s marked the foundational decade of scholarship on enslaved women, then the 1990s represented a decade of framing. Works published in this decade appeared against the backdrop of a modern civil rights movement after the Rodney King beating, Latasha Harlins’s murder, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Scholars in the Caribbean had been writing about enslaved women since the 1970s and early 1980s, but they too were influenced by the racial unrest in the United States. McLaurin’s study on Celia came at a crucial moment in history—a time when women’s studies programs proliferated and scholars interested in slavery were on the rise. These convergences in academic programs, scholarly interest, and current events proved to be essential for the development of histories of gender and slavery, which meant that McLaurin’s study was bolstered by the interest of a wide range of students. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine organized fourteen scholars to explore enslaved women in the British, French, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean, South America, and the United States in More Than Chattel (1996). Patricia Morton also edited an anthology that same year with fourteen scholars titled Discovering the Women in Slavery. Both works confirmed the range of historical evidence that could be mobilized to write the history of women and slavery, and both suggested that ample work remained to be done.²

When published in 1991, Celia, A Slave occupied a relatively rarified space as there were few full-length studies of enslaved women published in the first half of the 1990s.³ That may partially be explained by the robust growth of the field of African American women’s history and literary studies. Scholars and writers were turning their attention to the historical periods that followed slavery, often grounding those studies in introductory chapters that concerned the experience of enslavement, but then turning to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century lives of free Black women. Yet the significant interest in understanding the lives of women during slavery helped shape the reception of McLaurin’s study, where it was received as a critical contribution both to the history of slavery and the law and to the craft of biographical writing. With the additional publication of Nell Irvin Painter’s Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol in 1996, scholars began to develop an interdisciplinary methodological approach to writing the biographical histories of enslaved women, an approach that would increasingly come to define the field and to shape a critical theory of the archives and of archival practices. Such innovation followed in the footsteps of Deborah Gray White, who, in her 1985 Ar’n’t I a Woman?, mined the autobiographical interviews of formerly enslaved women conducted by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.⁴ She revealed that such interviews, while not always straightforward or transparent, formed a crucial corpus in the history of Black women, one that required a reflective and critical methodology.

The Millennium

By recognizing that writing the history of enslaved women required a capacious approach to archival evidence, scholars working in the first decade of the twenty-first century produced a range of new studies that centered the lives of women under slavery. At the same time, this generation of scholarship was able to build on what had come before and thus no longer needed to fight on the battlefield of legitimacy. As a result, such scholars were able to turn their attention to specific questions regarding health, resistance, labor, and family as they pertained to women held in bondage. These histories, in turn, provided the kind of fine-grained scholarship that could serve as context for more contributions in biography—three on Harriet Tubman and a second on Sojourner Truth.⁵

Towards the 2020s

In the most recent decade, the volume and depth of scholarship suggests that we are in the midst of a renaissance of work on women and slavery. From all-encompassing encyclopedias to more-detailed exposés based on archives and/or centered around such topics as the dress or mental and physical health of women in the Civil War and Reconstruction, we are now learning more about enslaved women’s experiences and, equally important, the impact that these women’s lives and labors had on the development of the Americas. We are beginning to understand the extent to which slavery relied on African women and their descendants both to fuel the wealth of the Atlantic world and to articulate the ideologies of race and racial hierarchy to begin with.⁶ Into this new landscape we read Celia, A Slave from a different vantage point; no longer is it just a straightforward story of an enslaved woman’s effort to protect herself from sexual violence—though it remains that as well. We now understand Celia to be a study that opens up discussions about archives, about mothering, about race and reproduction, about resistance, and about methodology. Celia compels us to ask, how do we do this work of telling the history of women’s lives under hereditary racial slavery?

With thirty years of scholarship and more than thirty additional books on gender and slavery, it is no surprise that we would approach Celia’s story much differently today. Legal historians have analyzed the trial, execution, and murder. Celia now has her own Wikipedia page, and the University of Michigan conducted a detailed study of the trial documents as part of the Celia Project (https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/celiaproject/). Today, scholars would, for example, change the language of slave and concubine and offer deeper analyses of Celia’s experience with rape, childbearing, childrearing, incarceration, and execution.⁷ We would also draw on the work of legal scholars and historians of the Black press to ask how the case reverberated and how word of Celia’s sexual violation spread through Black abolitionist communities.

But we should also ask questions about how McLaurin framed Celia’s story, and how that shapes the ways in which readers have received it. We need to ask what it means to begin this book with Robert Newsom, rather than with Celia herself (who doesn’t enter the text until page 9). Understanding the context into which Newsom forced Celia is clearly crucial, but we should think carefully about the gaps in our knowledge prior to her time in the grasp of Robert Newsom. McLaurin reminds us that we know very little about Celia’s life before her arrival at the Newsom farm (9). McLaurin acknowledges upfront that Newsom set out to purchase a replacement for his wife, dead now for nearly a year . . . [as] a sexual partner (18). McLaurin is very clear about how Celia is introduced to the parameters of her new life with the Newsom family: On his return to Callaway County, Newsom raped Celia (20). We need to ask hard questions about what it meant for a young enslaved girl to be sexually assaulted by her enslaver before she reached his property. What does it mean for her, and for the institution of slavery more broadly, that her labor was so deeply entwined with rape and sexual assault? Although we know very little from Celia herself, thirty years of scholarship allows us to take her story deeper and into new places.

McLaurin describes the family response to Celia’s arrival as an intrusion, but Celia most likely also felt intruded upon. Describing her as Newsom’s sexual partner is not language contemporary scholars would embrace given the rich historiography this study is now grounded in. We now can add deep analysis to discussions of enslaved women and girls and have the ability to use informed speculation, to borrow from Saidiya Hartman. Rather than focus solely on what the court record says about Celia, historians now add depth to discussions where there were gaps, silences, and omissions. We pay careful attention to age, maturity, and development and avoid conflating girlhood with womanhood. We recognize that enslaved women had a variety of responses to sexual abuse and murder was their self-defense, their resistance, and sometimes their only option.

Celia Today

How would historians teach or retell the story of Celia today? While some would focus on her actions, others would emphasize her relationship with George. Scholars might spend more time analyzing the complexities of enslaved people’s relationships with other enslaved people. They would probably ask questions about Newsom’s ongoing sexual exploitation of Celia with George present (24-25, 33-37, and 45-46).⁸ In addition, there would be greater focus on her experiences with pregnancy and motherhood (24-26) and more engagement with her crime, confession, trial, and execution. In the end, historians would tell Celia’s story from her perspective, outlining the complexities of sexual abuse, motherhood, and murder. They would consider pregnancies and her escape followed by her execution.

The intertwined nature of sexual violation and forced labor is now understood as at the foundation of racial slavery, and Celia’s story—while unique in many regards—is exemplary on this subject. Having raped her on the way to the farm, it would perhaps have come as no surprise to Celia that Newsom would regularly rape her in the years that followed. She was forced therefore to bear two children fathered by this man, and the fact that he isolated her in a house of her own could have hardly been received as the reward that McLaurin suggested her small brick abode to be. Indeed, one can easily imagine that its proximity to the Newsom home amplified her children’s complicated relationship to their father, who was also their owner, and thus compounded the stress Celia shouldered on a daily basis. McLaurin frames the relationship between Celia and George as a romance, one that situated Celia in a triangle between George and Newsom. Such a framing feels significantly at odds with the conflicted demands that George placed on her when her third pregnancy became evident. His demands that she end things with Newsom should raise difficult questions for the modern reader about sexuality and slavery—not the least being the ways in which racial slavery could destroy the experience of intimacy and family and interject violence between Black women and men subjected to the whims of despotic enslavers.

While McLaurin’s characterization of the sexual politics of slavery remains fundamentally true, we are now compelled to ask whether the powerlessness of Black women in the face of sexual assault at the hands of white men might signify more than a perverse social relationship and, rather, speak to something at the heart of the political economy of racial slavery. Sex with Black women was not only a prerogative of power, it was a means of enhancing one’s capital wealth that had been enshrined in colonial slave law as early as 1662. Newsom did not simply rape Celia for sexual gratification; he did so for economic gain as well. In this regard, the verdict of the court did more than protect the state from the spectacle of Black women and men testifying in court against whites; it also protected the economic investment in women’s reproductive capacity, a capacity that was arguably at the very heart of the economic power of slave states like Missouri.

The fact that Celia entered the historical record through a court case is not incidental. In fact, for thirty years, her story focused on her crime, confession, and trial. Scholars debated whether she was capable of killing Newsom on her own or had assistance. Scholars read and reread the court transcripts, searching for deeper analyses of the case. What is now clear is that doing so has sometimes redirected attention away from Celia toward Newsom, despite the fact that it was her own actions that propelled the legal case forward.

On June 23, 1855, the night of the crime, McLaurin writes that Newsom left his bedroom and walked . . . to Celia’s cabin . . . for the purpose of having sexual intercourse with Celia (29). Today we would ask questions about his motive and elaborate on her response. Told differently one could establish the scene from Celia’s perspective. Something like this:

After tucking her two children in bed, Celia settled in for the evening only to have it disrupted by Newsom’s arrival. She had already warned him that she did not grant him consent and that if he continued, she would protect herself. Despite those warnings, Newsom advanced, and Celia was left with a common choice for sexual assault victims: concede or defend oneself. She chose the latter.

Celia defended herself from continued sexual abuse at the hands of Newsom. That night was the last time he would attempt to rape her. Celia went to jail, denying (for a while, at least) any knowledge of Newsom’s whereabouts. While incarcerated she withstood threats to sell her children and threats on her own life. As McLaurin does in this text, legal historians of slavery would analyze every aspect of the case, including details about the attorneys and other participants in the hearings. But today, scholars would center the actions of Celia and her willingness to deny any wrongdoing. They would think carefully about her subject position, her capacity to think strategically about the outcome of her crime, and her desire to protect both her children and her pregnancy. While they would question her confession (38–40) and analyze the jury and witnesses (42–43), they would privilege her voice. By the time she took the stand and admitted to the crime, Celia had made a decision to entirely shoulder the blame. She claimed that she had no assistance in killing him (43). The state formally charged her with murder, and the trial began.

Celia’s representation and defense would be of great interest to scholars today. They would analyze every witness and the line of

Reviews for Celia, a Slave

[carterchristian1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Most of the viewers read this as a story of slavery. But why was it instead more a critique of the American legal system at the time. Celia killed her master for attempted rape. The judge disallowed the motive to be presented to the jury. In fact Missouri law did not disallow the rape of a slave woman and she was executed To understand this book, assigned to students with little understanding of the court process. The point of the probably is never truly made. Good in terms of the particulars of the law, not so good as a biography for which it is usually read.

[scoutj_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Thoroughly engrossing, even if at times a bit repetitive.

[srfbluemama · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thought Celia, A Slave was very good. I've read a few slave narratives before, but this was a fascinating departure from that. It focuses on the trial of a 19-year-old slave accused of murdering her master in Missouri. It explores the politics of slavery (Kansas was being fought over by pro- and anti-slavery groups at the time), as well as the powerlessness of women, especially slave women, during this period. It was a bit slow reading at first, but once it got to the crime and the trial, I was hooked. It was quite readable for a scholarly work, and was brief enough that it kept my attention.