Murder in missouri: celia’s story

Slavery in America is one of the most intriguing yet controversial episodes in modern history.  Essentially an economic system, its tentacles reached north, south, east, and west.

 The culture of slavery, particularly as it developed in the south, was a complex web of social and labor arrangements ranging from gang to task labor, skilled and unskilled workers, field and domestic servants.  Perpetual servitude found legitimacy in the construction of local and state laws designed to undermine the ability of black men, women, and their children to negotiate the conditions of labor and leisure.

Although ubiquitous, the character of slavery was unique to each region and the extent of its acceptance determined by local politics and profitability.

In the north, where the soil was unsuitable for an agricultural based economy, the factory system developed allowing for the rapid conversion of southern grown raw materials to finished goods.  In the south the plantation system emerged due, in large part, to the richness of the soil, numerous waterways, and the widespread of slave laborers both domestic and imported.

In the west, where virgin land was most plentiful during the early nineteenth-century, young men like Robert Newsom left the depleted regions of Virginia, oftentimes with their families and slaves, to seek fortune and a better life.

It was this “promise and its fulfillment,” argues Melton A. McLaurin in his true story, Celia, A Slave, that inspired people like Newsom to emigrate to Missouri. [1]   A decisive region in pro and anti-slavery debates, the Missouri Compromise of 1821 insured that there would be slavery in the old Louisiana Territory.  By 1850 Newsom was well respected and considered “comfortably well off.” [2]

In antebellum Missouri, plantations were more the exception than the rule as the economic profitability determined the number of slaves owned by a small farmer.  Still slaves were considered property and enslaved women were always subject to the sexual advances of the master.

These coerced and morally questionable encounters oftentimes produced children who were the object of the mistress’s hate and a reminder of her husband’s promiscuity.   Enslaved women in Callaway County, Missouri, much like those in other slaveholding regions, were without legal or community protection and, all too often, their suppressed anger erupted in violence and, in some cases, the brutal murder of their master and sexual abuser.[3]

Consider the case of Celia, a slave.  Celia was purchased by Robert Newsom when she just fourteen years old.   Convinced that she should be his continuous sex partner and not simply a cook, he raped her on the return trip to Callaway County.  After repeated unwelcome sexual encounters, she bore two children and, at some point, Newsom provided her with a “luxurious” cabin adjacent to his home near a “beat down path.”[4]

 As it turns out, Celia fell in love with George, a slave owned by Newsom who was aware of his [Newsom’s] sexual assaults.   George gave Celia an ultimatum demanding that if she did not “force Newsom to stop having sexual relations with her” their relationship would be over. [5]  Celia confronted Newsom who ignored her warnings.  She even turned to his daughters for help.  It was then that Celia decided she would “resort to a physical attack to repel his advances.”[6]

When Newsom arrived on the night of June 23, 1855 as promised, Celia hit him with a stick.  When he reached for her again, Celia “raised the club with both hands and once again brought it crashing down on Newsom’s skull.”[7]  Celia disposed of the body by burning it in the fireplace.  On the following morning she asked Newsom’s grandson, Coffee Waynescott, to “clean out her fireplace” and “carry the ashes out” in a container and, after which, he “spilled the remains in the grass.” [8]

[1] Melton A, McLaurin, Celia, A Slave: A True Story of Violence and Retribution in Antebellum Missouri (Athens: University of Georgia Press), 3; 4-8, (hereinafter cited as Celia, A Slave).

[2] Under the terms of the Compromise, Missouri was to be admitted to the Union as a slave state; Ibid, 8.
[3] McLaurin, Celia A Slave, 14-16; 95-101.