37 pages • 1-hour read
Celia, A Slave
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Introduction-Chapter 2 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction
In the Introduction, McLaurin reminds us that although history tends to focus on the stories of “great men and women,” we can learn much from the “lives of lesser figures,” such as Celia, “a slave who lived and died in Callaway County, Missouri” (ix). McLaurin also reflects on the limitations of such an approach to history, noting that the record of Celia’s life is, “like that of most lives judged inconsequential, […] incomplete,” and, consequently, “the significance of [her] story rests in large part upon the manner in which others responded to her” (x). He notes that while Celia’s trial cannot tell us much about some aspects of slavery, it does help us see more clearly and concretely the “moral dilemmas that [slavery] produced” (x).
Chapter 1 Summary: Beginnings
Chapter One, called “Beginnings,” provides background knowledge about Robert Newsom, who was Celia’s owner, and John Jameson, her attorney, as well as about the town of Fulton, the county seat of Callaway County, Missouri. Both Newsom and Jameson made their modest fortunes as early settlers to the young state of Missouri, Newsom emigrating from Virginia with his wife and two children between 1819 and 1822, and Jameson from Kentucky in 1825. Newsom made his living as a farmer, and Jameson practiced law, served in the House of Representatives, and was later ordained as a minister. Both men were also slave owners, and the first chapter ends with the somewhat ominous statement: “Of the two men, however, only one was what he seemed” (13).
Chapter 2 Summary: The Crime
Chapter Two provides an overview of the passage of the Missouri Compromise, which set the conditions upon which Missouri was allowed to become a state. As McLaurin notes, “Missouri’s formal request for statehood in 1819 was to meet with unexpected resistance in Congress. For the first time since ratification of the Constitution, members of Congress seriously debated forcing a territory to abandon slavery as the price for admission into the Union” (14). There was fierce opposition in Missouri to the idea of outlawing slavery in the would-be state, leading to the compromise that became known was the “Missouri Compromise,” which allowed for the admission of Missouri as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and all the Louisiana Territory south of Missouri only to become, eventually, slave states (with the remainder of the Territory north and west of Missouri to be free). This context is provided as a backdrop for an exploration of Robert Newsom’s ownership of slaves—four adult men and one five-year-old boy by 1850, and Celia, a fourteen-year-old girl purchased sometime during 1850.
Chapter Two also provides the context for making sense of Newsom’s relationship to Celia in particular, who was bought by Newsom—ostensibly to be the household cook—after his wife had been dead for almost a year. This detail is significant, as McLaurin asserts it was Newsom’s intent to buy a slave for sexual purposes, even though he could have married again. Moreover, Newsom’s daughters—one a teenager and one in her thirties—lived at home and ran his household, so it’s clear that Newsom was not without domestic help. That Celia was raped by Newsom on the way back from the sale and then set up in a cottage separate from the other enslaved people at the farm, presumably to make Newsom’s visits to her less noticeable to others, reveals Newsom’s intent with regard to Celia, who bore him two children and was pregnant with a third when Newsom was killed.
McLaurin speculates as to Newsom’s children’s response to his relationship with Celia, noting that it would have been unlikely that they did not know about it but that even if they disapproved, they were in no position to object. McLaurin also discusses Celia’s likely psychological response to Newsom’s continued sexual abuse, and how she would have been seen as a potential mate to the other slaves on the farm. Indeed, Celia did become involved with a slave named George, and it was his insistence that Celia break off her relationship with Newsom that was the catalyst for “the crime” of the title of this chapter. When Celia attempted to refuse Newsom’s sexual advances the next time he came to her cabin—on Saturday night, June 23—he dismissed her resistance and she hit him over the head with a large stick. Then, realizing he was dead, she burned his remains in her fireplace over the course of the night, hiding any telltale chunks of bone too large to smash under her floor. In the morning, she had Newsom’s own grandson unknowingly clean his ashes out of her fireplace.
Introduction-Chapter 2 Analysis
Celia’s story teaches us how slavery forced people to deal with the “moral ambiguity” of slavery by creating situations that challenged people’s sense of right and wrong in new and troubling ways. The first chapter provides a clear sense of how slavery was encouraged by the state, by the community, and by the obvious economic advantage it afforded slave owners, who amassed, on average, three times as much in assets as farmers who did not own slaves. The first chapter also shows how much labor went in to carving out Callaway County into a patchwork of small, diversified farms, and the work that went into establishing Fulton as its county seat—clearly illustrating how much Newsom had invested in his move west. Chapter One also takes great pains to show how, at least from the outside vantage point of historical hindsight, Robert Newsom and John Jameson do not appear to be so different from one another, in terms of their social and economic standing, their respective investment in the success of their community, and their own willingness to own slaves. This chapter, then, sets the stage for the question of why each man behaved so differently with regard to Celia, who is at the center of the story but whose history—or “beginnings”—are so much a mystery that she is barely introduced in the chapter, except to note that she arrived at the Newsom farm in 1850 at age fourteen—the same age as Newsom’s own daughter, Mary.
Chapter Two, “The Crime,” seems, at first glance, to refer to Celia’s crime of killing Robert Newsom and disposing of his body in her fireplace. However, the context McLaurin provides for this crime points to other “crimes”. There is the “crime” of Newsom’s rape of Celia, which while not legally a crime, as she is considered his property, is morally a crime. There is, also, the larger “crime” of slavery itself and the buying and selling of human beings, which could also be considered as “the crime” of this chapter’s title, given the amount of space devoted to the discussion of the Missouri Compromise in 1819 and the later 1850s debates over slavery in the state and country at large. The Missouri Compromise itself could be considered a “crime,” as it “acquired federal recognition of the legitimacy of the institution” of slavery, rather than something “that could be eliminated within a generation or two” (16).
McLaurin also notes other less explicit “crimes,” such as George’s “demand [on] the most vulnerable member of the triangle” made up of him, Celia, and Newsom. As McLaurin observes, Celia’s predicament illustrated “perfectly the vulnerability of female slaves to sexual exploitation by males within the owner’s household” (26). Not only would Celia be risking her own life in defying Newsom, she’d also risk losing her children. She first asks Newsom’s family to intervene on her behalf, citing sickness from her pregnancy as the reason Newsom should leave her alone. Another “crime” McLaurin describes with detail is Celia asking Coffee Waynescot, Newsom’s grandson, to clean the ashes out of her fireplace, which has him unknowingly scooping out and likely inhaling his own grandfather’s ashy remains.
The Introduction and first two chapters emphasize ambiguity—how appearances can be deceiving and how what is a “crime” depends on who is doing the defining. This ambiguity is important to understanding the full significance of Celia’s story, since accepting ambiguity also allows us to see things from multiple and decidedly different points of view, which is essential to understanding the complexity of morality in a slaveholding society.
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