Celia, a Slave: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

The trial has entered “the determination of jury instructions.” In Missouri, the defense and the prosecution must draft their own requests for jury instructions, which the judge will express, or choose not to express, to the jurors after hearing both sides’ instructions. Jameson, no great legal researcher, probably delegates most or all of the work on jury instructions to his two aides, Kouns and Boulware.

One of most important parts of the defense’s legal instructions is that the jury must reach a verdict of not guilty unless it can conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Celia willfully killed Robert Newsom. Furthermore, the defense argues that Robert’s legal ownership of Celia didn’t entitle him to have sex with her. Finally, the defense argues that the jurors must acquit if they can conclude that Newsom was attempting to compel Celia to have sex against her will at the time of his death.

To bolster its claims, the defense cites a precedent in Missouri state law allowing for “any woman”—including, the defense argues, slaves—to use deadly force to protect her “honor.” In advancing this precedent, the defense raises some complicated questions about the legality of slavery itself: “the issue of who controlled sexual access to female slaves held tremendous economic … significance.” Predictably, the prosecution objects to the defense’s interpretation of the law, forcing Hall to choose between the defense and the prosecution’s sets of juror instructions.

The defense objects to all but one of the prosecution’s instructions: that the jury acquit only if it can conclude that Celia “acted in self-defense.” However, the prosecution has already requested that the jurors be instructed that Robert Newsom made no threats to Celia’s life, meaning that its instruction on self-defense is a deliberate dead-end.

Judge William Hall now faces a tough decision: he must weigh both sides’ legal instructions, knowing that the case largely comes down to how he presents these instructions to the jurors. In the end, he favors the prosecution, delivering every one of the state’s instructions and ignoring all but three of the defense’s instructions. Legal precedent in Missouri is, for the most part, on the prosecution’s side. In prior cases, judges have refused to acknowledge that there is such a thing as the rape of a slave. Furthermore, Hall disagrees with the defense’s interpretation of the phrase “any woman” in Missouri state law—he argues that this phrase doesn’t apply to female slaves.

The defense has made a radical interpretation of Missouri slave law—far more radical, even, than the one advanced by the attorneys for Dred Scott in 1852 before the Missouri Supreme Court. Dred Scott is a runaway Missouri slave who flees to a free state. Scott’s attorneys argue that Scott has earned his freedom by entering a free state, but Missouri courts advance the more traditional interpretation of slave law, that slaves are their masters’ property regardless of where they go. This is the same legal interpretation that the Supreme Court infamously advances while ruling on the Dred Scott Case in 1857.

The defense’s arguments pose a serious threat to slaveholders, and had they been accepted by Judge William Hall, they could have been used to dismantle the institution of slavery. Antebellum compendia of legal cases involving slaves include no cases—not one—of white owners raping female slaves. Of course, this isn’t because white owners didn’t rape their slaves, but because the law didn’t acknowledge such a crime. To acknowledge such a crime would mean acknowledging that slaves have certain rights that they can use against their owners, and that they have control over their own lives.

The sexual abuse of female slaves by white owners was a terrifying reality during the antebellum period. It partly explains why white women were among the most notable critics of slavery: white male rape of slave women “threatened the stability of the white family and emphasized the fact that in many respects married white women were little more than the property of their husbands.”

The defense’s arguments didn’t only threaten the core concept of slavery; they also threatened the economic practicalities of the institution. A law giving a slave woman the right to defend herself from rape could have been further interpreted to allow the slave woman to control who she married and whether she had children, thereby interfering with the master’s desire to produce a new generation of slave children.

The defense’s arguments posed one final challenge to antebellum society: they questioned the concept of the white man as a woman’s protector. At the time, white men were seen as the protectors of their families; furthermore, white slave owners were often expected to treat their slaves with a measure of respect. What this “respect” meant was difficult to define, but there was an unwritten rule, especially in the South, that property owners behave honorably to their entire “extended household.” The defense’s points about rape would have undermined the image of the white landowner as a wise, honorable father figure.

On October 11, Jameson and his two aides appear before the court and move to “grant a new trial” on the grounds that Judge William Hall has been unfair in his rulings and interpretations. Hall doesn’t respond to the motion, but delays the reading of the verdict. On October 13, however, he reads the jury’s verdict: Celia will be hanged to death as punishment for murdering Robert Newsom.

McLaurin then emphasizes a historical ambiguity: it’s unclear if Celia was still pregnant during her sentencing. However, it’s known that Celia delivered a stillborn baby sometime during her incarceration, either before or after the trial.

Celia is sentenced to be hanged on November 16. Her only hope is that the Missouri Supreme Court will intervene on her behalf, some time before her execution.