The Political and the Personal Theme Analysis

Celia, A Slave might be called a micro-history—that is, an historical account that covers the life of an ordinary person, someone considered inconsequential by both historians and her contemporaries. For McLaurin, this unconventional approach to history can prove particularly illuminating. He says as much in his introduction, writing, “the lives of lesser figures, men and women who lived and died in virtual anonymity, often better illustrate certain aspects of the major issues of a particular period than do the lives of those who, through significant achievement, the appeal of the orator, or the skill of the polemicist, achieve national prominence.”

Celia’s story is by most standards self-contained and highly personal. Her trial did not receive anything close to national attention. The verdict was expected, and though it seems her defense hoped to set a legal precedent that would undermine the entire institution of slavery in Missouri, they failed to win the case. The murder of Robert Newsom and Celia’s subsequent trial had almost no broader political repercussions, and the whole affair was quickly forgotten by those not directly involved.

However, the story demonstrates how the personal and the political are never quite separable. Celia’s utter powerlessness—first in the face of continual abuse by her slave owner, then in the face of the American justice system (she was forbidden by law to testify)—was a consequence of the political order in the antebellum American south, which was more or less based in the systematic oppression of black people.

Perhaps more importantly, McLaurin demonstrates how Celia’s story aligns with the broader historical trends of the era. Primarily, he points out that, around the time of Celia’s trial, Missouri and neighboring Kansas (then just a territory) were becoming the foremost battlegrounds for the increasingly contentious issue of slavery. He suggests that the tumultuous political climate led Celia’s lawyers to see her case as potentially influential in the ongoing debate about the future of slavery in America. Further, he suggests that everyone involved in the case—judge, jury, prosecution, and defense—made individual, personal decisions that were “also a judgment on the morality of the institution of slavery itself.”

While McLaurin’s account does not show that Celia’s case had any real lasting political repercussions, it does show that the political conditions of the day completely saturated Celia’s life. In this way, her story illustrates how the moral dilemma of slavery—which may today seem abstract—expressed itself concretely, in the lives of real people. For Celia, her lawyers, and her prosecutors, the personal was inevitably political, the political inevitably personal.