Celia, A Slave

Celia, A Slave is Melton A. McLaurin’s book-length analysis of the trial and execution of Celia, a slave in Callaway County, Missouri who kills her master and burns his body in her fireplace.  McLaurin, a historian, argues that Celia’s case offers us important insights into how together, gender and racial oppression render enslaved women completely powerless to protect themselves from sexual exploitation, and how the moral ambiguity caused by slavery is often reconciled in the courts, whose rulings alleviate white Southerners’ crises of conscience when confronted with the “hard daily realities of slavery” (ix).

In his “Introduction,” McLaurin makes the case for focusing on “the lives of lesser figures” to “better illustrate certain aspects of the major issues of a particular period” (ix).  He argues that Celia’s story in particular offers us a “detailed case study of what historian Charles Sellers referred to as ‘the fundamental moral anxiety’ that slavery produced” (x), and reminds us that “the personal and the political are never totally separate entities” (xi).

Chapter One, “Beginnings,” provides an introduction to the two white men most important to Celia’s story—her master, Robert Newsom, and her lawyer, John Jameson.  The chapter details the early history of the state of Missouri—Callaway County in particular—as well as the prosperity and status that came with owning slaves.