She killed the white master raping her, then claimed self-defense
A look at the 1855 case, Missouri v. Celia, a Slave
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s DeNeen L. Brown.
In Missouri in 1855, it was a crime “to take any woman unlawfully against her will and by force, menace or duress, compel her to be defiled.”
Women could then argue self-defense in resisting such assaults. Did that law apply to enslaved women?
Celia, an enslaved woman who had endured years of rape, would find out.
Robert Newsom, a Missouri widower in his 70s, purchased Celia when she was 14. For five years, he sexually assaulted her. She gave birth to two of her predator’s children.
Celia was being courted by an enslaved black man named George. When she became pregnant a third time, George told her the farmer’s abuse could not continue.
Celia, 19, warned Newsom that she would hurt him if he came to her cabin again. She also asked his two adult daughters to help keep their father away.
But on the night of June 23, 1855, Newsom crept into her cabin and tried to force her to have sex with him. Celia took a stick and bashed his head with it, killing him, according to court documents. Then she pushed his body into a roaring fire in her cabin’s fireplace. The next day, his bones were carried out in the embers.
Celia was later arrested. A groundbreaking legal case — the State of Missouri vs. Celia, a Slave — ensued.
Celia’s court-appointed defense lawyer asked Circuit Court Judge William Hall to instruct the jury that a slave master had no right to rape a slave and that the slaying could be considered justifiable.
But the judge refused.
Instead, Hall told the 12 white men weighing the evidence:
“If Newsom was in the habit of having intercourse with the defendant who was his slave and went to her cabin on the night he was killed to have intercourse with her or for any other purpose and while he was standing in the floor talking to her she struck him with a stick which was a dangerous weapon and knocked him down, and struck him again after he fell, and killed him by either blow, it is murder in the first degree.”
Though Celia had pleaded not guilty, she’d confessed to the crime, according to Jefferson Jones, who investigated the killing. Jones had interrogated Celia in jail about a week after she was arrested to learn if there were any accomplices in Newsom’s slaying.
“I asked her whether she thought she would hang for what she had done,” Jones testified. “She said she thought she would hang. I then told her to tell the whole truth.”
According to court documents, Celia told Jones the farmer had been abusing her for years and “he had told her he was coming down to her cabin that night. She told him not to come, that if he came she would hurt him.”
When asked if George had asked her to kill the farmer, Celia said no. He only told her he would have “nothing to do with her if she did not quit the old man.”
Celia told Jones that after she killed Newsom, his body lay about an hour on the floor, before she decided to burn it, he testified.
Christopher Gordon, director of library and collections at the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, called the trial “a sham.” Most of the jury was either pro-slavery or owned slaves themselves, he said.
“The thought of a slave — and let alone a female slave — getting away with something like this was not anything they would permit,” Gordon said. “The defense tried very hard to play on sympathy and cast Robert Newsom as a predator. … But the racial politics of the day won out.”
On Nov. 1, 1855, the Glasgow Weekly Times reported that Celia had been found guilty in Callaway County Circuit Court “of murder in the first degree … for the murder of her master.”
The jury sentenced her to death, though her case was appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court.
While awaiting her execution, Celia escaped. She was captured a few days later, and the state Supreme Court refused to overturn Celia’s conviction. Her execution was delayed long enough to allow her to give birth to her third child. The baby was stillborn.
On Dec. 21, 1855, Celia was taken to the Calloway Courthouse in Fulton, Mo., and “hanged until she died.”
