Celia, A Slave

Chapter Three, “Inquisition,” describes the search for Robert Newsom, which began on the morning of Sunday, June 24, when his daughters missed him at breakfast.  Soon, they asked for help from the neighbors, in particular William Powell, a neighboring slave owner who McLaurin surmises would have been especially interested in finding out what happened to Newsom, given the similarity of their circumstances.  The Newsom sons also joined the search, and George was brought in for questioning, since the family was aware of his relationship with Celia.  George denied knowing anything about Newsom’s whereabouts but implicated Celia by suggesting that the last place Newsom walked was the path between his house and hers.  The search party then confronted Celia, with Powell taking the lead in her questioning.  She steadfastly denied knowing where Newsom was, but after repeated questioning and pressure from Powell, she admitted only that Newsom came to her window and that she hit him and he went away.  After still further questioning, she said she would tell Powell what happened to Newsom if he sent Newsom’s sons out of the room.  She then admitted to Powell that she accidentally killed Newsom by hitting him on the head with a stick and, upon realizing he was dead, burned his body in her fireplace.

The search party then found evidence of Newsom in the ashes that Celia had his grandson remove from her fireplace, including his belt buckle and buttons from his clothes.  They also found pieces of bone.  All of these things were taken by Virginia Waynescot for safekeeping in her room.  The next day, Monday, June 25, an inquest jury of six men was sent to interview the family, Powell, and Celia to determine whether she should be arrested.  They decided that there was cause for her to be arrested and charged.  She was then transported to jail to await her October trial.

Chapter Three also provides an overview of the media response to Celia’s arrest, noting that the Fulton Telegraph published an inaccurate, sensationalist account that pandered to existing fears about slave revolt and violence, while the St. Louis paper published a more factual account that nonetheless placed the crime scene in the kitchen of the Newsom home rather than in Celia’s cabin.  It also described the crime as being without motive.

McLaurin describes the key events in the history of slave revolts that fostered white Missourians own fears of slave violence and accounted, in part, for the belief of those close to the Newsom case that Celia did not act alone.  First, McLaurin cites the Haitian revolution, led by Toussaint L’Oueverture in 1789, where a half million Haitian slaves overthrew the white planters, driving them off the island and killing most of the white people left behind.  Missourians also remembered the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831 Virginia, and the more recent and close-to-home group of Missouri slaves who attempted an armed escape in 1850.  Because it seemed unlikely that Celia could have handled the burning of Newsom’s body on her own, and because fears of slave revolt were incited by the shock of Newsom’s murder, a lawyer, Jefferson Jones, who was John Jameson’s nephew-in-law, was called in to conduct another interrogation of Celia, during which she steadfastly denied George’s involvement in the murder and disposal of Newsom’s body.  The chapter ends with McLaurin’s account of Harry Newsom’s “curious” (51) demand that a St. Louis newspaper print a retraction, clarifying that the scene of the crime was Celia’s cabin, not the Newsom kitchen.  McLaurin speculates that Harry Newsom wanted it made clear that no one in the family had any role in Newsom’s death, but that his demanded correction also raises the question of what Newsom was doing in Celia’s cabin on a Saturday night.