Celia, A Slave Quotes

“The South’s retention and spirited defense of the institution suggests that most whites found ways of reconciling slavery, including its denial of the essential humanity of those enslaved, with their personal moral values, as happened in Celia’s case.10 What is unknown, and perhaps ultimately unknowable, is the psychic energy required, both individually and collectively, to facilitate that reconciliation. The events in the last year of Celia’s life, although extraordinarily dramatic, demonstrate the nature of the moral choices individuals faced and indicate that some individuals had great difficulty making them. Those events also suggest that the psychic cost to whites of the defense of slavery, though paid, was high, just as they suggest that the psychic cost to blacks, though paid, was incalculable and enduring.”
― Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave

“Celia’s case demonstrates how difficult an undertaking this was, as long as southerners continued to insist that slaves possessed legal rights. The female slave’s lack of a legal protection against rape illustrates the society’s preference for sentiment rather than law, but only for women. The sexual activities of black men were not left to sentiment, but rigidly controlled by law, since sexual relations between black men and white women challenged the power of the white man. The law was also used to create the illusion that slaves possessed certain human rights, and thus to assuage the conscience of white society.”
― Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave

“Celia’s challenge to her master’s power over her sexual integrity was personal, violent, extreme, and unacceptable to a slaveholding society. It was unacceptable because gender mattered in both the social conventions and in the laws that upheld slavery. To have empowered slave women in the domestic arena, to have recognized their right to control their sexuality, would have undercut the power of the master to a degree that would have threatened the very survival of the institution.3 Celia’s”
― Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave

“The sexual politics of slavery presented an exact paradigm of the power relationships within the larger society.13 Black female slaves were essentially powerless in a slave society, unable to legally protect themselves from the physical assaults of either white or black males. White males, at the opposite extreme, were all powerful, with practically unlimited access to black females. The sexual politics of slavery in the antebellum South are perhaps most clearly revealed by the fact that recorded cases of rape of female slaves are virtually nonexistent. Black males were forbidden access to white females, and those charged with raping white females were either executed, or, as in Missouri, castrated, and sometimes lynched.”
― Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave

“James Shannon delivered the convention’s opening address, which set the tone for the two-day event. His remarks were nothing if not unequivocal. Any threat to the biblically sanctioned right to hold slaves, Shannon assured his audience, “is just cause of war between the separate states.” Those who advocated restrictions on slavery he denounced as “liars, yelping curs, assassins, knaves, Negro thieves and horse thieves.”14 After”
― Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave

“The six-man inquest jury assembled was composed of local residents, men whose lives strikingly resembled that of the murdered Robert Newsom.”
― Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave