Court Cases about Women - Famous or Infamous

18thVirginia

Major
Joined
Sep 8, 2012
Although we often read that women had no rights in the antebellum period and sometimes that things like divorces were never awarded by the courts, when I read a novel, Selma, by a judge in Alabama, he noted cases in the back of the novel. One of these was a case awarding a divorce to an Alabama woman. There are other cases such as that of the slave Celia, who was hanged for defending herself against her master in Missouri. Judith Keller Schafer, a former professor at Tulane, read and documented a lot of antebellum legal cases involving prostitutes and slaves in antebellum New Orleans.

I thought it might be helpful to have a thread that we can continue to add to where we explain a little about some famous or important legal cases that involved women.

Celia, A Slave
For nineteen-year-old Celia, a slave on a Missouri farm, five years of being repeatedly raped by her middle-aged owner was enough. On the night of June 23, 1855, she would later tell a reporter, "the Devil got into me" and Celia fatally clubbed her master as he approached her in her cabin. The murder trial of the slave Celia, coming at a time when the controversy over the issue of slavery reached new heights, raised fundamental questions about the rights of slaves to fight back against the worst of slavery's abuses.

The political implications of Celia's trial could not have escaped Circuit Court Judge William Hall. Certainly, he knew, proslavery Missourians expected Celia to hang. Hall's choice as Celia's defense attorney, John Jameson, was a safe one. Jameson's reputation as a competent, genial member of the bar and his lack of involvement in the heated slavery debates (despite being a slave owner himself) ensured that his selection would not be seriously contested. Jameson could provide the defendant with satisfactory--but not too satisfactory--representation. In addition, Hall appointed two young lawyers, Isaac Boulware and Nathan Kouns, to assist Jameson in his defense.


The Supreme Court ruled against Celia in her appeal. In their December 14 order, the state justices said they "thought it proper to refuse the prayer of the petitioner," having found "no probable cause for her appeal." The stay of execution, the justices wrote, is "refused."

Celia was interviewed for a final time in her cell on the evening before her execution. Again, she denied that "anyone assisted her...or abetted her in any way." She told her interrogator, as reported in the Fulton Telegraph, "as soon as I struck him the Devil got into me, and I struck him with a stick until he was dead, and then rolled him into the fire and burnt him up." Celia died on the gallows at 2:30 P.M. on December 21, 1855.


For a more complete summary, go here: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/celia/celiaaccount.html

Case records can be found here: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/celia/celiarecords.html

celia.jpg

https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/WHO-WAS-CELIA-Celia-A-Slave
 
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Jeter vs. Jeter, 36 Alabama 391 (1860) Alabama Supreme Court affirms a divorce decree granted to the wife on the grounds that husband was having sex with one of his young slave girls. Appeal from the Chancery Court of Chambers County. This case involved an appeal from a divorce decree granted by the lower court on the grounds that the husband was a slave owner and was having sex with one of his young slave girls. The court granted the wife a divorce and awarded her in gross in a figure equal to at least one fourth of the value of the husband's considerable estate. The Supreme Court affirmed the lower court's decision on both the grounds for the divorce, and on the award of alimony. See also Mosser vs. Mosser, 29 Alabama 313 (1856). Val McGee, Selma: A Novel of the Civil War, p. 375.

In 1858, Sarah Jeter filed suit against her husband Samuel Jeter, whom she married in 1853. Her brother and an overseer testified to having seen Jeter with a slave girl Emeline. Mrs. Jeter alleged that Samuel had an estate worth $80,000 and wished a part of it as alimony. The Jeters had one child born of the marriage. Sarah also requested the return of a piano and one negro woman she'd brought to the marriage. The Court awarded her the return of her property and $20,000 as alimony, with a lien placed on Samuel Jeter's property.

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Chambers County Courthouse
 
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What tough reading, the enslaved woman. You just know at the time she felt it worth it- knowing her fate. Why they bothered with a trial is beyond me, that takes some nerve. It only prolonged her suffering, am guessing it was a warning to other enslaved " Do not do this, our white justice system will kill you right back ". Wonder if white men took their lesson from this too- the one which she sent them- " We would rather die while killing you than be raped one, more time".
 
I read Celia, A Slave several years ago. It was quite good. Another suggestion is The Lost German Slave Girl about a woman in New Orleans in the 1840s who sued herself out of slavery by establishing her "whiteness" which wasn't apparent before. Apparently.

Court cases are interesting. They often give a detailed picture of how people lived who always available elsewhere.
 
That's the case of Alexina Morrison in Jefferson Parish, Matthew Mckeon. I'd started on it last night, but was just too sleepy to finish.

Edited to say: Must have been very sleepy, that is a separate case heard in the 1830s, while Alexina was the 1850s-60s.
 
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There's a recent book out about a case in New Orleans, where the owner sold a child to Cuba. During the CW, the mother sued, since there was a law in Louisiana that prevented a child under 10 to be sold away without the mother's permission. I'll check the title.

Apparently there were people sold to Cuba when emancipation loomed in the USA.
 
There's a recent book out about a case in New Orleans, where the owner sold a child to Cuba. During the CW, the mother sued, since there was a law in Louisiana that prevented a child under 10 to be sold away without the mother's permission. I'll check the title.

Apparently there were people sold to Cuba when emancipation loomed in the USA.

The book is Beyond Freedom's Reach.
 
Poor Celia, I'm sure she felt like she had no way out of the situation. Running away was probably not an option and sadly killing him was the only way to make him stop his repeated attacks. I agree, why bother with a trail? Were they trying to keep things on the up and up in the legal sense in case the abolitionists had something to say? I wonder what non-slave holding folks of the era thought of such cases...

As for the Jeter case in Alabama I wonder how many other women endured a similar situation with divorce not an option because they didn't have a such a credible witness testify against their husband for his adultery. I'm surprised though on the portion she received as part of the settlement. Women rarely came out the 'winners' in divorce settlements in previous centuries.
 
In Morrison v. White, heard in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana in 1857, Jane or Alexina Morrison claimed to be a white woman, not a slave. A blue-eyed, blond haired girl of 15, she ran away from her master and surrendered herself to the jail in Jefferson Parish, claiming to be a white woman. As Jane Morrison, she'd been sold in the slave market in New Orleans to James White, a long time slave trader who'd purchased land in the parish just upriver of New Orleans, Jefferson and was retiring from the trade. He'd purchased "Jane," or as she called herself "Alexina" as an investment in his new venture as a planter.

Alexina had likely been born to a mulatto mother in Texas, but claimed that she was white because she looked white and that she'd been fraudulently sold as a slave in Arkansas. White claimed that "philanthropists" acting for a group of abolitionists had encouraged Alexina Morrison to run away from him. In an essay about this case, Walter Johnson explains that the slave markets offered all kinds of descriptions of female slaves by background and by color. Buyers sought women with darker skin to work in the fields and those who were "griffes, mulattoes, quadroons" to serve in their households as domestics or seamstresses. A level of "whiteness" also put a higher value on a slave woman as a potential for the "fancy" trade.

Morrison's lawyer based his claims that she was not a slave on her appearance and behavior, that she looked and acted white. He brought witnesses who would attest to her status because "Had witness been introduced to the girl without knowing her, he would have taken her for a white girl . ." White's witnesses testified that the girl looked as though she had African blood. http://www.uvm.edu/~psearls/johnson.html

During the 1850s, the Louisiana legislature and courts started to enforce a greater separation between those of black and white color with all kinds of restrictions on behavior of slaves and free people of color. By the end of the decade, the legislature would end manumission entirely. But Alexina Morrison did not claim to be a freed slave, she claimed to be white.

After the first trial ended in a mistrial in Jefferson Parish, the second was held in Orleans Parish, where a jury found Alexina Morrison to be free and white. James White then appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court, who overturned the the results of the trial. The case was tried a third time in 1862 and ended with a jury that voted 10-2 that Alexina Morrison was a free white woman. White again appealed and the case was delayed by the Civil War.

Walter Johnson has a long essay about Alexina Morrison and her various trials,
The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s, which can be read here: http://www.uvm.edu/~psearls/johnson.html

 
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The Lost German Slave Girl, Sally Miller, was working in a tavern near the waterfront in New Orleans in 1843 when it was asserted that she was not a slave, but a white German girl, Salome Muller, who'd arrived in New Orleans in 1818 with her family, who'd all died, either in transport or once in Louisiana. The Mullers had come to the U. S. as indentured servants, but the mother and another child had died on ship and shoemaker father Daniel and another brother perished at the sugar cane plantation where they'd been taken in St. Martin Parish.

A German immigrant who'd traveled on the same boat saw Sally Muller/Miller at the New Orleans cafe in 1843 and Madame Karl Rouff insisted she was Salome Muller. Other German relatives agreed and the German community hired a lawyer to charge that the planter in St. Martin Parish had converted Muller from an indentured servant into a slave.

The case was tried in 1844, with the New Orleans court ruling against Miller, but in 1845, the Louisiana Supreme Court reversed the decision and ruled in her favor.
 
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Beyond Freedom's Reach: A Kidnapping the the Twilight of Slavery
Adam Rothman, 51Cfq4tgQAL._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Rose Herera was a slave in rural Louisiana who was sold several times and finally purchased by the DeHarts, who fled to Cuba when the Union took over in New Orleans in 1862. They took Rose's three children with them--this is the story of her attempts to get them back.
 
The Case of Mary Jean Scypion's Descendants. Mary Jean Scypion was born to a Natchez Indian mother and a black father in the 1740s in what would become Illinois. She belonged to a French priest who gave her to his cousin, whose daughter inherited her. The daughter married Joseph Tayon, whose name figures prominently in this story.

The Spanish governor of the Territory ordered that all Indian slaves be freed, as the Spanish government no longer allowed Indians to be enslaved, but due to the uproar in St. Louis, locals were allowed to keep their slaves for awhile longer. Mary Jean Scypion bore three daughters in St. Louis. Two of them, Celeste and Catiche, were taken by the priest's cousin's daughter, Madame Tayon and given to her own married daughters, Helen Chevalier and Mary Louis Chauvin.
When Mdm. Tayon died, her husband moved in with the Pierre Chouteau family, one of the wealthiest and most prominent in St. Louis and great defenders of slavery.

When Joseph Tayon decided in 1799 to sell Mary Jean and her three daughters, Helen Chevalier and Mary Louis Chauvin protested that their mother had given them the slave women. He also heard from others that their Indian heritage might make a sale difficult to accomplish. By 1803, Mary Jean had died and upper Louisiana was now American territory and Joseph Tayon again started to pursue selling Mary Jean Scypion's daughters and grandchildren. His own daughters had papers drawn up declaring Celeste and Catiche to be free. In 1805, Celeste and Catiche petitioned the Court for their freedom and were declared free. Their sister, Marguerite, had been given to their brother, Francois, who argued that she was a negro and not free. The Courts ruled that all three were free.

However, Joseph Tayon went back to court and a jury headed by Pierre Chouteau's brother-in-law declared them slaves again. The Chouteau's were harsh slave owners and Chevalier went back to court and was awarded custody of Celeste and her children. By 1824, when Missouri passed a new law over allowing slaves to sue for their freedom, most of the Scypions were under control of the Chouteau's. In 1825, an attorney in St. Louis sued for the freedom of the Scypion family. Again the courts turned them down and in 1826, they again petitioned the court for their freedom. This time, Judge George Tompkins ruled in their favor that their suits could go forward and the families of Catiche, Celeste and Marguerite went to court against Pierre Chouteau. Chouteau beat and confined Celeste for this action.

This time a jury ruled against the Scypions and they remained slaves of Chouteau. By 1836, the legal wrangling over this family had been going on for 30 years and all agreed to a case tried in a small town in Missouri. A jury set all the Scypion descendants free and the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the verdict. Many of the Scypions had died by the time in 1838 that Marguerite vs. Pierre Chouteau would end Indian slavery in Missouri, 69 years after the Governor of the upper Louisiana territory had ordered it ended.

Dred Scott would be argued in 1846 in St. Louis.

For the full article from the Missouri Historical Review on the various trials of Marie Jean Scypion and her descendants to continue to pursue their freedom, written by William E. Foley, see http://statehistoricalsocietyofmissouri.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/mhr/id/41510/show/41366


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St. Louis Courthouse
http://www.issues4life.org/images/stlouiscourthouse680x465.jpg
 
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Virginie and Celeste, f.p.c. v. Himel, No. 3842, 10La. Ann. 185 (1855) is not a well known case, but interesting in perhaps giving an idea of the times. Joseph Bernard, a public house of entertainment keeper, moved from New Orleans to Cincinnati in 1835, taking his slave mistress Melite and her two children Virginie and Celeste with him. In Ohio, he formally manumitted all three of them. When he later moved to Missouri, a slave state, he again went to court and formally emancipated his mistress and children. He then moved back to Louisiana, where Melite died.

After his death, his white heirs took Virginie and Celeste and their children and sold them at auction in 1847. In 1853, the sisters and their children sued for their freedom and their wages from 1847 to 1853. The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that they were free, despite several questions brought by Bernard's white heirs. They suggested that his estate wasn't large enough to cover the 10% restriction that was part of Louisiana law. The Court determined that at the time of the original emancipation, Bernard had enough property to cover this. The heirs also alleged that Louisiana law forbade giving an estate to one's concubine, but the Court stated that this was not enough to disregard the emancipation of the slave mistress and her children.

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The case of is not famous for either the woman involved or the ruling, but for the lawyer who represented her. Maria Chapman married her husband in 1838 and had 5 children with him by 1851. When she discovered George's infidelity, she sued him for divorce and custody of the children. She was awarded both and he had to pay court costs. The attorney for Maria Chapman was Abraham Lincoln, who handled 115 divorce cases during his legal career.

Illinois was at the time the most liberal state for a woman to obtain a divorce. The western states were the earliest to give courts jurisdiction over divorce rather than the legislature and Illinois also made it cheaper for women without means to access the courts for a divorce.

Another case handled by Lincoln was that of Catherine Hampton, who sued her husband of 21 years for divorce, charging that he'd abandoned her and was living with another woman whom he treated as his wife. She also charged that he'd wasted his income on drink. In 1845 when she sued for divorce, she was living with 2 adult sons. Her divorce was granted by the court in Sangamon, Illinois.

For more information about Lincoln's divorce cases: http://www.lib.niu.edu/2003/ih030106.html

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