Missouri law’s self-defense statute explicitly excluded enslaved women from womanhood

Evidence

Celia confessed to Jefferson Jones, who was sent by white citizens to interview her in her prison cell to find out if she had any accomplices. She was tried for first-degree murder before a jury composed entirely of white men, and Jones testified for the prosecution. Celia argued that she should be found not guilty under the state law of self-defense. An 1854 Missouri statute provided that women could defend themselves against “every person who shall take any woman, unlawfully, against her will, with intent to compel her by force, menace or duress…to be defiled” (emphasis added). But the presiding judge instructed the jury that the law didn’t apply to Celia, for Celia didn’t fall within the category of “any woman.” Instead, the judge considered Celia the chattel property of Newsom and therefore without any legal right to protect herself against him. The jury found Celia guilty of murdering Newsom. The judge delayed her execution so she could give birth to her third child, which would become the property of the Newsom family. But the baby was stillborn; Celia’s other two children were sold. Celia was hanged on December 21, 1855. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 221

Categorization

• DEFINE: The judge’s ruling that Celia was not ‘any woman’ is the sharpest possible definitional boundary: personhood vs. chattel put in explicit legal language.
• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s stated purpose — this is a precise, citable empirical anchor for the claim that law structurally excluded enslaved people from human categories. Complements the reframing-vs-deviation distinction.
• DEEPTHINKING: The judge’s decision to delay execution so she could give birth first — so the child would belong to the Newsom family — is a compressed demonstration of the entire chattel system in one judicial act: reproduction as property transfer carried out by the state itself.
• SEED: Essay angle: how the legal fiction of ‘any woman’ operated — the categories of personhood that statutes create and the boundary-violation of those who fell outside, a framework applicable to modern legal exclusions.
• SHARE: Would send to a legal historian or anyone teaching the law of slavery — the 1854 Missouri statute text versus the judge’s ruling is a perfect primary-source teaching moment.