Charles Jones’s trial provides a unique lens into the practical implications of Presbyterian doctrine in the South before and during the civil rights movement. Because PCUS constricted presbyteries by banning segregation, Orange Presbytery could not officially act against Jones because of his integrationist projects. Instead, they needed to punish and critique him in code, though most people involved saw through the appeals to Presbyterian doctrine. Indeed, this represents a larger movement in southern churches. As larger church organizations, whether it be Presbytery, Baptist, or Methodist, moved toward integration policies, ministers who followed these rules and integrated their churches were often forced out. Jones’s case demonstrates how such a removal could happen and the response from the public when it did.
The public response to Jones’s trial showed the sharp divide within the Presbyterian Church between liberals and conservatives. Both sides used the Bible to advance their agendas, but conservatives clung to ideas of the spirituality of the Church while liberals attempted to advance Social Gospels. The appeals that both parties made followed distinct patterns. Conservatives tended to appeal to the “evil” of integration, invoking Old Testament stories. They also appealed to strict doctrinal readings that precluded the Church from investing in social projects. Liberals, in contrast, sought to further social justice because they believed that God dictated the Social Gospel. They appealed to images of good and promise, particularly in Jesus’s teachings, and believed that Christianity held more importance than Presbyterianism. Indeed, even today, religious language is a powerful tool in social justice movements and fights for racial equality.
Though Jones began his project early in the civil rights movement, these uses of the Bible and denominational doctrine continued to serve liberals and conservatives throughout the twentieth century. Jones’s trial provides a glimpse into the language of good and evil in the fight for racial equality in religious contexts.
Tyra Pearson
“Unnatural Mother”: Race,
Gender, and Infanticide in the
Nineteenth-Century South
On September 21, 1849, a slave named Mary left her quarters alone and in secret, found a place out of her master’s sight, and gave birth to a male child. After she had delivered her son, whom the coroner later characterized as having been born alive, healthy, and “in the peace of God and the state,” Mary assaulted her infant, killing him instantly. Later, after the child was discovered, Mary was arrested and indicted for infanticide. The indictment charged that she, the slave of Jesse Rankin, had “bestowed mortal wounds” onto her child by kicking and beating it with “both her hands and feet.” She continued to inflict harm by casting and throwing the newborn “against the ground” and repeatedly injuring his “head, temples, throat, wind pipe, stomach and back.” The indictment read that Mary did “kill and murder against the peace and dignity of the state.”1
Despite the evidence presented against Mary, the North Carolina Superior Court found her “not guilty,” freeing her of all charges and permitting her to return to her master’s farm. The court’s decision in this case mirrored the experience of many women who were
1 State v Mary (a slave), Fall 1849, Davidson County Criminal Action Concerning Slaves 1840, 1843, 1844, NorthCarolina, CR.032.928.9, North Carolina Department of Archives and History (NCDAH).
Tyra Pearson
charged with infanticide in the nineteenth-century American South. Even when the prosecution provided sufficient evidence to secure a guilty verdict, courts repeatedly found women not guilty of infanticide.
Nineteenth-century conceptions of gender, race, and condition of servitude pervaded the legal system and shaped court rulings. Infanticide cases are revelatory sources for understanding race and gender in the antebellum era. Infanticide was legally defined as a crime that could only be perpetrated by women. Nineteenth-century infanticide cases therefore highlight the roles that women were expected to perform and provide rare instances of women transcending race and legal status in the South. This article argues that infanticide cases in the South allowed women to transcend societal limitations even as they reinforced gendered expectations of southern women. Such cases illuminate contradictions within southern patriarchy and the institution of slavery.
Infanticide cases in North Carolina illuminate the intersection of race, gender, slavery, patriarchy, and the law. Historians have studied infanticide in the South, but primarily in the eighteenth century. One of the earliest works on this subject was Peter Hoffer and N.E. Hull’s study of infanticide in New England between 1558 and 1803, in which the authors analyzed data in order to understand the dynamics that caused women to murder their own children. In searching for those influences, Hoffer and Hull strove to understand why courts acquitted more women in the eighteenth century than they had in earlier periods. The authors believed that intricacies of the law could explain these changes and did not pay much attention to the women themselves.2 An analysis of nineteenth-century cases in the South
shows that the pattern of acquittal outlined by Hoffer and Hull continued into the nineteenth century and was not confined to northern states.
More recent scholarship has situated infanticide within the broad development of social constructs. In Narrating Infanticide: Constructing the Modern Gendered State in Nineteenth-Century America, Felicity Turner argues that infanticide narratives were critical to the formation of ideas
2 See Peter Hoffer and N.E.H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in Englandand New England 1558-1803(New York: New York University Press, 1984).
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regarding gender in the nineteenth century.3 A detailed examination of
southern infanticide cases, however, shows that infanticide narratives, in conjunction with courts’ decisions, did not help form new ideas about race and gender, but reinforced existing notions. In the nineteenth century, southerners had already formed strong opinions about race and gender, as many historians have shown. Indeed, as early as the late seventeenth century, supporters of slavery had used conceptions of race to support and justify bondage. By the same token, the definition and responsibilities of motherhood and womanhood had been firmly established in the South before the turn of the nineteenth century.
By the nineteenth century, the “peculiar institution” of slavery was deeply embedded in the South’s way of life. Many scholars have discussed the experiences and distinct vulnerability of enslaved women in the South, who were subjected to the most inhumane treatments, including sexual exploitation, psychological abuse, and physical mistreatment. Furthermore, these women’s legal status limited their social mobility,
3 Felicity Turner, Narrating Infanticide: Constructing the Modern Gendered State in Nineteenth-Century America (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010). For more recent scholarship on gender and race in the nineteenth-century American South, see Wilma King, “‘Mad’ Enough to Kill: Enslaved Women, Murder, and Southern Courts” In
The Journal of African American History92, no. 1 (Winter, 2007): 37-56.
The Modern Medea, a wood engraving of an enslaved woman who killed two of her four children to prevent them from living through the horrors of slavery. This was a common motivation for enslaved women who committed infanticide in the nineteenth century. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.)
Tyra Pearson
the customs they adopted, and the ways in which they interacted with one another.4 Analysis of infanticide cases, in which enslaved women
served as defendants, can demonstrate how these women drew upon their experiences to help them make choices in order to survive the depredations of “the peculiar institution.”
Infanticide cases also shed light on white women’s experiences in the nineteenth-century South. Many historians have discussed white women’s limited political and social power in the antebellum South, demonstrating that their rights and capabilities were solidified through marriage and their husband’s political and social power.5 White women’s experiences
can be further understood through the analysis of infanticide narratives formulated through witness testimonies, infanticide court documents, newspaper articles, and writings by nineteenth-century intellectuals.
These findings complicate modern ideas about women’s associations to slavery. Whereas some scholars have drawn a firm line between the daily lives of black and white women in the antebellum South, an examination of infanticide cases blurs that line due to similarities in the treatment of black and white women in North Carolina’s superior courts. Whether white or black, southern women were held to high standards of motherhood, making infanticide a highly gendered act that could transcend racial lines.
Court officials were reluctant to convict women for infanticide even when there was often satisfactory evidence to convict. The regularity of “not guilty” verdicts in these cases shows that factors outside the law influenced the court’s decisions to acquit women. In analyzing such verdicts, this article reveals that southern courts were pressured to make decisions that upheld entrenched southern social norms, the system of slavery, the patriarchal system, and conservative ideas of womanhood and motherhood. These findings expand on previous scholarship of women’s
4 For research on the experiences of enslaved people in the antebellum South, see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 34-42; Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976); and John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). For experiences of enslaved women on the plantation, see Deborah White Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South ( New York: Norton, 1999) and Marie Jenkins Schwarz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South
(Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Press, 2009).
5 See Laura Edwards, People and their Peace; Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Clara Lyons,
Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Genderand Power in the Age of Revolution,
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experiences in the nineteenth century and show how ideas surrounding slavery and patriarchy were woven into the South’s social, political, and legal fabric, shaping women’s choices and experiences in the nineteenth century.