Reform vs. Resistance Theme Analysis

The events of Celia, A Slave occur against the backdrop of an increasingly untenable, increasingly violent debate over the future of slavery in America, which took place in the 1840s and ‘50s and paved the way for the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860. For those determined to abolish slavery, or at least prevent its spread into Kansas and the other western territories of the United States, the question of how best to oppose the institution was a crucial one. On the one hand, many opponents of slavery tried to contain its spread and call for its abolition through legal pathways. In the first half of the nineteenth century, congressmen introduced over a hundred bills calling for the end of slavery, all of which were shot down.

There are many examples of similar (and similarly futile) attempts at peaceful reform within Celia, A Slave. The anti-slavery “free-soilers” in Kansas encouraged migrants to establish family-based farmsteads (without slaves) in the Kansas territory, hoping that the influx of likeminded anti-slavery farmers would create an anti-slavery majority in the territory, meaning that when Kansas applied for statehood, it would be admitted into the union as a free state. (An earlier bill, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, had called for “popular sovereignty” in Kansas, leaving the question of whether the state should support slavery up to the people who lived there.) Similarly, Celia’s lawyers appear to have attempted to undermine the institution of slavery by arguing that Celia had a right to defend herself against sexual violence, and trying to instruct the jury to reach a verdict with that in consideration. Such an argument, if accepted by the judge and then confirmed by the jury, would have established the full personhood of slaves with unprecedented clarity, and would have, as a legal precedent, proved disastrous for the institution of slavery. When the judge did not accept the lawyers’ instructions, the lawyers then appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, a last ditch effort.

Other opponents of slavery, seeing that trying to reform slavery from within the legal system was a losing game, resorted to more extreme forms of resistance. McLaurin notes the perennial violence in Kansas (which eventually became known as as “Bleeding Kansas”) committed mostly by proslavery “border ruffians,” but also by abolitionists. McLaurin also comments on the slave rebellions of the era, namely Nat Turner’s rebellion and the Haitian Revolution. In both instances, slaves took up arms against their masters (successfully so in Haiti).

On the “micro” level, McLaurin insinuates that Celia’s lawyers helped break her out of jail when they discovered the judge would not grant her a stay order (i.e. would not postpone her execution date, even though her case was awaiting consideration from the Supreme Court). While not violent, this act certainly constituted an illegal form of resistance. Then, there is Celia’s own personal act of resistance: her killing of Robert Newsom. While she did so in self-defense, and so likely did not consciously understand the act as political, the implications of the killing were unambiguously political. In killing Newsom, Celia stood up for her personhood and her right to consent—an act that by definition challenged the institution of slavery.

The impending Civil War looms heavily over the events of Celia, A Slave. In 1855, when the book is set, there were very few Americans who genuinely wanted to fight a civil war over their political convictions. But American slaveholders were so opposed to compromise that peaceful, legal attempts at reform did very little to improve the human rights situation for millions of black slaves. Slaves, and the free whites who supported their liberation, faced a difficult choice. They could either try legal, gradualist means of fighting slavery—means which were usually futile—or they could take the law into their own hands and opt for radical, often violent means. McLaurin suggests that the latter, radical form of resistance was the most moral approach, both during the events dramatized in Celia, A Slave and in the Civil War itself.