Accident
Accidents were the leading cause of death in the CSI:D sample, and drowning was the leading cause of death among mortal accidents. There are myriad reasons why. Broad swaths of the American public did not know how to swim. Primary modes of transportation, especially early in the century, involved river routes. Mill ponds were prevalent. Children played outside—generally a good thing but occasionally a sad one. Perhaps the saddest of these incidents involved a mass May Day drowning at Boykin Mill Pond in 1860. Twenty-eight teenagers set off on a raft that hit a snag and more than twenty-five drowned, including all five children from one family. Sadder still may be the case of Noah Wesley Dawkins. In mid-June 1888, Dawkins and his friends, all African Americans, set off for a local watering hole where they ran into three white boys, one of whom offered Dawkins fifty cents if he would walk into a particular area in the creek, assuring him it wasn’t deep. It was deep, and Dawkins drowned. It is tempting to classify this as a homicide, but it is clear from testimony that the white children thought they were playing a cruel trick, not a deadly one.
Alcohol was such a critical indirect cause in so many of the accidental drownings, shootings, fires, and falls in CSI:D that it really ought to be regarded the deadliest force in nineteenth century South Carolina. In addition to these indirect roles, alcohol was the direct cause of accidental death in more than sixty cases. It was probably also a direct cause in many of the ‘exposure’ cases—bodies that were discovered outside and were thought to have died from exposure to the elements.
Nineteenth century law enforcement had no recourse to blood-alcohol tests. Even today, determining precise BACs postmortem, and working back from those to levels of inebriation at time of death, is fraught with difficulty. This meant that nineteenth-century coroners had to rely exclusively on witness testimony and the known habits of the deceased to determine alcohol’s role in producing death. Standing around a dead man, jurors found themselves passing judgment on just how drunk he had been the night before. According to witnesses, John Goodlett “seemed to be drunk.” John Agner was “sorry he was drunk.” Abe Waganan was “very funny & lively”—very drunk as [was] his custom.” Is ‘very drunk’ drop-dead drunk? It is hard to know. On the night of January 15, 1816, Angus McQueen drank more than half a gallon of spirits. “The dec’d was very much intoxicated,” noted one witness, “and fell down four times during which time he vomited upon the carpet.” Because McQueen kept getting up and falling down, the jurors determined that the falls (and the winter cold) contributed to his demise, though it is equally possible that McQueen died of alcohol poisoning. Juries were more likely to fix upon ‘intemperance’ as a clear cause of death if the deceased was a notorious addict. In December 1842, H. P. Church was discovered by his land-lady sprawled half on and half off of his bed. A “habitual drunkard” who had been continuously drinking for two weeks, she did not even bother to try and shake him awake. The inquest did not hesitate in finding that Church had died of intoxication.
The third leading cause of accidental deaths were ‘vehicular’ accidents, a catch-all category that includes drunken falls from a train and sober buckings from a horse. Further complicating this picture is the fact that many of the drownings probably belong in this category. There is little difference between falling unwitnessed off of a train and off of a boat, except that in one case you land on tracks and are quickly found where in the other you wash downstream, far from the site of the accident.
Bartholomew Darby was thrown from the saddle and hit his head on a stump, his wagon then “running over his head ... & breaking his neck & deeply cutting him under the right ear.” Steve Yeldell fell out of his cart and broke his neck.
All such accidents pale in comparison to the staggering mortality brought to South Carolina by train. Richard Springs was “run over by a train.” Fannie Ford was “run over by a train.”A slave named Sam was “Run over by [a] train.” Almost as soon as trains arrived in these counties, there were sots to fall off of them, laborers to be crushed by them, and depressives to jump in front of them. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a technological innovation responsible for a sharper uptick in the per capita death rate. It is also clear that coroners and inquest juries were unprepared for the level of bodily violence meted out by train. The body of a slave named Berry was “very much mashed and limbs and bones severed.” William Abbott’s body was “mangled, bruised, cut and crushed.” Even so coroners and their juries were often at pains to absolve the railroad itself of any wrong-doing. Hosea Jackson “came to his death by his own carelessness and from no carelessness whatever on the part of the engineer.” The crushing of William Roberts was likewise “not caused by any dereliction of duty on the part of the rail-road employees.” With train accidents we see for the first time the question of corporate responsibility, and potential corporate liability, creeping into the inquest process.
The larger point, however, is a physical one. Moving the body at a faster speed than the body was designed to go is an enormous convenience that has to be paid for. Today vehicular accidents (car, motorcycle, and all-terrain-vehicle) are the fourth-leading cause of death among Americans after heart disease, cancer, and stroke. The nineteenth century was not particularly different, except that families moved by horse, wagon, and train—and died less often of cancer.
The fourth leading cause of accidental death in the CSI:D sample involved the discharge of firearms. Some were simple cases of men who were cleaning or handling weapons that suddenly went off. The vast majority of cases, however, involve an unfortunate bystander. In 1849, Tilman Attaway was mistaken for a turkey by his hunting buddy. In 1808, James Spradley was leaning in to watch two dogs fight over a dead deer. Fourteen-year old George Nettles sought to break up the dogs by bashing one of them with the butt of his gun. Instead the gun discharged into Spradley’s face. As this case attests, guns and children made as disastrous a pairing then as they do now. In 1820 ten-year old Mancel King accidentally shot and killed his brother. In 1899 ten-year old John McManus shot and killed his friend. “I was fooling with the pistol and it went off,” he told the inquest.
Undoubtedly some of these gun-related ‘accidents’ were not accidents at all. A dead man alone in a room might have been cleaning his gun, or he might have harbored hidden miseries. Similarly some of the accidental misfires on bystanders were probably intentional homicides. Unless new evidence emerges at this late date, however, such cases will have to remain categorized as accidents.
The fifth leading cause of death by accident in the CSI:D sample was death by suffocation—another category that speaks more to what a coroner was called to investigate than to what people actually died from. A majority of the ‘smothering’ deaths were probably SIDS victims. In white households such cases would not have been investigated—infant mortality was relatively high in the period and a white family’s ‘dear pledges’ were often ‘recalled to God.’ But in a society where every enslaved child was as potentially valuable as a Lexus, infant death in the quarter was more rigorously investigated. Coupled with deep prejudices against enslaved mothers, inquests typically found that an unnamed “negro Child” was “negligently Smothered” by its mother, or that the enslaved child Lora was “accidentally smothered” in the family bed, or that the enslaved children Henry and Alcy were crushed in the night, having being “overlaid” by their parents. It is possible that such ‘negligence’ did occur among overworked and overtired slaves, and such findings were far preferable to those cases where enslaved parents were charged with infanticide.
The sixth leading cause of death by accident in the CSI:D sample was death by fire. Most homes in the period were made of wood. Most had fireplaces. None had a fire extinguisher. Fire was light and life, but it was also occasionally death. In 1866 a freedman named Sloan was burnt to death in a gin house. In 1890 a child named Julia Hightower wandered too close to the family fireplace. Her younger sister tried to dowse her with water to no avail.
These six types of accidental death—drowning, alcohol abuse, transportation mishaps, gun miscues, suffocations, and fires—account for 75% of the accidental deaths in the CSI:D sample. Other relatively common accidents involved falling trees and limbs, industrial accidents, and poisonings and overdoses. Rounding out the sample were accidents that were more unique. Home alone, Medora Williams had an epileptic seizure and fell into her own fireplace. Traveling with the Bailey & Company circus, George West was gored by his own elephant. (Some might not consider this an ‘accident’ since the elephant had ‘cause’; and acted with ‘intent.’)
NEXT: Natural Causes
Accident Inquests
Name | Deceased Description | Date | Inquest Location | Death Method | Inquest Finding |
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female infant Slave | female infant Slave | May 15, 1847 | at A. S. Gregorys, Union County, SC |
upon oaths do say that . . .they do believe the child must have been Smothered by its mother in bed |
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Rachail Langley | December 30, 1878 | in Spartanburg Co., Spartanburg County, SC |
upon their oaths do say ... the said Rachail Langley came to her death from indigestion caused by eating too much heartily of unwholesome diet |
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Milton Barter[?] | youth | August 24, 1849 | at Capt. Andrew J Hammonds Mills, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their Oaths do say . . .by accidental drowning in Mr Andrew Hammonds Mill Pond |
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Jim Mason | free man of color | January 9, 1850 | near the residence of William Poole, Anderson County, SC |
do say that he was of extremely intermperate habits, and altho there is no positive proof that he was drunk when last seen, the jury and unanimously of opinion before all the circumstances, that he was laboring under the influence of drink, and came to his death from the effect of his habits and exposure to the weather, during the rain and storm of Sunday night and monday last. |
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slave | slave | June 24, 1843 | at Thomas Holland's, Kershaw County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that according to evidence believe the said child was strangled to death by its mother's milk |
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John Ronnie | February 15, 1898 | Kershaw County, SC | |||
Andy Yongue | Fairfield County, SC |
NO OFFICIAL STATEMENT |
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James Adis | June 13, 1818 | Union County, SC |
do say u[?] thr oaths that the desceased [?] come to his by being drowned |
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John H Webb | January 22, 1882 | at James Webb Residence, Edgefield County, SC |
upon there oaths do Say . . .that said John H Webb Came to his Death from Drowning in Sleepy Creek |
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Henry | July 6, 1834 | at the house of John Holly, Fairfield County, SC |
do say upon their oaths that they believe said Henry came to his death by going in to little river to wash or bathe himself it happened that accidently casually and by misfortune he the said Henry suffocated and drowned |
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James Crooks | March 29, 1807 | at little River Near Laurens Court house, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oath here insert that in Crossing a log he fell in & was Drowned. |
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Koon | female child | April 23, 1836 | at the house of Davin M[?] [?], Union County, SC |
do say upon their oaths that the said child . . .died by the visitation of God by accidentally Getting Droud in the Spring |
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Wade Harper | September 3, 1924 | at Cheraw, Chesterfield County, SC |
Wade Harper, about 17 years old, son of J. F. Harper, of Cheraw S.C. came to his death at Anderson's Mill, Cheraw, by mischance, without blame on the part of another person |
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Esther Jeter | April 17, 1893 | at Huiets x Roads, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the aforesaid Esther Jeter came to her death by accident. . .burned to death |
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Amelia A. Alexander | May 5, 1860 | at Boykin's Mill, Kershaw County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the said Amelia A. Alexander came to her death by accidental drowning in the millpond of A.H. Boykin. . .by sinking of a Flat caused by the weight of between fifty-three & fifty-six persons |
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Willie Sizemore | August 7, 1882 | Spartanburg County, SC |
upon their oaths aforesaid do say that the said Willie Sizemore ... came to his death by misfortune or accident |
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Callen O'Neall | November 11, 1855 | at Luke Havirds[?], Edgefield County, SC |
upon their Oaths do say, that the said Callen Oneall came to his death. . .By drinking too much liquor and supposed to have strangled to death by Throwing up |
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Thomas Bramblet | May 28, 1889 | at Laurens Court House, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the said Thomas Bramblet came to his death by being accidentally struck by the Hose Reel, near the Greenville Laurens RR trestle on the evening of the 27 of May 1889. |
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George Gardner | January 22, 1935 | in Chesterfield County, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their Oaths do say that George Gardner received . . . mortal wound by Rifle Shot in the hand of Rance Cue some being unavoidable accident |
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Rebecca Hendrix | June 11, 1834 | at the house of Capt. Peter Hamilton, Spartanburg County, SC |
do say upon their oaths are of opinion that she came to her death by accidentally falling into the cogs of the mill |
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James Edwards | little boy | January 14, 1876 | at Enoree Church, Greenville County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the aforesaid James Edwards came to his death by being accidentally burnt by his clothers taken on fire |
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Chas McQueen | February 5, 1895 | at Chas. McQueen's place, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: That Chas McQueen came to his death from some bodily ailment unknown to us and by exposure in the cold |
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infant child | infant child | June 14, 1891 | at Kenny Grave Yard, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the Said Child Came to his death from Suffication |
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Samuel Whillow | December 17, 1818 | Laurens County, SC |
We the Jurors after having been lawfully summoned, & sworn by James Watts having examined the body of decsd. Give it as our opinion that sd. Whillow came to his death by reason of his being very much intoxicated with ardent spirits & in attempting to go home some time about dark forced his young horse in saluda river at Childs' Ferry & drowned... |
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Jesse | May 15, 1850 | at Lyles Ford on the Broad River, Fairfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the negro man came to his dead by drowing or accident to the Jurors unknown |
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John Madison Winburn | April 21, 1887 | at J. C. Winburn's, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the said John Madison Winburn came to his death by Accidental drowning at J. C. Winburns Still |
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William Hopkins | at J. Feaster Lyles' plantation, Fairfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that he came to his death by the accidental discharge of a shot gun in the hands of Robert Hopkins[.] |
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Siller | female slave | November 12, 1842 | at an oald wast house in the plantation of Mrs Susannah Turners, Union County, SC |
upon their oaths do say, that . . .the said Siller axcidently caught fire in her beding whilst a sleep, and from inability to help her Self ware burned to death |
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Tom | negro man Slave | August 21, 1850 | at H. L. Maysons in Beach island, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the negro man Tom came to his death from being accidentally drowned in savanah river |
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Male Infant | Male Infant | March 20, 1884 | at the Jeff Sumerel place, Laurens County, SC |
upon their Oaths do say; that the deceased male infant came to his death by suffocation or mischance. . . |
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John Cotton | March 15, 1826 | at the river bank in Mr. Jno. Nelson's field, Kershaw County, SC |
do say upon their oaths that on the second day January last that the said John Cotton came to his death by attempting to go to the shore from a boat that was lodged in the shoal near Jones Mills within said district and was drowned accidentally and not otherwise |
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Titus | July 19, 1857 | at the Thoroughfair landing, Horry County, SC |
upon their Oaths do say, that the said negro slave Titus came to his death by accidental drowning |
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Alice Robinson | May 5, 1860 | at Boykin's Mill, Kershaw County, SC | |||
Ella Davis | at the dwelling house of Alice Simms, Fairfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the said Ella Davis, being a child of six years, and having been left alone in the dwelling house of said Alice Simms by the said Alice, the mother of said child, in the afternoon of the day aforesaid, no one being present and able to protect her, accidently took fire on her clothing and died from burning and suffocation[.] |
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Tip Jackson | November 29, 1885 | near New Prospect, Spartanburg County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that Tip Jackson came to his death by accidentally falling down a steep bank about fourteen feet, his neck falling across a log causing suffocation new New Prospect on the Mills Gap Road about midnight |
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Mary Harrison | September 10, 1894 | at Dornville, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say, that the said Mary Harris, aforesaid, came to her death. . .by accidental scalding with hot Water |
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Isaac Grimer | December 10, 1868 | at Jacobs Branch on the Spaun Church road, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say That Isaac Grimer came to his death on the Spann Church road near Jacobs Church ... by misfortune or accident |
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A. G. Howard | February 28, 1860 | at Grannet Ville Depot, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that. . .he came to his death by accident that is by being struck a falling pine tree which stood by the side of the road where he was passing which tree was burned down having caught fire from the burning of the woods around it |
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John Maddox | June 15, 1881 | at Williamston, Anderson County, SC |
do say that the aforesaid John Madox came to his death by his own act of going into the Saluda in said county^ River and getting drowned. |
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Unknown | March 26, 1877 | at James McGill's, Fairfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the said child came to its death by being accidently overlain by its Mother, and was smothered to death. |
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Furman Smith | December 16, 1874 | at Snow Hill, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: That the said William Smith & Furman Smith came to their death by misfortune or accidently being burned |
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William Smith | December 16, 1874 | at Snow Hill, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: That the said William Smith & Furman Smith came to their death by misfortune or accidently being burned |
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William Giles | Capt | May 13, 1811 | at his own Dweling, Union County, SC |
do Say on their Oaths that . . .William Giles Came to his Death by fall of a Limb from a tree which appears to have Broake his skull and one of his arms |
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infant female | infant female | November 25, 1880 | at T. H. Long, Greenville County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that . . . the said infant came to its death by being smothered by its Mother accidentally while she was asleep in bed |
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John Dawkins | July 14, 1904 | [in] Chesterfield County, South Carolina, Chesterfield County, SC |
before their oaths do say that the said John Dawkins caused to his death by his own negligence |
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infant child | infant child | January 18, 1892 | at the Plantation of L. G. Swearinger, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say from suffocation |
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Alexander | January 2, 1862 | at Dr. Austins, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the said Alexander came to his death Jany 1st by accident having been caught in the running gear of the gin. |
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Nancy James | March 13, 1875 | at Thomas[?] Fegins[?], Fairfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: She came to her death bye falling in a ditch |
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Charlie Woodard | November 15, 1915 | at H. L. Woodards, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: By accidental gunshot from his own hands |
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Daniel Fountain | Unknown, Fairfield County, SC |
upon their oaths [do] say that he was shot accidentally by [a] pistol in the hands of his brother [?] Fountain about seven years old, about three Oclock yesterday evening and died [?] morning near Wallaceville[?]. |