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.
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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
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Deceased Description | Date | Inquest Location | Death Method | Inquest Finding |
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Emma Williams | January 8, 1894 | at J.O.C. Fleming's mill, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the said Emma Williams came to her death By accident, having been caught in the machinery of the mill. |
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Enoch Adams | November 23, 1916 | at Cheraw, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: that he came to his death by caving in of Cotton Seed upon him at the Cheraw oil mill being smothered. |
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Enoch Douglass | August 11, 1879 | near Wesly Barrs on the rail road, Edgefield County, SC |
upon there oaths do say that the said Enoch Douglass came to his death by accident |
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Enoch McLean | August 27, 1840 | at Wm C. Brown's, Union County, SC |
upon their oaths do say . . .came to his death by misfortune or accident |
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Ephram Chapman | February 15, 1885 | at Thomson Creek Bridge on Cheraw Road, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: That the deceased came to his death by freezing on the night of the 12th of Feb. A D 1885 and the deceased was unknown to us all |
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Ernest Bean | April 6, 1884 | at the Mill of B[?] Hill, Edgefield County, SC |
upon there oaths do say that Ernest Bean Came his death from accidental drowned |
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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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Eugenia Richardson | on James McGill's plantation, Fairfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that she was accidently over layed by her mother and smothered to death, and came to her death by misfortune or accident. |
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Euphemia Jones | child | February 6, 1894 | on the plantation of Mr. Stroud, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say the said Euphemia Jones here deceased came to her death from being burned, by accident, whereunto we the jurors and coroner here set our names and seals. |
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Eva Blocker | February 11, 1893 | at J. P. Wrights Plantation, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the said Eva Blocker. . .came to her death by accidental burning |
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Eva Tucker | May 29, 1894 | at R. P. Tucker's place, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: that the said Eva Tucker came to her death from an accidental pistol shot wound in the hands of Wm M Chappell, inflicted on or about the 27th of April 1894 |
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Evans Campbell | March 14, 1892 | at Rhett Copelands, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that Evans Campbell came to his death by Accident or Misfortune, By the burning of the house he was in |
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Everett Hook | July 18, 1891 | at the saw Mill of M J Hook, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say by accidently falling upon a cicular Saw While in Motion |
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Ezekiel Thomas | February 4, 1879 | near Johnstons, Edgefield County, SC | train |
upon their oaths do say that the said Ezekiel Thomas came to his death by a collission of the Sharlott Columbia and Augusta Train No 3 coming from Columbia going south from Columbia on the high way coming in contact with him and his wagon & [?] while attempting to cross the tract on a publick Road |
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F. H. McNair | February 2, 1899 | on E.M. Wells' Plantation, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say. And so the jurors aforesaid do say that F H McNair in manner aforesaid came to his death by natural causes |
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Fannie Dennis | March 6, 1950 | at Cheraw, S.C., Chesterfield County, SC | automobile |
upon their oaths do say that Farris Dennis received in Chesterfield County a mortal wound by Car-Truck Collision in the hands of Tim Robinson |
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Fannie Ford | March 5, 1893 | at Trenton S.C., Edgefield County, SC | train |
upon their oaths do say that. . .Fannie Ford came to her death from being run over by a train |
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Fannie Patton | November 18, 1898 | at Francis Williams house, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that upon examination find that Fannie Patton Came to her death by accidental Drowning |
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Fanny | July 22, 1856 | at "Gressetts Landing or Store Landing" on the Waccamaw River, Horry County, SC |
upon their Oaths do say that the said slave Fanny the porperty . . . of the said R. G. W. Grissett did on Sunday the 20.th Inst came to her death by Misfortune or accidental drowning |
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Fany | female slave | June 11, 1855 | at Mrs Jane Clowneys, Union County, SC |
upon there Oaths do say that they Believe she Dsed Came to her death . . .by some cause to the Jury unknown think she might have died sadingly from some Lingering diseasas she was very often Complaing . . .or might have Falen in the Beauch & was unable to get out & Drowned as she was found in the Beach |
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Faye Bennett | February 6, 1938 | at Chesterfield, Chesterfield County, SC | automobile |
upon their oaths do say that Faye Bennett received in Chesterfield County a mortal wound by Being struck by automobile in the hands of J. M. McDonald |
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female child | female child | May 19, 1879 | at Greenville, Greenville County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the unknown female child . . . came to her death. . . by mischance or accident or from causes to this jury unknown |
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Female Child of Press & Lindy Beasley | Female Child of Press & Lindy Beasley | August 30, 1890 | on the plantation of Capt Alex Henry's, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the said female child came to its death from "suffocation" |
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Female Infant of Milly Campbell | Female Infant of Milly Campbell | October 17, 1867 | at Laurens C.H., Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say - that it came to its death by accidental Suffocation. |
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female Infant Slave | female Infant Slave | December 25, 1846 | at the plantation of J. C. Ison, Union County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that . . .the child was . . .smothered in bed by its mother throuch[?] or by accident without having any intention to do so |
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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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female Infant Slave | female Infant Slave | May 30, 1847 | at the house of Mrs Sarow Brandons, Union County, SC |
upon their oaths do say . . .the child dyed by the visitation of god or [?] have been axcidently Smothered by its mother |
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Fleetwood Moody | May 20, 1936 | at Patrick, Chesterfield County, SC |
Upon their oaths do say that Fleetwood Moody received in Chesterfield County a mortal wound by Burned in the hands of origin unknown . . . came to his death from burns and suffocation origin unknown |
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Flemming Taylor | at Jack Taylors house, Fairfield County, SC |
upon their Oaths do say that deceased came to his death near his home on P W Clarks place in Fairfield County SC the 15 day of Nov 1896 from a Pistols Shot Wound at hands of Abram Kennedy |
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Fletcher Boan | October 25, 1947 | at Chesterfield, Chesterfield County, SC | tree |
upon their oaths do say that Fletcher Boan received in Chesterfield County a mortal wound by________ in the hands of_________ |
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Fletcher Forest Hankins | June 18, 1941 | at Jefferson, S.C., Chesterfield County, SC | automobile |
[No official declaration] |
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Fletcher McFarland | January 17, 1881 | at Davis McFarlands, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say That the Said Fletcher McFarland came to his death by being burned and that it was accidently |
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Flora Bell Ford | October 18, 1948 | at Cheraw, Chesterfield County, SC | automobile |
upon their oaths do say that Flora Bell Ford received in Chesterfield County a mortal wound by Ford Automobile in the hands of William Sanders |
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Francis Sanders | April 27, 1848 | at Sakin's[?] Mill, Fairfield County, SC |
we the Jurors do find and [?] that the said Francis Sanders; came to his death by drowning in the Broad River on the 26th[?] April 1848. |
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Frank | a negro boy | December 11, 1866 | [at] Liberty Hill, Kershaw County, SC | pistol |
upon their oaths do say that the said Boy Frank came to his death by a shot from a pistol accidentally fired by his brother named Lee |
Frank Young | June 28, 1874 | at Broom's Mill, Fairfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say: That Frank Young (colored) while bathing in Broom's Mill Pond in said County before noon on the 27th day of Juned 1874, did then and there come to his death by accidental drowning; |
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Frank Young | in Fairfield County, South Carolina, Fairfield County, SC |
We find that the deceased Frank Young came to his death by accidental drowning |
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Frank Young | infant | January 11, 1877 | at Greenville, Greenville County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the child came to its by accidentaly being overlaid by its mother. |
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Franklin Turner | son | December 26, 1850 | at John Turners, Union County, SC |
upon their oaths do say . . .that the aforesaid Franklin Turner . . .came to his death by misfortune or accident |
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Fred Demby | October 12, 1945 | at Pageland, Chesterfield County, SC | automobile |
upon their oaths do say: Fred Demby came to his death by a car being driven by the hands of Abe Clark |
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Fred Hanna | November 27, 1939 | at Ruby, S.C., Chesterfield County, SC | automobile |
upon their oaths do say that Fred Hanna received in Chesterfield County a mortal wound by automobile in the hands of T. G. Griggs, Jr. |
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Fred Walker | February 10, 1929 | at Cheraw, Chesterfield County, SC | train |
the Said Fred Walker came to his death by being run over by a Seaboard train |
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Freeman Holten | November 5, 1826 | at, or near, Mr. John B. Pickett's rig[?] at Mr. Richard Harrison's Mill, Fairfield County, SC |
do say upon their oaths that the said Freeman Holton came to his death on the 4th of November in A Mill house of Mr. Richard B Harrison's came to his death by a Fall from the upper Story in the inside of the House, the floors not being laid |
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Friday | slave | October 6, 1830 | at the house of Robt Martin, Union County, SC |
upon their oaths do say . . .that the sd Friday a slave came to his death by accident . . .on tyson River by the water wheel of Gd[?] Mill catching him the sd Friday a slave between the arm of Gd[?] wheel and a sile near it |
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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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Gabriel Gibson | April 18, 1819 | at Elbethel Meeting house, Union County, SC |
Doe say upon their oaths that . . .Gabriel Gibson Came to his End By Mischance & Say that he was Spliting Roling Down A Decent |
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George | May 6, 1849 | at C... Garlington Mill pond, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do Say by accidental drowning. |
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George | February 6, 1815 | at the plantation of Daniel Brag, Laurens County, SC |
doth say upon their oaths saith that on the 5th of this instant in crossing Enoree River got wash. Off his horse and got drowned. |
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George Bowers | May 26, 1891 | at Kenards bend, Edgefield County, SC | mule |
upon their oaths do say that George Bowers came to his death by misfortunes or being thrown from a Mule getting his foot hung in trace and dragged to death |
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George Craig | January 19, 1825 | at the house of Mathew Richmond, Fairfield County, SC |
do say upon their oaths that, according evidence and their own belief a tree which he assisted to cutdown, by misfortune fell on him and broke his scull on the evening of the 18th. |