Homicide
In 1827, a slave named Ambrose escaped from his owner Berryman Burger. Like most runaways, Ambrose did not make the dangerous trek north but remained in the area, a practice called ‘lying out.’ In most cases, such slaves kept a low profile, living off the land or from scraps gleaned from friends and compatriots in the quarter. Ambrose, however, took a different path, waging guerrilla war against slavery and local slaveholders. Over the course of more than a year he broke into barns, slaughtered hogs and poultry, pillaged smokehouses, burned outbuildings, destroyed cotton, and generally behaved like a local Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and returning to his fellow slaves. Within months, Ambrose had induced other runaways to join him, and he was regarded by local planters as a “desperate character ... capable of any act of villainy” who should be killed on sight.
Early in the morning of September 24, 1828, a local white man, Kirkland Harmon, surprised Ambrose in his camp and gunned him down as he rose. Ambrose winced as the buckshot “enter[ed] his back loins & hips,” and he bled out on the ground. His one-man rebellion was effectively over. Without the coroner’s inquest convened over his body, however, we would know nothing of his rebellion; the record of his death is the only record we have of his life. How many Ambroses were there? It is hard to know. To its credit, Ambrose’s band picked up his mantle and continued to operate in the area as a plague to local planters.
I was not surprised to learn that such local resistance was quashed and that slaves like Ambrose were routinely murdered. I was surprised to learn how often the coroner responded. In her WPA interview, the former slave Mittie Freeman remembered the coroner as “that fellow that comes running fast when somebody gets killed,” and the coroner is mentioned in quite a few of the most famous slave narratives, including those by Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown. The coroner was often the only magistrate mentioned because he was the only ‘outside’ law the slaves ever saw. We will never know precisely how many enslavers murdered their slaves and effortlessly covered it up. But in cases where the murderer was someone other than the enslaver, or where the enslaver failed to cover it up, there usually was an investigation, at the very least because property had been destroyed, and someone expected compensation.
Reflecting on the South he was forced to flee because of his Unionism, John Aughey noted: “Of course the laws which exist in every state against the murder or torturing of slaves are about as well observed as might be laws enacted by wolves against sheep-murder.” But in the coroners’ inquest there was actually a subtle game of community standards going on. Standing over the body of a slave and surveying the grim damage, a coroner’s jury was often perfectly comfortable recommending that a white be indicted. And at coroner’s inquests slaves were allowed to testify. The actual jury nullification came later, in the courtroom, when the mangled body was not actually present and the murderer was let off. But by then he had been held up to public scrutiny; his judgment and decency had been questioned publicly and legally. It is less than justice, but it is not nothing, a fact which slaves themselves recognized. When the coroner came a-runnin’, many slaves thought he might bring justice with him from some far off, saner place. And in his own Narrative, Frederick Douglass tells the story of an unnamed slave girl whose mistress “pounded in her skull” with a piece of firewood because she allowed a baby to cry uncontrollably and wake the household. “I will not say that this murder most foul produced no sensation. It did produce a sensation. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Mrs. Hicks, but incredible to tell, for some reason or other, that warrant was never served, and she not only escaped condign punishment, but the pain and mortification as well of being arraigned before a court of justice.” It is hard to believe that for all he’d seen of the institution of slavery, Douglass still thought it capable of any justice at all.
What does not make it into many of the slave narratives, including Douglass’s, is the violence that existed within the slave community. Enslavement does not magically transform all who endure it into savvy, self-sustaining freedom-fighters. If we are going to grant the enslaved their full humanity we must grant that, like any other group of people, they occasionally fought, fornicated, and got into petty disputes that sometimes took a murderous turn. To be sure, as historian Steven Hahn has noted, the slave quarter produced one of the most radical and transformative politics ever seen in America, a politics that produced Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass and finally brought down a $3.5 billion dollar interest. But in coroners reports we get a glimpse of the violence that existed within the slave community that we knew had to be there. Thus did the enslaved of the Haile plantation turn their children over to Tamer, the enslaved nurse, on their way out to the fields, little knowing that she liked to punish the children by tying them too close to a fire, a practice that was only discovered when she finally cooked one of them to death. Or take the case of an enslaved man named Dick who became so jealous that he pulled a log from a fire and murdered the man who was staying in the cabin of a woman he wanted to sleep with.
Today, the typical homicide in the United States involves one man shooting another, and this is equally true in the CSI:Dixie database. Comparatively speaking, the CSI:D sample has a higher percentage of male victims and a lower percentage of gun use. Today firearms are used in 68% of American homicides; in the CSI:D sample guns are used 52% of the time. Today 77% of homicide victims are male; in the CSI:D sample 88% are male (and virtually all of the perpetrators are men). Put bluntly, in the nineteenth century south, violent death was a more exclusively male province, and Death had more faces.
Interestingly, though, in the CSI:D database virtually none of the gun-related homicides are related to robbery. Most are the product of the highly combustible combination of anger and alcohol. The last words of J. Edward Sims were typical: “Shoot you damed cowardly son of a Bitch.” Or take this poignant exchange:
Tom Rutland (firing): “I will kill you, you son of a bitch.”
William Padgett (bleeding): “You have already.”
In the strange alchemy of the male brain, friends became mortal enemies in an instant, often over trivialities. “How in the hell did you Gap up My ax?” Gus Settler demanded to know of Allen Holmes in March 1882. I hardly know what a gapped-up axe looks like, but I do know that returning a borrowed tool in less than satisfactory condition is no grounds for murder. Settler disagreed and shot Holmes dead.
Infanticide
Life in the Faulknerian world of CSI:D was especially cheap for children. Catherine Berry, a domestic in the R. C. Poole household, was told that she would be terminated if she was indeed pregnant. In an awful feat of endurance, she continued with her chores until, doubled over with pain, she snuck away to give birth in the potato shed. Reeling from the loss of blood, she still managed to strangle the baby and fling it into the Pacolet River, where it washed up at the feet of some fishermen. When Peggy Bedenbaugh felt her first contractions, she went out to a corner of the yard, gave birth in a hole, and covered the baby over with dirt. Luly Collins threw her baby down a well. Nancy Owens swept hers under a brush pile. All had denied for months that they were in the “family way”; all had killed the evidence; all were indicted for murder.
Or take the case of Jane Arnold. On September 7, 1857, Brazeal Cox and his wife found sixteen-year-old Jane Arnold stretched out on the ground with a baby beside her, bleeding from its umbilical cord. When Arnold became aware of the couple she called out to Mrs. Cox, who wrapped the dying infant in Arnold’s apron and took it into the Arnold home. Mrs. Cox then returned and asked the girl why she hadn’t given birth indoors. Because her daddy was “doging” her, she said, and had cast her from the house. “She seemed to be grieving,” Cox told the coroner in a model of understatement, “but [I] don’t know what for, whether on the part of her dead child or the abuse of her father.”
Three years later, at four in the morning, a shivering Jane Arnold knocked at the door of a neighboring farm. She was cold and unkempt, but she couldn’t make up her mind to stay. Instead she returned to the abandoned schoolhouse where she had taken her latest baby, born in the middle of the road, to die of exposure.
The coroners’ office reveals a world where men force women into sex and women pay the price for it, in embarrassing pregnancies, social stigma, and the occasionally desperate attempt to cover up the evidence. In 1829 a fire in Thomas Welsh’s smoke-house revealed a small cubby in which a full term child had been secreted in a jar of lime. It is impossible to know whether this was an infanticide or a child who had been stillborn. Regardless the mother was covering up something. Occasionally that something was an interracial liaison. More often it was simply a pregnancy out-of-wedlock. Many of the cases reveal that the women had been trying for some time to induce an abortion. ‘Home remedies’ for pregnancy mentioned in the CSI:D sample include savin powder mixed with turpentine, red bark bay tea, and the ashes of dried corn cobs. In this sense some of the infanticides might be considered extremely late-term abortions. One unnamed mother, for instance, gave birth to a stillborn child who bore unmistakable marks of abuse en utero. M. Lipscomb was found doubled over a fence having apparently bled out in a botched, self-induced abortion.
Almost sadder is the number of women who were held to account for the ‘murder’ of infants who had most likely died of crib death or SIDS. Often sent back to the cotton field within days of giving birth, enslaved mothers were understandably exhausted, and they often slept with their infants so they could breast feed in a haze and go back to sleep. When they occasionally awoke to dead babies, they were unfortunately as susceptible as their doctors and enslavers to believe that they had smothered their children in their sleep, a phenomenon which only enhanced their reputation as uncaring and unnatural mothers.
NEXT: Suicide
Murder Cases Tried in South Carolina, 1887-1900
Year | Number of Homicides Tried | Not Guilty Verdicts | Guilty Verdicts | Cases Dismissed or Continued | Percentage Found Guilty |
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1887 | 79 | 54 | 11 | 14 | 13.9% |
1888 | 117 | 61 | 36 | 20 | 30.1% |
1889 | 120 | 69 | 30 | 21 | 25.0% |
1890 | incomplete returns | - | - | - | - |
1891 | 151 | 76 | 46 | 29 | 30.0% |
1892 | incomplete returns | - | - | - | - |
1893 | incomplete returns | - | - | - | - |
1894 | incomplete returns | - | - | - | - |
1895 | 210 | 112 | 67 | 31 | 31.9% |
1896 | 201 | 110 | 67 | 24 | 33.3% |
1897 | 215 | 120 | 64 | 31 | 29.7% |
1898 | 248 | 105 | 96 | 47 | 44.0% |
1899 | 205 | 83 | 97 | 35 | 47.3% |
1900 | 224 | 127 | 71 | 26 | 31.7% |
Credit: John Hammond Moore, Carnival of Blood: Dueling, Lynching, and Murder in South Carolina, 1880-1920 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 130-131, taken from Reports and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina
Homicide Inquests
Name | Deceased Description | Date | Inquest Location | Death Method | Inquest Finding |
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Patterson Blackwill | May 22, 1914 | in Chesterfield County, South Carolina, Chesterfield County, SC |
on the 22 day of May 1914 find that the deceased came to his death by a gun Shot wound in the heands of J. A. Blackwill and our virdic is a justified homiside this 22 day of May 1914 |
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Unknown | [?], Fairfield County, SC |
JUST A DISCHARGE PAPER |
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Archie Woods | February 8, 1937 | at Cheraw, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that Archie Woods received in Chesterfield County a mortal wound by Pistol Shot in the hands of Marion Johnson |
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infant child | infant child | August 5, 1878 | at the residence of H J Wright, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say the female Child . . . Came to its death by Misfortune or accident |
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infant | March 10, 1865 | at Anderson Court House, Anderson County, SC |
do say that it came to its death ^at the house of Wm Shanachans[?] in the town of Anderson^ by violence inflicted by its mother Adelia C. Parker |
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Elizabeth M. Skipper | June 5, 1857 | at the House of Abraham B. Skipper, Horry County, SC |
upon their Oaths do say, That the said Elizabeth M. Skipper, was killed and murdered by some person or persons to the Jurors unknown |
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D. M. Pettit | December 19, 1899 | at G.J. Redfern, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: we the jurors find that D M Pettit came to his death by a wound on left side of his head causing fracture of the skull and depression on the brans in some manner unknown to the jury |
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John Moore | November 19, 1880 | Greenville County, SC | |||
Elizer | slave | June 13, 1845 | at the plantation of Mrs S. C. Sims, Union County, SC |
upon their oaths do say . . .the death was occasioned by the violent abuse given her by the hands of David R. Henderson the overseer of [??] Sims by beating her with such weapons as was calculated to destroy life |
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John Goodlett | December 28, 1880 | at Greenville CH, Greenville County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the deceased John H. Goodlett came to his death from a wound on the head how caused the Jury are unable to say |
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William Gathings | August 16, 1932 | at Pageland Township, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: William Gathings came to his death by Pistol Shot wounds in the hands of Guy Watts |
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John David Twiggs | September 15, 1864 | in Hamburg, Edgefield County, SC |
upon there oaths do say that Doct J D Twiggs came to his death by Pistol shots in the hands of R. J. Butler sen on the Publick Rode |
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Harry Shelton | March 28, 1871 | in the County aforesaid, Fairfield County, SC |
do say upon their oaths that the said Harry Shelton came to his Death from a Ball shot from a pistol or Rifle by an unknown hand being done near Shelton Depot. |
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Barnett S. Langston | August 8, 1889 | at Lanfords station, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say; that the said Barnett S Langston came to his death by Pistol shots in the hands of Jno. W. Lanford |
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William Samuel | April 26, 1891 | at Scima[?] Hill Church, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that. . .the decease William Samuel Came to his death ... by a Gun Shot Wound in the hands of Henry Glover in Self defince |
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Jno. C Swearingin | April 24, 1895 | at Edgefield CH, Edgefield County, SC |
the said Jno C Swearingin came to his death by a gun shot wound in the hands of B. L. Jones |
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Jeff Evins | March 24, 1895 | at the residence of Jeff Evans, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that Jeff Evans came to his death by Pistol Shot fired from the hands of Will Smith, and so the jurors afore said do say that the afore said will Smith in mann. And form then and there feloniously did kill against the peace and dignity of the State afore said... |
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Abe Simmons | October 21, 1870 | near Samuel Blakeleys, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say, that Abe Simmons aforesaid, came to his death at Samuel J Blakeleys in County aforesaid by gun shot wounds from guns in the hands of some person or persons unknown to the jury |
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white infant child, boy | white infant child, boy | March 24, 1858 | at John Thomas Boat Landing, Union County, SC |
the infant Came to it Death by it being Killed and throwed in the River |
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infant | April 14, 1869 | at Capt. J.D. Jakell's plantation, Kershaw County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the said male infant child was killed by its mother Peggy Bedenbaugh [and] after she was delivered of it ... that she buried it about thirty yards back of the house in which she resides on Capt. J.D. Jakell's plantation |
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Albert Williams | August 9, 1934 | at Cheraw, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: We the undersign Jurors agree that Albert Williams came to his death at the hands of Pete Parson in a gun fight |
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James Thomas | colored | July 20, 1869 | at Liberty Hill County, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that James Thomas came to his death by a gun shot wound in the stomach . . .from a gun in the hands of some person or person unknown |
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Presley Wise | July 11, 1891 | at D W. Padgetts plantation, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths aforesaid do say that the aforesaid Presley Wise came to his death by gun Shot wound in the hands of an unknown person |
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Infant child of Susanah Finny | Infant child of Susanah Finny | June 8, 1821 | at the House of Mary Holland, Laurens County, SC |
do say upon their oaths, and so the Jurors aforesaid upon their oaths aforesaid, say that the aforesaid infant Child the aforesaid Susannah Finny, then and there feloniously Did kill and murder, against the peace of this State. |
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Wesley Smith | at Winnsboro, Fairfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say, that the said Worley Smith came to his death on the sixteenth day of February A.D. 1900 from blows inflicted by one |
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Luther Sullivan | October 26, 1898 | near John Stuarts, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that Luther Sullivan came to his death from gun shot wounds in the hand of unknown parties |
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George | freedmen | October 25, 1865 | at John H. Campbell's, Greenville County, SC |
upon their oaths do say . . . that the said George was willfully homicideed . . .received a bullet wound near the reg of the heart and lodged 2 1/2 inchs below the right nipple also a bullet wound in the left shoulder lodging in the body |
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infant | September 12, 1882 | at Chester Scruggs well, Spartanburg County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the said infant was murdered by being thrown into an unused well by some person or persons to the jurors unknown |
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Will Coe | September 17, 1914 | at Chesterfield County, South Carolina, Chesterfield County, SC |
The verdic of the Jury was that McCoy was Justifiable Homcid |
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Tom | negro slave | December 18, 1858 | at Chlo Watsons, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the aforesaid Jim in manner and form aforesaid, Tom then and there feloniously did kill |
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Unknown | at Pollete [?] Harrison, Fairfield County, SC |
upon their oaths that the said Child came to its death by premeditated[?] and criminal negligence and exposure on the part of the parents or others unknown to the Jury |
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Irving Stallings | March 3, 1857 | at Court House, Horry County, SC |
upon their Oaths aforesaid do say, that the aforesaid Jeremiah Benson, (Called J. M. Benson) in manner and form aforesaid Irving Stallings, then and there feloniously did Kill against the Peace and dignity of the same state aforesaid |
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Reeves | February 23, 1855 | Laurens County, SC | |||
James Nelson | November 22, 1903 | at E. C. Clark's place, Chesterfield County, SC |
We the undersigned juror of inquest over the body of James Nelson find that he Come to his death by being hanged by some unKnown Partyes. |
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Col. John Taylor | July 8, 1904 | at Miden dolph, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: that the deceast John Taylor came to his death By measures unknown to the Jury. |
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female child, white child | female child, white child | January 21, 1881 | at Greenville, Greenville County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that. . . the said unknown female child came to her death from violence at the hands of a party or parties to the Jury unknown |
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Sarah Hardy | free girl of color | October 4, 1865 | at William Page's, Union County, SC |
We the Jurors can [?] deceasd came to her death by gun shot wound inflicted by some person unknown |
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George | slave | July 19, 1855 | near Pine Tree Creek, Kershaw County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the said negro child George, from the evidence adduced before the Jury came to his death by the hands of one Jackson Bradley aided and abetted by one William Adkins on the Saturday night before the said Jackson Bradley was committed to Jail |
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Robert Jefferson | July 13, 1932 | at the Home of Agnes Smith, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: That Robert Jefferson came to his death by gun shot wounds in hands of John Henry Smith Justifiable Homicide |
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Robert J. Butler | September 15, 1864 | at Hamburg, Edgefield County, SC |
upon there oaths do say that Robert J Butler sen[?] came to his death by gun shot wound inflicted by Doct J D Twiggs |
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unnamed infant | unnamed infant | January 21, 1868 | at Conwayboro, Horry County, SC |
upon their oaths do Say,--That they find the Said Infant to have dead some two or three weeks--that from the evidence before them they belie vethe Said Infant to be the offstriping of Emma Gallard a colored woman now in the Jail . . . and that they believe that the said Infant came to its death by Violence at the hands of the Said Emma Gaillard |
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S. B. C. Lowney | March 5, 1873 | Fairfield County, SC | |||
Ephram Neetles | February 1, 1890 | at the residence of Ephram Neetles, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say. That the said Ephram Neettles came to his death by a shot from a Pistol in the hands of Rich Davenport - and George Henderson and Hugh Henderson being acceessories. |
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male baby | male baby | May 24, 1891 | at the Saluda River, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that. . .he was feloniously murdered and thrown in the Salud River at the hands of his own Mother or at the hands of Some one known to her |
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infant | April 6, 1865 | near Hobbysville, Spartanburg County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that after a most careful investigation of the whole matter ... that the said child, we are satisfied, came to its death by having the posterior part of its head crushed, wilfully and violently, by the hands of Martha Robinson, the mother of said child, or Elizabeth Robinson, the grandmother of said child, later in the evening of Tuesday the 4th day of April |
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Timothy Spann | April 24, 1812 | two miles below Camden, Kershaw County, SC |
do say upon their oaths that they believe that said Timothy Spann came to his death in consequence of a wound received by a shot in a duel with a certain ---- Lowell |
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Spencer Simpson | November 25, 1896 | at Clinton, Laurens County, SC |
We the Jury of inquest. . . find that Spencer Simpson died in Laurens County on 21st Day of Nov AD 1896 - from the Effects of a gunshot wound from the hands of Jno. Miller, and so we all agree. |
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Sam Dehays | October 23, 1870 | at Thernus quarter, Laurens County, SC |
upon the oaths do say that the said Sam Dehay came to his death on the road between Duncans creek & Clinton on the 22d Oct 1870 by a gunshot from parties unknown to the jury |
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Cesar | Negro, negro boy | July 7, 1843 | at the house of Elijah Watson, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their Oaths do say. . .believe said negro came to his death by a sever blow given him by Jerry one of said Watsons negroes not with the intention to Kill |
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two negro children | two negro children | June 4, 1824 | at Ellis Palmers, Union County, SC |
do say upon their oaths that a negro woman named Sunaka Another of said children property of said Ellis Palmer did . . .choake the said children with a glove |