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.
![](/sites/default/files/library/csid_figure_homicides_by_type_0.png)
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 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
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 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
John James | April 13, 1892 | at the Traynham place, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that at his residence in Laurens County on or about 12 oclock on the 18th day of April AD 1892 the said John James came to his death by two gunshot wounds said wounds being made by a Pistol fired by one Stribbling deputy for B.F. Balleu Sheriff and so the jurors aforesaid do say that the aforesaid Stribbling deputy for B.F. Balleu sheriff in manner and form aforesaid John James then and there did Kill against the peace and dignity of the said State aforesaid. |
||
Pollock Chewning | October 14, 1931 | at Cheraw, Chesterfield County, SC |
Upon their oaths do say that Luke Smith and Pollock Chewning came to their Deaths by means un known. |
||
Amos M. Williams | January 2, 1874 | Horry County, SC | |||
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 |
|
Clement D. Wallace | November 28, 1867 | at Gopher Hill, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say: that the said Clement D Wallace was disabled or killed with some instrument unknown or by the burning of his dwelling house |
||
John Kellett | July 24, 1876 | at the residence of John Kellet, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the aforesaid John Kellet in manner and form aforesaid on the morning of the 19th inst was shot by some person or persons unknown by us |
||
Howard Braxton | April 20, 1943 | at Cheraw, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that Howard Braxton received in Chesterfield County a mortal wound by 38 Pistol in the hands of Wallace Turner |
||
Joseph Riddle | April 10, 1856 | at Hamburg, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say, that the said Riddle came to his death by a wound or stab with some cutting instrument inflicted just under the left ear by some hand to this jury unknown |
||
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 |
|
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 |
||
Caleb Campbell | near Winnsboro, Fairfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the deceased Caleb Campbell was killed and murdered by hanging by some person or persons to the jury unknown[.] |
|||
Willie G. Harris | March 25, 1897 | at Edgefield CH, Edgefield County, SC |
We the Jury find that Willie G Harris came to his death by a Gun shot wound in the hands of [?] Wm Thurmond |
||
Elizabeth South | June 23, 1839 | at the dwelling House of William South, Laurens County, SC |
do say upon their oaths that some person unknown with certainty not having God before his eyes but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the Devil on the twenty second day of June in the year Eighteen hundred and thirty nine with a murderous weapon in the District afforesaid in and upon the person of the said Elizabeth South then and there being in the peace of God and of the said State feloniously voluntarily and of his own malice aforethought made an asalt [sic] - and that the afforesaid persown [sic] unknown with certainty. Then and there inflict a number of wounds on the person of said Elizabeth South then and there on her throat crosswise one of them passing through to the neck bone of which mortal wounds the afforesaid Elizabeth South did then and there in a short time die... |
||
Charles Little | June 11, 1934 | at Chesterfield, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: as the result of pistol shot in the hands of W. Lester Russell |
||
J. M. Clark | July 19, 1897 | at J.M. Clark's residence, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that J.M. Clark came to his death by Gun shot wounds inflicted by the hands of Willie Franks on the 10th day of June 1897 and that his father F.B. Franks was accessory to the act. |
||
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 |
|
Henry Purse | September 23, 1838 | at Camden, on the corner of Market & York Streets, Kershaw County, SC |
upon their oaths do say we found upon examination that the Boddy is that of H. W. Purse who came to his death by the discharging fo a gun supposed to be loaded with shot by Franklin Ray. The wound inflicted was mortal, the load having passed into the right breast. |
||
Reece Chapman | July 26, 1948 | at Chesterfield, South Carolina, Chesterfield County, SC |
VERDICT: The said Reece Chapman came to his death by a 31 Pistol at the hands of Buck Diggs. |
||
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 |
|
Abe Dubose Jr. | at the old[?] mill place of S.D. Dunn, Fairfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the said Abe Dubose Jr. came to his death by a gunshot wound at the hands of William Dubose and that Frances Dubose is accessory to the killing[.] |
|||
John Webb | March 26, 1899 | at Edgefield Court House, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do Say that the aforesaid John Webb came to his death by Gun Shot wounds inflicted by weapons in the hands of Robert Coile[?], Dan Coward Hill Howard, and R L Burnett as principals, Milledge Reece and A.J. Corley as accessories |
||
Dr. E. C. Shell | November 5, 1868 | at Henry Shell's, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that they do believe from the evidence given that from the evidence given that Jess Woody, Rich Dial, Nathan Crews, Bill Bryson, Samuel Allison Sr., Daniel Allison Jr., Harry Shell Jr. and Mar Williams either as principals or accessories did willfully and feloniously kill and Murder Dr. E.C. Shell by a shot gun or musket shot on the second day of Nov 1868 near the residence of his father H R Shell against the peace and dignity of the State afore said. |
||
Albert Jenkins | September 13, 1937 | at Cheraw, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that Albert Jenkins received in Chesterfield County a mortal wound by Pistol Bullet in the hands of Buster Ellebre |
||
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 |
|
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 |
|
Peter | October 25, 1854 | Laurens County, SC | |||
Unknown Colored Man | Unknown Colored Man | July 5, 1892 | at Will Davis, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the unknown man came to his death from Gun Shot wound in the hands of A B Blakely in self defence. |
|
Nelson Smith | freedman, boy | October 4, 1866 | at Andrew Warts, Edgefield County, SC |
upon there oaths do say that Nelson Smith freedman came to his death from being shot with some kind of fire arms in the hands of two persons from the way he was shot by persons unknown |
|
William Padgett | February 22, 1894 | at W.D. Readys plantation, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say, that the said William Padgett aforesaid Came to his death from a gun shot wound in the hands of Tom Rutland |
||
Mack Byrd | July 20, 1885 | at Duncans Creek Colored Baptist Church, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the aforesaid Mack Byrd came to his death on the 19th day of July AD 1885 in Laurens County near to Duncans Creek Colored Church by a pistol shot in the hand, of Alfred Dean alias Alfred Harley. |
||
Luke Smith | October 14, 1931 | at Cheraw, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: We the coroners Jury in the case of L. Smith find that L. Smith came to his death by Gunshot wounds of Gun in the hands of Paul Cuffin |
||
Bookey | January 26, 1863 | at Conwayboro, Horry County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the slave Bookey came to his death by a State of General Congestion through the internal organs caused bya whipping at the hands of Henry Mardy, Murphy Hughes N. A. McLeod and R G W Grissett Instruments a Strap & Paddle Justifiable in the punishment they inflicted |
||
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 |
||
Henry Dennis | August 22, 1876 | at the residence of Laurens County's Jefferson Abercrombie, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the aforesaid Henry Dennis in manner and form aforesaid on the night of the 20 isnt was shot by some person or persons unknown. |
||
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 |
||
Walter Brown | November 26, 1943 | at Cheraw, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that Walter Brown received in Chesterfield County a mortal wound by _______ in the hands of Mose McKay. . . He came to his death by a gun in hands of Mose McKay. |
||
Mary Grace Aldrich | infant child | August 11, 1856 | at Graniteville, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say. . .that said child came to her death at the time and place aforesaid by having large portions of laudaunum administered by a servant girl the nurse of the name of Clarissa. . .with felonious intent |
|
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 |
|
infant | infant | January 10, 1898 | at Johnston, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do Say: That the said Infant was killed and murdered by Some person or persons to the Jurors unknown |
|
Francis Stuart | May 8, 1883 | in a house occupied by Henry Langford on the plantation of W.S. Pitts, Laurens County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that on the night of 7th of May 1883 about half past 8 O'clock the said Francis Stuart came to her death from the effects of a gun shot wound supposed to have been inflicted by Lewis Stuart, her husband, and so the jurors aforesaid, do say that the aforesaid Lewis Stuart, in manner and form aforesaid, Francis Stewart, then and there feloniously did kill against the peace and dignity of the said State aforesaid. |
||
Robert Williams | November 4, 1881 | at Wilson's Bridge, Greenville County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that the deceased Robert Williams came to his death . . . by hanging at the hands of parties unknown to the jury |
||
Riley Parker | January 15, 1884 | at Clifton in Spartanburg, Spartanburg County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that at Clifton S.U. on Jan. 14th 1884 that the said dec'd Riley Parker in manner and form aforesaid came to his death by means unknown to us |
||
Frank | slave | July 16, 1840 | at the house of Charles M. Breaker, Kershaw County, SC |
upon their oaths do say we suppose he came to his death by the evidence before us by being stabbed in the thigh with a deadly weapon and that done by the hands of a negro man slave by the name of Titus the property of Samuel A.B. Shannon in or near the main road leading from Camden to Salisbury |
|
William Clyburn | September 15, 1948 | at Pageland, S.C., Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say that William Clyburn received in Chesterfield County a mortal wound by 38 S&W Pistol in the hands of Mr. Ike Plyler. . . The Jury recommends that I. K. Plyler be not held responsible -- justifiable Homicide |
||
unnamed infant | unnamed infant | May 18, 1870 | at and near Cools Spring, Horry County, SC |
upon their oaths do Say that the said infant came to its death by the Hands of providence |
|
James Reynolds | December 20, 1860 | at the residence of James Reynolds, Edgefield County, SC |
upon there oaths do say that the said James Reynolds came to his death feloniously at the hand of Joseph Samuel. . .from the affects of a wound inflicted on the head Just above the left ear by a large stick |
||
Mahlon Jones | December 25, 1891 | at Landrams Farm, Edgefield County, SC |
upon their oaths do say That Mahlon Jones was . . .killed by a pistol. . .shot in the hands of Henry Scott and that Coleman Maroney was accessoror |
||
Cris Little | November 9, 1884 | at Laurens CH S.C., Laurens County, SC |
being a lawful Jury of inquest who being charged and sworn to enquire for the State of South Carolina where and by what means said Cris Little came to his death. Said Cris Little came to his death by a pistol shot wound entering in the left side of body from his back, said pistol was in hands of a Police man of the Town of Laurens by the name of Andrew Nelson and so the Jurors aforesaid do say that the aforesaid Andrew Nelson in manner and for aforesaid Cris Little, then and there did Kill, against the peace and dignity of the State aforesaid. |
||
Lewis Trabough | July 14, 1913 | at Cheraw, Chesterfield County, SC |
upon their oaths, do say: Lewis Trabough came to his death From pistol shot in the hand of Ben Gardner. |
||
Haigood Mirfan[?] | Fairfield County, SC |
NO OFFICIAL STATEMENT |