The death of one man is a tragedy,” Stalin is supposed to have said. “The death of millions is a statistic.” There is value, however, in taking a statistical view, if only to reveal the depth and nature of the tragedy. CSI:D digitizes, datafies, and makes publicly available 2,444 coroners inquests taken over the course of the nineteenth century in ten South Carolina counties. The counties were chosen for a simple reason: they had the largest, most complete sets of records. In addition, the CSI:D visualization engine allows users to examine two other inquest samples, one from Virginia and one from Missouri, digitized under different auspices but datafied to the CSI:D standard.

I believe it is especially incumbent upon digital humanities projects to state very clearly at the outset not what their data does and doesn’t say but what it can and can’t say. Humanities data is almost never like scientific data, which is to say highly controlled and created in a laboratory under ideal conditions. Humanities data, especially older data, is created amid the Sturm und Drang of human life; it is highly contextualized, limited by the ends and means—what I call the ‘data conception’—of the people who created it. In later sections, I highlight what our data does say and invite users to explore alternative readings and insights; in this section, we explore what our data can say, and especially what it can’t.

In the nineteenth century South, the coroner investigated a tiny fraction of deaths. (My ‘best case’ estimate, as we’ll see, is 3%.) A woman who died on the birthing couch was so unfortunately common that the coroner would never have been called. Too often, an overseer could whip a slave to death, bury the remains, and a coroner might never have known about it. In the nineteenth-century, coroners tended to stand over bodies that could not be immediately explained or explained away: a dead woman washed up on a foreign shore, a stranger expired in the public square, a body hanging from a rafter who had no friends to cut him down. Especially early in the century coroners were the kissing-cousins of the sheriff, with all that that implies about their potential biases and priorities; coroners specialized in mortal intrusions upon the body politic—civic problems that needed to be solved. Though it pains me to put it this way, coroners were the ‘road-kill’ crew of the county bureaucracy, and it took the whole of the nineteenth century for them to (imperfectly) become what we hope they might be today, medical examiners and agents of public health. No graphic on the whole of this site, then, is more important than this one:

This graphic may look like tangled spaghetti, but what we’re seeing is this: as a percentage of total inquests over time, accidents and suicides stay roughly constant; homicides and natural causes switch places. What does this mean? Were our forebears more murderous than we are, and now we live more innocent lives? No. Once, as imperfect agents of law enforcement, coroners specialized in the ‘horrible’ until gradually and unevenly they became agents of the more ‘mundane’ and typical, which is to say they became medical examiners or at least medical-examiner adjacent. A nineteenth-century inquest, then, does not correlate with death generally but with a specific kind of death—the kind the then-constituted authorities chose to investigate. CSI:D, it should be admitted at the outset, is erected on a foundation of bureaucratic bias and whim, putting me in my mind of Edgar Allan Poe’s last line as an author: “The basis on which the [entire] structure rests seems to me to be chalk.” Except that this isn’t quite true. The entire structure rests upon shifting sand, which is more or less true for any data gathering system. While I would love as a historian to look at this data and make broad claims about change over time, the data doesn’t permit it, just as it wouldn’t permit it over a long period today. The solution is always to compare apples to apples. If, as a percent of an entire decade’s sample of homicides, more homicides were committed by gun in the 1860s than in the 1840s, this is a valid claim, and one worth investigating. There is no known bias in the coroners’ system that would suddenly cause them to care, one way or the other, about the weapon-of-choice for the homicidally-inclined. This raises another important point. The earliest DH projects (Valley of the Shadow, for instance) revolutionized how we store and access information—massive archives of raw data were made searchable via the web. If the data were more available, however, they were not necessarily more digested; the mess of the past had merely been reproduced in digital form. Newer DH projects revolutionize how we collect, sift, render, layer, visualize, and analyze information. They tend not, as in cliometrics, to answer questions but to raise them, using computing technologies to find (and display) new patterns and meanings within the data that we can then subject to further qualitative analysis and study. The ethic that animates CSI:D is humility, and a determination to use imperfect data to raise interesting questions.

There are other, equally important, caveats about this data, beginning with the differences in the samples for each state:

The South Carolina Data

CSI:D datafies, which is to say categorizes and disciplines, three state datasets, each with its own origins and strengths. The South Carolina sample, funded by the ACLS and the Willson Center, is eHistory’s attempt to gather together every extant coroner’s inquest for the state over the whole of the nineteenth century. We began with the counties for which the most records survive and worked our way down. (Sherman made a particular point of decimating county courthouses, and fires and floods have done an equal amount of damage since. Even today, county records are the most deeply endangered in the historical profession, and yet they are the most historically important: Especially in the nineteenth century, most Americans lived their legal lives at the county level.) By deliberately gathering data for the whole of a century, the South Carolina sample has the peculiar advantage of balance, representing the lives (which is to say deaths) of blacks and whites, enslaved and free, over the broadest temporal spectrum. (See “Extant Historic Inquests for Nineteenth Century South Carolina” (below) for the current status of our digitization and datafication efforts.) In South Carolina all county-level records from the nineteenth century were supposed to have been sent from their county courthouses to the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. A trip to the Kershaw County Courthouse, however, proved that a small number of nineteenth-century records, including a small clutch of coroner’s inquisitions, had been missed. Could some of the records from other counties have been similarly overlooked or lost? Absolutely. Coroner’s reports can also occasionally be found inter-filed with other relevant court documents in an individual case file, collected by the court as the case proceeded to trial. Are some such inquests still lurking in SCDAH’s voluminous indictment files? Almost certainly. From a statistical perspective we can only hope that what we are missing is essentially random, leaving us a representative sample from each of our ten counties.

The Virginia Data

The Virginia Sample depends upon our partnership with the Library of Virginia's Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative, which “aims to provide greater accessibility to pre-1865 African American history and genealogy found in the rich primary sources in our holdings.” Logically, then, the Virginia data cannot be used to make racial comparisons or say something about Reconstruction—that’s not what the project was designed to do. Where the Virginia data is particularly strong, however, is in taking researchers inside the lives (and deaths) of Virginia’s antebellum black population, enslaved and free.

The Missouri Data

The Missouri data also bears the stamp of its origins in the Missouri Digital Heritage Coroner's Inquest Database, which datafied records for various Missouri counties, the City of St. Louis, and the St. Louis Medical Examiner. This last point is critical. While medical examiners and coroners often perform similar functions, the medical examiner's portfolio is usually broader, encompassing criminal justice, forensics, medical diagnostics, and public health. In practical effect, this means that a medical examiner's office casts off more records of a broader nature. St. Louis was relatively rare in having a city medical examiner in the nineteenth century, which makes the Missouri data particularly fascinating as an early example of a Southern city under the dominion of an M.E. The records are also fantastic for taking us into city life (which is to say city death), amid the fatal bustle of streetcars, steamships, trains, elevators, and early automobiles. Like the other samples, the Missouri data has its weaknesses as well; it was never encoded for enslaved status, for instance, partly because it skews so massively toward the latter end of the century. Given its volume, the Missouri data can easily overwhelm the peculiar features of the other samples.

Anatomy of an Inquest

Before treating the sample in the aggregate, we might examine the anatomy of a single inquest file to get a better feel for the information it typically does and does not contain. Virtually every inquest record has at least two documents. The first is a note from the coroner charging a magistrate near the site of the body with the task of rounding up a jury that must appear and meet the coroner at a specified time and place. Typical language would be: “These acts require you immediately on receipt ... hereof to summon and warn verbally or otherwise fourteen men of the said district to be and appear before the ... coroner of said district up the Road leading to the boat yard about the end of York Street at the edge of the town of Camden within the said district between the hours of four & five o’clock this afternoon then and there to enquire upon the view of a body of certain person there lying dead how he came to his death. Fail not herein as you will answer the contrary at your peril.”

The other standard document in an inquest file is the coroner’s “cover sheet,” which is similarly formulaic and written in legalese. The typical document records: 1) the place where the inquest was taken; 2) the date; 3) the name of the coroner; 4) the name of the deceased; 5) the names of the jurors; and 6) the finding of the jury, usually preceded by the phrase “do say upon their oaths....” (In the case at left a man considered to be deranged escaped his family’s care and died in the woods of neglect or exposure.)

In addition to these two documents, an inquest often includes the testimony of witnesses, usually dictated to the coroner himself, with the witness’s signature (or mark) at the bottom swearing to the truthfulness of the statement. Testimony from a physician (what might be called an expert witness) is also typical. It is critical to emphasize that women and slaves could and often did testify at inquests (though they were often barred from participating at any subsequent trial). Their testimony is not documented verbatim, and certainly their words and ideas come to us as distilled and edited by the coroner, but at least we have them. Very occasionally an inquest contains what might be called a ‘minority report’ in cases where a juror or jurors does not agree with the majority finding.

For most of the nineteenth century, coroner's were expected to keep duplicative records. One (loose) copy of each inquest was expected to be filed with the court and to follow any subsequent legal case through the court system. A second copy was expected to be inscribed into the coroner's inquisition book. Being bound, these are generally preferable, providing greater confidence that the record set is continuous and in tact.

Points of Comparison

As it happens, CSI:D’s South Carolina counties are predominantly in the piedmont, a region of moderately fertile clay soils that cotton cultivation devastated over the course of the nineteenth century. By comparison to the antebellum South as a whole, these CSI:D counties had relatively high concentrations of slaves. By comparison to South Carolina as a whole, however, these counties had somewhat low concentrations of slaves, with only Edgefield and Kershaw being above average for the state.

Statistical differences between the ten counties are explored in the Counties section. It should be noted at the outset, however, that the counties are more similar than they are different, especially when put into a comparative frame with the (few) other systematic studies of coroners’ reports. Sixty-six inquests survive from Plymouth, Massachusetts, for instance, spanning the years 1636 to 1684 (see below). The overwhelming majority (85%) of cases were found to be accidents. In 1661, Jeremiah Burroughs turned over in his “naughty canoo” and drowned. In 1672, John Barnes was gored by a bull, and John Richmond was run over by a cart. But in the almost fifty year span, only two people were found to have committed suicide and two were found to have been murdered, one beaten to death by his master in 1655, and the other killed by unspecified means in 1684.

Another, much larger study of the inquests conducted on Nottingham, England (see below) came to similar conclusions. Between 1828 and 1866, 86% of the deaths were found to be the result of accidents or natural causes. Burning, scalding, and “traffic accidents” accounted for most of the accidental deaths. Homicides were relatively rare, accounting for just 2% of cases.

In the CSI:D South Carolina sample, by contrast, homicides were more than ten times more likely. The discrepancy could be explained away, but only partially. Perhaps colonial coroners were less rigorous investigators, finding accidents where there were murders. Maybe Nottingham was the scene of a massive number of homicidal hit-and-runs by horse. But the more obvious conclusion, upheld by all anecdotal evidence, is that South Carolina was simply more violent. Gun-related deaths of any kind were all-but-unknown in Plymouth and Nottingham; in South Carolina men apparently shot themselves and others with an abandon that went well-beyond any conceivable margin of error. There is a danger, though, in presupposing that this simply confirms our notion of the south as an honor-bound region of gratuitous dueling and eye-gouging. There is violence of this kind aplenty, but as Acts lays bare the view from the coroner’s office is really much bleaker.

Indeed, what I have learned at a nineteenth-century southern morgue is what I ought to have deduced from the beginning—what a social worker could have told me before I started. In 1860, seventy-five percent of whites belonged to families that owned no slaves; forty percent of whites belonged to families that owned no slaves and no land, qualifying them for the label ‘poor white.’ Add to these the massive number of African Americans who were held in forced bondage and illiteracy, and our image of the Old South shifts from a land of massive slave fortunes to a land of large-scale rural poverty. Things did not particularly change in the second half of the nineteenth century. The war laid waste millions of acres of farm and forest in the South, destroyed two-thirds of Southern wealth, slaughtered two-fifths of the region’s livestock, killed a third of those who had fought and one-quarter of the South’s white males of military age. The industries and labor forms that move in after the war—debt peonage, chain gangs, sharecropping, extractive industries, over-production of cash crops steadily sinking in value—ensured that by 1935, Franklin Roosevelt would still call the South “the nation’s No. 1 economic problem.”

How do people die in such places? The don’t die in duels or dandified rituals. They drown because they are not taught to swim. They are beaten to death by underemployed fathers and husbands. They hang themselves in despair or die in suicidal escape attempts. They are malnourished and over-worked and collapse in the field. They die, in short, of the consequences of rural poverty in an exploitative, extractive economy.

NEXT: Data Visualizations

South Carolina Inquests in CSI:D Sample by County and Decade

Nottingham Inquests

Credit: Bernard V. Heathcote, Viewing the Lifeless Body: A Coroner and His Inquests Held in Nottinghamshire Public Houses During the Nineteenth Century, 1828 to 1866 (Nottingham: Technical Print Services Limited, 2006), p. 24

Plymouth Inquests

Credit: Jeff Norcross, The Plymouth Colony Archive Project

Sample of African American Inquests from the Library of Virginia