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 1,583 coroners inquests taken over the course of the nineteenth century in six South Carolina counties. The counties were chosen for a simple reason: they had the largest, most complete sets of records.

How complete? It is difficult to know. 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 the archive's voluminous indictments 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 county.

A more important caveat is that we must always remember that inquests do not remotely represent a complete portrait of how people died at a particular place and time. They represent only what the ruling class of a community chose to investigate. A woman who died on the birthing couch surrounded by family was too common an occurrence to have aroused the coroner’s interest or concern. The coroner specialized in suspicious and sudden deaths, especially those that intruded upon the public view — bodies washed up on shore, suicides hanging from the rafters of public buildings. From the morgue, we get a very skewed picture of a society. We see Death, in a sense, at its very worst, although there were undoubtedly other heinous crimes that went uninvestigated. A planter could murder a slave and usually get away with it. A posse could get away with a lynching.

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. 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 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.

The CSI:D Sample

As it happens, the CSI:D counties are predominantly in the Carolina 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.

There are important statistical differences between the six counties, and these are explored in the Counties section. But it should be noted at the outset 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 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 economy.

This at least is how the world looks from the coroner's office. Before descending completely into that world, however, we need some way to compare how people died for the coroner and how they died generally in the nineteenth-century. We know our sample gives a skewed portrait of Death. But is there any way to know how skewed?

NEXT: The Mortality Census

Number of Surviving Nineteenth-Century South Carolina Inquests 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