Celia, a Slave

Chapter Four: BACKDROP

Chapter Four NDICTEDfor Newsom's murder on June 25, Celia would spend the remainder of the summer in the Callaway County jail awaiting her October trial. As she waited through the summer heat, the citizens of Callaway and Missouri who would conduct her trial and determine her fate were being drawn into yet another emotionally charged debate over slavery and its future in the neighboring Kansas Territory. As in 1820 and 1850, the debate raged across the nation, its volume and intensity reaching levels that frightened many who had previously paid scant attention to the morality of slavery. In Missouri the debate acquired an even more strident, threatening tone, and eventually plunged the state into violence that threatened its citizens with civil war. Slavery captured the interest of the state's press, as papers in St. Louis, Columbia, Jefferson City, and other communities devoted column after column to the escalating clash ofopinions about slavery within state and nation. As the year progressed, news accounts and editorials alike presented little hope that the debate would remain peaceful in either Missourior the country. The pages of the Fulton Telegraph reflected this increasing concern over the issue ofslavery, indicating that the citizens ofFulton and Callaway County were fully aware of the mountingseriousness of the controversy. Coverage of the slavery issue in the Telegraph and other local Missouripapers indicates that the white population of Callaway County, including those individuals who would eventually compose the jury impaneled 53 BACKDROP I CELIA, A SLAVE for Celia's October trial, were themselves caught up in the emotional fervor of the slavery debates.1 Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois had insured that the people of Callaway County would be more than ordinarily concerned about slavery in the summer in which Celia was tried for her life. He had not intended to plunge the nation into a wrenching examination of the morality of slavery, or to throw the people of Missouri into a dither about the nature of the institution and its future prospects. Through the Kansas-Nebraska Act of the previous year, he sought only to organize additional territories that lay west of Missouri in the old Louisiana Purchase so that the nation could proceed with the business ofconstructingatranscontinental railroad, preferably one with its eastern terminus in Chicago . To enhance its chance of adoption, Douglas championed a bill that repealed the old Missouri Compromise and allowed the possibility of the expansion of slavery into the new federal territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which the proposed legislation would create. Douglas also proposed this legislation in part to bolster his chances ofcapturing the Democratic presidental nomination, which would have required strong support from the South. Like other northern Democrats who did not view slavery as an essentially moral issue, Douglas woefully underestimated the opposition to the bill among average northern citizens, most ofwhom had reached the conclusion that slavery was neither morallyacceptable nor in their economic interest. While most were willing to allow their white southern brethren to continue the practice, they were not prepared to see the institution spread into territories from which it had been barred by an agreement accepted by southerners for some three decades. Northern anger over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the role of Democrats in securing its passage launched the Republican party in the congressional elections of 1854. To many northerners, abolitionists and nonabolitionists alike, the bill's enactment represented a challenge from the slaveholding South, one to which they were determined to respond . On the Senate floor William Seward expressed the thoughts of millions of his fellow citizens when he accepted the perceived challenge from the South "in behalf of the cause offreedom." The citizenry of the free states, he prom54 BACKDROP ised, stood ready to "engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in the right."2 Seward's words were no idle threat. Even before the Kansas-Nebraska bill won Congressional approval, Eli Thayer and others had organized the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company. Capitalized at $5 million, the company, which later became the New England Emigrant Aid Company , sought "to aid and protect emigrants from New England or from the Old World in settling in the West." Thayer and other company leaders sought to insure that Kansas be peopled by free soilers, emigrants dedicated to the family farm and the exclusion of slavery...