Enslaved Women who Murdered their Enslavers

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. This week, we're discussing enslaved women who resisted their enslavement in the most effective way they could, by murdering their enslavers. As a word of warning, this episode includes some graphic descriptions of violence. Lethal resistance to enslavement was rare, especially by enslaved women. But it did happen. Sociologist David V. Baker found that nearly 200 enslaved women were executed in the United States between 1681 and 1865, most of those for the crimes of murder, attempted murder, or conspiracy to murder. That number almost certainly, under counts the number of enslaved women who murdered, likely by quite a lot, both because records of cases were destroyed or are missing, and because not all of the women who murdered were executed through the legal system. They may have been killed in retaliation, sold out of state, or more rarely, may have gotten away with the act. The experience of slavery in the American colonies, and then in the United States, varied widely, depending on the era, the location, the type of property on which the people were enslaved, and even the attitude of the individual enslavers. What did not vary was that enslaved people had few, if any, legal protections in a system set up to protect their enslavers and those enslavers' property rights. Slave codes, or the formal state and local laws that governed enslaved people, limited the rights of those who were enslaved, and punished them severely for even minor infractions. For example, enslaved people in antebellum Virginia could be executed for the crime of possessing 10 pieces of coin. Even free Black people were not immune from these restrictive laws. In antebellum Virginia, they could be sold into slavery if they were in debt. If an enslaved person was executed for one of these crimes, or for instance, the crime of running away, the slave owner would be reimbursed for the loss of their property. Not only were enslaved people severely punished for minor offenses, they also had little to no recourse when they were the victims. During the slave era, enslavers could assault those they enslaved without any threat of prosecution, giving enslaved people no legal outlet for complaint, no matter how terribly they were treated. When an enslaved woman murdered her enslaver, as in the cases we're looking at today, she would almost certainly be sentenced to death, regardless of the horrific circumstances that may have led her to kill. There are a few key reasons for this outcome. First, the jury that tried an enslaved woman, if in fact, there were juries at all, would have consisted of white men, generally wealthy white men, and especially in southern states, that would mean the entire jury may be enslavers. The first Black jurors in the United States didn't serve until 1860. Second, in most states,  Black people, both free and enslaved, were prohibited from testifying in court. In many cases, even the defendant could not testify on their own behalf. Third, defense attorneys were either not provided for enslaved defendants as in North Carolina, for instance, or they were provided, but didn't bother to mount a real defense on their client's behalf. Finally, the right of the enslaved person to appeal a sentence, no matter how egregious the mistakes in the trial, was either non existent or severely limited. For instance, North Carolina and South Carolina did not permit appeals by enslaved people until the 19th century, while Louisiana and Virginia waited all the way until 1865 to permit such appeals. With the entire legal system stacked against them, enslaved women who murdered their enslavers knew that they were essentially signing their own death warrants. And yet, some still chose lethal resistance, not in the heat of the moment, but after careful planning. So why would they take that step? As today's guest, Dr. Nikki Taylor writes, "Enslaved women's philosophy of justice was practical, and boiled down to a sense of fairness, decency, and humane treatment. It was a powerful current flowing within them. Justice was so important that they were willing to risk their own lives to obtain it. In fact, they were more willing to die for justice than for freedom." We'll discuss this argument in more detail in the conversation to come. That's just one example of this kind of lethal action in pursuit of justice. An enslaved woman named Agnes was executed in Prince William County, Virginia, on July 16, 1850, for killing her enslaver Gerald Mason, with an axe as he slept. Agnes had complained in the past of whippings ordered by Mason, and had warned that she would retaliate if he continued to abuse her. The white witnesses who testified at the trial reported that according to Agnes, Mason had attempted to rape her. However, in the eyes of the Virginia court system, presided over by slave owners, Mason's actions were justified. Agnes' we're not. Joining me now to help us understand the enslaved women who chose lethal resistance, what drove them to these actions, and why these stories are so important to tell, is Dr. Nikki M. Taylor, Professor of History at Howard University, and the author of several books, including, "Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance," which is the source of much of this introduction.

Hi, Nikki, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Nikki M. Taylor  9:18  
Hi, Kelly, how are you?

Kelly Therese Pollock  9:20  
I am thrilled to be speaking with you. So I want to hear, this is not your first book. You've written several books before. I want to hear a little bit about the impetus for you writing this book. How did this come about? And why now?

Dr. Nikki M. Taylor  9:33  
Yeah, this book probably was an outgrowth of book number three, which was, "Driven Toward Madness," and it was the story of Margaret Garner, who was the real woman that Toni Morrison wrote about in her book, "Beloved." And, you know, it got me really interested in Black women's resistance. And of course, that was a very different type of resistance. Sadly, and unfortunately, Margaret Garner chose to  kill her children. And I said, "Wow, I wonder why she made that choice instead of directing her, you know, murder at the person who she really probably would have preferred to, to kill." And so that's how I got interested in this topic. And of course, even in graduate school, there was a usual script that we learned is that Black women tended to resist quietly and more covertly. We were the ones that would spit in the water. We might, you know, poison the food, but we were not at all present during slave revolt, and we didn't tend to resist violently. And that always kind of unsettled me. And I was like, "Well, why is that? That doesn't really make sense to me. And that certainly doesn't sit well with what what I know, as a Black woman, and how I know about how we protest and resist even today." And so so all of those interests came together for this project, just longstanding interest. And then it allowed me to carry a story that I started with the Margaret Garner project, you know, and make it more palatable to people because not everybody liked the fact that Margaret Garner took her resistance out on her children. Not everybody was okay with that. So I said, "Hey, I've got some, some other options for you. Right."

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:28  
Enslaved people, in general, enslaved women, especially, are a really hard population to know anything about in the archives. So can you talk a little bit about the sources you were able to find on these women? How you chose the case studies that you did?

Dr. Nikki M. Taylor  11:47  
Thank you so much. That's a really good question. And I, you know, I'm so glad I have an opportunity to discuss this. It is almost, it's one of the most difficult thing you can do is research the lives of enslaved women. Not only are they enslaved, not only are they Black, but they're women. So unfortunately, any records about them, people were not inclined to preserve. And added to that was the fact that they were not able to read and write for the most part. So it's an incredibly difficult demographic, to find primary source evidence about. And so with all of my projects, it's been very painstaking. I do what I call "scrappy history," where you find these scraps of evidence here, scraps of evidence there, and you try to weave a narrative together, Kelly, from these scraps of evidence. But this book was different. This book completely blew me away, because I'm so used to Black women being muted, in the historical record, silenced, in fact. And so I was really shocked that these cases are right there in court records, and that even some of their cases are also published in newspapers. And unlike all the other stories about Black women who lived during slavery, or who were enslaved, they actually spoke, and their voices were there in the historical record. And in fact, Kelly, this is the irony. So the people that these enslaved women murdered, their enslavers, are less visible in the historical record than these women. So these women are there, they're speaking in thunder tones, they're in their court records. They're saying why they did it. And their enslavers are just really just regular people about whom we would know nothing about were it not for the fact that they were murdered by these enslaved women. So it's really, you know, kind of ironic, but also, it blew my mind, because I never would have expected that, that all of these voices would be in these court records. So I was very pleased to know that that was very easy research on on a lot of levels.

Kelly Therese Pollock  14:13  
Yeah. And so then, talk to me a little bit about the the reasons that they resisted so violently, you know, that this is, of course, not everybody, right. This is a portion of the population. So what what were some of the reasons that they gave, that they're saying in these court cases of why they chose the actions that they chose?

Dr. Nikki M. Taylor  14:38  
Yeah, that's another great question. And yes, you're right to emphasize that this is not the majority of Black women. It's not the majority of enslaved Black women, a very small minority; but the reason that they gave is the cruelty of their owners. And they're basically saying that they wanted to get a type of revenge on their owners for injuries  insults, and injustices that they'd suffered at the hands of their owners. So what I state very explicitly in the book is that these women were not necessarily trying to end slavery, Kelly, that they were trying to end their enslavers. And so it's very distinct. They, they simply wanted to end the lives of the people who had caused them pain, mental anguish, disrespect. And so that and they were very explicit about it. And to them, you know, that's what mattered to them, is getting that type of justice. And I have this whole framework in the book for how we might consider this as a practice of justice for these women. And so nobody's ever used this theory. That's my theory. But, you know, it's helpful to understand how they could rationalize the sorts of crimes and murders that they committed.

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:01  
Could you talk some about the ways in which they couldn't access the kind of justice that you or I might be able to access when there are harms done to us?

Dr. Nikki M. Taylor  16:13  
Yeah, so oh, wow, that the justice system was not necessarily a justice system. It was merely a judicial system for enslaved people. And there were just a myriad of insults that, and denials of justice, that they were not, you know, allowed in that time of day. For one, although most people couldn't testify in court, they specifically couldn't testify in court against white people. And so even when the white person had done something to them, they couldn't testify in their own defense, and that was pretty, pretty bad. And a lot of times, they were tried in separate courts, Kelly, so you had the regular courts where regular white citizens would be tried in, and then you had a separate court for enslaved people. And those separate courts were led and presided over by slaveholders. So I mean, they couldn't expect for any justice when when the slave holders or enslavers in their neighborhoods were the ones meting out the justice. And so not only was it a tribunal, or you know, the justices were enslavers in their neighborhoods, but they oftentimes were tried and convicted and executed within hours or days. So there wasn't a time for any kind of reasonable defense. And sometimes, in some cases, they didn't even have like, reasonable defense attorneys. And if so, the defense attorneys did not and could not put on a, you know, case to defend them. And so it just became, you know, a burlesque all the way around. It was like a joke of a system so to speak. And so it just really, people knew if they were ever brought, you know, up on charges, up on any kind of felony, they were gonna be, you know, convicted, for the most part, not all, always, but, you know, oftentimes. I would say too, that the justice system at the time, or the judicial system at the time, it wasn't just murder enslaved people could be convicted of. Enslaved people could be convicted of different types of crimes, that were considered felonies at the time, including practicing religion, practicing medicine, lying, stealing a chicken, all of those were crimes that they could be convicted and executed for. So it was a very scary time for them, as well, throughout the entire period of slavery. I think it was very clear that there were two judicial systems, one for Black people and one for white people. And oftentimes, Kelly, enslaved people and free Black people had very similar experiences, when brought before the judicial system.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:14  
So one of the things your book really highlights is the way that slavery is, it's a terrible system for all of them. But it's very different in the way it's practiced in different places and at different times. And because you're able to access through these records, kind of what their lives were like, we're able to see those those glimpses of how slavery was different. Could you talk a little bit about that? How it might be different in the urban north, versus in, you know, plantations in the South?

Dr. Nikki M. Taylor  19:45  
Yeah, that's a really good question. So I'm not even the first person to point this out. One of my favorite historians, a man by the name of Ira Berlin is the one that came up with this thesis, that slavery was not the same across time and space. And so we can't say that we can paint slavery with the same brush. And so we have to look at different contexts. And so I was very aware of his thesis, and I've used it to study and also to write throughout my entire career from the time I was in graduate school. And so, yes, slavery in colonial Massachusetts is very different than slavery in antebellum Mississippi, or antebellum Texas. And, you know, not only because there are different levels of work expected, different levels of proximity to whiteness. In some cases, enslaved people lived in the same houses as their enslavers. Oftentimes, they had to respond to their every beck and call. I think my book also points out that there's not a strict dichotomy between house slaves, as we call them and field slaves. And so people who were enslaved in a lot of these rural northern areas, like Pennsylvania, and even New York, had to do both. They had to do farming, and they also had to take care of the home inside and cook and clean and did the dishes and care for the infant. So it was just backbreaking labor, it was around the clock labor. And the thing that makes it different in those spaces is that they were, there was not much of a slave community that they could turn to. So they were pretty much isolated. Whereas what we know about plantation slavery in places like Mississippi, Arkansas, and places like that, people tended to be enslaved in these large plantations. And so they had more of an opportunity to have, you know, a community where they could have some sort of, you know, air their grievances, and maybe even bond over, you know, their mutual grievances. They could practice their religion together and things like that. So the people I feature in my book had none of that. They were mostly isolated, and disconnected from other enslaved people, which made their enslavement even more horrific, and just really unbearable on so many levels.

Kelly Therese Pollock  22:21  
Yeah. So one of the things that I think is also really comes out in this book is the the actions of the white women, so the the white women who are enslavers, and the way that they are treating these women that that are enslaved. And obviously that that is really an impetus for some of this violence. Could you talk a little bit about that that relationship?

Dr. Nikki M. Taylor  22:51  
Yeah, and people like Thavolia Glymph, and others have talked about the relationship of white women who owned enslaved people. They called them mistresses, and how they really were, you know, another arm of the enslavement experience. They were no less, you know, inhumane and brutal than than men. And so that's one of the false notions that a lot of people have, that somehow the white women were more genteel and more empathetic and  less severe  in their punishments. And so those historians have written about that on plantations, like Thavolia Glymph has, and so I say in my book, I argue and demonstrate that it's not just white women on plantations, but also white women on these farms, these singular farms where they only have or own one woman, or one man, and they were just as cruel and inhumane and severe with their punishing, as, as we would expect of the plantation mistresses. And so it is shocking, because we would expect, you know, our modern feminist sensibilities would expect that they would feel some sort of compassion or some sort of empathy for these women, these enslaved women, because they were mothers and they understood all of the demands of motherhood, all of the demands of being a wife and having your husband away and on another farm, but they didn't. And the evidence shows that they didn't necessarily see these enslaved women as their equals at all, or even, you know, worthy of compassion on any level.

Kelly Therese Pollock  24:41  
Yeah. So it's so much of this, of course, is is hard to read, right? This is this is really hard history. It's hard both in seeing the way that the enslaved people are treated. It's horrific. And then of course, the actions that they take, however, understandable they might be, are really horrifying too. Can you talk a little bit about doing that kind of history doing that kind of work? How you process that as you're researching and writing?

Dr. Nikki M. Taylor  25:13  
Yeah, any time you're dealing with the history of slavery, it's very difficult, especially as an African American woman. So I'm a descendant of slaves, of American slaves. And so it's very difficult on that level, but also, you know, as a human being to see that there was a time in our country, that Americans had the capacity to treat other Americans this way. It's jarring to me on that level. And it was a time when we were more religious as a society. I mean, arguably, we're less religious than we've ever been. And so sometimes it's hard for me to square that, how could this be possible at a time when people were actually active in churches and in you know, more devout, but specifically this type of bloodiness, this, when you're dealing with murder as a type of resistance, it's it's troubling, because some of the women in my book ended up killing children. And I'm a mother, you're a mother. That's a difficult one, right. And so it's difficult when we look at it just from that vantage point. But what I had to do as an author is to look at it from their perspective and how they would have seen the children as maybe as inheriting a type of whiteness, what we now call whiteness. They're inheriting white privilege. They're inheriting slaveholding privilege. And so that's what they were acting against. And not necessarily this four year old, little girl, but they're acting against slavery itself in that vein. And so yeah, it's difficult. This type of work, when I was writing my last book, I was just troubled by migraines. I mean, it's just hard to get through it. And so with this book, I had already done that. But it was no less difficult for me. It's just not easy to write about these topics. It just isn't. And I'm glad that you brought that up and can appreciate that this is the ugly side of US history that no one wants to talk about. But in order for us to really understand and reckon with the US past, we must, we must look at all sides of it.

Kelly Therese Pollock  27:40  
Can you talk a little bit about how that's in a lot of ways becoming more difficult, you know. There's these attempts at all over the place to you know, ban history, ban certain books, take books out of libraries, because one parent objects to it. Can you talk a bit about how that makes this whole process more difficult and, and why it's still so important to do?

Dr. Nikki M. Taylor  28:04  
Yeah, so you know, it's important because, you know, the work that I and other historians have to do to uncover, and to uncover history that has been buried for 200 or more years, and to amplify voices that have been muted. Forever. They've been forever muted, since the day these women were executed, right. And so it takes a lot of work. It's painstaking. And it's tedious. And it's laborious. And so no one does all of that work, and then to have someone act against it, you know, and say, "Oh, this book isn't worthy of us reading." It's a lot of work, just on a personal level, it's too much work to uncover those voices and to bring these stories to light just to have someone for political reasons, say this book isn't worthy of reading. This knowledge is not worthy of us knowing. And I think it also corrupts US history when we don't have all sides of it. When we have too much of one side of US history, then it's a corrupted history. It's, it's not an adequate picture of who we are in the soul of this country. And the soul of this country includes slavery too. It includes slave resistance too, and so we must persist in writing these stories, and we must persist in reading these stories, and having these kind of dialogues like you're having on this podcast. I mean, that's absolutely part of who we are as intellectuals. It's part of who we are as people who want to rise above our past, and people who want to build a better tomorrow so that our children and our children's great grandchildren never have to repeat these ugly things that you know, our ancestors  endured.

Kelly Therese Pollock  30:00  
Yeah. You mentioned earlier this, this framework that you have in the book, and so you talk about a Black feminist practice of justice. So I wonder if you could expand upon that a little more, how we can see that in these cases. And, and of course, and you say this, this is not how these women saw it themselves, they did not have this language. Right. But But what what does that mean to to look at it in this framework? And how does that really then help us think as we're thinking through these, these hard histories and studying and moving forward and learning from it? How does that sort of bring us into that space?

Dr. Nikki M. Taylor  30:41  
Thank you so much. So this came about, I have a daughter, and she can be a little cheeky. And, you know, I told her about this. And she says, "Mom, aren't you afraid that people are gonna say these are just angry Black women?" And I said, "Oh, my God, you're right. You're right." You know, I hated to admit that she was right. So I couldn't just tell the story as a straight story. And I had to really dig a little bit deeper, so that I did not simply portray these resistors as simply enraged, impulsive Black women. And when I got into their stories, that's not at all what they were. But if you tell the story exactly as it is, without a framework, it will end up being they were impulsive, they had no reason they to murder these people, and they just were bloodthirsty. That's how the story would have ended up looking had I not framed it in the way that I did.  The way that I framed it comes from my training at Duke University, where I was trained in women's studies. And one of the theories that has been near and dear to my heart is Black Feminist Theory. Patricia Hill Collins and others have built on that theory over the years, but she's the grandmother for me of what Black Feminist Theory is. And so I coined this thing called "the Black feminist practice of justice," not because enslaved women were feminists, as you said, they're not. But because this theory can help us understand their motivations, right? And why they did what they did, so that we move away from just saying they're impulsive, and they're angry Black women. Because what Black Feminist Theory does, it resists and rejects these tendencies to paint Black women with these racist tropes, these stereotypes, the Jezebel, the angry Black woman. So that's one of the things the theory does. It rescues us from that and prevents us from doing that. So what is the Black feminist practice of justice? Well it's derived from Black Feminist Theory, and a Black feminist philosophy of justice. Now, it's ironic, how can I talk about justice when I just said earlier, that they got no justice? Well, that's the irony of it. They, they kind of crafted their own definition of justice in a world where they got no justice in any other way. So to them, what did justice mean? And I had to really think about what they were saying. And so that's how I came up with the theory. The theory is derived from these women and their lived experiences, and the words that they said. So collectively, it's about fairness, decency, justice, being humane, and receiving humane treatment. It prioritizes as I said, their lived experiences and looking at the world through their eyes. So this is their theory. They crafted it. And broadly, it has a lot of intersectionality of it, you know, within it. So this idea that as Black women, as enslaved Black women, they had a unique experience. It's very different than enslaved Black men, and it appreciates that Black women during the era of slavery, had no advocates, and no defenders. Nobody was going to advocate for them and nobody was going to come to their defense, if their enslavers were being abusive. Nobody. So the only person that they could rely on to defend them was themselves. That's it. I also part of that theory is I grapple with the issue of rationality. And so how rational was it to think that I have a right to kill somebody because they have been mistreating me? So I grapple with that in the book. And then I also demonstrate that this was not just to counter this idea that they were impulsive, as it this was not the first or even the second option that these women chose. Oftentimes it was their last best resort. So murder was their last best resort. They tried other types of resistance, Kelly, and when those other types failed, they said, you know, "This is the last best thing to get some relief, to get a little ounce of justice for myself." I also grapple with the issue of proportionality. That's at the heart of our justice system here in America today. You know, we don't execute somebody for stealing a pack of cigarettes, right? So we have a concept of proportionality. But in this case, you know, there's a question, "Well, I don't think these women went too far." A lot of people that I read these stories, too, they concluded, "Oh these women went too far." But a Black feminist practice of justice says, "You can't judge them. From their perspective, they, they went far enough, right, that's, that's, that's the length that they had to go in order to get justice for themselves." And so all of that they were very conscious of their outcomes. They knew what would happen to them. And planning was at the center of this. They were not impulsive. I demonstrate in thunder tones in every chapter. These women planned for weeks, for months, for years, the murders of their enslavers. So this was not at all impulsive. So I challenge all of those ideas about this being just an impulsive, angry Black woman. And so only with that theory, do you see it that way. If you don't have that theory, and you just look at these cases very quickly, then, you know, you end up saying what my daughter said, "Aren't they just angry Black women?"

Kelly Therese Pollock  37:05  
Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's really persuasive. So I want to encourage people to read the book. So how can they get a copy?

Dr. Nikki M. Taylor  37:14  
Thank you. So you can go to Cambridge University website, and it's there. It's called, "Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance." And also, luckily, it's also on Amazon. And it's really cheap, it's really affordable. And so for the hardcopy, it's $24. And then there's also an audio version, which will be out in September. So if you're the type that just likes to drive and let your book play, you can get that version. And also, it's available on Kindle. So we've anticipated every type of reader. And so there's no excuse for anybody not to read this book. It will challenge and provoke you in ways you never imagined.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:01  
Yeah, absolutely. I'm so glad there will be an audio book. I'm a huge proponent of audiobooks. And I think it's a shame that more academic books do not make it onto audio.

Dr. Nikki M. Taylor  38:12  
I agree. I agree. I agree.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:16  
Well, Nikki, thank you so much for joining me. I hope people will check out the book and if people are looking for movies to make, there's quite a few movie ideas in this book as well.

Dr. Nikki M. Taylor  38:27  
Thank you so much. I'm so honored to be here in front of all of your listeners. Thank you for listening and thank you for having me on.

Teddy  39:08  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on twitter or instagram @Unsung__History or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye! 

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