Celia A Slave Case Study

The Sexual Violence of Slavery in Celia, A Slave Melton McLaurin’s case study Celia, A Slave illustrates slavery and issues of law, morality, resistance, and more; one of its most prominent themes is gender and sexual violence within the institution of slavery. This sexual violence was used to relegate slave women to the most marginalized and powerless category within the social system. Celia’s case shows how laws and social attitudes excused and allowed slave rape, and how this violence reflected the broader moral issues of slavery. This paper argues that Celia’s case study exemplifies that sexual violence and mistreatment of Black slave women was intrinsic to the institution of slavery and considered necessary to maintain the systems of

That Celia’s rape was considered irrelevant to the trial, and in fact dismissed as defensive evidence, shows that slave rape was legally acceptable. Indeed, McLaurin states that Missouri law only acknowledged the rape of a slave woman as trespass—part of property law—and therefore had no legislation against rape committed by the slave’s owner. McLaurin says that the law favoured the master’s property rights over the slave’s human rights, to maintain both the master’s absolute power and the economic advantages of controlling and increasing slave reproduction. Pokorak mentions that this control was particularly important after the 1808 ban on importing slaves, as the maintenance of the slave system relied entirely on a natural birth replacement rate. Baptist, conversely, suggests that economic factors actually influenced the prevalence and normalization of slave rape, through the process of fetishization : treating slave women as property allowed white men to morally reconcile themselves with rape, and vice versa, the power of rape allowed them to relegate the slaves to the status of objects. Either way, in the eyes of the masters, and therefore in the eyes of the law, slaves were first and foremost property, which made

McLaurin portrays Celia as “morally, if not legally, innocent” and shows that her defence attorneys, and perhaps some townsfolks, held this view. The real argument of her trial, then, is the moral debate of property versus personhood, a debate which extends beyond the topic of rape to concern slavery in general. The defence attempted to portray Celia’s crime as morally justified, as an act of self-defence, but this was dismissed by the court and thus deemed irrelevant. In doing so, the court was stating that slaves have no personhood to defend; they are first and foremost property. This is what makes Celia’s sexual assault allowable or at least ignorable, and more broadly, what allows the subjugation of slaves. Celia’s defense case calls these ideas into question, and in doing so, calls the very morality, or rather, the immorality, of the institution of slavery into question. For example, the defence suggested that the power differential between master and slave woman meant the master was using coercion and therefore there was a lack of consent; this raised the question of who owned a slave woman’s sexual parts, and to a greater extent, questioned the authority and ability of master to use power to control slaves in general. Baptist argues that rape symbolised the entire