Slavery, Abolition, and Murdering Mothers

In June 1833, the pregnant enslaved woman Esther gave birth on the property of her owner Duncan Graham in Robeson County, North Carolina.  Immediately afterward, Esther first choked her son and then beat him against the wall of the house.  Yet, it was only when Margaret Graham heard Esther “grunting and groaning” did she send her children to find Esther’s recently delivered child.  By then bruises covered the body of the dead infant, with signs of Esther’s fingers around his neck.

Esther’s story seems to fit within the narrative framework established by anti-slavery activists such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her 1848 poem, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point.”  First published in the abolitionist periodical The Liberty Bell, Browning’s poem conveyed the imagined grief of a slave mother who killed her child.  Abolitionists used Browning’s poem to vividly illustrate the violence and horror of slavery. By linking infanticide to slavery, abolitionists defined maternal violence as a distinctive feature of the enslaved during the antebellum period. 

Yet in promoting this particular narrative, abolitionists actually marginalized the experiences of all women—free and enslaved—who murdered their babies during the nineteenth century.  Juxtaposing local stories of infanticide from antebellum North Carolina with narratives of child murder generated by anti-slavery activists, this paper argues that abolitionists typed infanticide as an act of violence so antithetical to motherhood that only slavery could inspire a woman to commit it.  In contrast, however, murdering mothers constituted part of the fabric of everyday life in nineteenth-century America.  People throughout the country dealt with infanticide, not often, but regularly, producing diverse narratives dedicated to understanding the act.  Abolitionist discourse, in contrast, not only marginalized women’s experiences, but also obscured the broader issues—such as class—that shaped alternate narratives of child murder in communities across America.