Early Republican Maternal Violence in White, Black, and Red

Not all mothers in the early American South were the hearthside angels painted so vividly by popular literature and religious propaganda. Though many in the South viewed motherhood as an inherently moral profession, the “proper” roles and behaviors of mothers were not biologically determined but were taught, enforced, and, occasionally, ignored. This paper investigates those mothers who failed to conform to expectations of appropriate parenting in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century South by practicing violence within their families. Was Kitty Shields, who killed her eighteen-year-old daughter in 1811, motivated by similar reasons as the Catawba mother who dashed her child upon a rock in the 1790s? Did either woman experience the same emotions as the enslaved black woman who threatened to slit her children’s throats rather than relinquish them to a slave trader? Where did maternal violence stem from, and how was it constructed in response to the social norms of the early Republic? The cultures in which these women lived drew the bounds of motherhood very sharply, and the moments in which women stepped beyond those bounds reveal the gaps in a society’s ability to dictate behavior. Whether these cultural irregularities were idiosyncratic or whether they represented some small clutch at empowerment, acts of maternal violence prove women’s continuing, if often obscured, power over their own homes and families. This paper argues that the dark side of motherhood provides as much insight into the lives of early American women as the “sacred” image of motherhood that so many women, whether by choice or instinct, upheld.