Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910 / Edition 1

by Kali N. Gross

Overview

Colored Amazons is a groundbreaking historical analysis of the crimes, prosecution, and incarceration of black women in Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century. Kali N. Gross reconstructs black women's crimes and their representations in popular press accounts and within the discourses of urban and penal reform. Most importantly, she considers what these crimes signified about the experiences, ambitions, and frustrations of the marginalized women who committed them. Gross argues that the perpetrators and the state jointly constructed black female crime. For some women, crime functioned as a means to attain personal and social autonomy. For the state, black female crime and its representations effectively galvanized and justified a host of urban reform initiatives that reaffirmed white, middle-class authority.

Gross draws on prison records, trial transcripts, news accounts, and rare mug shot photographs. Providing an overview of Philadelphia's black women criminals, she describes the women's work, housing, and leisure activities and their social position in relation to the city's native-born whites, European immigrants, and elite and middle-class African Americans. She relates how news accounts exaggerated black female crime, trading in sensationalistic portraits of threatening "colored Amazons," and she considers criminologists' interpretations of the women's criminal acts, interpretations largely based on notions of hereditary criminality. Ultimately, Gross contends that the history of black female criminals is in many ways a history of the rift between the political rhetoric of democracy and the legal and social realities of those marginalized by its shortcomings.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822337997
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	06/22/2006
Series:	Politics, History, and Culture Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	276
Sales rank:	611,628
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Kali N. Gross is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Africana Studies at Drexel University.

Read an Excerpt

COLORED Amazons

Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910

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By KALI N. GROSS

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3799-7

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Chapter One

OF LAW AND VIRTUE: BLACK WOMEN IN SLAVERY, FREEDOM, AND EARLY CRIMINAL JUSTICE

In every human Breast, God had implanted a Principle, which we call love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance. -Phyllis Wheatley, 1774

UNFREE LABOR ACCOUNTED FOR nearly one-third of the labor force in colonial Pennsylvania. Slavery and indentured servitude coexisted at the time of the colony's founding and ended together in the decades just after the American Revolution. The number of Africans in Philadelphia rose from approximately 150 in 1684 to almost 2,500 in 1790-at that time blacks accounted for 5 percent of the city's inhabitants. Divided almost equally according to sex, the black population combined those imported from the Caribbean with native-born blacks and, toward the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves shipped directly from Africa. Largely the property of merchants and artisans, enslaved blacks lived with their owners in numbers of fewer than three to a household. Most slaves led hard, isolated lives punctuated by hunger, disease, and degradation. Theirdisproportionate mortality rate, 50 percent higher than European Americans, spotlights the harsh realities of slavery in the North.

Early abolitionists such as free blacks and Mennonites decried the inhumanity of slavery almost from the time of Pennsylvania's founding. When the colony stirred with the rumblings of insurrection, black Pennsylvanians hoped that revolutionary ideals would make their own liberation inevitable. Although the struggle for independence did not end slavery, it ushered in swift changes that profoundly altered the quality of life for most blacks in the region. More than political rhetoric or revolutionary banter, liberty was an infectious principle that roused many. It breathed new life into the cause of black freedom and it prompted slaves to "steal themselves." It also engendered intense debate about the political and moral implications of a democratic society that tolerated slavery. In Pennsylvania, Independence invigorated the antislavery movement, expedited abolition in the state, and radically transformed justice and punishment. Yet liberty also proved temporal, fraught with strife, and, ultimately, fleeting.

The trial of Alice Clifton, an enslaved woman accused of murder in 1787, acts as a historical conduit through which we can look backward as well as forward in Pennsylvania's history. Balanced on the axis of key social contexts, Clifton's trial occurs at a historical crossroads. Positioned between slavery and gradual abolition and corporal punishment and the emergence of the prison system, the case accompanied the birth of two nations-a burgeoning republic and a fledgling freed black community. The circumstances of Clifton's crime hearken back to the days of slavery, yet her trial is poised at the threshold of the future. The hearing, then, attests to the transformation of justice as well as to blacks' social status in the wake of the Revolution.

Perhaps most important, Clifton's trial diagrams how legislation regulating slavery shaped broader notions of race, gender, and sexuality. Ultimately, the statutes created impossible binaries in black women's lives. The circumstances of the case also highlight the impact of race relations on the development of criminal justice. Specifically, social mores established by slave laws criminalized blacks and erected systemic inequalities in the justice system. By using Clifton's case as a doorway into legal and social developments that came before her crime and those that followed, this chapter highlights three key periods in Pennsylvania's history. Mapping early enslavement, gradual abolition and industrialization, and early penology is crucial for understanding the interplay of race, gender, and justice in the late nineteenth century. Not to be lost is the symbiotic relationship between racial tension, social unrest, and the evolution of criminal justice. As this relationship becomes visible so too does a pattern of partial justice that leaves black women vulnerable to the vagaries of the legal system.

The Trial of Alice Clifton

Alice Clifton went on trial for the murder of her illegitimate child on April 15, 1787. Clifton, seventeen years old at the time, labored primarily as a domestic servant for her owners, John and Mary Bartholomew, Philadelphia shopkeepers. She stunned her owners on April 5, 1787, the day that Mary Bartholomew's sister-in-law discovered the lifeless body of a newborn girl stuffed in a trunk in the family's home. The Bartholomews soon learned Clifton had slashed the infant's throat, making a cut nearly four inches long and one inch deep with a razor purchased for a shilling. Ironically, such a wound would typically constitute proof that the infant had been born alive, but Clifton's defense attorneys would argue that peculiarities surrounding the pregnancy pointed to a stillbirth. Her counsel tried in vain to convince the court that despite the reprehensible cutting, Clifton could not be found guilty of murder because she cut the child's throat postmortem.

Formerly the property of Mrs. Bartholomew's father, Clifton lived with the Bartholomews for three years before her arrest. Arduous labor, threadbare clothes, cruel punishments, and scarce food typified slaves' existence. Most likely Clifton would have been supervised by Mrs. Bartholomew and charged to perform a host of tasks from cooking and cleaning to laundry, sewing, and gardening. Clifton might also have been hired out to labor for other families or merchants in the area. The close quarters in which slaves and masters lived rarely engendered pity or sympathy on the part of masters. Rather, slave owners often exploited the most basic human needs as a means to compel submission. Silvia Dubois, the slave of New Jersey and Pennsylvania innkeepers during the 1780s, said of her diet of potatoes, pork, beef, mush, and milk: "We didn't get a bellyful of these sometimes-I've often gone to bed hungry ... was no use to complain-you had your measure and you got no more." Dubois also told of terrible beatings she received from her mistress, noting that she had been marked so badly that she would "never lose those scars."

Slave owners also restricted spatial mobility, though bondwomen like Clifton routinely found ways to escape the master's watchful eye. Running errands that took her away from the home probably doubled as a means to meet with other slaves in the area. Evening jaunts likely provided avenues to socialize with members of the opposite sex. During one of these excursions Clifton met John Shaffer, a white man who lived nearby. The two developed an intimate relationship. According to the record, Clifton conceived the first time "she was debauched" by him. Clifton met Shaffer regularly thereafter, and the two conspired to keep the pregnancy a secret.

Despite repeated inquiries from the Bartholomews, who suspected the pregnancy, Clifton denied the charges. Even during labor, Clifton complained only of feeling ill. Mrs. Bartholomew checked on her routinely, but Clifton delivered between her mistress's visits and managed to conceal her daughter's birth. Although within earshot of Clifton, neither Mrs. Bartholomew nor members of her family heard the newborn cry. When Mrs. Bartholomew entered Clifton's room, the young woman, at that time up and about, asked for a change of clothes, claiming she felt much better. Mrs. Bartholomew searched the house and enlisted the help of family members. Her sister-in-law discovered the infant under a roll of linen in a storage trunk. According to the testimony, Clifton initially claimed that, "she had laid on it, but could not help it." The Bartholomews summoned the authorities.

Members of the inquest discovered the neck laceration, and shortly afterward Clifton confessed, though it remained unclear when she had cut the child's throat. Witnesses at the house could not say with certainty because the infant's head laid on its chest; in the absence of any blood, all believed that Clifton had smothered the child. Clifton's multiple stories compounded confusion over the time of death. First claiming to have accidentally caused the infant's death and then taking responsibility for cutting its throat, Clifton later stated that the infant was stillborn. To support the latter claim, her attorneys offered evidence of an injury she had sustained a month prior to the birth. The Bartholomews' testimony corroborated Clifton's account of having fallen down the cellar steps a few weeks before she delivered. Because she fell with a log in her hands, the defense argued that this accident had gravely injured the fetus and precipitated a premature stillbirth. Two doctors from the inquest testified that based on a preponderance of evidence-the fall, the small size of the fetus, the fact that Clifton delivered alone, and the lack of blood on the wound-they could conclude only that Clifton had made the incision postmortem.

But Clifton's damning words and actions undermined her defense. Moreover, her reason for hiding the pregnancy supplied motive for the prosecution. According to Doctor Foulke's testimony, Clifton said that Shaffer had persuaded her to kill the child. At the time she conceived, he planned to wed a "fine woman," and he feared the impact of a scandal. Shaffer had promised he would purchase her freedom if she killed the baby. He said she would live "as happy and as fine as his wife." Presumably taking advantage of the stillbirth, Clifton claimed to have cut the infant's throat in order to keep her agreement with Shaffer. Neither Clifton nor Shaffer testified, and there is no indication that John Shaffer, who at the time of the trial was indeed wed to "Chavilier's daughter," faced criminal charges.

At the close of the trial, when the chief justice informed the jurors of their responsibility, he took the liberty of offering his own opinion on the matter. He charged that, "so far as her efforts could effect [the infant's] destruction, [Clifton] exerted them unpitying, and void of maternal affection." The jurors deliberated for three hours before finding Clifton guilty of willfully causing the death of her bastard child.

Yet the verdict did not herald Clifton's ultimate demise. Before sentencing, Clifton's defense introduced an affidavit charging that Edward Pole, a juror, had stated prior to the trial that he did not see how the verdict could be anything other than guilty. That Pole reached this conclusion before the hearing constituted cause, according to the defense, for the court to grant Clifton a new trial. The court denied the petition and sentenced Clifton to death. However, it appears that Clifton's sentence was overturned. The reason is omitted, but the record noted that Clifton's punishment was "respited by the Honourable Supreme Executive Council." Perhaps the Bartholomews intervened, given that the outcome concerned their property. Beyond the abrupt cessation of the account, however, Clifton's fate is unknown; yet her ordeal sheds light on the social barriers bisecting black women's lives. Her case also explicates the role of the legal system in erecting those barriers.

Clifton's crime may behoove sympathy, but the broader circumstances cannot be overlooked, principally, that her best shot at freedom could be obtained only in exchange for the life of her child. Though her relationship with Shaffer appears to have been consensual, there can be little doubt of its exploitative nature. Clifton wielded some power by using her pregnancy as a bargaining chip, but her doing so more effectively discloses the extent of her powerlessness.

Clifton's behavior during and after the pregnancy maps her fragmented social context. Her crime embodies the tortured yearning that Phyllis Wheatley expresses in the epigraph to this chapter-"pant[ing] for Deliverance" epitomizes the actions of the young mother who pressed a razor into the throat of her newborn child. The extremeness of her crime attests to the paradoxes of resistance; no matter how noble the desire for freedom, actually resisting slavery rendered any adherence to the law or conventional morality impossible. Yet accepting enslavement often translated into even greater injustices and moral transgressions. The laws that sanctioned slavery fundamentally outlawed the virtue of enslaved black women. Moreover, the legal system responsible for punishing Clifton itself bore no small measure of culpability in the circumstances leading up to her child's death.

The justice system in 1787 acknowledged the legal freedom of blacks born after 1780 at the same time it upheld the enslavement of those born before the gradual abolition statute. This circumstance is intimately related to the commission of Clifton's crime. Indeed the justice system wrought the legal and ideological void that restricted the liberty of black women like Clifton even as it would attempt to subject them to severe punishments for their efforts to obtain freedom. The contending forces that overlay Clifton's case, however, reflect the vestiges of colonial law and its initial negotiation of unfree labor. Early slave laws did not simply regulate the labor of imported Africans. Rather, it mediated broader aspects of social status and judicial access. As statutes crystallized slavery in the region, race, gender, and sexuality took meaning in ways that inscribed immorality and dishonesty onto black womanhood.

Slavery, Law, and Black Women in Colonial Pennsylvania

Laws governing unfree labor structured social hierarchy in colonial Pennsylvania, and as a consequence slaves and indentured servants occupied the lowest rungs. It would not be the first time-or the last-that a legal system would bear the distinctive characteristics of those holding power and status. Yet the contours of social strata, particularly as they took shape through the evolution of slavery, severely affected black womanhood and black women's experiences in the justice system.

Slavery took root in Pennsylvania in much the same ways it did in colonies like New York and Virginia in that the early status of Clifton's predecessors remained legally ambiguous. Brought by Dutch and Swedish settlers, both enslaved and indentured Africans toiled along the banks of the Delaware River in the 1660s. The prevailing legal code, the Duke of York's Laws, contained only a tacit sanction of slavery. The statute outlawed the enslavement of Christians, though it noted that conversion to Christianity did not grant freedom to blacks who converted after they had been purchased. Upon his arrival, Penn attempted to treat blacks as indentured laborers. He included a provision in the Free Society of Traders stipulating that blacks should serve for fourteen years and thereafter become serfs. Most white Pennsylvanians, however, ignored this provision, and Penn himself instructed his steward in 1685 to purchase blacks to work on his farms because "a man has them while they live."

Although slavery was antithetical to Quaker beliefs, the colonists eagerly purchased slaves. The new masters set blacks to work building houses, shops, wharves, and taverns. The colonial community numbered just over a 1,000 in 1684, so the influx of 150 Africans transformed the cultural landscape. Quakers were not the only immigrants in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, and they were not immune to the bigoted assumptions firmly held by most European colonists. Rather, because of their tolerance of religious difference and their commitment to pacifism, the Quaker province attracted diverse settlers-both religious and political dissidents. The native population, the Lenni Lenape, had been largely displaced before Penn and the Quakers arrived, but even with their numbers dwindling they too existed on the periphery of colony. This mixed demographic together with the infusion of Africans reconfigured the severity of the more traditional European social divides.

Race, however, did not completely supplant customary class, ethnic, and gender divisions among European settlers; rather, it acted as a modifying agent. The social and economic boundaries that distinguished "good wives" from "nasty wenches" and mistresses from maids were modified in that both types of women were Anglo and Christian. As such, white women were entitled to an elevated status, one separate and above that of Indian and African women. Colonists considered Indian and African women fundamentally barbarous and lascivious. Women like Alice Clifton would occupy the lowest stratum in this emerging society. Landed gentry and yeomen, even indentured European men, shared a more contiguous definition of manhood, which was in opposition to that of indigenous and African men.

Furthermore, Christianity, formerly the nexus of bitter social and political conflicts, served as a marker of civility that distinguished European immigrants from the heathen cultures of Indians and Africans. Even conversion to Christianity could not raise either group to the social status of white colonists or white indentured servants-none of whom could be enslaved for life. As European religious and cultural values colored early impressions of Native and African peoples, so too would they play a key role in how racial differences correlated to criminality.

Specifically, differences in physical appearance and social rituals such as dancing and courting translated, for the English in particular, into unlawful behavior. Public nudity, polygamy, and the worship of deities beyond Christ and the Holy Father were punishable offenses in England. Ethnocentric in their reasoning, Europeans viewed the culture of blacks and reds as one predicated upon lawless, amoral conduct. These notions contributed to a discourse that regarded criminality as characteristic of Native and African identities. Such ideas proved highly damaging for black and red women because Europeans held females to an even stricter moral code. Appearing just as immoral as their men made African and Indian women seem far more depraved.

As African slavery gained a foothold in the colonial economy, slave laws reflected an ideology that increasingly scripted blacks as servile and untrustworthy. Through the manipulation of punishment and protection, the justice system governed slaves and servants and their social conduct among the colonists, and in doing so it positioned blacks as fundamentally inferior. Differences in punishment, particularly the pattern of harsher discipline for blacks, conveyed blacks' powerlessness at the same time it implied greater criminal culpability. Moreover, by failing to distinguish punishment for black men and black women, the laws especially devalued black femininity.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from COLORED Amazons by KALI N. GROSS Copyright © 2006 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Notes from the Author: Crime and Black Women’s History 1

1. Of Law and Virtue: Black Women in Slavery, Freedom, and Early Criminal Justice 13

2. Service Savors of Slavery: Labor, Autonomy, and Turn-of-the-Century Urban Crime 39

3. Tricking the Tricks: Violence and Vice among Black Female Criminals 72

4. Roughneck Women, Pale Representations, and Dark Crimes: Black Female Criminals and Popular Culture 101

5. Deviant by Design: Race, Degeneracy, and the Science of Penology 127

Conclusion: “She was Born in this Prison”: Black Female Crime, Past and Present 150

Appendix 157

Abbreviations and Notes on Sources 167

Notes 171

Bibliography 231

Index 251

Editorial Reviews

"Colored Amazons is a rigorously researched and lively written account of Black women's circulation through Philadelphia's criminal justice system in the decades after Reconstruction and offers a compelling history of punishment and of the evolution of racism at the turn of the twentieth century. . . . It would be a wonderful addition to courses on Black women's history, urban studies, or penal studies."--Courtney Denine Marshall "Women's Studies"

"[A] must read for those wishing to fully investigate the inner workings of freedom and justice in America. Colored Amazons serves the important purpose of suggesting how much more we have to learn from the way crime and criminalization operate in society. Gross has demonstrated the power of crime as a social prism, and Colored Amazons will both inform and inspire scholars."--Shawn Leigh Alexander "Journal of American History"

"Gross writes with passion and sensitivity about a particularly oppressed group of women in nineteenth century Philadelphia. She is to be congratulated for having the courage to apply her considerable talents to a very sensitive subject. . . ."--David R. Johnson "Journal of Social History"

"Gross's book provides historians with a spirited account of black women's criminality in Philadelphia during the Progressive era."--Anne Meis Knupfer "American Historical Review"

"Gross's innovative work is exceptional for its position in the historiography of black women's history, brilliant use of source material, and noble application of social history. . . . Colored Amazons is not only for academic audiences but also for public policy analysts, legal professionals, and people who are interested in understanding how the complexities of race, gender, and class affect America's ideology on crime and prison reform. . . . A remarkable study."--Sylvea Hollis "H-Net Reviews"

"In this deeply researched account of fin-de-sìecle Philadelphia, Kali Gross combines social and cultural history. . . . Gross's arguments are enhanced in the detailed compilation and analysis of arrest, conviction and prison records, especially those from Eastern State Penitentiary. She has mined the tedious, but rich material found in the convict registers, warden's journals and prison docket books of the most important sites of incarceration to draw a nuanced profile of black female criminality."--Timothy J. Gilfoyle "Gender & History"

"Readers will agree that this book is a valuable contribution to the dialectic surrounding history, politics, and culture. . . . This book will be of interest to persons seeking to understand the impact of the criminal justice system on female inmates, and offers potential remedies for the disproportionate rate of black female incarceration. . . . Kali Gross has presented a well-researched and carefully argued investigation of female criminality."--Floris Barnett Cash "Journal of African American History"

"Heartfelt and bold, Colored Amazons stands confidently at the intersection of several kinds of history. Kali N. Gross has used statistics, scandal rags, and sophisticated modern studies to produce a genuinely innovative study of race and power, crime and sex, stereotypes and gender roles."--Roger Lane, author of Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900

"In this high-spirited and original study, Kali N. Gross combines top-notch scholarship and a sense of the empowering potential of history as she mines previously untapped sources to understand black women's crimes in Philadelphia in the period 1880-1910. She tells the story of how race, gender, and sexuality shaped criminal justice, criminology, and urban reform movements while she also explores how black women negotiated with the justice systems they encountered. Gross addresses topics other scholars have avoided, including these women's experiences of abuse and their own acts of violence, to produce a story that is at once painful, moving, and inspiring."--Nicole Hahn Rafter, author of Partial Justice: Women in State Prisons, 1800-1935

"Much has been made in media reports about the fact that African American women are the fastest growing population in today's jails and prisons. If you have ever wondered about the historical roots of this trend, Colored Amazons is an excellent place to start. Kali N. Gross approaches her subjects with sensitivity without being sentimental as she unravels the complexities of poor women as agents and as victims negotiating survival and bouts with the law. This is a must read for all who want to understand the criminal justice system, women inmates, and the evolving social structure that locks them out and locks them up."--Tera W. Hunter, author of To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War

"Through an examination of black women engaged in both property and violent crime in the context of political, social, and economic disfranchisement, Kali N. Gross has produced a riveting narrative that reveals the ways in which criminal acts and courtroom and prison behavior were also expressive acts. She not only contributes profoundly to our understanding of black working-class and poor women in and around turn-of-the century Philadelphia but also resists the tendency to romanticize these women as 'primitive rebels.' The work is truly pathbreaking."--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

From the Publisher

In this deeply researched account of fin-de-sìecle Philadelphia, Kali Gross combines social and cultural history. . . . Gross’s arguments are enhanced in the detailed compilation and analysis of arrest, conviction and prison records, especially those from Eastern State Penitentiary. She has mined the tedious, but rich material found in the convict registers, warden’s journals and prison docket books of the most important sites of incarceration to draw a nuanced profile of black female criminality.

Gender & History - Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Readers will agree that this book is a valuable contribution to the dialectic surrounding history, politics, and culture. . . . This book will be of interest to persons seeking to understand the impact of the criminal justice system on female inmates, and offers potential remedies for the disproportionate rate of black female incarceration. . . . Kali Gross has presented a well-researched and carefully argued investigation of female criminality.

Journal of African American History - Floris Barnett Cash

[A] must read for those wishing to fully investigate the inner workings of freedom and justice in America. Colored Amazons serves the important purpose of suggesting how much more we have to learn from the way crime and criminalization operate in society. Gross has demonstrated the power of crime as a social prism, and Colored Amazons will both inform and inspire scholars.

Journal of American History - Shawn Leigh Alexander

Gross’s innovative work is exceptional for its position in the historiography of black women’s history, brilliant use of source material, and noble application of social history. . . . Colored Amazons is not only for academic audiences but also for public policy analysts, legal professionals, and people who are interested in understanding how the complexities of race, gender, and class affect America’s ideology on crime and prison reform. . . . A remarkable study.

H-Net Reviews - Sylvea Hollis

"Gross writes with passion and sensitivity about a particularly oppressed group of women in nineteenth century Philadelphia. She is to be congratulated for having the courage to apply her considerable talents to a very sensitive subject. . . ."

Journal of Social History - David R. Johnson

Colored Amazons is a rigorously researched and lively written account of Black women’s circulation through Philadelphia’s criminal justice system in the decades after Reconstruction and offers a compelling history of punishment and of the evolution of racism at the turn of the twentieth century. . . . It would be a wonderful addition to courses on Black women’s history, urban studies, or penal studies.

Women's Studies - Courtney Denine Marshall

Gross's book provides historians with a spirited account of black women's criminality in Philadelphia during the Progressive era.

American Historical Review - Anne Meis Knupfer