In Thrice Condemned: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Practice of Leniency in Antebellum Virginia Courts, Tamika Y. Nunley examines “the homicides of white Virginians and the enslaved women held responsible for their deaths.” Murder (and attempted murder), she asserts, “was a form of enslaved women’s resistance” and not all of the accused women who stood trial in nineteenth-century Virginia were put to death for their crimes. (P. 5.) In fact, some had their sentences commuted in “what nineteenth-century jurists referred to as acts of ‘leniency’ or ‘mercy.’” Nunley argues that these acts of mercy help to illustrate both “competing ideas about the relationship of gender, paternalism, and leniency” and “the contradictions built into the meaning and administration of justice in antebellum Virginia.” (P. 6.)
Nunley brings together a number of fields of historical study in her work, as she explores not only slavery and the laws of Virginia, but also gender, resistance, and local legal culture. Her engagement with the work of Philip J. Schwarz’s Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 (1988) is evident in her title. In Schwarz’s telling, enslaved laborers tried for crimes in Virginia courts were “‘twice condemned’ by southern law and slavery.” (P. 6.) In Nunley’s telling, enslaved women accused of capital crimes were, in fact, thrice condemned. They were not only condemned by southern law and slavery, she argues, but also by the courts’ use of “racialized gender stereotypes” to decide their fates. (P. 6.) Thrice Condemned, then, makes clear the “interconnectedness of gender, slavery, and southern law,” and the variety of ways in which Virginia communities reacted to the convictions of women who violently resisted their enslavement. (P. 34.)
The historical record rarely provides scholars with the voices of the enslaved, and Nunley’s experience in the archive was no different. In many instances, she found “legal records with only a few lines and little to no information about the enslaved women involved;” however, she also uncovered some truly rich cases and supplemented them, when possible, with newspapers and the papers of Virginia governors. (P. 10.) The stories of women like Nelly, Jane Williams, and Agnes serve as anchors for Nunley’s article. But throughout, she also provides evidence of other enslaved women who stood before the court for having killed, or attempted to kill, either their own masters and mistresses, or other white Virginians, both young and old, in their communities. (P. 10.)
Nunley first discusses the case of Nelly, an enslaved woman who appeared before the Prince William County Court in the late 1850s for the death of George E. Green, her master. Alongside Nelly stood her children and her grandchildren. The court found all five enslaved laborers guilty and sentenced them to death. Nelly and her two children, Betsy and James, hanged for their crime. Ellen and Elias, Nelly’s twin grandchildren, did not. Instead, after receiving petitions from residents of Prince William County and neighboring counties—some of which called for Ellen and Elias’s hanging and others that called for leniency—Governor Henry A. Wise commuted the twins’ sentences and ordered they be transported out of the county.
At first glance, it might seem as though Wise’s decision was a merciful one, one that saved the twins from certain death. But, in commuting their sentence to transportation, Nunley makes clear that Wise ensured the twins “remained in bondage without the elders who raised them and who had perhaps offered daily examples of generational resistance and their own ideas about justice when they were alive.” It is also likely that part of Wise’s calculations centered on the twins’ “capacity for long-term labor,” being only fourteen at the time of the trial. (P. 16.) Absent from Wise’s pardon was any acknowledgment of the brutality of slavery or the particular cruelty of George E. Green. His so-called leniency, then, much like that displayed in the other cases Nunley examines, took “gender, age, race, and sex” into account but also made sure to protect slaveholders and the institution of slavery itself. (P. 6.)
Nunley’s careful reading and analysis of Commonwealth v. Nelly and others is just one example among many in Thrice Condemned in which she teases out the reasoning behind the decisions made in Virginia courts. She does much the same with the case of Jane Williams, an enslaved woman who attacked a Richmond family for whom she periodically worked, killing the wife and severely injuring the baby and husband, and again with Agnes, an enslaved woman who murdered Gerard Mason, a particularly “sadistic” slaveowner and the grandson of George Mason. (P. 29.) While Nelly, Jane, and Agnes died for their crimes, the intricacies and nuances of each case bolster Nunley’s arguments regarding the contradictory nature in which Virginia courts administered justice in the nineteenth century. Even when communities stepped in to “temper the discourse to reflect a morally critical community,” they did not do so out of any kindness toward, or consideration of, the enslaved, but, instead, to defend “the ‘moral good’ and ‘necessity’ of slavery.” (P. 34.)
Also included in Nunley’s study are the trials of Caroline, Rebecca, Suckey and Kelsie, Annie, Susan, Mildred Ware, and Rose, women whose cases are not as detailed as those of Nelly, Jane, and Agnes, but provide insight into the different ways that Virginia courts came to their decisions and the justifications some courts made for commutations. Taken together, these cases elucidate the ways in which enslaved women, were, indeed, thrice condemned. Nunley’s study of enslaved women accused of crimes in nineteenth-century Virginia is a significant contribution not only to the existing scholarship on slavery and the law, but also to that on enslaved women’s resistance.
