Two Murders in Marion

In 1844, William B. and Sarah Haselden lived in Marion District on their plantation. Along with six children younger than fifteen years of age, they lived in a community among many relatives between the Lynches and Pee Dee Rivers near Mars Bluff. They did not own a grand plantation; they Page 116 →only had a single cabin for the people whom they enslaved.¹⁸ The individuals whom Haselden enslaved worked under the “task system,” wherein Haselden assigned specific tasks to each laborer for the day.¹⁹ Once those tasks were completed, the rest of the day belonged to the enslaved to use any way they wished, consistent with the restrictions of slavery. As was common, Haselden often rented enslaved laborers from other nearby enslavers to work for him.²⁰ From the perspective of those rented out to him, Haselden remained bound by the rules of the task system.

On Friday, July 12, 1844, the enslaved people working for Haselden worked a full day and completed the tasks assigned to them. Haselden enslaved two of them: Harry, who was in his late thirties, and Scipio, called “Sip,” in his midtwenties. Neighbors enslaved other workers and rented them to Haselden for specific work. One of the enslaved women Haselden hired was Risbe, Harry’s sister. Hepsa also worked that day. Haselden’s son John previously owned Hepsa, but by 1844, she was enslaved by Isabella Gregg, a sixty-year-old widow and neighbor.²¹ Hepsa was in her late twenties and was the mother of several children, also enslaved by Gregg.²²

As late afternoon turned to evening, the enslaved people working for Haselden gathered at his sole “negro house” for supper. It rained not only that day but also the night before, and the ground was wet. The wet soil was ideal, and the season was right to plant slips for sweet potatoes. These were cuttings from the sweet potato plant used to speed the growth of new vines. Haselden wanted the enslaved laborers to plant these slips after their supper. Haselden sent his son James to order the workers to come back out and plant the slips. Harry told James, “They were not done eating.” James went back to Haselden’s house and waited a while, then returned. All the enslaved people were inside. James ordered them out repeatedly. Harry insisted that they were still eating. When James told him this, Haselden became enraged and took matters into his own hands. He went to the enslaved workers himself to demand they come out and plant the sweet potato slips. As soon as he entered the dwelling, Sip killed him.²³

In the trial that followed, conducted in Haselden’s own house, nine whites and three enslaved people testified. There was no conflict in their stories. Harry and Risbe described what happened in the “negro house” after James demanded that they continue work after supper. Immediately, Sip refused to go. Sip and Hepsa said that it “was a pretty come off to have to plant slips after doing their tasks.” She meant that the order was unfair and oppressive. Hepsa was adamant that the tasks assigned to her were “too large.” She Page 117 →was furious with Haselden for violating the task system by ordering her to do more work beyond her assigned tasks in the hours of remaining daylight after supper.²⁴

After James’s first trip to the laborers’ cabin, Harry and Risbe started to get their hoes. Sip and Hepsa told them to put them down in the “negro house yard.” Hepsa dared Harry “to touch them.” Hepsa said she was going to leave and go to Reese Gregg’s for the night.²⁵ She sent her children off the Haselden property, telling them she would meet up with them later. Harry, the oldest of the enslaved, ordered the rest to obey James’s second demand that they plant the slips, but Sip and Hepsa angrily refused.²⁶ The excuse that Harry gave twice to James was his way of attempting to delay and diffuse a dangerous confrontation. He knew he was in the middle of a firestorm.

Harry and Risbe’s testimony made it clear that Sip and Hepsa were very close. They never quarreled, Harry said, and “they were mostly in company” with each other. Sip and Hepsa already harbored intense animosity toward Haselden. Hepsa was open about her contempt for Haselden, his family, and whites in general. She told Harry, “That she would not take a whipping from Haselden or any other Buckra”—buckra being an insulting term for white people that was common among the enslaved. She told Risbe “that Haselden should not whip her” and “that her own people did not whip her and if anybody else tried it, she would fight till she died.” Hepsa said, “She did not like any of the [Haselden] family.”²⁷ They “were the meanest people she had ever lived with in her life,” she told Risbe. Haselden’s wife, Sarah, testified, “Hepsa’s general conduct has not been that of a faithful slave and [she] has been pretty stubborn” and “disobedient,” once telling Sarah, “Not to bother her.” Sip told Harry and Risbe that he was not going to sleep in the warehouse anymore. This was a one-room storehouse and, unlike the house for the enslaved, it had no beds or fireplace, making it a miserable place to rest. Hepsa urged him to refuse. James Haselden testified that Sip told him the previous week, “that if I have to lie in that warehouse any more, there will be war.”²⁸

Harry and Risbe left the “negro house” and headed to the kitchen house.²⁹ William Haselden met them there, holding a walking stick with a pewter tip. His wife and two of his daughters saw him beat Harry and Risbe when he met them in the kitchen. Sarah called it “correcting them lightly,” adding that “he gave them a cut or two.” Thirteen-year-old Elizabeth, “Betsy,” was more graphic, saying her father was, “whipping Harry and Risbe.” Nineteen-year-old Mary agreed with Betsy. After Haselden beat them in the kitchen, Page 118 →Harry and Risbe headed for the “big gate” at the entry to the lane that led to the public road. At the gate, they heard, but could not see, what happened next. Haselden’s daughters, Betsy and Mary, saw it all.³⁰

After beating Harry and Risbe at the kitchen house, Haselden, wearing his hat and carrying his walking stick and a whip, marched to the “negro house,” only fifteen steps away. As he reached the house, Hepsa’s children left and headed to the cornfield where Hepsa had spent the day working. Betsy saw Hepsa in the house and said she moved from the fireplace to the other end of the house. Sip was standing at the fireplace.³¹

As soon as Haselden entered the house, Sip struck him several blows with the blade of an axe. The girls yelled for their mother to come, Betsy shrieking, “Ma, I saw Sip strike Pa!” Sarah ran to the “negro house” and screamed. She saw Haselden lying on the floor and confronted Sip, gasping, “Oh Sip, have you killed my poor husband?” Sip was still holding the axe, tossing it from his left hand to his right. He turned the blade toward Sarah and yelled back, “Yes, damn you, I hope I have!” James heard her screams and ran to the “negro house.” He saw his mother cradling his father’s head in her arms. Blows from the axe left gashes on Haselden’s right jaw, two above his right ear, on his arm and on his leg. His right eye was swollen badly. They carried Haselden to their house and laid him in a bed.³²

As the family moved Haselden into their house, Sip and Hepsa fled. On their way off the property, Sip cut Haselden’s walking stick with the axe, and Hepsa threw his hat and whip into the yard. They joined Harry and Risbe in the cornfield near the road outside the big gate. Hepsa told Harry how Sip struck Haselden with the axe. Sip confirmed that he cut Haselden with the axe. Clearly excited, Hepsa said that if she had struck Haselden, “she would have knocked him so dead, he would not have blowed,” meaning that he would not have breathed. Sip and Hepsa warned the other two enslaved people not to go back to Haselden’s. They told Harry, “If he went back, they would shoot him.” Hepsa told Risbe that if they stayed there, the Haseldens “would kill her or whip her or burn her things.” Hepsa, Harry, and Risbe returned to the “slave cabin” for their belongings. Hepsa collected a bundle of her clothes and left it with her children in the cornfield. Once the others gathered their property, Harry used his lock to secure the door of the “slave cabin,” and they all left Haselden’s farm.³³

Hepsa and Sip did not go, as she originally planned, to Reese Gregg’s place, but to the house where Ephraim Gregg, his younger brother, lived. Harry said he was afraid to go back to the “negro house” and went with them. He stayed that night at Gregg’s place. After dark, Hepsa and her children Page 119 →went to the house of Joe, one of the people Gregg owned. Joe asked her, “Why are you here this time of the week?” She answered, “I gained the time,” meaning that she had done her assigned tasks and earned the free time. Then she told him about the murder of William Haselden earlier that evening. She said that “after the rain, they were ordered to plant slips” and “they refused to.” She said that she “saw Mr. Haselden whip Harry and Risbe near the kitchen,” that Sip struck him, and that “I heard groans.”³⁴

Haselden’s wife summoned Dr. James H. Jarret, who lived nearby. He arrived at the house at sundown, around eight thirty. Dr. Jarret examined Haselden and concluded that the wounds to his head were fatal. He described “compression of the brain,” caused by the axe blows. He concluded that the injuries to Haselden’s leg and arm were not from the blade of an axe but from a blunt object like a stick. It was difficult to rouse Haselden, Jarret said, but Haselden finally became conscious and answered Jarret’s questions after asking for water. He told Jarret and his son John that Hepsa also struck him with a stick. However, neither Jarret nor John Haselden was certain that William Haselden was competent at that point. Jarret’s opinion was that he was “insensible.” Significantly, John testified that he had no opinion as to Hepsa’s guilt. John further testified that he sat with his father that night after Jarret left. After midnight, Haselden called out and “worked his hand toward him.” He took John’s hand. William Haselden died the next night.³⁵

Two days later, William R. Johnson held a coroner’s inquest at the Haselden house. Johnson and his jury determined that Haselden’s death resulted from the blows to his head. Magistrate A.L. Gregg, Haselden’s sonin-law, issued a warrant for the arrest of Sip and Hepsa arrest for murder. Gregg went on to preside at the trial of Sip and Hepsa. For Gregg to act as the judge in a trial for murder of his father-in-law was not as much of a conflict of interest then as it would be today. At the trial, Hepsa’s enslaver, Isabella Gregg, paid E. A. Law to represent her. Gregg also sent her son-in-law, John Foxworth, a riverboat captain, to serve as her agent.³⁶ Some of the pages of the trial record are missing. The extant record shows that Law argued that enslaved people were permitted to testify in South Carolina. The prosecutor, General William W. Harrell, agreed that this was the practice throughout the state. The magistrate accepted Law’s argument and ruled that enslaved people could testify for the defense. When the state finished presenting its case, Law and Foxworth chose to present no evidence in Hepsa’s defense. There is no indication whether counsel represented Sip, but it is doubtful. After all, his enslaver, the only man who might have paid for a lawyer, was dead.³⁷

Page 120 →On August 3, the jury found both Sip and Hepsa guilty and sentenced them both to “suffer death by hanging by their necks until they are both dead.”³⁸ Magistrate Gregg ordered the hanging to take place at “the crossroads near Mars Bluff on the west side of the Great Pee Dee River.” Their bodies were to be buried under the gallows. An appraisal was conducted of the value of both. The jury of white men found that each was worth two hundred dollars.³⁹ The purpose of this valuation was so the state could properly compensate their enslavers for putting them to death.⁴⁰ The two hundred dollars for Sip, of course, was to be paid to the estate of William Haselden.

On the day the jury found both defendants guilty and sentenced them to death, Sip made an impassioned statement that Hepsa was in no way responsible for the murder. The magistrate noted that Sip “cleared the culprit Hepsa from any participation in the murder.” On the basis of Sip’s statement, the jury unanimously granted attorney Law’s motion and recommended that the governor grant Hepsa executive clemency. On August 14, 1844, Governor James H. Hammond did not merely commute her sentence: He pardoned Hepsa. He adopted the same condition requested by the jury that “she be removed beyond the bounds of this state on or before the 6th of September never to return on penalty of the immediate execution of the penalty.” This meant that if she came back, the authorities would hang her. Having saved Hepsa’s life, Sip went to his death on the gallows at the Wolf Trap crossroads in Mars Bluff on August 16, knowing that the governor, in an extraordinary act, had spared Hepsa the same fate. The magistrate annotated the record confirming that authorities hanged Sip, and “he died with indifference like a dog.” ⁴¹ It is not likely that Sip was indifferent; he simply refused to show any fear or remorse for killing Haselden.⁴²

As with any political act, there is the temptation to look for a political motivation. Isabella Gregg, Hepsa’s enslaver, was not poor, but she was by no means rich. Her family had been in Marion District for many years, but she could not be classed as politically influential.⁴³ Governor Hammond was not from the Pee Dee region. His roots were in Newberry District. The lack of any obvious political tie to explain the governor’s pardon of an enslaved woman convicted on strong evidence of complicity in the murder of a white man makes his act even more remarkable.

There is no mystery, however, about what led to the murder. Already strong resentment from the enslaved people who worked for him was inflamed into violent rage by a single act. Haselden demanded that they continue working after their tasks for that Friday were complete. His order to keep working after supper was an egregious affront to what they considered Page 121 →as their right. They had already worked all day in the rain. They completed their tasks and considered the rest of the day their time. They were having their supper when he tried to make them keep working. His attempt to coerce them into working more than their assigned tasks, in violation of the task system’s rules, cost him his life.⁴⁴ The public narrative suggests that enslaved people were subject to control without any tangible limitation. This case is a window into a far more complex reality.

No case is more tragic and none illustrates more strongly the burning desire to escape the bonds of slavery than the murder of Rhoda Etherton.⁴⁵ Etherton was a widow around forty years old who lived alone. She never enslaved anyone. Woods near the crossroads of Wahee Road and Moore’s Mill Road four miles west of the village of Marion surrounded her home of many years.⁴⁶ It was just west of Catfish Creek, a small house with a central hallway and two bedrooms.⁴⁷

On the evening of Friday, May 17, 1850, Etherton prepared herself for bed. She laid her bonnet and a basket on the table next to the bed and pulled on a nightcap. Before she could remove her blue homespun frock, an intruder burst into the room, swung the blunt end of an axe, crushing her skull, and killing her with a single blow. There were no dogs to warn her of the attacker. The murderer turned the bed over searching for valuables. He took Etherton’s two trunks outside to her collard patch and broke the larger one open. He left a dress and other personal items in the trunk before making his way down Wahee Road in the quiet spring night. All he took was a switchblade knife.⁴⁸

As the killer passed the home of Job Foxworth, a half mile away, the family’s dogs began barking loudly. It was nine o’clock at night. The man ran back toward Etherton’s house chased by the dogs. This aroused Etherton’s neighbors, who came to her house, and there they found her body. Marion’s Sheriff, Elly Godbold, attended a coroner’s inquest the next day. The scene that Godbold and another participant, twenty-nine-year-old Wesley Gregg, described was gruesome. Blood pooled around Etherton, and brain tissue was splattered on the floor. The blunt end of the axe was still embedded in her head.⁴⁹

The murder was widely reported in newspapers from Wilmington to Georgetown. It was the most frightening kind—a random killing by a total stranger. The Marion Star described Etherton as, “a mild inoffensive being Page 122 →who disturbed or meddled with no one.” The paper noted that the murder could not have been for “plunder, for she certainly had nothing which could have [been] an inducement.”⁵⁰ Coroner John McMillan led an investigation. On Wednesday, May 22, he issued an affidavit charging Garrett, a man no more than twenty years old, who was enslaved by Sanders McCall, with the murder.⁵¹ By the middle of June, authorities detained Garrett in the Georgetown jail. Elly Godbold’s twenty-two-year-old son, Hugh, took charge of him and returned him to Marion. On July 11, a jury trial began. Seventeen witnesses testified: nine white men and eight enslaved individuals. There was no evidence that raised any doubt about Garrett’s guilt.⁵² The jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death. Garrett was hanged in Marion on Friday, August 2, in front of a crowd of two thousand observers, most of them enslaved people sent to witness the hanging by their owners.⁵³ News of the hanging was reported not only by papers in the region but also by the leading abolitionist paper in the country, The Liberator.⁵⁴

The swiftness of the investigation was the result of the close ties of people living in Etherton’s community. The enslaved and white people knew each other very well. One of those neighbors knew exactly who planned to kill Etherton and why. Many others described Garrett’s movements before and after the killing and corroborated his motivation. The key witness identifying the killer was Barnabas Powell, a thirty-eight-year-old white laborer who lived close to Etherton. A week before her murder, Powell was in the Marlboro District jail in Bennettsville with seven other men, including a white man named “Truman” and two enslaved men, Grantham, enslaved by the McRae family, and Garrett, enslaved by Moses Sanders McCall (called “Sanders”), who lived in eastern Darlington District.⁵⁵ Powell did not enslave anyone or own land and was illiterate. At trial, Powell explained that Garrett confided in Clark, another prisoner, and later to Powell that Truman had promised him one hundred twenty dollars to kill Etherton, twenty of which was to be in paper currency.⁵⁶ Powell, who knew Etherton, was emphatic with Garrett in a conversation on May 10, “I told him for God’s sake not to do it.”⁵⁷ Powell was not on speaking terms with Truman, having “fallen out about a knife.” He described Truman as often speaking to Black people outside from the window of the jail and noted that Truman and Garrett had many private talks.⁵⁸

The same day Powell told Garrett not to kill Etherton, Garrett learned that Sanders McCall was coming to take him from the jail and back to his plantation. Garrett was “very excited” and feared that McCall would “use him badly.” He knew from the other times he ran away that McCall would Page 123 →have him whipped. In rejecting Powell’s advice, Garrett ominously said, “I would rather do it and be hung for it than to live with McCall.” As he left the jail on Saturday, May 11, Garrett asked Powell if “Truman was good to do what he promised.” Powell testified, “I told Garrett that Truman was worth nothing and that the $20 bill was counterfeit.” As Garrett left, Truman said, “Good bye Garrett. I am sorry you are going to leave us.” The following Tuesday night, May 14, Truman tried unsuccessfully to “break jail.” Powell admitted that he did not ask the sheriff in Marlboro to report the plan to murder Etherton “down to Marion.”⁵⁹ Not only could he have told the Marion sheriff of the plot, he also could have warned Etherton directly, but he did neither.

One of Marion’s lawyers, forty-seven-year-old E. B. Wheeler, explained why Truman would want to have Etherton killed. At the previous term of court, Truman was tried and convicted of beating his wife. Etherton testified against Truman as a prosecution witness. Convicted for assault and battery, Truman was sentenced to six months in jail. The testimony of other witnesses indicated that Truman expected to be released from jail in October. As Powell described it, the murder was a “hit” procured by Truman to get even for Etherton’s testimony.⁶⁰

Etherton knew the threat posed by Truman’s anger. In the days before the murder, she visited several of her neighbors. A week earlier, Sarah, a woman enslaved by Willis G. Smith, asked Etherton about the knife in a basket she was carrying, “I asked her what she was going to do with it.” She said, “Guard herself and that she had a pistol at home well loaded.” Sarah did not pursue the matter. The fact that Sarah so freely asked Etherton about the knife, however, suggests a degree of familiarity between the two women. Authorities took the same knife from Garrett when they arrested him in Georgetown, and a series of witnesses in addition to Sarah identified it. Etherton’s neighbors, Cyrus Bassett, John Turbeville, and Stephen Martin all identified the knife, a switchblade, as the property of Etherton’s late husband.⁶¹

Garrett arrived in the Marion area by May 14, the Wednesday before the murder, having absconded from McCall’s plantation only four days after being returned to it. He met two enslaved individuals that day on different plantations, both of whom he knew—Aaron, whose enslaver was not listed in the case file, and Fran, one of thirty people enslaved by Charles Reaves. Garrett told both men the same thing: While in jail in Marlboro District, near where he lived, a white man promised that he would pay him and “carry me to one of the free countries” if Garrett “took care of a piece of business” near the courthouse in Marion. Garrett told Aaron that he was on his way to Page 124 →the Burroughs plantation where he would see his brother. He refused to tell either man what “business” the man hired him to do. If Barnabas Powell’s testimony was truthful, the “business” was killing a woman not just for one hundred twenty dollars but also to be taken out of slavery to a place where he would be free.⁶²

On the night of the murder and in the days after, Garrett met many people. The white people did not know him. All but two of the enslaved did. Marion is thirty-eight miles from Bennettsville, the area where Garrett grew up. It is thirty-two miles from the Sanders McCall plantation. For travel on foot, these were not small distances. However, Garrett knew most of the enslaved he visited during those weeks in May. The distances are even more impressive because Garrett was barefoot. All the witnesses who ran into him that week recalled that he wore no shoes. They also remembered in consistent detail his clothes—dark pantaloons, a dark green overcoat with outside pockets, and a black high crowned hat with the bill damaged. He stuttered, so that when he encountered a stranger, he spoke very slowly.⁶³

Garrett did not know where Etherton lived. The night of the murder, he encountered Lige, a man enslaved by Elly Godbold, on the road. Lige did not know Garrett but said that the man he encountered was coming from Catfish Creek and asked him where Etherton lived. Lige said he did not know but directed him to the Foxworth’s property where he could get directions. It was sundown. At eight o’clock that evening, Garrett passed Hugh Godbold, the twenty-two-year-old son of the sheriff who later picked him up in Georgetown. Godbold said he spoke to Garrett, whom he did not know, which was itself strange for the community. Godbold thought it even stranger that the Black man did not answer him but only laughed.⁶⁴

Sometime between eight and nine o’clock, Garrett found Etherton’s house, entered it, and killed her with an axe he found outside. Either Etherton did not know he was in the house or she did not perceive him to be the threat she feared, because she did not put up a fight. After all, it was Truman who, she thought, would come after her. In either case, her knife and pistol were no protection. Garrett did not have any wounds from a knife, and no one heard a gunshot that night.⁶⁵

At nine o’clock, Chesly Foxworth, the twenty-six-year-old son of Job Foxworth who lived a half mile from Etherton, was preparing for bed when his dogs alerted him to a “young man” who ran from them back toward Etherton’s house. At ten o’clock, Garrett came up behind Jim, a man enslaved by Nathan Evans, traveling west in a wagon on the road from Catfish Creek. Jim explained that he did not know the man, who said his name was “Tom Page 125 →Dickinson” and talked very slowly.⁶⁶ Garrett took the fork in the road toward the house of “Uncle Cuff,” a seventy-five-year-old man and one of ten people enslaved by Jane Evans. Cuff testified that Garrett arrived at his house around ten o’clock. He was suffering from a toothache and was sitting up when Garrett called to him from outside. Cuff’s dogs were barking loudly.⁶⁷ He knew Garrett and offered him shelter for the night as well as food. Garrett slept all night by the fire until Cuff awoke him at daybreak. At noon on Saturday, Garrett saw Jim, a man in his thirties enslaved by William Hodge. Jim knew Garrett and went to “Abrams” to get food for him. When leaving, Garrett said he planned to meet a man from Marlboro and would be back a half hour after dark, but Garrett did not return.⁶⁸

That night, Garrett again visited Aaron and Fran. He said that he had to leave the area, as a white woman had been killed and there was “a cry about it.” The “white people made such a fuss about it I could not stay.” He said he had to hide (“lie concealed”) until the man came to take him “to the free countries.”⁶⁹ On May 23, the Thursday after the murder, Garrett showed up at the house of Frederick, a man enslaved by Peter Evans, during supper. Frederick said he “knew him well.” When Frederick asked why he was there, Garrett explained that he had been in Charleston but was recognized getting off a boat by “a colored man.” He was then apprehended and returned to his owner, where he was “put in stocks.” Garrett questioned Frederick about Truman and his wife—“what made Truman hurt her?” Frederick explained that Truman “punished” his wife and when they came to get him, “he would not submit.” Frederick said that he had not seen Etherton since court, referring to the trial of Truman for assault and battery of his wife. It may be that Etherton witnessed Truman beating his wife or was told about the beating by her. Frederick told Garrett that Truman was “a bloodthirsty man,” who had been in jail three times. Frederick added, “He was there any time I was.” Frederick showed Garrett the way to Back Swamp, which runs east of Marion between the town and the Little Pee Dee River.⁷⁰

Garrett also visited another enslaved person who is not named in the court record, part of the record having been lost, but the testimony that survives is poignant. The meeting took place at a plantation where Garrett lived and worked for a year east of Marion. He said that he traveled with a white man he did not identify whom he claimed had killed Etherton. Still, Garrett was afraid that if he was caught, they would “make me touch her.” He said, “If you murder anyone and touch it, it will make the body bleed. If they are to catch me and dig her up and make me touch her and she was to bleed, it would not be because I killed her, but because I was knowing to it. My Page 126 →God. I’m clear of it.”⁷¹ Garrett was terrified that someone would ask him who he belonged to and “was pestered in mind.” He said he had taken the road from the Evans plantation “and came into the road at Smith’s Swamp”—a stream between Marion and Back Swamp—“and took the road to the Back Swamp.”⁷² Garrett, with his fear and perhaps guilt infused with superstition weighing heavily on his mind, headed across the Little Pee Dee and to his capture in Georgetown in June. Six weeks later, authorities hanged Garrett before a crowd of thousands.

When Garrett walked up the steps of the gallows in Marion, the crowd of enslaved people ordered to witness his hanging believed they knew why this was happening to Garrett. Society had found that he killed Etherton, a woman he did not know and from whom he took nothing except a switchblade. They knew he was desperate to escape from Sanders McCall and from slavery. He spent a good deal of time as a runaway and was frequently jailed and whipped for it, leaving his back badly scarred.⁷³ The enslaved people who knew the young man always began his greeting when he showed up at their houses at night the same way: “Why are you here?” “Where have you been?” They unfailingly took care of the tortured teenager, giving him shelter, food, and directions. They did not ask too many questions, and they let him talk. They knew they were committing a crime by “harboring a runaway slave” and could be severely punished, but they helped him anyway.⁷⁴ In the wake of Etherton’s brutal murder, however, they did not hesitate to tell the full truth about Garrett’s acts and his intent, perhaps to save themselves from punishment.⁷⁵

Garrett was comfortable dealing with white men, even befriending them. Powell tried to save him, whereas Truman trapped him in an evil scheme to commit murder. Garrett’s burning desire to be free made him easy prey for the smooth-talking reprobate. Like many murders over time, this one asks the same question: Was Garrett the real murderer? No jail records for a “Truman” survive to confirm whether he succeeded in escaping before the murder. It is certainly possible that Truman paid someone else to commit the murder. Even Powell, who strangely failed to warn his neighbor of a threat on her life, is a little suspect.

The detailed record leaves little to the imagination. The images of Etherton in her blue homespun frock and nightcap and Garrett in his green overcoat and high crowned hat are vividly overlaid in this tragedy that cost both their lives. Powell moved to North Carolina soon after Etherton’s murder. His admission that he failed to warn her attracted too much disgust in the community for him to remain.

The society depicted in these prosecutions is mostly familiar to us. It was overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. In these closely intertwined communities, Black and white people knew each other, as people would in any rural area. They recognized each other’s voices. When someone did not attend church, others noticed. They knew each other’s personalities. Both white and Black people knew the husbands and wives of enslaved people and where they lived. This picture of a close-knit rural society is very recognizable.

Over one hundred sixty years separates us from slavery, and American society has undergone fundamental changes since then. Laws have banned racial discrimination in government and businesses for more than sixty years. The concept of one person owning another seems horribly alien to us. For the most part, the testimony by enslaved people in these cases provides the only contemporary statements by the enslaved in South Carolina describing their lives. They did not write diaries or journals, and the New Deal–era interviews with the surviving formerly enslaved people were conducted seventy years after slavery ended.⁷⁶ These case testimonies in South Carolina, on the other hand, contain the words of men and women in the very middle of it. These witnesses were not elderly survivors; they were mostly young. Their testimonies are not fictionalized dialogues, secondhand quotes, or autobiographies written much later. Their words were taken down as they were spoken in open court, testimony by witnesses describing places, people, and events that were important to the fate of the enslaved people on trial, sometimes for their lives. They are the voices of the enslaved who are speaking to us from the other side of Jordan, in the words of the old spiritual, before they crossed over to freedom.⁷⁷ If we want to try to understand the reality of slavery, we should listen to them.

Stan Barnett graduated from The Citadel in 1974 and the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1977. His practice focuses on contract litigation and environmental regulation. He served in the Army on active duty and in the Reserves for twenty-five years and has taught political science courses at The Citadel as an adjunct professor. In 2003, he published A Single Star (Corinthian Books), an action-suspense novel set primarily in South Carolina. He has also written history, including Rivers in Time, a history of associated families in northeastern South Carolina, and a history of the southern half of Williamsburg County, A Brave, Honest and Industrious People.

1. 1. Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Northup, Twelve Years a Slave.
2. 2. Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain; Plummer, Dying Confession. For a useful discussion of the impact of Sketches in the Life of Joesph Mountain, see Baaki, “Circulating the Black Rapist.”
3. 3. Miles, All that She Carried.
4. 4. Chien, “America’s Paper Prisons,” 592.
5. 5. See, e.g., the ruling of a circuit court judge in Anderson, SC, who reversed an enslaved man’s conviction and death sentence for burglary because the confession that formed the basis for the conviction was clearly coerced: “The prisoner’s own confession made under circumstances such as these, to be of that free and voluntary character which is deemed sufficient to consign a human being to the extreme penalty of the law, handled here to say the least of it, willfully to ignore all those humane principles which pervade every deportment of our code of criminal jurisprudence.” The State v. Sam, a Slave, Anderson District (1861).
6. 6. For more on slave patrols, see Hadden, Slave Patrols.
7. 7. “Impudence to a white man” was a common charge. In Anderson District, there were twenty-one such cases, of which thirteen resulted in convictions. See Trial Papers of Magistrates and Freeholders (Anderson District).
8. 8. An Act for the Better Ordering and Governing Negroes and Other Slaves In this Province, Province of South Carolina, no, 670, 1740, cited as Negro Act of 1740 in O’Neall, The Negro Law of South Carolina, 33, 34.
9. 9. The Court of Appeals recognized this right in Ex Parte Brown, 2d Bail. 323, cited in O’Neall, The Negro Law of South Carolina, 36.
10. 10. See Black, “Benefit of Clergy,” Black’s Law Dictionary, 200.
11. 11. Negro Act of 1740, Sec. 13 and 14, cited in O’Neall, The Negro Law of South Carolina, 14.
12. 12. For more on abuse, see Fede, “Legitimized Violent Slave Abuse in the American South”; and Wyatt-Brown, “The Mask of Obedience.”
13. 13. See case records for “The State v. Richmond, A Slave,” Anderson District (1852); and “The State v. Jerry, Andy, Sam, Anderson, Steven and Ellis,” Slaves, Spartanburg District (1860).
14. 14. O’Neall, The Negro Law of South Carolina, 35, quoted in Henry, Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina, 59.
15. 15. Hayne, “Annual Message to Legislature, 1833,” quoted in Henry, Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina, 59, 65.
16. 16. Pardon documents from two other governors survive, one from Governor J. H. Hammond in 1844 and one from Governor R. F. W. Allston in 1858.
17. 17. See, e.g., Hindus, “Black Justice under White Law”; Wood, “’Until He Shall Be Dead, Dead, Dead’”; Schwarz, Twice Condemned; Frazier, Slavery and Crime in Missouri; and Hindus, Prison and Plantation.
18. 18. William Haselden, Plat for 132 Acres on the Big Pee Dee River, Marion District, Surveyed by John Harllee, 28 July 1817. State Plat Books.
19. 19. For more on the task system, see Morgan, “Work and Culture.”
20. 20.Page 129 →For more on how enslavers hired enslaved laborers see Martin, Divided Mastery.
21. 21. The State vs. Sip or Scipio and Hepsa, Slaves, Marion District (1844).
22. 22. According to the US Census, 1840, Gregg enslaved fourteen people. Isabella Gregg, Marion, US Census, 1840.
23. 23. The State vs. Sip or Scipio and Hepsa, Slaves, Marion District (1844).
24. 24. The State vs. Sip or Scipio and Hepsa, Slaves, Marion District (1844).
25. 25. David Reese Gregg was the thirty-two-year-old nephew of Isabella Gregg and lived next door to her on his own farm. In 1840, he enslaved twenty-four people. US Census, 1840.
26. 26. The State vs. Sip or Scipio and Hepsa, Slaves, Marion District (1844).
27. 27. The clerks making notes and summarizing testimony in these cases often alternated between first and third person. Their summaries were not word-for-word transcriptions, which would have been beyond the technology of the time and beyond the abilities of most clerks to take down in handwriting.
28. 28. The State vs. Sip or Scipio and Hepsa, Slaves, Marion District (1844).
29. 29. Kitchens were separate buildings that were close but not joined to the main house to reduce the risk of fire.
30. 30. The State vs. Sip or Scipio and Hepsa, Slaves, Marion District (1844).
31. 31. The State vs. Sip or Scipio and Hepsa, Slaves, Marion District (1844).
32. 32. The State vs. Sip or Scipio and Hepsa, Slaves, Marion District (1844).
33. 33. The State vs. Sip or Scipio and Hepsa, Slaves, Marion District (1844).
34. 34. The State vs. Sip or Scipio and Hepsa, Slaves, Marion District (1844).
35. 35. The State vs. Sip or Scipio and Hepsa, Slaves, Marion District (1844).
36. 36. There are several possible motivations for Gregg paying a lawyer to represent the woman accused of cooperating in the murder of her daughter-in-law’s father. First, Hepsa was valuable property. Second, she also was seen by the community as part of Gregg’s “household,” so Gregg’s reputation would be affected by her conviction for murder. For more on lawyers who represented enslaved individuals, see Gillmer, “Lawyers and Slaves.”
37. 37. The State vs. Sip or Scipio and Hepsa, Slaves, Marion District (1844).
38. 38. The jurors for the trial were Nat McCall, Joseph Gregg, Christopher Bailey, H. Singletary, and J. C. Legette.
39. 39. The State v. Sip or Scipio and Hepsa, Slaves, Marion District (1844).
40. 40. For more on the valuation of enslaved people, see Berry, The Price of Their Pound of Flesh.
41. 41. The State v. Sip or Scipio and Hepsa, Slaves, Marion District (1844).
42. 42. Scott refers to such action as infrapolitics, a way of subtly resisting the system of slavery. What white onlookers perceived as a lack of remorse may have been his resistance against their expectations of him. See Domination and the Arts, 183–201.
43. 43. In the US Census, 1840, there are at least twelve Greggs in Marion. For more on the Greggs in Marion County, see Gregg, History of the Old Cheraws.
44. 44. Their resistance, first through continuing to eat and then through violence, are examples of agency. Enslaved people did not passively exist within slavery. Each day, they accommodated and resisted their circumstances. For more on agency, see Maza, Thinking about History, 33–34.
45. 45. Page 130 →The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
46. 46. The US Census, 1840, shows Etherton living alone and between twenty and thirty years old, already a widow. She may have been the daughter of David Leggett Sr., who lived nearby.
47. 47. According to the US Census, 1840, Etherton’s home was also only four farms away from the house where William B. Haselden had been murdered six years before.
48. 48. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
49. 49. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
50. 50. “Murder,” Marion Star, reprinted in the Wilmington Journal, 7 June 1850, 4.
51. 51. The marriage contract of Moses S. McCall and Catherine F. McRoe, dated May 6, 1847, was filed in Darlington District and lists fourteen enslaved people McRoe brought into the marriage, including “boys,” one of whom was Garrett. See “Separate Property of Married Women 1849–1872.”
52. 52. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
53. 53. Marion Star, reprinted in Weekly Commercial, 23 August 1850, 4.
54. 54. “Execution,” The Liberator, 30 August 1850, 4.
55. 55. The other prisoners were men named Sias, Peter, and George; Barnabas Powell on redirect testimony, The State vs. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
56. 56. Wertheimer discusses another case of such “criminal bargaining” in South Carolina. See Race and the Law in South Carolina, 6–7.
57. 57. Powell is noted in the summary of his testimony as referring to Truman as Etherton’s husband. This is probably an error in the note taking. Etherton is referred to by news accounts as a widow, a fact confirmed by her probate record in Marion County. Powell knew and lived close to her, so he was certainly aware that she was not married to Truman.
58. 58. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
59. 59. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
60. 60. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
61. 61. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
62. 62. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
63. 63. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
64. 64. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
65. 65. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
66. 66. This is another instance of agency. Garrett gave a false name in hopes of evading capture.
67. 67. South Carolina law forbade the enslaved from owning personal property, and what property they had was really the property of their enslaver. However, these case files clearly show that, regardless of the law, enslaved people were understood to own property, and many cases revolved around their ownership of animals, guns, watches, jewelry, and money.
68. 68. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
69. 69. There are many references in cases across South Carolina to an enslaved person longing to be taken to “a free country.” The reference is almost certainly to states that had outlawed slavery, such as Pennsylvania and New York.
70. 70. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
71. 71.Page 131 →This refers to a practice called cruentation that can be traced back to medieval Europe. Authorities would place a murder suspect in front of their supposed victim with the expectation that the body would bleed in front of the actual killer. See, e.g., Brittain, “Cruentation: In Legal Medicine and in Literature”; Peterson, Involuntary Confessions of the Flesh in Early Modern France; De Ceglia, ed. The Body of Evidence; Rosen, “’The Voice of the Innocent Blood Cries Aloud from the Ground to Heaven’”; and Rosen, “Framing Mark: Reading Africanist Presence in Early American Broadsides.”
72. 72. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
73. 73. For more on enslaved people running away in South Carolina, see Johnson, “Runaway Slaves and Slave Communities in South Carolina”; Morgan, “Colonial South Carolina Runaways”; Schweninger, “Counting the Costs”; and Marshall, “‛They Will Endeavor to Pass for Free.’”
74. 74. There are many of these case files where enslaved people were prosecuted for exactly that crime. As with all categories of crime, they were often acquitted, but when there were convictions, the punishment could be harsh.
75. 75. The State v. Garret, a Slave, Marion District (1850).
76. 76. Beginning in 1937, the Federal Writers’ Project, which was part of the Work Projects Administration, began collecting the oral histories of people who had been enslaved. Transcriptions of those histories are available through the Library of Congress. See “Born in Slavery.”
77. 77. Numerous Negro spirituals associate crossing the Jordan River with escaping slavery. Bradford reports that, while escaping slavery, Harriet Tubman sang, “I’m sorry, frien’s, to lebe you,/Farewell! Oh, farewell!/But I’ll meet you in de morning’,/Farewell! Oh, farewell!/I’ll meet you in de mornin’/When you reach de promised land;/On de oder side of Jordan,∕For I’m boun’ for de promised land.” See Harriet, The Moses of Her People, 28.

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