By 1850, during the time of Celia’s trial, Missouri had already been the focus of the national slavery debate for a while, and because the many key problems of the slave debate were unsettled by the Missouri Compromise, many residents of agriculture-based citizens of Calloway County who owned slaves, favored the “pro-slavery rhetoric” and politics that were talked about in the papers of that time. A man by the name of Robert Newsom was a resident of Calloway County that decided to look for a domestic servant to help his daughters with household work and cooking, and had apparently desired much more out of the servant who was doing domestic work at home. In the Spring of 1850, Newsom traveled to Audrain County and purchased his new slave, Celia. At the age of 14, Celia transformed into a white-man’s “personal mistress” and over time, Celia allowed herself to be pushed into that role in the Newsom household and bore two of Newsom’s children. Somewhere towards the end of the years she spent at the Newsom farm, she began a relationship with a Newsom slave named George. George, detesting Celia’s association with Newsom, …show more content…
In understandable prose, he exemplifies the ideology behind the relationship between seemingly unimportant individuals and national politics, the hypocritical exterior of the justice system, one’s women’s struggle to live under violent oppression, and offers a captivating narrative that has a bit of enigma in it. He expresses all this with clarify and transparency, and despite there being some discrepancy in the documentary evidence and what really happened. His work did a great job in gathering sympathy for Celia from