“With No One Present With Her But Her Mother”: Infanticide and Social Childbirth in the Post-Civil War U.S. South

Abstract

Historians have long characterized infanticide as an act committed by unmarried women alone and in secret. However, this article demonstrates that in the post-Civil War U.S. South, the grandmothers of deceased infants, or the mothers of women accused of killing their newborns, were frequently suspected of having aided their daughters. This essay draws on local court records, coroners’ inquests, and newspaper reports involving Black and White women from South Carolina to explore this overlooked aspect of historical infanticide and to situate the participation of grandmothers in coroners’ inquests, criminal trials, and infanticide itself within the broader context of social childbirth.

On a July afternoon in 1868, in the town of Camden, South Carolina, two children played together. Alice Deas, a 9-year-old African American girl, told her friend Henry House that she had seen “a baby in the well.” Going to investigate, Henry looked down into the well she indicated and saw what he first thought was “an alabaster doll baby.” Quickly, he realized the truth. Henry and Alice went to tell Alice's mother, middle-aged freedwoman Louisa Deas, what they had found. Louisa, however, told Henry to “rake up some trash” and throw it over the baby in the well to hide it. Henry hesitantly tossed a bit of grass into the well and Louisa Deas threw down “a piece of matting” from her yard. Then she told Henry not to let anyone know what he had seen. Nevertheless, word quickly spread. Alice told her sister, who told a White female neighbor, who then told her husband that a baby had been found in the well. This man alerted a magistrate, who acted as coroner and held a formal inquest over the infant's body.

The acting coroner and a coroner's jury of fourteen local Black and White men investigated, examining the body and interviewing people, including young Henry House, to try to identify the infant's mother. A key witness became Maria Williams, a Black midwife who said she had “followed the profession for 28 years.” In the rural Deep South, where midwives, not physicians, still presided over most births, midwives like Maria Williams possessed crucial knowledge about the pregnant and postpartum women in their area. Maria testified that she believed the mother of the deceased infant, described as a “full term” “mulatto” baby, was Lula Collins, a 19-year-old unmarried “mulatto” freedwoman who worked as a seamstress. ¹ Maria said she had recently sat beside Lula while they both watched a criminal trial in the Kershaw County Courthouse, and she had noticed then that Lula was “certainly in a family way.” But though Lula no longer appeared pregnant, Maria had “never heard of [Lula] being delivered” by a midwife nor “confined” to rest in her home after childbirth, as was customary. Moreover, the midwife suspected that Lula was not solely responsible for the infant's death. “I am under the firm belief that some other person put the child in the well. She would not be able to have left her bed at that time,” Maria testified. The coroner's jury then questioned Lula's mother Louisa Deas—the woman who had told Henry to cover up the baby in the well. She did not explain her strange actions. “I can say under oath that if my daughter Luly was in a family way, I did not know it,” Louisa swore. However, neighbors testified that they had noticed Lula had been “in a family way” for months. The coroner's jury accused both Lula and her mother Louisa of murdering the infant, a capital crime in South Carolina. The two freedwomen were indicted by a grand jury and stood trial together in January 1869. Louisa's husband William Deas (Lula's stepfather) was a coachmaker who worked out of his own shop in Camden, a Black man who was prospering under the economic and political advances made by Black South Carolinians during Reconstruction. His finances likely helped Lula and Louisa secure a skilled attorney and win what a newspaper referred to as a “speedy acquittal” in court. ²

While historians have long characterized infanticide as the desperate, solitary act of unmarried women, a significant minority of infanticide cases in the post-Civil War South saw the deceased infant's grandmother investigated and accused alongside her daughter, as happened to Louisa Deas and her daughter Lula. ³ In some cases, communities and juries blamed and even convicted grandmothers alone for the death of their daughters’ infants. Neighbors who testified as witnesses during coroners’ inquests, officials, and midwives like Maria Williams evidently believed that a mother like Louisa Deas, a woman with experiential knowledge of reproduction and childbirth, could not have failed to notice that her daughter was pregnant and had given birth. Furthermore, they believed that a mother whose daughter became pregnant out of wedlock might help her daughter give birth in secret and dispose of the infant to protect the family's reputation or else to escape the economic precarity that having an infant represented for poor women and their families. Most Black and White women in the postbellum Deep South, especially in rural areas, continued to observe the practices of social childbirth, giving birth at home with the assistance of a midwife and with female relatives, friends, and neighbors attending them. ⁴ Therefore, a young woman who gave birth with only her mother present drew suspicion if the infant disappeared or died soon after birth. Neighbors frequently believed her mother was also complicit, having acted to protect her daughter's reputation or “hide her shame,” as people often put it.

In recent years, some historians have explored the roles of people other than accused mothers in infanticide investigations and trials. Elaine Farrell, focusing on nineteenth-century Ireland, and Joanne Ferraro, a historian of early modern Italy, have shed light on the roles of fathers in such cases. They found that while authorities usually only prosecuted unmarried mothers, the fathers of illegitimate infants sometimes played a large part in newborn child murder or child abandonment. ⁵ Meanwhile Laura Gowing and Felicity Turner have explored the roles of midwives and physicians as expert witnesses in infanticide cases and of ordinary neighbors as witnesses. ⁶ Most recently, Jane Nicholas has written about children in nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Canada who testified as witnesses during coroners’ inquests. Children, like Alice Deas and her friend Henry House, were sometimes the first to discover infants’ remains while they were playing and exploring. ⁷ Historians of infanticide have also sporadically noted individual cases in which grandmothers were accused. This suggests that grandmothers sometimes appeared, to varying extents, as witnesses and co-defendants in a range of historical contexts. However, none have yet specifically examined grandmothers’ testimony in infanticide inquests or the dynamics of cases in which grandmothers were accused of murdering or assisting in the murder of their daughters’ infants, as this essay does. ⁸

This article argues that the grandmothers of deceased infants were central figures in many infanticide investigations and trials in the post-Civil War South. An analysis of local court records and newspapers from postbellum South Carolina shows that in addition to frequently testifying as witnesses in cases involving the suspicious deaths of their daughters’ infants, grandmothers were investigated and indicted for infanticide alongside their daughters in at least twenty-one South Carolina cases between 1865 and 1900. In keeping with the heightened racism and poverty that African Americans faced, twelve of these cases involved Black mothers and daughters. Yet seven White mother-and-daughter pairs were also co-defendants, demonstrating that the phenomenon crossed the color line. (In two cases, I could not positively identify the women.) In four other cases, Black grandmothers stood trial alone for the murder of their daughters’ infants. Overall, more than a fifth of 112 infanticide cases in postbellum South Carolina saw grandmothers charged alongside their daughters or as sole defendants. ⁹

This essay explores this overlooked phenomenon and contextualizes the scrutiny that grandmothers faced in infanticide cases by drawing on county-level court records, pardon petitions, penitentiary registers, census records, and coroners’ inquests from South Carolina and newspaper reports from across the South. For most of the cases discussed, I have pieced together multiple types of sources. For example, archival traces of Lula Collins and Louisa Deas’ trial for infanticide in Kershaw County, South Carolina can be found in a local coroner's inquest as well as brief newspaper articles. Most of these sources are short and fragmentary, usually reflecting one stage of an infanticide investigation or trial. Coroners’ inquests provide perhaps the best accounts of how communities initially investigated infanticide because coroners took verbatim testimony from witnesses, usually at the place where the body was discovered. Coroners’ inquest records include brief testimonies from the people who discovered the corpse, suspects, local physicians who conducted postmortems, and anyone else who volunteered information, including legally disenfranchised and marginalized people such as Black women and poor White women. In fact, women represented the majority of witnesses in many coroners’ inquests. As Black midwife Maria Williams’ centrality to the Lula Collins/Louisa Deas case suggests, midwives and neighbor women who had personal knowledge of women in their area and experiential knowledge of infants and childbirth were important witnesses in infanticide cases, as were grandmothers who testified about their daughters’ reproductive histories.

In the rural Deep South, childbirth remained a social and familial affair decades after physicians had begun delivering infants in other regions of the United States. Well into the twentieth century, midwives, female relatives, and neighbors still expected to attend Black and White women during childbirth and confinement. Parturient women's mothers, with their experiential knowledge of giving birth and caring for newborns, served key roles as childbirth attendants for their daughters in ordinary circumstances. For an unmarried woman who preferred to give birth as privately as possible, her mother might be her only attendant. But when a young woman who appeared to be pregnant emerged from her house without a living infant and without having called a midwife or female neighbors to her bedside to be “delivered,” as Maria Williams disapprovingly noted of Lula Collins, neighbors tended to suspect that her mother had been complicit or even instrumental in the infant's death and the concealment of its body.

At times, neighbors and officials were probably correct that African American and White grandmothers helped their daughters through an unplanned pregnancy, childbirth, and the concealment or disposal of an unwanted infant. As we shall see, Louisa Deas, who urged young Henry not to tell anyone about the baby in the well, was not the only grandmother who apparently acted to protect her daughter from an infanticide accusation. Other women likely only helped their daughters quietly give birth at home, without a midwife or neighbors attending, because they feared the stigma of having an illegitimate child. If an illegitimate child was stillborn or died naturally, such women were especially vulnerable to infanticide accusations. The truth behind an individual infanticide case is ultimately unknowable. Infant mortality was high and nineteenth-century physicians struggled to distinguish infanticide from natural death and stillbirths. ¹⁰ But for some women, helping their grown daughter through the reproductive crisis of an unwanted pregnancy, aiding her in concealing a swelling belly or the body of an infant, protecting her from neighbors’ gossip, or resolutely testifying on her behalf before a coroner's jury may indeed have constituted powerful, if unconventional, acts of motherly love.

Examining the prominent roles of grandmothers in infanticide inquests and trials in post-Civil War South Carolina therefore reveals a surprising dimension of mother–daughter relationships as well as previously overlooked facets of infanticide and the importance of situating legal investigations of newborn child murder in their historical and regional context. In particular, this article emphasizes how accused women's relationships with other women, especially their own mothers but also midwives and neighbors, shaped infanticide accusations and investigations. The history of slavery and emancipation, gender and racial ideologies and their material consequences, the relationship between class, poverty, and privacy, the stigma faced by unmarried mothers, and tensions among women all played a role in what led women to commit infanticide as well as what led neighbors to suspect certain women but not others. So, too, did family structure, namely unmarried Black and White women's tendency to live with their parents, and close mother–daughter relationships, particularly in the domain of childbirth, in which mothers often guided and cared for their grown daughters.

Infanticide, Slavery, and Emancipation in South Carolina

Although a Columbia newspaper covering an infanticide trial in 1866 declared that it was “a crime heretofore unknown in South Carolina,” South Carolinians living in the wake of the Civil War were as familiar with women who killed their newborns as were people elsewhere. ¹¹ Yet overgeneralizing about infanticide across time and space obscures “the messy and complicated histories of childbirth-related crimes” and risks ignoring how specific historical contexts shaped women's experiences. ¹² To understand infanticide in post-Civil War South Carolina, we must first consider the longer history of how people in the region understood and responded to newborn child murder and how race, slavery, and Emancipation fundamentally shaped that history.

South Carolinians investigated and interpreted infanticide in ways strongly influenced by South Carolina's history as a state with an enslaved African American majority beginning in the colonial period and by the ubiquity of racial politics in southern courts and communities. Much antebellum discourse around infanticide centered on enslaved mothers and their children. Northern abolitionists drew attention to cases of enslaved women like Margaret Garner, a freedom seeker who killed her daughter rather than see the child be recaptured by her enslaver. ¹³ Conversely, slaveholders in the U.S. South and across the Atlantic World believed that enslaved mothers killed their children out of barbarism or neglect. ¹⁴

Historians of Atlantic slavery have debated the extent to which enslaved mothers deliberately killed their newborns, because the mortality rate for enslaved children was high and infant death was ambiguous. Perhaps 40% to 60% of enslaved children in the antebellum U.S. South died within their first five years of life. Some studies have found particularly high rates of infant mortality on rice plantations like those in the South Carolina low country. Poor nutrition, limited medical care, infectious diseases, and frequent separation from their overworked mothers made life perilous for enslaved infants. ¹⁵ Enslaved Black women and their children, who legally belonged to their mother's enslaver, were also subject to slaveholders’ surveillance in ways that free women were not. Slaveholders angered by the financial loss of their young human property sometimes blamed infants’ deaths on maternal irresponsibility rather than the poor conditions in which women and their infants lived or natural causes. They may have interpreted enslaved infants’ natural or accidental deaths as infanticide, particularly in cases of overlaying, when women who slept beside their infants accidentally rolled over on them while asleep. On the other hand, infanticide could look much like overlaying or natural infant death. ¹⁶

As with most cases of alleged infanticide, we cannot know for certain if individual women deliberately killed their children, and the sources are particularly sparse for trials involving enslaved women in the U.S. South. Nevertheless, brief petitions and coroners’ inquests show that antebellum courts in South Carolina convicted several enslaved women of killing their infants. In Union District, an enslaved woman, Clarissa, was convicted of murdering her daughter Rachel in 1838 and sold from the state as punishment. ¹⁷ Anaca, also enslaved in Union District, was hanged in 1824 for allegedly killing her two young children. ¹⁸ In Edgefield District, Clarisy fled her enslaver's plantation shortly before her three children were found dead. A coroner's jury determined that Clarisy had killed Riller, age ten, Lizzy, age three, and Rose, an infant, by striking them with an axe and slitting their throats. Women like Anaca and Clarisy may have acted to spare their children from a life of enslavement. ¹⁹

White women also stood trial for infanticide in antebellum South Carolina, often alongside their own mothers. This pattern was already clear before the Civil War among infanticide accusations involving White women. In an 1838 case from rural Laurens District whose outcome is uncertain, a coroner arrested Martha McConathy and her mother Isabelah for killing Martha's infant. ²⁰ Similarly, in 1828 a York District coroner's jury accused Sarah Johnson and her unmarried daughter Peggy of suffocating Peggy's newborn. Peggy, whom the coroner, “from the feelings of humanity,” “suffered to remain at home” to recover, took advantage of his decision and absconded. Officials arrested her mother Sarah and lodged her in jail in Yorkville, though she was ultimately released. ²¹

While several enslaved women in South Carolina were convicted of infanticide and executed or sold out of the state, White women benefited from more lenient treatment. Most were acquitted, in part because the legal punishment for murder was execution and White male juries hesitated to sentence White women to death. South Carolina, like several other southern states, also had no penitentiary in which to incarcerate people for lengthy custodial sentences until after the Civil War.

Moreover, juries and officials throughout nineteenth-century America often gave women the benefit of the doubt, recognizing not only the role of shame, distress, and mental illness in many incidents of maternal infanticide, but also the reality that infant death remained medically ambiguous. From the late eighteenth century, physicians began to write about maternal infanticide as a crime that might result from postpartum mental illness, termed “puerperal insanity.” ²² Similarly, doctors recognized that medical tests to determine if a deceased infant had been born alive, such as the hydrostatic or lung floatation test, in which the infant's lungs were placed in water to see if they sank or floated, were inexact. ²³ Several northern and Mid-Atlantic states did not execute any woman for infanticide after the early republican period. ²⁴ However, in the South the trend towards greater sympathy for women accused of killing their newborns primarily benefited White women, who were often accused of infanticide alongside their mothers. By contrast, enslaved Black women were sporadically executed for infanticide.

After the Civil War and Emancipation, the history of slavery and the racial ideologies that White Americans had produced to justify and strengthen it continued to shape the differential treatment of Black and White women accused of infanticide. With the Civil Rights Act of 1866, freedwomen gained the right to be tried in the same courts and with the same procedural protections that only White women had enjoyed in the antebellum period. Post-Civil War court records and coroners’ inquests therefore contain more of accused Black women's own words and their efforts to defend themselves. Yet even in freedom, Black women continued to face more severe scrutiny from their communities and greater condemnation from courts. As historian Felicity Turner has demonstrated, White southerners racialized infanticide as Black in newspaper narratives and medical discourses. ²⁵

In the postbellum period, Black mother-and-daughter pairs also began to stand trial for infanticide together, a phenomenon that had been confined to White women during the antebellum years. During slavery, Black women had often been separated from their mothers, but after Emancipation many Black women were able to live with their mothers and benefited from their mothers’ aid when they gave birth. However, Black grandmothers also came under new scrutiny in postbellum infanticide cases.

During Congressional Reconstruction (1868–1876), South Carolina's progressive Republican legislature abolished capital punishment for all crimes except “willful murder,” but infanticide continued to be tried as murder in the state. ²⁶ Women accused of infanticide therefore still faced the death penalty, a punishment that newspaper editorialists and juries complained was too harsh. “The state of the law…makes this crime murder, and the verdict must be to that effect, or acquittal. There is no middle ground,” complained a South Carolina man in 1843. ²⁷ Thirty years later, another commentator similarly criticized the law: “Juries act as though they think it is not quite fair to take a woman's life for a child's, in a world suffering from a superabundance of babies.” ²⁸ Juries’ only solutions to this dilemma were to convict a defendant of the lesser charge of manslaughter, or to convict her of murder but then petition the governor to commute her sentence to imprisonment. However, the uncertainty of the governor's response made juries hesitate to convict, particularly if the woman who might face the noose was a White woman.

Between 1865 and 1900, eighteen Black women and one White woman were convicted of the murder or manslaughter of a newborn child. Significantly, the White woman, a poor widow named Sarah Calhoun, was convicted of killing a multiracial infant, her child with a freedman. ²⁹ In the 1890s, as Jim Crow segregation laws hardened and lynching became frighteningly common, South Carolina escalated its harsh treatment of Black women accused of infanticide. In 1892, Newberry County officials executed Anna Tribble, a young Black woman, after Governor Benjamin Tillman refused to commute her sentence to imprisonment. ³⁰ All other Black women convicted of infanticide escaped execution, but they nevertheless frequently served long terms in the South Carolina Penitentiary in Columbia, constructed in 1867. ³¹

One such incarcerated Black woman was Elizabeth “Lizzie” Mills, a washerwoman in her mid-thirties who was convicted of the murder of her daughter's infant in 1884. A jury in Spartanburg County found Lizzie guilty of “killing and burying” the newborn child of her unmarried daughter Mary Keys, a young domestic servant. Lizzie and Mary claimed the infant had been stillborn, but the jury became convinced that Lizzie was most responsible for deliberately killing the child. Mary was acquitted, and Lizzie, originally sentenced to hang, received a reprieve in the form of a life sentence. Lizzie suffered ill health in the penitentiary. ³² Like the roughly fifty other women incarcerated in the South Carolina Penitentiary in the mid-1880s, the great majority of them also Black women, she labored for the state's profit. She perhaps worked in the prison's onsite shoe and hosiery factories or “doing the washing of the institution.” She and the other women spent their nights confined in tight quarters on the upper level of the prison's commissary building, “the use of which prevents me to isolate the women [from the men] entirely,” as the penitentiary's superintendent wrote in 1884. ³³ Perhaps because she was ill and unable to productively labor for the state, Lizzie received a pardon in 1888, after four years. At last, she could return home to Spartanburg County and to her daughter Mary. ³⁴

Grandmothers and Infanticide in the Postbellum Period

As Lizzie Mills’ ordeal shows, the grandmothers of deceased infants were often accused of infanticide alongside their daughters in the decades after the Civil War. On April 4^th, 1865, days before Robert E. Lee surrendered his army at Appomattox, a coroner's jury in Spartanburg determined that Martha Robinson, a poor White woman, or else her mother Elizabeth had killed Martha's infant by “having the posterior part of its head crushed.” ³⁵ As late as 1912, too, Julia Tissener and her mother Adeline, poor White women who worked in a textile mill near Columbia, stood accused of killing Adeline's infant and discarding its body in a well. ³⁶ While in the antebellum years all mother-and-daughter defendant pairs appear to have been White, in the decades after Emancipation, freedwomen and their daughters, like Lizzie Mills and Mary Keys, also began to be indicted for infanticide together.

Nor was the phenomenon geographically confined to South Carolina, although my archival evidence is strongest for that state; neighboring southern states also tried and occasionally convicted mother-and-daughter pairs and grandmothers alone of infanticide. In 1881, Rose and Frances Randolph, a Black mother and daughter, fled from Cobb County, Georgia, after a coroner's jury accused them of killing Rose's newborn. ³⁷ A Georgia jury found Anna and Malinda Brock, a White mother and daughter, guilty of infanticide in 1900. The judge sentenced them to life in the penitentiary, though they were pardoned after two years. ³⁸ “Lottie Reid and Her Mother Are Charged with a Serious Crime,” declared a newspaper headline from Charlotte, North Carolina. The two Black women were arrested for “murdering the infant of Lottie Reid.” ³⁹ In 1900, an unmarried young White woman in Alabama from “a very prominent family” was jailed alongside her stepmother for having allegedly killed her child and burned its body “to hide her shame.” ⁴⁰ An Alabama court sentenced Julia Ann May, a Black woman convicted of killing her daughter's illegitimate child in 1892, to life in the penitentiary. ⁴¹

One key reason for southerners’ scrutiny of grandmothers in infanticide investigations stemmed from the social and familial context of childbirth in the post-Civil War South and grandmothers’ important roles in helping their daughters through childbirth. In rural southern communities, childbirth was not supposed to be private, let alone secretive. Rather, Black and White women continued to practice social childbirth, giving birth in a homosocial context where female relatives, female neighbors, and, of course, the midwives who delivered most children were present during childbirth and aided the mother and the newborn afterwards.

Parturient women's mothers played a central role in their daughters’ childbed experiences. Reading White southern women's letters and diaries, historian Sally McMillen noted that even women who had married and moved far away from their home communities insisted on returning home so that they could be with their mothers when they gave birth. Some women went to their mother's home to have their baby even if their husband initially objected. White southern mothers “regarded parturient care of daughters as a natural duty, and most assumed this responsibility.” ⁴²

While Black women had been less likely to be attended by their mothers during slavery, because many families were separated by slaveholders, enslaved Black women had also given birth with the aid of other women, including enslaved or free midwives, other enslaved women, and, sometimes, White physicians or female slaveholders. Enslaved women learned midwifery and healing from older Black women. After Emancipation, freedwomen and their descendants largely relied on Black midwives, the communal support of Black female neighbors, and family members and their own mothers, with whom young freedwomen often lived until they married. ⁴³

Many Black and White women wanted their mothers, with their experiential knowledge of delivering and caring for children, to assist and comfort them during childbirth—which, after all, constituted a frightening and dangerous experience. The South's maternal mortality rates were considerably higher than in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states, so pregnant women would have known other women who had died during or after childbirth, such as from puerperal infections. ⁴⁴ After delivery, most women wisely observed a period of lying-in during which they rested in bed and female family members or neighbors helped care for the mother and newborn and aided with domestic work.

Childbirth was such a social event in the nineteenth-century South that when an unmarried woman appeared to be pregnant but failed to arrange for a midwife and female neighbors to help her during the delivery, women in her community became suspicious. If the woman subsequently reappeared in the community, no longer pregnant but without an infant, female neighbors and midwives were often the first to ask questions or report their suspicions to a magistrate. Because mothers played a key role in attending their daughters during childbirth, neighbors often assumed that a young unmarried woman's mother had helped her daughter give birth and knew what had happened to her daughter's newborn.

Neighbors particularly suspected mother-and-daughter pairs of infanticide when the young woman lived with her mother, as most unmarried women did in the South. While unmarried women in other areas of the United States were increasingly finding industrial employment and living on their own by the late nineteenth century, southern women frequently lived at home with their families until they married. Wages for southern workers remained low, especially for women—and triply so for African American women. Young Black and White women who worked as farm laborers or on rural family farms lived in close quarters with their mothers in small communities. Even southern textile mill workers usually lived with their families, as southern manufacturers preferred to hire poor White families rather than young women alone. ⁴⁵ Those who accused mother-and-daughter pairs of infanticide assumed that a mother, with her experiential knowledge of pregnancy and personal knowledge of her daughter, could not have been unaware that her daughter had become pregnant and given birth while living under her roof.

Coroners’ inquests and local court records reveal that female neighbors and midwives—the people, in other words who expected to attend women in childbirth—most frequently accused Black and White mother-and-daughter pairs of infanticide, not landlords or police. White women usually drew officials’ attention to the suspicious actions of White women; Black women were the principal accusers against other Black women. While some historians have suggested that Black neighbors refused to meaningfully cooperate in infanticide inquests out of racial solidarity, this was not true in post-Civil War South Carolina. To the contrary, Black women, usually older, married Black women, frequently instigated searches and accusations against unmarried Black women and, at times, their mothers. ⁴⁶

Many infanticide investigations involving mother-and-daughter pairs began when local women noticed that an unmarried woman who had been visibly pregnant no longer was and that her infant was nowhere in sight. Sometimes, women acted as a group to find out what had happened to the infant. In 1893, a group of Black women who lived on an Edgefield County cotton plantation accused Mary Jane and Jane Gilchrist, a young Black farm laborer and her mother, of infanticide after Mary Jane's illegitimate infant disappeared soon after birth. The women searched for the infant's body until they found it buried and then “ran to tell” a magistrate. When the grandmother Jane retrieved the infant's body and hid it again, placing it in a creek, the women determinedly searched for and discovered the body once more. Jane admitted she had tried to “hide her daughter's shame,” but she insisted the infant had been stillborn. ⁴⁷

Midwives also reported women for suspected infanticide and provided authoritative testimonies during coroners’ inquests and jury trials. Recall that Maria Williams, an experienced Black midwife, was an important witness against Lula Collins and her mother Louisa. Historians have emphasized the successful crusade of male physicians to become the primary attendants of women in childbirth by pushing out midwives and casting them as ignorant and dangerous, yet midwives continued to practice in the rural Deep South long after physicians had apparently marginalized and regulated them in the Northeast. ⁴⁸ Indeed, midwives were ubiquitous in coroners’ inquests in postbellum South Carolina.

Many Black and White southern women, especially in rural areas, had all their babies delivered by midwives who had learned their craft from assisting older midwives. Some such women were full-time midwives while others worked informally as midwives while also “keeping house” or working in another occupation. “I am a general midwife, do good business,” testified Judy Gillespie, a middle-aged Black woman from rural Marlboro County who provided testimony in a bastardy case in 1893. She described coming to a woman's house in the evening, tending to her overnight during her labor, and delivering the child in the early morning with the helpful attendance of the woman's married sister. Afterwards, she “left in the afternoon and came back every day to see after [the mother] and the baby” for a week. Many midwives clearly provided attentive care for mothers and babies, and they generally worked within their own communities. ⁴⁹ In the early-twentieth century, licensed physicians and southern state boards of health did attempt to regulate African American “granny midwives,” intensifying their efforts in the postwar period. Nevertheless, Black midwives continued to deliver many children into the 1950s and 1960s. ⁵⁰

Although scholars have often romanticized midwives and other female childbirth attendants as providing gendered sympathy and comfort, Black and White midwives did not exhibit gendered or racial solidarity with all women. Rather, midwives considered it part of their duties to report women they suspected of infanticide to authorities and to participate in coroners’ inquests and other legal matters—such as the bastardy case mentioned above—by providing information about women's reproductive histories. Sometimes midwives’ testimonies helped exonerate suspects, but other midwives testified before coroners and trial juries that they believed women had killed their infants. “I have acted as midwife several times and have seen women have children born dead, and I believe the child was born alive,” a Black midwife testified in an 1897 investigation in Marlboro County. ⁵¹

In western South Carolina, Jeannette Maxwell, a young Black farm laborer, and her mother Dafney stood trial in 1881 after a Black midwife reported the death of Jeannette's infant to a magistrate. The midwife, Mary Crump, provided extensive testimony during the coroner's inquest. She told the coroner that early that morning, Dafney Maxwell had come to her house asking her to attend her daughter Jeannette, who Dafney said had “had a baby and it is dead.” Mary Crump was somewhat irritated—“I told her, I got a day's work to do,” she testified. The midwife also did not understand why Dafney had not summoned her the evening before when Jeannette gave birth: “I asked her why she did not call after me or somebody.” Nevertheless, Mary Crump dutifully followed Dafney Maxwell to her home and attended to Jeannette and her deceased newborn. “The child was very badly blistered,” Mary Crump told the coroner's jury. “The skull was broken…when I held its head up, the blood oozed out of its nostrils.” Because the Maxwells “had nothing to dress the child” in their “very small” house, the midwife noted disapprovingly, she found clothes in which to wrap him. She examined Jeannette, who was lying on the bed bleeding and “said she felt very bad.” “I cleaned [the infant's body] and got away,” Mary testified. Although she had seen stillborn infants, she said she had never seen one with a broken skull and blistered skin, and so she reported Jeannette's infant's death. A White physician who conducted a postmortem examination agreed with Mary Crump that “the child was born alive and came to its death from violence.” The coroner's jury found both Dafney and Jeannette responsible for the infant's death. At their trial, however, the women and their attorney created sufficient doubt by arguing that Dafney had accidentally produced the infant's head injuries when she helped Jeannette give birth. The medical ambiguity of infanticide led the jury to acquit.

The testimonies of midwives like Mary Crump show that they took the regulatory aspects of their roles as midwives seriously and suggest some midwives’ moral indignation towards unmarried women whom they suspected of killing or neglecting their infants and the young women's mothers. Mary Crump clearly disapproved of Jeannette and Dafney's failure to have clothes “to dress the child” after his birth and especially Dafney's failure to summon someone to assist her during Jeannette's labor. ⁵² In reporting Jeannette and Dafney, Mary Crump likely acted according to her own conscience and saw herself as fulfilling her duty as a midwife dedicated to helping mothers and babies and to making her community orderly and moral. ⁵³ Importantly, she also exercised authority. Though she was a Black woman, disenfranchised and marginalized in most spheres of late-nineteenth-century southern society, Mary's testimony was taken seriously due to her expertise in the domain of childbirth and her personal knowledge of her community.

Neighbor women, too, reported mother-and-daughter pairs for suspected infanticide and testified against them during coroners’ inquests if an unmarried woman gave birth alone with only her mother to attend her. When one married Black woman in rural Marlboro County heard that her young, unmarried Black neighbor had given birth to a stillborn child, she commanded the girl to “go and get the child and bring it to me.” The teenager disinterred the infant's body and gave it to the woman, who later testified about the “bruises” and “purple spots” she had seen on the baby's head and even her attempts to locate the afterbirth. ⁵⁴ In another case from 1892, a neighbor accused a Black mother and her 15-year-old daughter of covertly killing and burying the daughter's newborn. As evidence she offered the fact that “no one but a woman who is a particular friend of the family was called to [her] bedside.” ⁵⁵

Even an unmarried woman and her mother who did allow neighbor women to visit the mother's bedside could face suspicions if the child died when no one else was near or if neighbors found their behavior insufficiently maternal. In 1865, several married White women in Spartanburg reported an unmarried White woman and her mother, Martha and Elizabeth Robinson, after Martha's child died a few days after birth. The women testified that the newborn had previously “appeared like a healthy child.” The wet nurse, who described how she, at least, had previously cared for the child and tried to get the mother Martha to breastfeed it, disapprovingly recalled that Elizabeth, the grandmother, had “said she would do nothing for the child if it cried.” She quoted Elizabeth as saying, “It might cry [and] if it die, it die.” ⁵⁶ In testifying before coroners’ juries about infants’ suspicious deaths and the behavior of women suspected of infanticide, female witnesses like this wet nurse temporarily exercised important authority despite their relatively marginalized status. Such women witnesses also implicitly showed that they were good mothers and caretakers of infants.

As historian Laura Gowing observes of early modern England, “the all-female word of childbirth could be beset by conflicts and tensions” as well as solidarity, a dynamic which certainly applies to the post-Civil War U.S. South as well. ⁵⁷ Married women could be antagonistic towards unmarried pregnant women—and the mothers of unmarried women, whom they likely viewed as women who had failed to raise moral daughters. Nineteenth-century gender ideologies held women responsible for making the familial home a pleasant, virtuous domestic environment and for inculcating Christian moral values, including premarital chastity, in their daughters. ⁵⁸ When daughters became pregnant out of wedlock, this seemed to be a clear sign that their mothers had failed in their maternal duties.

Women in small, rural communities also exercised authority and emphasized their own respectability when they reported or testified about women suspected of killing their newborns. ⁵⁹ Although Black women were among the most marginalized people in southern society, Black women as well as White women could exercise this authority in their own communities. In their testimonies, Black midwives and female neighbors emphasized their previous experiences of childbirth or delivering children, sometimes noting how many children they had. Based on this experiential knowledge, they testified that they could distinguish a “healthy child” from one likely to die or offered their opinion that an unmarried woman and her mother had not done enough to prepare for the birth or had not cared for the newborn appropriately.

A more sympathetic reading of these cases is that many single women were ashamed to be pregnant and did not want anyone but their mother or perhaps “a particular friend of the family” attending them when they gave birth. “I asked my mother to nurse me as I wanted to keep it all quiet,” one unmarried White woman suspected of infanticide testified in 1895. ⁶⁰ Such women understandably sought to avoid the disapproval that men and women, Black and White, expressed towards unmarried pregnant women.

The sexual double standard which most severely condemned women for sex outside of marriage and the stigma borne by unmarried women who became pregnant, a key factor in infanticide, very much cut across the color line in the post-Civil War South. “I told her she must quit visiting me[,] as she was a bad character,” a Black man in rural Marlboro County testified about his sister-in-law in one infanticide case. He also did not allow the woman's mother (his mother-in-law) to visit his family, “she being immoral.” ⁶¹ Jane Edna Hunter, who grew up in a Black sharecropping family in late-nineteenth-century South Carolina, remembered in her memoir, “At home on the plantation, I knew that some girls had been seduced. Their families had felt the disgrace keenly—the fallen ones had been wept and prayed over.” ⁶² Similarly, a White female diarist writing in the 1870s recalled a White teenage girl's “downfall” when she became pregnant and the father refused to marry her. “All the world forsook her,” the woman wrote, adding that the teenager's pregnancy had brought “shame and sorrow” to her parents. ⁶³ The relatives of unmarried women who became pregnant clearly might also experience shame.

Given the stigma that single women who became pregnant and their families faced, it is unsurprising that some women and their mothers sought to conceal illegitimate pregnancies or at least keep them as quiet as possible. Unmarried pregnant women often felt ashamed to call on a midwife or ask female neighbors to attend them. They instead relied on their mothers, who likely shared their daughters’ desire to “keep it all quiet.” But if the newborn was stillborn or died after birth, as many newborns did, they might well be suspected of infanticide. Of course, some infant deaths were infanticides. The shame that motivated some women to conceal their pregnancy or give birth attended only by their mother drove others to neglect or kill a newborn.

While public knowledge of an illegitimate pregnancy could badly damage any woman's reputation, economic precarity as well as shame played a role in why some poor women committed infanticide. Single women with children struggled to find and keep work, and most women accused of infanticide came from poor families. Women in the postbellum South found their opportunities for work severely constrained by sexism and, for Black women, sexism and racism. Most worked as domestics, laundresses, seamstresses, or, in rural areas, field workers. Of these, domestics were overrepresented among women accused of infanticide, because domestics enjoyed little privacy. Employers also frequently fired unmarried domestics who became pregnant, feeling that their employee's “immorality” would damage their own family's reputation. White landowners, too, often refused to hire unmarried Black women with young children as field laborers. Landowners preferred to contract with male heads of household and knew that caring for infants circumscribed women's ability to work in agricultural labor. ⁶⁴ Lizzie Goldsmith, a Black farm laborer accused of leaving her baby in a creek in Greenville County in 1889, allegedly confessed she had done it “so as to have a better chance to get work.” ⁶⁵

Infanticide therefore sometimes reflected the circumstances faced by poor, single women who had to work for wages to survive but found employers unwilling to hire a young woman with an infant. Young women's mothers could not but be aware of this. Because poor families survived only by piecing together income from every member of the household, mothers often depended on their children's income to make ends meet. Many grandmothers accused of infanticide alongside their daughters were poor widows, meaning they were especially economically vulnerable women who partly depended on their children's labor.

Some women also likely sought to protect their daughters from becoming mothers too young or in traumatic circumstances. Court records reveal glimpses of how some mothers sought to terminate their daughters’ unwanted pregnancies. In 1881, 13-year-old Lucy Cain, a White girl in western South Carolina, was raped and became pregnant. Her mother Lucretia Cain, a poor White widow, desperately tried to induce a miscarriage. She beat her daughter Lucy in the stomach. When this did not work, Lucretia, with the help of two Black female neighbors, made a tea for Lucy containing “black pepper, puccoon root, cotton seed, bluestone mistletoe, and hartshorn”—a laundry list of herbal abortifacients. This time, the abortion succeeded. Most such abortions probably remained secret, because both women and abortion providers had incentive to keep quiet, especially in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, as southern states followed their northern counterparts in criminalizing abortion. ⁶⁶ In this case, however, young Lucy naively told a relative about the abortion. Convicted of “administering deleterious drugs with intent to procure a miscarriage,” Lucretia and one of her neighbors, Julia Simmons, were sentenced to two years and one year, respectively, in the penitentiary. ⁶⁷ Other women likely also tried to obtain abortions for young daughters who became pregnant, but abortion methods were unreliable and somewhat dangerous. In the absence of effective contraceptives and safe access to abortion, some women and their mothers may have desperately resorted to infanticide instead.

Several grandmothers accused of killing their daughters’ infants had given birth to their own daughters when they were very young. This was particularly true of freedwomen, several of whom had their daughters when they were enslaved preteens, most likely after suffering sexual assault. ⁶⁸ We can well understand that some such women likely did not want their daughters to become child mothers as they had been, to give birth to children conceived in traumatic circumstances, or to face the shame and economic precarity of unwed motherhood.

Race and Representations of Mother-and-Daughter Pairs Accused of Infanticide

As we have seen, the social and economic factors that drove some women to commit infanticide were similar across the color line. Yet Black mother-and-daughter pairs were more likely to face infanticide accusations in the postbellum South. While coroner's juries usually pinpointed the deceased infant's grandmother as an accomplice or co-defendant rather than the sole perpetrator, several Black grandmothers—but not White grandmothers—even found themselves convicted alone for the murder of their daughters’ infants.

When grandmothers stood trial alone for infanticide, coroner's juries seem to have believed that the older, more experienced grandmother had acted to hide her daughter's shame or ought to have known how to care for a newborn. In 1872, Rosa and Sylvia Jackson, an African American mother and daughter, drew the suspicions of neighbors in rural Abbeville County after Rosa's newborn died. Neighbors saw Sylvia, the grandmother, burying the infant in a garden while Rosa lay in bed and the coroner's jury decided the infant had died “due to the neglect of the grandmother.” Sylvia alone stood trial, though she won an acquittal. ⁶⁹ Similarly, Angelina Brewer of Chester County, a poor married Black woman, stood trial in 1878 for killing and burying “a new-born infant, her own grandchild.” Much like Sylvia Jackson, she had reportedly buried the infant while her daughter was resting. The infant's head showed signs of fractures, but Angelina insisted her aim had been to bury the child, who died of natural causes, before her daughter found it to spare her daughter grief. In court, Angelina's attorney read excerpts from medical textbooks about “the great number of still-born children, and the great number of deaths among children immediately after birth.” Angelina was acquitted. However, local newspapers still condemned her, opining that the “circumstantial evidence” “was very strong” and referring to the alleged infanticide as a “diabolical act.” ⁷⁰

As historian Felicity Turner has argued, post-Civil War southern newspaper writers racialized infanticide, “constructing the murderous mother as inherently Black” to argue that African Americans were unfit for family life and citizenship. Deemphasizing the social and gendered factors that led to infanticide which crossed the color line, such as poverty and the stigma attached to unwed motherhood, newspaper accounts instead wrote as if Black women were innately bad mothers. The trope of the uncaring and murderous Black mother became prominent among the racist narratives that White southerners circulated in the postbellum era. ⁷¹

A subgenre of these newspaper narratives featured Black mother-and-daughter pairs accused of infanticide, and writers emphasized the roles of allegedly coercive and vicious Black grandmothers who killed their daughters’ infants. Shortly after the Civil War, an Edgefield County newspaper published a report of uncertain province about an infanticide “of the most revolting character.” An unnamed freedwoman supposedly confessed that her infant “had been murdered by her mother,” who had also previously killed two of her other children. ⁷² Similarly, in 1893, South Carolina's largest paper ran a story about the “horrid deed” of a poor Black woman and her unmarried daughter in rural Marion County. The pair had supposedly “planned for the death of [the daughter's infant] long in advance,” even “having made a burial plot for it.” Newspapers more rarely reported on the judicial outcomes, but they widely circulated narratives about Black women who callously killed their infants and the mothers who allegedly aided them—or perhaps orchestrated events. ⁷³

White-owned newspapers’ lurid narratives sometimes even suggested that Black grandmothers instructed their daughters in infanticide, as if in a perversion of how many women taught their daughters domestic skills, healing knowledge, or midwifery. “An Expert Infanticide,” declared the headline of an 1887 article about Jane and Effie Shaller, a Black mother and daughter who lived near Lancaster, South Carolina. The article reported that Effie, a farm laborer who had reportedly given birth to three stillborn children, had recently had a fourth stillborn infant with “no one present with her but her mother, Jane Shaller.” An unidentified neighbor alerted an official, and mother and daughter were jailed with their bond set at an exorbitant $2,000. In the end, both were acquitted, but the newspaper neglected to report this. ⁷⁴

Stories about grandmothers killing their daughters’ infants recall early modern European and West African tropes about older women as witches, hags, and poisoners, dangerously knowledgeable about life, death, and reproduction, and inclined to kill children. In her history of early modern witchcraft, Lyndal Roper found that witchcraft allegations centered on older women who allegedly attacked fertility, cavorted with the Devil, sacrificed infants, and made younger women barren. Midwives, with their reproductive and medicinal knowledge, were frequent targets of witchcraft accusations, as were mother-and-daughter pairs. People believed witchcraft was hereditary and especially that mothers taught their daughters witchcraft. Infanticide was a capital crime closely linked with witchcraft; early modern people believed that women who killed their infants did so as sacrifices to the Devil. Black southerners, too, were influenced by this European tradition of witchcraft belief as well as West African beliefs about witches and hags, often described as elderly women. ⁷⁵

Although nineteenth-century Americans no longer persecuted women as witches, the language and narratives they used to describe grandmothers arrested in infanticide cases reveal that underlying cultural associations between infanticide, older women, and witchcraft persisted. Southern newspapers described grandmothers arrested for infanticide in ways that emphasized their age, even though most were in their thirties or forties. Reporters referred to White and Black grandmother suspects as “the old woman” “the aged mother,” or even “an old and decrepit woman.” ⁷⁶ Even though, as we have seen, midwives sometimes reported women for suspected infanticide, several accused grandmothers were Black midwives, suggesting that midwives were sometimes suspected of aiding their daughters in infanticide just as they had once been suspected of infanticide and witchcraft. “Her mother is a granny, a midwife,” a White male witness testified about a young Black woman, implying she had been able to quietly give birth and dispose of the child with her midwife mother's help. ⁷⁷

In contrast to their dark and accusatory narratives about Black grandmothers, White-owned newspapers portrayed White mothers and daughters suspected of infanticide in a somewhat more sympathetic light, particularly if the suspects were elite White woman rather than poor millhands or farm laborers. On one hand, writers did appear to relish publishing the sensational details of cases involving White mother-and-daughter pairs, especially in their initial reports. For example, one report memorably claimed that a White infant had been found “smothered beneath the grandmother's pillow.” ⁷⁸

However, newspapers ultimately expressed sympathy for most White mothers and daughters accused of infanticide, especially those who went to trial. In 1883, newspapers widely reported on the arrest of Martha and Mattie Gunthorpe, a White mother and daughter in rural Pickens County, who were accused of killing 20-year-old Mattie's newborn. “Its head was split entirely in two pieces,” one paper reported, demonstrating the tendency to sensationalize infanticide characteristic of initial reports. “Suspicion at once pointed at Miss Gunthorpe as the mother of the child and the murderer…her mother, Mrs. Gunthorpe, was also placed under arrest.” Yet when the Gunthorpes stood trial, editors noted that the community demonstrated “great sympathy” for the women, who were well-off and came from “a very good family.” Ultimately, they were acquitted, though the trial revealed “some ugly circumstances,” principally Mattie's relationship with a married White man. White mother-and-daughter pairs tried for infanticide generally benefited from the cultural currency of White womanhood and, for middle-class and elite women, greater financial resources to fund their legal defenses.

Importantly, too, wealthier White women were less likely to be accused of infanticide in the first place, as they enjoyed greater privacy, making them better able to conceal illegitimate pregnancies or the births of illegitimate children. White women who lived on family property possessed more privacy than did poor women who lived in small, crowded, or rented spaces. Mattie and Martha Gunthorpe only faced an infanticide accusation because the Gunthorpe family sold their property and moved away. The property's new owners happened to discover a dead infant with a broken skull buried beneath the chicken house and summoned the coroner. Had the Gunthorpes never moved, the infant's death might have remained secret. ⁷⁹

By contrast, poor White women and especially poor Black women who worked as farm laborers possessed little privacy. Often living with family members in one-room cabins, young Black women who became pregnant faced surveillance from White landlords and, as we have seen, Black neighbors. In 1869, a coroner's jury investigated Peggy Bedenbaugh, an unmarried Black woman, for the murder of an infant that a neighbor found buried in a cotton field. Peggy and her mother and siblings lived only a few yards from their Black neighbors. These neighbors testified that they had noticed Peggy's pregnancy. One married Black woman told the coroner that she believed she could even pinpoint the exact time when Peggy had given birth, because Peggy and her mother Delia—who also came under suspicion—had sent the children out of their house and shut the windows. In small communities where people were frequently outdoors working and observing their neighbors, concealing an illegitimate pregnancy and childbirth proved nearly impossible for poor rural Black women like Peggy and her mother Delia. ⁸⁰

Meanwhile unmarried White women, though they also feared the social stigma of illegitimate pregnancy, had more privacy and a somewhat larger range of options for dealing with unwanted pregnancies. An 1896 case from Charleston exemplifies both the options available for unmarried White women who became pregnant and how White mother-and-daughter pairs accused of infanticide escaped conviction in part by leveraging their Whiteness and respectability. The incident began when a Black man working along the railroad tracks in Charleston noticed a White infant's body lying in a mill pond. He alerted the coroner, who began an inquest. Neighbors soon implicated Rosa Steinmeyer, an unmarried White woman from a wealthy “old family” in the city and her mother, referred to only as Mrs. Steinmeyer. The community believed Rosa had recently given birth to an illegitimate child.

The grandmother, Mrs. Steinmeyer, became the central witness in the investigation and offered a narrative which successfully displaced blame for the infant's death onto her daughter's lover. Her narrative also illuminates the strategies that elite White families used when unmarried women became pregnant. According to Mrs. Steinmeyer's testimony, her daughter Rosa became pregnant by a married White man, a “friend of the family.” Realizing her daughter's condition, Mrs. Steinmeyer “told her that she must leave the house” to protect the family's reputation. Rosa moved to “a different part of the city” and Mrs. Steinmeyer “made it a habit to go to her daughter at night to lend her assistance and tend her in her confinement,” though “she did not go to her in the daytime.” Visiting during the day would have likely drawn attention to Rosa's situation. Yet Mrs. Steinmeyer emphasized that she tended to her pregnant daughter, as a good mother did.

While it is not clear where Rosa stayed during her pregnancy, she and other upper-class White women had access to private institutions that poor women did not, such as the “lying-in houses” that quietly dotted nineteenth-century cities. These institutions, operated by Black or White women in their homes, enabled women who could afford it to stay and deliver their children in comfortable and quiet surroundings. Some lying-in houses also discretely placed babies with adoptive families. ⁸¹

Like many grandmothers, Mrs. Steinmeyer aided her daughter during childbirth, serving as her chief and in this case only attendant. “I asked my mother to nurse me as I wanted to keep it all quiet,” Rosa Steinmeyer explained in her testimony. Mrs. Steinmeyer described her granddaughter's birth: “it was a very healthy baby, its lungs were good, for it cried so the people next door must have heard it.” Soon, William Easterlin, the infant's father, came and “took the child.” He made Rosa and her mother “a solemn promise that the baby would be taken good care of by a colored woman some miles up the road and he would pay for it.” Paying a foster-mother to care for a child was another option for wealthier people looking to hide illegitimate pregnancies and children. Mrs. Steinmeyer said that was the last she saw of the baby until her body was found in the mill pond.

In her testimony, Mrs. Steinmeyer emphasized her motherly devotion and made a good impression on the coroner's jury, who declined to indict her and her daughter for infanticide. She described helping her daughter care for the infant and “taking her daughter back into her house” as soon as William Easterlin left with the child. Having sent the child to be raised by “a colored woman up the street,” Mrs. Steinmeyer said, she had wrongly believed all would be well. “She never denied to the coroner that her daughter had given birth to a child,” a reporter noted, praising Steinmeyer's honesty. The coroner's jury accepted Mrs. Steinmeyer's well-constructed narrative and seized on William Easterlin, the child's father, as the murderer. He was a “well-connected” man, but Charlestonians evidently preferred to condemn him than two respectable White women from “an old family.” William was jailed without bail and newspapers cast him as the seducer of Rosa Steinmeyer. The newspapers followed the “profound sensation” of the trial closely and expressed surprise when a jury eventually acquitted William. Throughout the affair, Rosa Steinmeyer and her mother lived quietly in their Charleston home. ⁸²

As Mrs. Steinmeyer's story shows, Black and White southern mothers from all socioeconomic classes were often privy to their daughters’ personal lives, serving as confidantes about matters that young women did not share with others and as childbirth attendants. Although they were not all as successful in controlling the narrative as Mrs. Steinmeyer, who benefited from her respectability, wealth, and Whiteness, poor White and Black mothers also defended their daughters when they were accused of infanticide. In doing so, women sometimes drew suspicion onto themselves.

Motherly Love in the Archives of Infanticide

Grandmothers who were not accused of infanticide alongside their daughters still often testified in their daughters’ defense during coroners’ inquests and trials. If the coroner's jury sought to identify a deceased infant's mother, grandmothers denied that their daughters had been pregnant. Alternatively, if the coroner knew her daughter was the mother of a dead infant, a grandmother might testify that the child had been stillborn or had died from natural causes.

Grandmothers turned their intimate knowledge of their daughters’ lives and reproductive health, one of the very things that made community members suspicious of grandmothers, to their advantage in the ways that they asserted their daughters’ innocence. In 1885, Mary Peters, Sr., of Richland County, a married Black woman, testified on behalf of her 18-year-old daughter Mary Jr. by providing information about her daughter's reproductive health. A White neighbor accused Mary Jr. of infanticide after he found an infant's body in a creek. He allegedly followed “a bare track” and “bloodstains” from the creek to the house where Mary Jr., rumored to be “in the family way,” lived with her parents. During the coroner's inquest and the later criminal trial, Mary Sr. successfully countered this evidence by testifying that “her daughter was always terribly sick with her monthlies, and that she knew nothing about whose baby it was in the creek.” Mary Jr. was acquitted. ⁸³ Women like Mary Peters, Sr. who defended their daughters against infanticide accusations probably knew that they risked being indicted as their accomplices, but this did not deter most women from testifying.

Other testimonies from coroners’ inquests reveal that some grandmothers had attempted to protect their unmarried daughters’ reputations in the community, providing reasonable explanations to neighbors about why their daughters appeared to be pregnant. In rural Clarendon County, the discovery of a Black infant in a well led to a coroner's inquest. Neighbors believed the mother was Frances Levine, an unmarried Black farm laborer who lived with her mother Rachel. “It was reported on her in the fall that she was in a family way,” a neighbor explained. One young Black woman testified that she had “asked Aunt Rachel what was the matter with Frances, and she said it was only cold.” This testimony proved dangerous for Rachel Levine. The coroner's jury subsequently concluded that Frances and her mother Rachel were responsible for the infant's death. Both women stood trial in 1899, though they were acquitted. ⁸⁴

Similarly, Susan McQueen, the elderly mother of Flora Godwin, a middle-aged White widow accused of infanticide in Marlboro County in 1884, defended her daughter against neighbors’ insinuations that she appeared pregnant. She publicly echoed Flora's explanation that her body was swelling due to “the drops,” or dropsy. Susan also told a physician who attended her daughter after she gave birth that Flora's postpartum bleeding was bleeding related to “the change of life,” or menopause. Once again, a grandmother defended her daughter using her knowledge of her daughter's reproductive health and her experiential knowledge of women's bodies, such as what “the change of life” looked like. ⁸⁵

Although the women at the center of most infanticide cases were young, unmarried women, daughters also occasionally testified in support of their mothers when older women were suspected. Two such supportive witnesses were the grown daughters of Sallie Williams, a widowed Black farm laborer accused of infanticide near Columbia in 1878. During the coroner's inquest, Sylvina and Minnie Williams refuted neighbors’ claims that their mother Sallie had been “in a delicate state.” They should know, they insisted, because they slept in the same bed with her. Eventually Sallie admitted to the coroner that she had had a child, but she said that “it was born dead.” She had buried the child soon after its birth “because she did not want her daughters to see it.” Whatever the truth, either Sallie had acted to protect her daughters or her daughters had acted, by claiming to be ignorant of her pregnancy, to protect their mother. Sallie Williams was acquitted, as there was no clear proof that her infant had been born alive. ⁸⁶

Ironically, then, sources about infanticide investigations sometimes provide powerful archival glimpses of motherly love: of mothers’ love for their grown daughters and their determination to help them through their reproductive crises, and of daughters’ love for their mothers. In 1892, a neighbor accused 15-year-old Annie Young and her mother Laura, poor Black women who lived in Rock Hill, of killing and burying Annie's newborn son. This was the case in which the women drew a neighbor's suspicion because “no one but a woman who is a particular friend of the family was called to [Annie's] bedside” during childbirth. As Annie rested from childbirth, the coroner arrested Laura for the infant's murder and imprisoned her in the county jail. According to a newspaper, “when Annie learned that her mother had been incarcerated[,] she got out of bed and came up town and pleaded so as to be allowed to spend the night with her mother.” The magistrate “attempted to induce her to return to her home” to rest, but Annie “declared that if her mother staid in prison she would too.” The magistrate finally allowed Annie and Laura's other daughter, a toddler who still needed her mother's care, to stay in jail with Laura. The devoted mother and daughter and the little girl spent several months imprisoned together before their trial, where Annie and Laura were acquitted of murder. ⁸⁷

A few women accused of infanticide were already mothers of living children and others afterwards became mothers. Overall, most women who did commit infanticide and the mothers who may have sometimes aided them or helped conceal their actions did not reject motherhood itself. Rather, women rejected a child at a particular time due to the stigma of unwed motherhood, poverty, and doubtless, individual circumstances, too. While weathering an infanticide accusation and especially undergoing incarceration and a trial were surely traumatic and stigmatizing experiences for women, most evidently did not remain social pariahs for life. ⁸⁸ Lula Collins, the young Black woman acquitted of infanticide in 1869 alongside her mother Louisa, with whom this article began, later married and had a son. After her mother died, Lula journeyed from South Carolina to Manhattan as part of the Great Migration and lived with her son and his family. Ultimately, her arrest and trial for infanticide became one brief, if harrowing period in Lula's long life—and in her mother Louisa's life.

Conclusion

Well into the twentieth century, many Black and White southern women experienced childbirth in a familial as well as social context. Most poor and rural women continued to be delivered by midwives rather than physicians. Female neighbors and relatives expected to attend women during and after childbirth. When an unmarried woman gave birth alone in the home she shared with her mother and the infant disappeared, female neighbors often accused the grandmother of complicity in the infant's death. Even when it was not clear that a grandmother had been present during the birth, neighbors and officials frequently suspected her involvement because of the cultural expectation that mothers attended daughters during childbirth. Moreover, in a region where lay midwives, typically older women who had learned their skills through experience, attended most births, people believed that a mother's experiential knowledge of reproduction would have alerted her to her daughter's pregnancy.

Sources about infanticide investigations provide fragmentary glimpses of close and complex intergenerational relationships between mothers and their grown or teenaged daughters, including poor and illiterate White and African American mothers and daughters whose familial relationships are hardly visible in many other sources. Intergenerational female relationships were clearly strong. Neighbors, officials, and newspaper editors all viewed the mother–daughter bond as so powerful that grandmothers would certainly protect their daughters by helping them conceal an illegitimacy pregnancy or even kill a newborn and hide its body. While only the mothers of deceased infants—and at times, the grandmothers—knew what truly had befallen them, witnesses did report seeing grandmothers hide infants’ bodies or otherwise try to protect their daughters. Grandmothers’ legal testimony on their daughters’ behalf also attests to their close involvement in these cases and in their daughters’ lives. On occasion, daughters also sought to protect their mothers when they were accused of infanticide.

The closeness of mother–daughter relationships in the post-Civil War South may sometimes have felt uncomfortably claustrophobic, particularly for poor women who had little space to call their own. Living together in a one-room cabin, sharing a bed with one's mother or sister, and enjoying negligible privacy may naturally have also prompted discord or a desire for some separation rather than loving familial bonds. Yet while the more contentious aspects of mother–daughter relationships in the nineteenth-century South, including mothers’ private responses to unmarried daughters’ pregnancies and their relationships with their living illegitimate grandchildren, certainly deserve further study, the archives of infanticide do not offer many examples of these less harmonious moments. Rather, when confronted by suspicious coroners and hostile neighbors, mothers and daughters came together to protect each other.