Celano Discusses Fascinating Connections in Recent Register Article
Daniele Celano, editorial specialist with the Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK), sat down to discuss her recent article in the Register of The Kentucky Historical Society. “’In Consequence of Such Escape’: Jailbreaks, Criminality, and Unfreedom on the Eve of Civil War” examines fugitivity, localized justice, and Kentucky’s state laws before the Civil War.
Celano begins her article describing the murder trial of Jane, an enslaved woman in Henry County, in the years leading up to the Civil War. Jane was tried for poisoning Mary Jane, the wife of House Porter, a man with an unscrupulous reputation. Celano expertly interweaves the story between her analysis of Kentucky’s fugitive slave laws and criminal system.
“What a way to start and grab attention! How did Jane’s story come to you?”
“I found her case on accident,” Celano laughs. Piecing together Jane’s story took time. She was at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville one afternoon looking through material on Kentucky attorney and Confederate general Humphrey Marshall when she first encountered Jane. The Filson had a full clerk’s copy of the trial, and Daniele was immediately enthralled. It was not a linear path, however, to uncovering the full story.
She learned of Jane’s eventual jailbreak from another collection at a different point in her research. “I am constantly interested in how jailbreaks and running from the law highlight important fault lines in the justice system and I realized that KHS has some papers about Jane in the CWGK collection: a letter from the jailer and a letter from Mary Jane’s brother.”
A year and a half later, Celano found out how Jane broke out of jail through a Louisville Daily Courier article that referenced the escape of an enslaved individual “through a brick wall nearly three feet thick.”
Celano decided to incorporate Jane’s story into her research of fugitive slaves and the criminal justice system at the state level. Jane’s story shows how the layers of gender, race, slavery, and criminal justice interact. Celano asks, “What does it mean to be a criminal? Jane existed in a world constrained by the power dynamics of slavery, in which she lacked both legal consent and judicial recourse.”
Throughout her article, the concept of “localized justice” is increasingly at play in Kentucky’s criminal system. In 1854, Kentucky instituted a uniform, state-based criminal code. Before this, localities in Kentucky had greater autonomy in determining their own legal procedures. And, even after, counties took a long time to institute the new code. “Some towns allowed juries to decide law and fact. The role of the jury was far less concrete than now,” Celano explained.
Most local justice officials had limited to no legal training yet wielded immense influence over establishing community norms around “just” punishment and the collective definition of a “criminal” in different towns. This created a system where civilians felt like primary actors in the justice system, which did not immediately disappear after the 1854 reforms. These sentiments can be seen in Jane’s case and the incredibly high number of executive pardons in Kentucky as compared to other states.
Celano elaborates: “Communities largely decided for themselves, both within and outside of the courthouse, which defendants were considered a danger to the community, or a “true” criminal, versus a citizen who broke the law. We saw this during Jane’s case, too, as the murder left the town in fear. Neighbors, including the prosecutor, technically broke the law by interrogating Jane in jail to find the missing poison, and when they found the poison, they immediately stopped visiting her [Jane].” Those with personal stakes in the crime were also involved in the trial. Mary Morris, for instance, of the neighboring Morris family, was present at the murder and her husband was one of the justices of the peace.
Celano uses Jane’s story to show that there were two levels of Kentucky’s justice system before the Civil War. There was the more local court system, structured by social networks and cultural norms. On the other hand, however, many prominent jurists pushed for strong adherence to the 1854 reforms to elevate Kentucky’s legal standing in the eyes of the nation. This was intrinsically tied with slavery.
In the legal world, “Kentucky was very much the frontier in the 1840s,” says Celano. This desire to change Kentucky’s rugged stereotype appeared in the characters of Jane’s jurists, who felt maligned by the barbarism cries of northern abolitionists. Jane’s lawyers fought for the acquittal of an enslaved, black woman; yet these same characters were pro-slavery.
“Honestly, it was wild to me,” says Celano, “These men were very committed to slavery, and enslaved dozens of people themselves. They propagated racist theories that argued slavery was a “necessary evil,” and the only way to structure an interracial hierarchy.” Their role in defending Jane in this sensationalized trial was to reinforce the alleged “benevolence” of slavery. Celano argues that we can see their intentions in Jane’s defense. Jane appealed to the members of the legal system both as a woman and as an enslaved person. “Jane argued that she simply followed the orders of a white man who held both physical and legal dominance over her. She appealed to various gendered norms of white society to mitigate her situation, by establishing that it was House Porter who had transgressed his role as husband and patriarch, not Jane,” Celano explains. “Instead of the whole system of slavery creating dangerous racial disorder, it was the actions of one man.”
Jane’s jurists, then, were trying to perpetuate this ideal of slaveholding men as benevolent patriarchs while showing the rising professionalism of the Kentucky bar.
The article shows the tension, which is still present in today’s legal system, of the appeal to localized justice and extralegal tactics, and Jane’s strategic capitalization on her statutory rights as a defendant before appellate courts. This tension is heightened for defendants from marginalized communities who face greater biases and systemic barriers to a fair or equitable trial.
“We tend to think of broad constitutional or national changes in federal law, instead of the state laws that governed the day to day. I speak to how race relations were established both on the ground and in courts, because the courts were operated very much the same after the Civil War as before. The legacy of slavery was still very present in the operation of justice, as jurists remained committed to Black disenfranchisement and communities violently and politically resisted emancipation.” Celano speaks of her inspiration from historians like Laura Edwards and Kimberly Welch, who focus on legal cases and slavery in the Civil War era. Celano expands on their work by delving more into criminal law. She argues that examining fugitive slave law as a local story provides a more robust understanding of how race, gender, and crime interacted in Southern slave states just before the Civil War.
Daniele’s future work will expand on these themes, focusing on civil liberties and the legal and criminal system in the Civil War era. “We need to grapple as historians and as Americans with what does it really mean to be a criminal in an oppressive system.” Holistically, Daniele sees the importance of setting the stage for what is about to happen to Kentucky in the Civil War. “We can’t understand the laws after the Civil War until you understand laws before it.”
Daniele Celano is a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation, “Conflicting Laws of Liberty,” examines the interplay between fugitive slave litigation and civil liberties claims in Civil War Kentucky. She also authored the piece “Concealed in the 92nd” for the Southern Accent column in America’s Civil War magazine. Celano was a Jefferson Scholars Fellow from 2020-2022.
The Civil War Governors of Kentucky Digital Documentary Edition (CWGK) is a freely accessible online collection of historical documents associated with the chief executives of the state, 1860-1865. Despite its title, CWGK is not about the five governors. It is about reconstructing the lost lives and voices of tens of thousands of Kentuckians—white or Black; free and enslaved; Unionist or Confederate—who interacted with the office of the governor between 1860 and 1865. CWGK is working to identify, research, and link together every person, place, and organization found in its documents. This web of hundreds of thousands of networked nodes will dramatically expand the number of actors in Kentucky and U.S. history, show scholars new patterns and hidden relationships, and recognize the humanity and agency of historically marginalized people.
