In Missouri in the spring of 1845, Vicey, an enslaved woman in her late twenties, gave birth to her fifth child, a son she named Stephen. In August of that same year, she killed him. Initially, Vicey claimed that Stephen died accidentally when she “fell into a deep sleep” with him in her arms. In preparation for burial, Stephen’s body “was placed away in the usual manner” and his death, attributed to his mother’s negligence, was not further investigated. Approximately six days after Stephen’s death, Vicey initiated a conversation with her enslaver, Catherine McMurtrey. Overwhelmed by guilt, Vicey confessed that “she had smothered her baby on purpose” by holding his “mouth and nose.” Prior to this confession, there is little to suggest that Stephen’s death was anything other than the accident that Vicey claimed it to be. As Catherine McMurtrey’s deposition testimony later revealed, however, Vicey asserted that her actions were not only deliberate, but they were also premeditated. When McMurtrey asked Vicey how long she had contemplated killing her son, she responded, “about three weeks.”
Enslaved women understood that their childbearing and rearing lay at the foundation of slavery. Consequently, preventing pregnancy or terminating a pregnancy represented more than an exercise of bodily autonomy, which was an act of resistance in and of itself; it represented a refusal to perform the labor deemed necessary for enslaved women. Vicey, like an unknowable number of enslaved women, consciously decided that she would not mother a child—to her, and others like her—her child’s death meant his freedom from slavery.
Although the specific impulses that led some enslaved women to kill their own children remain unknown, several women left no such doubts for their actions. Like Vicey, Margaret Garner saw infanticide as an act of emancipation. In 1856, Garner and her family ran away from the Kentucky plantations where they were enslaved. Their enslavers and Federal marshals tracked them to Ohio. Faced with capture and re-enslavement, Garner attacked her children, determined that they should not return to slavery and be “murdered by piece meal,” she decided that she “would much rather kill them at once and end their suffering.” In what was likely a spontaneous response to an immediate threat, Garner succeeded in killing her three-year-old daughter, Mary, but failed to kill her three other children.
Infanticide was an extreme means of maternal resistance. Preventing pregnancy and inducing abortion were other, likely more common but equally difficult to quantify, means of reproductive resistance. For enslaved women controlling their reproduction with preventatives and abortifacients represented the ultimate challenge to an enslaver’s authority as well as a reclamation of reproductive and bodily autonomy.