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Crawford County is a county located in the east-central portion of the U.S. state of Missouri. At the 2020 Census, the population was 23,056. Its county seat is Steelville. The county was organized in 1829 and is named after U.S. Senator William H. Crawford of Georgia.
Steelville is a city in Crawford County, Missouri, United States. The population was 1,472 at the 2020 census. It is the county seat of Crawford County. Steelville is the hometown of Congressman Albert Reeves and Missouri State Representative Jason Chipman. The town was named after the landowner James Steel.
The People's Court was a Sondergericht of Nazi Germany, set up outside the operations of the constitutional frame of law. Its headquarters were originally located in the former Prussian House of Lords in Berlin, later moved to the former Königliches Wilhelms-Gymnasium at Bellevuestrasse 15 in Potsdamer Platz.
Polly Berry was an African American woman notable for winning two freedom suits in St. Louis, one for herself, which she won in 1843, and one for her daughter Lucy, which she won in 1844. Having acquired the surnames of her slaveholders, she was also known as Polly Crockett and Polly Wash, the latter of which was the name used in her freedom suit.
The lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama, on March 21, 1981, was one of the last reported lynchings in the United States. Several Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members beat and killed Michael Donald, a 19-year-old African-American, and hung his body from a tree. One perpetrator, Henry Hays, was executed by electric chair in 1997, while another, James Knowles, was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty and testifying against Hays. A third man was convicted as an accomplice and also sentenced to life in prison, and a fourth was indicted, but died before his trial could be completed.
Arthur William Hodge was a Tortolan-born planter, politician and serial killer who was executed by hanging in 1811 for murdering one of his slaves. Born on the British Virgin Islands, Hodge studied at Oriel College, Oxford, matriculating in 1781 before briefly serving as an officer in the 23rd Regiment of Foot. Returning to Tortola in 1803, he settled down to a life as a plantation owner while also pursuing a political career, serving in both the colony's Executive Council and its Legislative Assembly. In 1811, Hodge was hanged after being found guilty of murdering a slave he owned, the first British subject to be executed for such a crime.
Susannah Martin was one of fourteen women executed for the suspicion of practicing witchcraft during the Salem witch trials of colonial Massachusetts.
George C. "Tiny" Mercer was an American man who was convicted for the rape and murder of 22-year-old Karen Keeton in Belton, Missouri, on August 31, 1978. At the time of the murder, Mercer had a charge pending against him of raping a 17-year-old girl. He was executed at the age of 44 by the state of Missouri by lethal injection. He became the first person to be executed in Missouri since 1965. His execution was carried out in the former gas chamber which was converted to use lethal injection.
Ann Bilansky was an American housewife convicted in 1859 of poisoning her husband with arsenic. She is the only woman in Minnesota to receive the death penalty and the first white person in the state to be executed by hanging.
Mahmood Hussein Mattan was a Somali former merchant seaman who was wrongfully convicted, in the United Kingdom, of the murder of Lily Volpert on 6 March 1952. The murder took place in the Docklands area of Cardiff, Wales, and Mattan was mainly convicted on the evidence of a single prosecution witness. Mattan was executed in 1952.
Elizabeth Booth was born in 1674 and was one of the accused as well as one of the accusers in the Salem Witch Trials. She grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, as the second eldest of ten children. When she was sixteen she was accused of being a witch. When she was eighteen, she began accusing people of practicing witchcraft, including John Proctor, Elizabeth Proctor, Sarah Proctor, William Proctor, Benjamin Proctor, Woody Proctor, Giles Corey, Martha Corey, Job Tookey, and Wilmont Redd. Five of these people were executed due to Booth's testimony. Elizabeth Proctor would have been executed as well if she was not pregnant. After the Witch Trials, Booth married Israel Shaw on December 26, 1695, and had two children named Israel and Susanna. Booth's death date is unknown.
State of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave was an 1855 murder trial held in the Circuit Court of Callaway County, Missouri, in which an enslaved woman named Celia was tried for the first-degree murder of her owner, Robert Newsom. Celia was convicted by a jury of twelve white men and sentenced to death. An appeal of the conviction was denied by the Supreme Court of Missouri in December 1855, and Celia was hanged on December 21, 1855.
Snelson-Brinker House was a historic home located near Steelville, Crawford County, Missouri. It was built by Levi Lane Snelson in 1834, as a one-story, double-pen log dwelling, and sold to John B. Brinker in 1837. Later that year, the property was the site of the murder of Brinker's two-year-old daughter Vienna, for which Mary the slave became the youngest person to be executed in Missouri history. The house was extensively rebuilt in the late 1980s. Also on the property are the log and frame smokehouse/root cellar, a cast iron pump, an open field and beyond the field is a cemetery with graves dating back to the 1830s. The property was eventually operated by the St. James Historical Preservation Society as a historic house museum.
Annice was the first female slave known to have been executed in Missouri. She was hanged for the murders of five children, two of whom were her own.
Celia was a slave found guilty of the first-degree murder of Robert Newsom, her master, in Callaway County, Missouri. Her defense team, led by John Jameson, argued an affirmative defense: Celia killed Robert Newsom by accident in self-defense to stop Newsom from raping her, which was a controversial argument at the time. Celia was ultimately executed by hanging following a denied appeal in December 1855. Celia's memory was revitalized by civil rights activist Margaret Bush Wilson who commissioned a portrait of Celia from Solomon Thurman.
United States v. Susan B. Anthony was the criminal trial of Susan B. Anthony in a U.S. federal court in 1873. The defendant was a leader of the women's suffrage movement who was arrested for voting in Rochester, New York in the 1872 elections in violation of state laws that allowed only men to vote. Anthony argued that she had the right to vote because of the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, part of which reads, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States."
Robert Wash served on the Supreme Court of Missouri from September 1825 to May 1837. During his term, the pro-slavery judge, who owned slaves himself, wrote the dissenting opinion on several important freedom suits, including Milly v. Smith, Julia v. McKinney and Marguerite v. Chouteau. However, he did join in the unanimous finding for the plaintiff in the landmark Rachel v. Walker case.
Thomas Andrew Williamson was a 19th-century American serial killer. First sentenced to death for an 1868 murder in Illinois, his sentence was commuted to 20 years imprisonment and he was released after serving 11 years. He then moved to Missouri, where he subsequently murdered his wife and two men in 1889 and 1890, respectively. He was convicted of the latter murders, sentenced to death again and executed in 1891.
Rebecca Ann Littleton Hawkins was an American pioneer woman. After enduring twenty years of beatings by her husband, Williamson Hawkins, she hired her neighbor Henry Garster in 1838 to kill him. The murder led to Garster's hanging, the first in Jackson County, Missouri, in 1839. Rebecca had previously attempted and failed to murder Williamson herself with rat poison, for which she was tried and sentenced to five years in the Missouri State Penitentiary. The Jackson County community petitioned the governor for her pardon, which he granted shortly before Rebecca's sentence began. The pardon saved her from the fate of being the first woman to be imprisoned in the Missouri State Penitentiary.
The Maryland Witch Trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in Colonial Maryland between June 1654, and October 1712. It was not unique, but is a Colonial American example of the much broader phenomenon of witch trials in the early modern period, which took place also in Europe.
References
- 1 2 MTSU Center for Historic Preservation (December 2016), Snelson-Brinker House: Historic Structure Report, p. 7.
- 1 2 MTSU (2016), p. 6.
- 1 2 Frazier, Harriet C. (2001). Slavery and Crime in Missouri, 1773-1865 . McFarland. p. 170. ISBN 9780786409778.
- 1 2 MTSU (2016), p. 8.
- ↑ The Courts, Crawford County Missouri History. Retrieved November 25, 2017.