Race and the Politics of Infanticide in Post-Emancipation Virginia

Although emancipation promised freedwomen greater control over their reproductive and familial lives, it also introduced new risks of state punishment for crimes related to reproduction, including infanticide. This article demonstrates that Black women and girls accused of infanticide in post-emancipation Virginia were subject to disproportionately harsh punishment, including lengthy periods of penitentiary incarceration. Drawing on court records, coroner’s reports, penitentiary records, medical literature, and popular media, this article reconstructs and contextualizes the story of Phillis Douglas, a young, Black woman convicted of killing her newborn infant and sentenced to 16 years in prison in 1869. Douglas’s fate was the product of both highly local dynamics and larger national struggles over the consequences of emancipation and new Constitutional guarantees of citizenship and equal protection. Competing accounts of how emancipation and the redefinition of citizenship had affected obligations between employers and workers, among kin, and between citizens and their governments, shaped conflicts around acts of infanticide, real and imagined, in the post-Civil War United States.