For five years, he kept her as his sexual slave, forcing her to bear two illegitimate children. In 1855, pregnant a third time and ill, she struck back, knocking her abuser unconscious by hitting him on the head with a club and burning his body in her fireplace.

During her murder trial, Celia's attorneys argued that a woman had a right to use deadly force to prevent rape. But the court ruled that in Missouri, as in other slave states, it was not a crime to rape a slave woman. Celia was found guilty and hanged.

A Virginia-born slave named Benjamin Montgomery was seventeen when he was purchased by a Mississippi planter named Joseph Davis in 1850. Davis, Confederate President Jefferson Davis's elder brother, had met the British utopian reformer Robert Owen, and wanted to apply Owen's ideas to his own plantation. He instituted a system of self-government on his plantation, including a court system in which slaves ruled on any cases of misconduct, and gave slaves like Benjamin Montgomery access to his personal library. Montgomery educated himself and became a skilled mechanic. He managed the plantation's steam-powered cotton gin and ran a retail store, eventually earning enough money to purchase his family's freedom. Nevertheless, he and his family decided to remain on the plantation. After the Civil War, Montgomery actually purchased the property from Davis, and ran it until his death in 1877.

The experience of slavery varied widely, depending primarily on a slaveholder's character and whims. Some masters, like Joseph Davis, attempted to treat their slaves in a kindly if paternalistic manner. Yet as Celia's example reveals, the institution of slavery could also bring out the very worst characteristics of human nature, for it allowed masters to treat a human being as a piece of property, to be exploited however they wished.

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