(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)
On this date in 1838, a teenage slave girl named Mary was hanged in Crawford County, Missouri. She had murdered Vienna Jane Brinker, a white child two weeks short of her second birthday.
Mary’s original owner was Abraham Brinker, Vienna Jane’s grandfather. Abraham was murdered by Indians southwest of Potosi in Washington County, Missouri in 1833. He died without a will and his widow, Fanny, and son, John, became administrators of his estate. John appropriated Mary for himself and eventually made her the babysitter for Vienna Jane, his daughter.
Mary, described as “shrewd” and “remarkably fond of children,” was “about thirteen” at the time she killed the toddler on May 14, 1837. That day Vienna Jane’s body was found in a stream on the Brinkers’ property. She’d been struck on the head and flung into the water, where she drowned.
Just why Mary committed the murder may never be known,* but she readily admitted killing Vienna Jane — at least, once Mary “was tied to a log” and interrogated with the sheriff, who “began to act as though he were going to whip Mary” — and her guilt was taken as given throughout her surprisingly protracted 15-month legal odyssey. The judge instructed Mary’s trial jury:
If the Jury shall find from the evidence that Mary, the accused person was under fourteen years when she committed the offense alleged in the indictment, then, unless they shall also find from the evidence that at the time when said offense was committed the said Mary had sufficient mind to know what act would be a crime or otherwise, they shall find for the defendant.
The jury found against her and sentenced her to death.
Mary’s lawyers — there were three of them — appealed on several grounds, but her age was not one of them. The appellate court granted her a second trial on a technicality, but she was convicted again and did not appeal further.
Writing of this case in her book Death Sentences in Missouri, 1803-2005, author Harriet Frazier remarks that “Mary remains the youngest known person ever put to death by the authority of the state of Missouri. It is no accident that she was a female and a slave.”
Willard Rand turned her case into a two-act play, The Trial of Mary, a Slave, which was performed in the Crawford County courthouse in 1990.
* This page on Brinker family history mentions speculation that Mary was revenging her own prospective sale, and/or that she might have had an illegitimate child by her master whom the family sold against Mary’s will.
On this day..
- 979: Gero, Count of Alsleben
- 1264: Not Inetta de Balsham, gallows survivor
- 1853: Hans McFarlane and Helen Blackwood, married on the scaffold
- 1944: Eliga Brinson and Willie Smith, American rapists abroad
- 1869: Charles Orme, rambler
- 1849: Konrad Heilig and Gustav Tiedemann, Baden revolutionaries
- 1703: Tom Cook, Ordinary's pet
- 1908: Khudiram Bose, teenage martyr
- 1828: William Corder, for the Red Barn Murder
- 1916: Private Billy Nelson
- 1997: Zoleykhah Kadkhoda survives stoning
- 1978: Antonina Makarova, Nazi executioner
1st time hearing this, but if she didn’t do it why she kept quiet ? why take it to her dismise? Why not deny, deny? Was she set up?
It is so sad…the whole story of the murder is a bunch of lies on this Child Mary ,anyone with common sense that can read knows its all a lie! They hung a innocent child ! RIP Mary i wont let them forget you baby!
JCF your comments prove you are part of the disgusting perversion of history today to fit the liberal identity politics of the time!
Please post the PROOF you have that Mr. Brinker was raping Mary or that she had an illegitimate child by him.
Oh, and that was my very first thought!
“she might have had an illegitimate child by her master”
Or whether she had a child or not, he was raping her: that was my very first thought. RIP, Mary (Vienna Jane, too).