Susannah's Choice

Wasn't easy then, isn't easy now.

Part 1, No. 8

Previously on Unsettled.

This is the story of how two young women—both unmarried and both pregnant—fared under laws governing women in such circumstances in Colonial America. Susannah Turner was the sister of my seventeenth-century grandmother and Elizabeth Graves was Susannah’s distant cousin. All of this to say they are kin, my primas, and why I get to share their stories. 

The hand written acknowledgement that Thomas Yancey had fulfilled his legal responsibilty for the child.

Susannah’s Story

Susannah Turner stepped to the front of the courtroom in Caswell County, took a sharp breath and squared her shoulders. Despite the damp heat of that North Carolina morning, she was wearing gray shawl clasped in front of her, like armor against the battle ahead. She was six months pregnant, and everyone knew it.

Susannah, the daughter of Henry and Nancy Turner, came from an “old” family—as colonial families go. Her mother was from the revered Kimbrough clan whose patriarch John Kimbrough had settled in New Kent, Virginia, a century earlier. The Turner family also hailed from New Kent, where they part of an elite circle of planters. 

In the 1760s, Henry Turner and his family joined the stream of settlers from New Kent heading to North Carolina to claim land newly opened by the crown. Among the would-be settlers were the Yanceys, fellow planters and friends. The Yanceys, like the Turners, would establish large tobacco-growing plantations and purchase dozens of slaves to work the fields. Both families prospered, yet it was the Yanceys whose fortunes grew larger as they expanded into business and politics. Over the years, the Yancey name came to mean power in North Carolina. 

It was common for these early families to worship and to socialize together with intermarriage the predicable result. The pairing of surnames such as Kimbrough, Turner, Yancey and Graves were proliferate in marriage records in Virginia and North Carolina.

Sometime in the winter of 1786, Susannah and Thomas Graves Yancey became lovers. Susannah was a confident young woman of 20, and the favorite among Henry Turner’s eleven children. Susannah would often sit alongside her father during long discussions on the workings of the plantation. Thomas, who came from generations of money and influence, took his Yancey birthright as a license to do whatever he pleased. He was only 17. The two appeared to have nothing in common.

Nonetheless, by spring Susannah was pregnant. She first told her mother, then her father. Marriage between the two prominent families seemed inevitable. (Indiscretions were fairly common in Colonial America, with the result that about a third of all marriages involved a pregnant bride.) The Yancey family, speaking for Thomas, favored the marriage. However, Susannah already had made her choice, and declared she  would not agree to marry Thomas Yancey. For good measure, she insisted on obtaining custody of the child. Henry Turner fully supported his daughter, and while her mother had no legal standing in the matter, she surely influenced Henry’s thinking. At first, the Yanceys likely viewed Susannah’s demands as rash and temporary. In the face of her resolve, however, they surely knew the turmoil that lay ahead for both families.

In the end, none of those involved— not the Yanceys, or young Tom, and not the Turners, or Susannah—would decide. Instead, the drama would play out in court. The colonies basically followed English common law, except when they thought a new law would better serve colonial interests. In one instance, lawmakers updated the statutes of inheritance to allow the father’s estate to be divided equally among all his children—unmarried daughters included. But in a ruling that later would affect Susannah, they passed another law giving the husband sole control of marital property. Because the law counted his wife and his legitimate children as property, once a woman married, she lost the right to own anything down to the furniture in the family kitchen. More importantly, she had no rights over her own children.

Elizabeth’s Story

As Susannah's drama played out in public, she was probably haunted by the story of Elizabeth Graves, a distant cousin who had faced a similar situation half a century earlier. (Susannah also might have known of their common family connection to Ann Graves, who was married to Bartlett Yancey—Tom Yancey’s great-uncle.)  

Elizabeth Graves was only fourteen In 1738 when she was tried in a Spotsylvania, Virginia court for “murdering her bastard child.” Court records show that the girl’s neighbor Mrs. Elizabeth Smith and her son-in-law Richard Phillips testified against her. Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Graves, also gave a deposition. But because the records were destroyed, not a word of testimony survives. Still, severity of the crime begs speculation. The records would have explained Richard Phillips’ involvement. Perhaps he had discovered the body. What did Elizabeth’s mother have to say for herself? Did she defend her daughter, or plead for mercy?  And poor murderous Elizabeth probably sat before her accusers in stunned silence.

The Law Takes its Toll

 In Colonial Virginia “bastardly” was in itself a crime, a law enacted in part so taxpayers would not have to support a fatherless child, but also lawmakers hoped to discourage poor women from “reproducing unchecked.” Punishment usually meant 30 lashes administered in public. In one account, Edy Hooker was sentenced to appear before the parish church wearing a white sheet and to ask the minister for forgiveness. In high drama, the young woman instead “cutt and mangled” her sheet and refused to repent. For her impudence she received twenty lashes and a second chance to apologize. Whether she complied is not known. 

Other women were so desperate to conceal their pregnancies and evade punishment that they killed their newborn babies. Such was the hopelessness that led fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Graves to “murder her bastard child.” Justices John Minor and John Waller, Jr. found the girl guilty of murder and dispatched her to the public jail in Williamsburg. She was never heard from again. In his will, Elizabeth’s father, Thomas Graves, lists the names of sixteen children, but not Elizabeth’s. The only measure of Elizabeth’s existence is her tragic role in a cautionary tale told to adolescent girls.

Susannah’s Day in Court

Though not as dire as a Elizabeth’s fate, Susannah’s future and that of her child also would be decided under Colonial law. If she married, she would lose all rights, especially any legal right over her child. Once she married, she and the child would become Yancey’s property and beholden to his powerful family. However, Susannah was fortunate to have both the means and the determination to fight for herself. Like the Yanceys, the Turners had money and influence. Just as they supported her decision to refuse marriage, the Turners would stand by their daughter as she took the next step—to plead her case in court.

By her court date on Aug. 1, 1786, Susannah was six months along and by then everyone in the county was following the drama involving the two prosperous families. On that sweltering North Carolina day, she stood before Caswell County Justices Robert Parks and James Rice and with a steady voice swore under oath that she was “with child at this time, and when born is a bastard.” With a short pause to put steel to her words, she named Thomas Yancey as the father. 

She next spoke in measured terms as she laid out two requests for their consideration. First, she asked for a court order requiring Thomas to support the child until adulthood.  Second, she asked them to legally prevent either Thomas or the Yancey family from taking the child from her. After considering her requests, and hearing no objection from Thomas, the court approved both requests. He also ordered Thomas to pay all court costs. 

When the baby was born on Oct. 30, she named her newborn son Yancey Turner—a bold declaration of her right to bestow the Yancey name on her son, as well as her right to refuse to take it for herself. Susannah continued to live on the Turner plantation and raised her son in her father’s house. When Yancey was sixteen she married James Donoho and she and her son moved to Donoho’s home in Sumner, Tennessee. She had no other children. Yancey later would inherit one-third of Donoho’s estate as well as eight pounds of Virginia currency from his grandfather Henry Turner. 

Thomas Yancey recovered quite well after fulfilling his obligation to Susannah and the boy. Thomas eventually owned a thousand-acre plantation in Georgia, complete with more than a dozen slaves, and a fine mansion. (Today the Yancey House is a favorite wedding venue of the area’s Black population.)  When Tom Yancey died, he willed equal shares of his estate to his seven children, including his daughters. Yancey Turner was not among the beneficiaries.

Sources

“Custody of Yancey Turner,” Susannah Turner, hand-written document, Jan. 19, 1787.

“Idle, Lew, Brabling Women:” Slander and Bastardly in Colonial Tidewater Virginia, 1640-1725, Anne Elizabeth Ward.

“The Pamunkey Davenport Papers,” by John Scott Davenport. 2009, #194: Spotsylvania County Court Order 4:7.

“The Yanceys and the Turners,” by Joyce Hetrick. Ancestry.com, Sept. 16, 2015.