CSI Dixie

The coroner's office is as old as death and taxes -- and related to both. In medieval England, if the sheriff was the King's guard dog, charged with keeping the peace, the coroner was the King's vulture, charged with scavenging the countryside in search of potential revenue. (The word "coroner" itself is derived from "corona," Latin for "crown.") Gradually coroners became different animals, though they have always been creatures of the state. To be sure, the view from a Southern coroner’s office is unrelentingly bleak. No society can or should be judged wholly from its morgue, nor indeed from any single place. But surely there is something significant in knowing that if, for instance, you were a white male who died under suspicious circumstances in Spartanburg County, South Carolina between 1840 and 1870, you most likely died of a combination of alcohol and stupidity. If it was winter, you passed out and died of exposure. If it was spring or summer, you fell off your horse and broke your neck. This reality is sad enough. Sadder still is the price your dependents paid for your right to drink yourself stupid. If you were a white female in the same county over the same time span, and the coroner came to claim you, you most likely hung yourself. And if you were a black male? Again, you most likely hung yourself. Long before Billie Holiday thought to sing about it, variegated fruit hung from the South’s poplar trees. The Old South is often remembered as a violent place, but if you asked the coroner before the war, he'd tell you it was more fair to call it a self-destructive place. Looking out his window, what he mostly saw was white men drinking themselves and their dependents to death.

Coroners’ inquests are some of the richest records we have of life and death in the Old South, and historians have done very little with them. In some cases, the inquest is pro forma. A jury is called and concludes that the person lying before them died "at the hands of a person or persons unknown." But in many cases the record is far richer. Through coroner's reports we can learn about antebellum abortion, child abuse, spousal abuse, master-slave murder, and slave on slave violence. To be sure, one might get glimpses of these same things in more traditional court records. But especially in the Old South, cases like these had a way of not-quite-percolating up through the court system. (And this says nothing of cases in which nothing "actionable" occurred: cases of suicide, accidental death, or "act of God.")

The antebellum coroner was not a homicide detective or a medical examiner -- he was both. He inspected the body and (possible crime) scene, rounded up witnesses, heard testimony, including from slaves, and made a recommendation. If there was cause, he would seek an arrest warrant. Far more than the sheriff, he was familiar with the strange intimacies inherent in the varied ways people go out of the world. Coroners reports, then, offer a singular glimpse into life and death in the Old South, and, when complete, "CSI Dixie" will collect and analyze them, as well as make them available to scholars.