Dec. 30, 2025
Edgefield, South Carolina: The Devil's Bargain Murder Trial of 1850
In February 1849, an enslaved sawmill worker named Appling approached his owner with an extraordinary proposal: he would murder Martin Posey's wife Matilda in exchange for a promise of freedom. What followed exposed the brutal mechanics of what historians call "criminal bargains"—informal contracts between enslavers and enslaved people that the legal system barely acknowledged.
Martin Posey, a man of modest origins who married into the wealthy Holmes family, had earned the nickname "The Devil of Montmorenci." Contemporary accounts describe him as having "quite the thirst for power and money, coupled with his inconsideration for everyone but himself." When his father-in-law died in 1847, Posey gained control of Matilda's inheritance through South Carolina's coverture laws. But he wanted more—specifically, he wanted Matilda's teenage sister Eliza and her portion of the Holmes estate.
The murder occurred on a Friday afternoon in February 1849. Matilda was last seen directing workers on the plantation before Martin asked her to check on the dairy door. There, Appling waited. He bludgeoned her to death while Martin, according to trial evidence, "encouraged him from behind." They buried her body in a shallow grave near a spring.
But the "deal" was always a lie. Roughly one month later, workers discovered Appling's decomposing body in neighboring Abbeville County. The coroner's findings revealed death by gunshot—but it was one detail that transformed everything: Appling's hands were still tied together. Martin Posey had simply erased the witness to his crime.
Timeline of Events
-The Martin Posey case unfolded in "Bloody Edgefield," a South Carolina town where 39 percent of all prosecutions involved violent offenses—the highest rate in the state. Violence wasn't exceptional here; it was routine. Historians have called it "the Deadwood of its day."
-1847: Matilda's father dies; his estate is divided among his children
-February 1849: Appling murders Matilda; she is buried in a shallow grave
-Approximately one week later: Searchers discover Matilda's body
-March 1849: Workers find Appling's body with tied hands in Abbeville County
-October 10, 1849: Four-day trial begins at Edgefield County Court House
-October 14, 1849: Jury returns guilty verdicts on both murder counts
-February 10, 1850: Martin Posey executed by hanging
Historical Significance
The Posey case illuminates the impossible position of enslaved people within antebellum legal systems. South Carolina's Negro Act of 1740 prohibited enslaved people from giving sworn testimony in court, especially against white defendants. Any promise Martin Posey made to Appling existed in a legal void—unenforceable, unwitnessable, and ultimately worthless.
Scholars studying this case note that Appling was "neither passively acquiescent nor docile" but entrepreneurial. He demonstrated what historians call "slave agency"—the capacity to negotiate even within brutal constraints. Lacking conventional bargaining chips like money or property, he weaponized the only thing he had: his willingness to commit violence.
The execution drew between 4,000 and 5,000 spectators—more than ten times the village population. The Edgefield Advertiser reported it was a spectacle "which even the oldest inhabitants could not recollect" for its size. That afternoon, the town square descended into what newspapers called "drunken brawls"—violence so normalized that even an execution couldn't proceed without it.
Sources & Further Reading
-This episode draws on scholarly research into antebellum South Carolina's legal system and the intersection of slavery, violence, and criminal law.
Primary Sources:
-Edgefield County Historical Society Walking Tour documentation, which preserves details of the October 1849 trial proceedings and execution
-South Carolina Department of Archives and History records
Secondary Sources:
-"Race and the Law in South Carolina: From Slavery to Jim Crow" - Academic analysis of the Posey
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WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_00]: March 1849.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Workers searching the woods between Edgefield and Abbeyville County, South Carolina, stumbled across a shallow grave.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Inside, the decomposing body of a man,
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[SPEAKER_00]: the coroner arrived, examined at the remains, recorded his findings in careful detail.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The sort of clinical precision that shows up in death records of the era, caused of death, a lead in ball shot from a gun or pistol by the hands of some person or persons unknown.
00:38.723 --> 00:46.913
[SPEAKER_00]: It was one detail that transformed this from a possible suicide or accident into something
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the dead man's hands were still tied together.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His name was Appling, he was enslaved, and roughly one month earlier, he'd made his owner a deal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'll murder your wife for you, and exchange you give me my freedom.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The tied hands, that was the evidence that the deal had always been a lie.
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[SPEAKER_00]: To understand how an enslaved man came to propose murder, we need to go back to Edgefield South Carolina.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A town where violence was so routine, local said blood had been shed on every square foot of the town.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back, friend, to hometown history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The podcast that takes a stroll down the main streets and back alleys of the past, to uncover how local stories shaped the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In today, we're exploring a story from Edge Field, South Carolina, a town that earned the nickname Bloody Edge Field, and a reputation as the dead wood of its day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the mid-19th century, Edge Field County recorded a 39% violent crime rate, the highest in South Carolina.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Violence wasn't exceptional here.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was routine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Against that backdrop, in February 1849, and enslaved saw Mill worker named Appling, made his owner an offer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Freedom, an exchange for murder,
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[SPEAKER_00]: what follow exposed the brutal mechanics of what historians call criminal bargains, and formal contracts between enslavers and enslaved people at the legal system barely acknowledged.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of Martin Posey, the man called the devil and the impossible negotiation that ended with two murders, a trial that transfixed a county, and an execution that drew the largest crowd Edgefield had ever seen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By all accounts, Edgefield, South Carolina, wasn't a place where violence shocked anyone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: 39% of all prosecutions in the county involved violent offenses, contemporary newspapers described drunken brawls in the town square as routine entertainment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The folks in Edgefield weren't horrified by violence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were accustomed to it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Historians have called it the dead would of its day, comparing it to the lawless mining towns of the American West.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The courthouse still stands today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A handsome brick building completed in 1839, designed by Charles Beck, associate of South Carolina's famous architect, Robert Mills.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It served as the County Courthouse continuously since then.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But in 1849, the cases that filled its docket weren't about property disputes or contract law.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were about violence, murder, assault, blood feuds that lasted generations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Martin Posey was 34 years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A man of modest means who married into the wealthy home's family to elevate his position.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He operated a sawmill and owned a plantation work by enslaved laborers, including aptling.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By all accounts, the community long distrusted him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He drank heavily.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He admitted to beating his wife from a tilde.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He earned a local nickname, The Devil of Montmarinzi, supposedly hosting, as one account put it, nightly carnivals with The Devil.
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[SPEAKER_00]: contemporary descriptions paint him as having quite the thirst for power and money, coupled with his inconsideration for everyone, but himself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Historians have called him a true narcissist, who ran his affairs like a mob boss.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This wasn't someone operating in the shadows.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This was a man whose reputation preceded him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The financial incentive was explicit and legally structured.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When Matilda's father died in 1847, his estate was divided among his children.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In South Carolina's cover-ture laws, create a quite the deadly incentive structure.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Under cover-ture, a legal doctrine inherited from English common law.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When a woman married, all her personal property became her husband's immediately.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He gained management in control of her real estate, and upon her death, he had strong inheritance claims.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Research shows only one to two percent of South Carolina couples executed marriage settlements to protect women's property.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The home's family apparently had no such protections in place.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So when Matilda inherited her portion of the home's estate, Martin Posey controlled it automatically.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He became, according to sources, obviously, evacuated with Matilda's younger sister Eliza.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A teenage widow still under 18.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If he could eliminate Matilda, and marry Eliza, he would control her portion of the home's estate as well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But South Carolina law does not permit divorce.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The state was one of the few that outlawed it entirely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For Martin Posi, murder became his calculation, the only solution to what was essentially a property problem.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Into this situation, stepped up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: According to trial evidence and historical accounts, Appling initiated the deal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He approached Martin Posey with the proposal, not the reverse.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Historians emphasized that Appling knew Martin was unhappy married.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He knew South Carolina Law did not allow divorce.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he offered to kill his and slayvers' wife in exchange for a promise of freedom
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[SPEAKER_00]: Scholars who study this case are careful to note that Appling was neither passively acquiescent nor docile, but entrepreneurial.
07:38.424 --> 07:41.507
[SPEAKER_00]: He demonstrated what historians call slave agency.
07:42.789 --> 07:46.993
[SPEAKER_00]: The capacity to negotiate, even within brutal constraints.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Lacking conventional bargaining chips like money or property, he weaponized the only thing he had.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the power asymmetry was absolute.
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[SPEAKER_00]: South Carolina's Negro Act of 1740 prohibited enslaved people from giving sworn testimony in court, especially against white defendants.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Any promise Martin Posey made, existed in a legal void, unenforceable, unwitnessable, and ultimately worthless.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The bargain was always alive,
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[SPEAKER_00]: But for Appling, it represented the only path to freedom, imaginable within slavery's suffocating logic.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On a Friday afternoon in February 1849, Matilda Posey was last seen directing and slaved workers on the plantation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Martin asked his wife to check on the dairy door, a mundane household task.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He bludgeoned her to death, while Martin, or according to trial evidence, encouraged him from behind.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They buried her body in a shallow grave, in the wooded land near a spring on the property.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Within days, teenage Eliza moved in with Martin.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The community buzzed with rumors.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Folks whispered that Applin had confessed to another enslaved person, named Franklin, about committing the murder, then fled.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But there was no proof, no body, no evidence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Approximately one week later, searchers found Matilda's body in the shallow grave.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then, roughly one month after Matilda's murder, workers accidentally discovered Appling's decomposing body in a nearby county.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The corner examined the remains, recorded his findings, death by Aladdin Ball, shot from a gun or pistol.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But it was one detail, the same detail that opened to this story, that transformed everything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This wasn't suicide, this wasn't an accident, this was an execution.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Martin Posey had simply erased the witness to his crime, the deal for freedom, died the moment it was useful.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The discovery of Appling's bound body shifted suspicion directly to Martin Posey.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Wilson Kirkland, Posi's overseer, was arrested first and by all accounts promptly accused Posi of orchestrating both murders without hesitation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That same night, authorities found Martin in Eliza, hiding at Francis Posi's house, Martin's father.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Both were arrested.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Within days, Francis Posey and Albert Posey, Martin's brother, were arrested as accessories to Appling's murder.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The entire Posey family network was implicated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The key witness was Franklin, an enslaved person who's exact ownership and location remain uncertain in historic records.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Franklin came forward with testimony that Appling had confessed to him about Matilda near the spring.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This information led investigators to the body's location.
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[SPEAKER_00]: According to South Carolina's Negro Act of 1740, enslaved people could not give sworn testimony in court.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yet their statements at coroner's inquest could be recorded.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The coroner's report on Matilda notes that, quote, one of my Negroes, had told him that Appling had killed my wife and buried her near the spring.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Franklin's voice existed, only as secondhand report.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Never direct, never sworn, never legally recognized as fully human speech.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But it was enough to build a case.
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[SPEAKER_00]: to put this in context, a landmark study by his story in Michael S. Hindu's found that of 71 prosecutions of white people, for killing enslaved people across 18 South Carolina districts, over 40 to 60 year periods, only 16 resulted in conviction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's a 22.5% conviction rate,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Chief Justice John Belton O'Neill, who himself enslaved roughly 150 people, was the only prominent South Carolinian to protest the evidentiary prohibition.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He argued that Negroes will feel the sanctions of an Earth, with as much force as any of the ignorant classes of white people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The legal system was designed to make crimes involving enslaved people invisible,
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[SPEAKER_00]: but Martin Posey had made two mistakes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: First, he killed a white woman from a prominent family.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Second, he'd left physical evidence, Appling's tied hands that contradicted any suicide narrative.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By October 1849, the case had generated intense public interest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Edge Field Advertiser sold a 75-page trial pamphlet for 20 cents.
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[SPEAKER_00]: White Assum for the era.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Suggesting strong demand for details about these crimes, the community was ready for answers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The trial began October 10, 1849,
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[SPEAKER_00]: the same handsome brick building that stands today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Martin Posi faced two separate murder trials, won for killing his wife Matilda, won for killing his enslaved worker, atling.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the public pressed eagerly into the space.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So many people that standing room vanished.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd come to hear the detailed evidence of how posi got abling to kill his wife and how posi subsequently murdered abling to keep him silent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The prosecution presented four days of evidence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Franklin's testimony about Appling's confession, the discovery of Matilda's body near the spring.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly where Franklin said Appling buried her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The coroner's finding on both bodies, Matilda Blodgeon, Appling shot with his hands tied,
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[SPEAKER_00]: The suspicious timing of Eliza, moving him with Martin, within days of Matilda's disappearance.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Wilson Kirkland, the overseer, testified about Martin's orders and movements.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Family members contradicted Martin's alibi, physical evidence mounted.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The defense argued quite the predictable strategy that Appling, as an enslaved person, had acted alone in murdering Matilda, and committed suicide out of guilt.
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[SPEAKER_00]: but those tight hands destroyed that narrative, you can't shoot yourself with tight hands bound together.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Someone executed Appling, and the prosecution made clear, who had both motive and opportunity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: After four days of testimony, the jury deliberated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They returned guilty verdicts on both
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[SPEAKER_00]: the sentence, death by hanging.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The execution will be carried out on February 10, 1850.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's believed Martin Posey was convicted because he crossed a line the community couldn't tolerate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: According to the trial manuscript editor, it is a saying in Edgefield an elsewhere that if a man have money, he may do anything and not behing for it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: but let him kill his wife here, and the goal of California can not buy eloquence enough to save him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The community could tolerate extraordinary violence toward enslaved people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The 22.5% conviction rate proved that, but murdering a white woman from a prominent family that crossed a boundary.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Significantly, Posi faced equal prosecution for both murders,
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[SPEAKER_00]: The legal system, at least, nominally recognized Applings' humanity, even while denying him most legal protections.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Justice so compromised by slavery's logic that calling it justice at all requires careful qualification.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On February 10, 1850, roughly four months after his conviction, Martin Posey was executed by hanging in Edgefield.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The crowd that gathered numbered between 4,000 and 5,000 people, more than 10 times the village population, the Edgefield advertiser called it a spectacle, which even the oldest inhabitants could not recollect for its size.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That afternoon, the town square descended into what newspapers called drunken brawls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Violence as entertainment, violence as community bonding.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Violence so normalized that even an execution couldn't proceed without it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The execution was justice of a sort, but it left questions unanswered.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What happened to Martin and Matilda's four children?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Where is Martin Posey buried?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Unknown.
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[SPEAKER_00]: While became of Eliza, the teenage sister who married Martin after his arrest, and was found hiding with him and his father's house.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She left South Carolina, but beyond that, the trail vanishes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and Franklin, the enslaved man, whose testimony helped convict Martin Posi.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What happened to him?
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[SPEAKER_00]: His voice exists only as a second hand report in a coroner's inquest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Never sworn, never legally recognized as fully human speech.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We don't even know who owned him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This 1849 case illuminates dynamics still contested in 2025.
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[SPEAKER_00]: this question of agency under constraint, how much autonomy exists within oppressive systems.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Remains central to discussions of criminal justice, labor rights, and power imbalances.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Appling's Deshbert bargain challenges us to think beyond simple victim, perpetrator binaries, while acknowledging that agency under extreme constraint is qualitatively different from genuine freedom.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The case also demonstrates how legal systems create injustice through structural design, not just biased application.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The prohibition on enslaved testimony wasn't an aberration, but a foundational feature ensuring the crimes involving enslaved people remained invisible.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Modern parallels exist, wherever legal systems systematically exclude certain voices or perspectives.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Edgefield County Courthouse still stands on the town square.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The same brick building where Martin Posi was tried in 1849.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It served continuously as the County Courthouse for 186 years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you visit Edgefield today, you can stand in the same space where that four-day trial unfolded.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Where Franklin's second-hand testimony helped convict a man
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[SPEAKER_00]: And if you listen carefully to the story's locals tell, you'll still hear the echoes of what made Edge Field, bloody Edge Field.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Even a spectacular execution couldn't proceed without drunken brawls in the town square afterward.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters, every hometown has a story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight it's Appling's Impossible Bargain, in the tight hands that proved the devil's deal was always a lie.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If this story resonated with you, share it with someone who appreciates history that challenges easy answers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Good night, friend.
00:03.018 --> 00:04.041
[SPEAKER_00]: March 1849.
00:05.905 --> 00:13.385
[SPEAKER_00]: Workers searching the woods between Edgefield and Abbeyville County, South Carolina, stumbled across a shallow grave.
00:14.568 --> 00:18.057
[SPEAKER_00]: Inside, the decomposing body of a man,
00:19.218 --> 00:25.866
[SPEAKER_00]: the coroner arrived, examined at the remains, recorded his findings in careful detail.
00:27.028 --> 00:38.683
[SPEAKER_00]: The sort of clinical precision that shows up in death records of the era, caused of death, a lead in ball shot from a gun or pistol by the hands of some person or persons unknown.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was one detail that transformed this from a possible suicide or accident into something
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the dead man's hands were still tied together.
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[SPEAKER_00]: His name was Appling, he was enslaved, and roughly one month earlier, he'd made his owner a deal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'll murder your wife for you, and exchange you give me my freedom.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The tied hands, that was the evidence that the deal had always been a lie.
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[SPEAKER_00]: To understand how an enslaved man came to propose murder, we need to go back to Edgefield South Carolina.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A town where violence was so routine, local said blood had been shed on every square foot of the town.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back, friend, to hometown history.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The podcast that takes a stroll down the main streets and back alleys of the past, to uncover how local stories shaped the world.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters.
01:47.424 --> 01:59.678
[SPEAKER_00]: In today, we're exploring a story from Edge Field, South Carolina, a town that earned the nickname Bloody Edge Field, and a reputation as the dead wood of its day.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the mid-19th century, Edge Field County recorded a 39% violent crime rate, the highest in South Carolina.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Violence wasn't exceptional here.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was routine.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Against that backdrop, in February 1849, and enslaved saw Mill worker named Appling, made his owner an offer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Freedom, an exchange for murder,
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[SPEAKER_00]: what follow exposed the brutal mechanics of what historians call criminal bargains, and formal contracts between enslavers and enslaved people at the legal system barely acknowledged.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of Martin Posey, the man called the devil and the impossible negotiation that ended with two murders, a trial that transfixed a county, and an execution that drew the largest crowd Edgefield had ever seen.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By all accounts, Edgefield, South Carolina, wasn't a place where violence shocked anyone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: 39% of all prosecutions in the county involved violent offenses, contemporary newspapers described drunken brawls in the town square as routine entertainment.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The folks in Edgefield weren't horrified by violence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were accustomed to it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Historians have called it the dead would of its day, comparing it to the lawless mining towns of the American West.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The courthouse still stands today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A handsome brick building completed in 1839, designed by Charles Beck, associate of South Carolina's famous architect, Robert Mills.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It served as the County Courthouse continuously since then.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But in 1849, the cases that filled its docket weren't about property disputes or contract law.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They were about violence, murder, assault, blood feuds that lasted generations.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Martin Posey was 34 years old.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A man of modest means who married into the wealthy home's family to elevate his position.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He operated a sawmill and owned a plantation work by enslaved laborers, including aptling.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By all accounts, the community long distrusted him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He drank heavily.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He admitted to beating his wife from a tilde.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He earned a local nickname, The Devil of Montmarinzi, supposedly hosting, as one account put it, nightly carnivals with The Devil.
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[SPEAKER_00]: contemporary descriptions paint him as having quite the thirst for power and money, coupled with his inconsideration for everyone, but himself.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Historians have called him a true narcissist, who ran his affairs like a mob boss.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This wasn't someone operating in the shadows.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This was a man whose reputation preceded him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The financial incentive was explicit and legally structured.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When Matilda's father died in 1847, his estate was divided among his children.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In South Carolina's cover-ture laws, create a quite the deadly incentive structure.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Under cover-ture, a legal doctrine inherited from English common law.
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[SPEAKER_00]: When a woman married, all her personal property became her husband's immediately.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He gained management in control of her real estate, and upon her death, he had strong inheritance claims.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Research shows only one to two percent of South Carolina couples executed marriage settlements to protect women's property.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The home's family apparently had no such protections in place.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So when Matilda inherited her portion of the home's estate, Martin Posey controlled it automatically.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He became, according to sources, obviously, evacuated with Matilda's younger sister Eliza.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A teenage widow still under 18.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If he could eliminate Matilda, and marry Eliza, he would control her portion of the home's estate as well.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But South Carolina law does not permit divorce.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The state was one of the few that outlawed it entirely.
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[SPEAKER_00]: For Martin Posi, murder became his calculation, the only solution to what was essentially a property problem.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Into this situation, stepped up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: According to trial evidence and historical accounts, Appling initiated the deal.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He approached Martin Posey with the proposal, not the reverse.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Historians emphasized that Appling knew Martin was unhappy married.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He knew South Carolina Law did not allow divorce.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And he offered to kill his and slayvers' wife in exchange for a promise of freedom
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[SPEAKER_00]: Scholars who study this case are careful to note that Appling was neither passively acquiescent nor docile, but entrepreneurial.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He demonstrated what historians call slave agency.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The capacity to negotiate, even within brutal constraints.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Lacking conventional bargaining chips like money or property, he weaponized the only thing he had.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the power asymmetry was absolute.
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[SPEAKER_00]: South Carolina's Negro Act of 1740 prohibited enslaved people from giving sworn testimony in court, especially against white defendants.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Any promise Martin Posey made, existed in a legal void, unenforceable, unwitnessable, and ultimately worthless.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The bargain was always alive,
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[SPEAKER_00]: But for Appling, it represented the only path to freedom, imaginable within slavery's suffocating logic.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On a Friday afternoon in February 1849, Matilda Posey was last seen directing and slaved workers on the plantation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Martin asked his wife to check on the dairy door, a mundane household task.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He bludgeoned her to death, while Martin, or according to trial evidence, encouraged him from behind.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They buried her body in a shallow grave, in the wooded land near a spring on the property.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Within days, teenage Eliza moved in with Martin.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The community buzzed with rumors.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Folks whispered that Applin had confessed to another enslaved person, named Franklin, about committing the murder, then fled.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But there was no proof, no body, no evidence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Approximately one week later, searchers found Matilda's body in the shallow grave.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And then, roughly one month after Matilda's murder, workers accidentally discovered Appling's decomposing body in a nearby county.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The corner examined the remains, recorded his findings, death by Aladdin Ball, shot from a gun or pistol.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But it was one detail, the same detail that opened to this story, that transformed everything.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This wasn't suicide, this wasn't an accident, this was an execution.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Martin Posey had simply erased the witness to his crime, the deal for freedom, died the moment it was useful.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The discovery of Appling's bound body shifted suspicion directly to Martin Posey.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Wilson Kirkland, Posi's overseer, was arrested first and by all accounts promptly accused Posi of orchestrating both murders without hesitation.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That same night, authorities found Martin in Eliza, hiding at Francis Posi's house, Martin's father.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Both were arrested.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Within days, Francis Posey and Albert Posey, Martin's brother, were arrested as accessories to Appling's murder.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The entire Posey family network was implicated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The key witness was Franklin, an enslaved person who's exact ownership and location remain uncertain in historic records.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Franklin came forward with testimony that Appling had confessed to him about Matilda near the spring.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This information led investigators to the body's location.
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[SPEAKER_00]: According to South Carolina's Negro Act of 1740, enslaved people could not give sworn testimony in court.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Yet their statements at coroner's inquest could be recorded.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The coroner's report on Matilda notes that, quote, one of my Negroes, had told him that Appling had killed my wife and buried her near the spring.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Franklin's voice existed, only as secondhand report.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Never direct, never sworn, never legally recognized as fully human speech.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But it was enough to build a case.
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[SPEAKER_00]: to put this in context, a landmark study by his story in Michael S. Hindu's found that of 71 prosecutions of white people, for killing enslaved people across 18 South Carolina districts, over 40 to 60 year periods, only 16 resulted in conviction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's a 22.5% conviction rate,
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[SPEAKER_00]: Chief Justice John Belton O'Neill, who himself enslaved roughly 150 people, was the only prominent South Carolinian to protest the evidentiary prohibition.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He argued that Negroes will feel the sanctions of an Earth, with as much force as any of the ignorant classes of white people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The legal system was designed to make crimes involving enslaved people invisible,
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[SPEAKER_00]: but Martin Posey had made two mistakes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: First, he killed a white woman from a prominent family.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Second, he'd left physical evidence, Appling's tied hands that contradicted any suicide narrative.
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[SPEAKER_00]: By October 1849, the case had generated intense public interest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Edge Field Advertiser sold a 75-page trial pamphlet for 20 cents.
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[SPEAKER_00]: White Assum for the era.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Suggesting strong demand for details about these crimes, the community was ready for answers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The trial began October 10, 1849,
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[SPEAKER_00]: the same handsome brick building that stands today.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Martin Posi faced two separate murder trials, won for killing his wife Matilda, won for killing his enslaved worker, atling.
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[SPEAKER_00]: the public pressed eagerly into the space.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So many people that standing room vanished.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They'd come to hear the detailed evidence of how posi got abling to kill his wife and how posi subsequently murdered abling to keep him silent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The prosecution presented four days of evidence.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Franklin's testimony about Appling's confession, the discovery of Matilda's body near the spring.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly where Franklin said Appling buried her.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The coroner's finding on both bodies, Matilda Blodgeon, Appling shot with his hands tied,
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[SPEAKER_00]: The suspicious timing of Eliza, moving him with Martin, within days of Matilda's disappearance.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Wilson Kirkland, the overseer, testified about Martin's orders and movements.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Family members contradicted Martin's alibi, physical evidence mounted.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The defense argued quite the predictable strategy that Appling, as an enslaved person, had acted alone in murdering Matilda, and committed suicide out of guilt.
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[SPEAKER_00]: but those tight hands destroyed that narrative, you can't shoot yourself with tight hands bound together.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Someone executed Appling, and the prosecution made clear, who had both motive and opportunity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: After four days of testimony, the jury deliberated.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They returned guilty verdicts on both
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[SPEAKER_00]: the sentence, death by hanging.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The execution will be carried out on February 10, 1850.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's believed Martin Posey was convicted because he crossed a line the community couldn't tolerate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: According to the trial manuscript editor, it is a saying in Edgefield an elsewhere that if a man have money, he may do anything and not behing for it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: but let him kill his wife here, and the goal of California can not buy eloquence enough to save him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The community could tolerate extraordinary violence toward enslaved people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The 22.5% conviction rate proved that, but murdering a white woman from a prominent family that crossed a boundary.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Significantly, Posi faced equal prosecution for both murders,
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[SPEAKER_00]: The legal system, at least, nominally recognized Applings' humanity, even while denying him most legal protections.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Justice so compromised by slavery's logic that calling it justice at all requires careful qualification.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On February 10, 1850, roughly four months after his conviction, Martin Posey was executed by hanging in Edgefield.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The crowd that gathered numbered between 4,000 and 5,000 people, more than 10 times the village population, the Edgefield advertiser called it a spectacle, which even the oldest inhabitants could not recollect for its size.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That afternoon, the town square descended into what newspapers called drunken brawls.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Violence as entertainment, violence as community bonding.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Violence so normalized that even an execution couldn't proceed without it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The execution was justice of a sort, but it left questions unanswered.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What happened to Martin and Matilda's four children?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Where is Martin Posey buried?
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[SPEAKER_00]: Unknown.
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[SPEAKER_00]: While became of Eliza, the teenage sister who married Martin after his arrest, and was found hiding with him and his father's house.
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[SPEAKER_00]: She left South Carolina, but beyond that, the trail vanishes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: and Franklin, the enslaved man, whose testimony helped convict Martin Posi.
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[SPEAKER_00]: What happened to him?
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[SPEAKER_00]: His voice exists only as a second hand report in a coroner's inquest.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Never sworn, never legally recognized as fully human speech.
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[SPEAKER_00]: We don't even know who owned him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This 1849 case illuminates dynamics still contested in 2025.
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[SPEAKER_00]: this question of agency under constraint, how much autonomy exists within oppressive systems.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Remains central to discussions of criminal justice, labor rights, and power imbalances.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Appling's Deshbert bargain challenges us to think beyond simple victim, perpetrator binaries, while acknowledging that agency under extreme constraint is qualitatively different from genuine freedom.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The case also demonstrates how legal systems create injustice through structural design, not just biased application.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The prohibition on enslaved testimony wasn't an aberration, but a foundational feature ensuring the crimes involving enslaved people remained invisible.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Modern parallels exist, wherever legal systems systematically exclude certain voices or perspectives.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Edgefield County Courthouse still stands on the town square.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The same brick building where Martin Posi was tried in 1849.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It served continuously as the County Courthouse for 186 years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If you visit Edgefield today, you can stand in the same space where that four-day trial unfolded.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Where Franklin's second-hand testimony helped convict a man
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[SPEAKER_00]: And if you listen carefully to the story's locals tell, you'll still hear the echoes of what made Edge Field, bloody Edge Field.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Even a spectacular execution couldn't proceed without drunken brawls in the town square afterward.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Shane Waters, every hometown has a story.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight it's Appling's Impossible Bargain, in the tight hands that proved the devil's deal was always a lie.
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[SPEAKER_00]: If this story resonated with you, share it with someone who appreciates history that challenges easy answers.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Good night, friend.
