ABSTRACT
The published confession of Cato for the murder of Mary Atkins is just one of an entire genre of 'jail confessions' published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Popular in both America and Britain, these short volumes contained salacious details of criminality and here of sexual deviancy as well, but were made respectable by earnest pleas that readers should reform themselves to avoid a similar fate. Cato’s confession is interesting because it was one of the few to involve a slave. The most famous published black confession was that of Nat Turner, the leader of the bloodiest slave rebellion in North America, which also has authorial problems. Cato was a slave first in New Jersey and later in a rural part of New York, about 30 miles west of Albany. Cato’s position as a black slave in a society where 95 per cent of the population were free whites was typical in the post revolutionary northern states.
