Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture

Journal of Southern History, August, 2008 by Sally E. Hadden

Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture. By Jeannine Marie DeLombard. Studies in Legal History. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2007. Pp. xiv, 330. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-5812-7; cloth, $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3086-4.)

Jeannine Marie DeLombard has crafted an intriguing examination of several well-known sources and events--Sojourner Truth's account of the Matthias scandal, Harriet Beecher Stowe' s Dred (1856), Frederick Douglass's various autobiographies, John Brown's trial for attacking the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry--looking at their ability to shape northern views on abolitionism. To these DeLombard has added William MacCreary Burwell's proslavery novel White Acre vs. Black Acre (1856), putting all together to provide a new twist on a familiar theme. As Karen Halttunen and Hendrik Hartog have previously shown, trials were frequently dissected in the antebellum press for the lurid, the grotesque, and the infamous. DeLombard asks her readers to reconsider the trope of the antebellum trial as one in which, literarily, African Americans were systematically recast in new roles.

New roles gave African Americans new authority but also new restrictions. Where they had been portrayed in novels and newspapers of the colonial period as untrustworthy criminals, in the antebellum period African Americans became powerless, oppressed supplicants in the witness box, pleading before humanity. Abolitionists manipulated this image, DeLombard argues, in order to put the criminal trial process itself on trial. Putting trials into the print medium allowed abolitionists to cast the public as the final jury, capable of preempting a judicial system where African Americans could rarely expect justice. In print, courthouses were linked with the slave markets of the South. Taking cases away from courtrooms and putting them before the public rendered the public more likely to accept slaves as credible witnesses. Sojourner Truth's account and Frederick Douglass's first autobiography follow this literary pattern.

However, merely witnessing traded one form of powerlessness for another, a shortchanging bargain that DeLombard tracks in Douglass's second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). In that book Douglass ceased being a witness and attempted also to act as a lawyer, prosecuting the South. She links this shift to the arrival of African American lawyers in the courtroom in the 1840s and 1850s. To serve as effective advocates, they had to overcome racist views that would have limited African Americans solely to the witness box due to their so-called diminished intellectual capacity. Stowe recognized the parallel problem of putting African Americans into the witness box while not allowing them to prosecute their own case against the South. In Dred, Stowe's ambivalence about the slave-as-witness trope is explored, and her uneasiness with having northern whites (mis)speak for downtrodden slaves becomes clear. In her novel the southern lawyer eventually resigns from his profession because the law could never fully protect slaves.

The most interesting part of Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture tracks Burwell's proslavery response to Stowe in White Acre vs. Black Acre. DeLombard shows how even white southern writers adopted the trial metaphor to state their case; however, in White Acre vs. Black Acre, the trial is not a criminal prosecution but a property struggle. In the novel Burwell tried to portray white abolitionists as self-interested, only prosecuting slave trials in order to benefit economically from free black labor. Moreover, DeLombard suggests, Burwell painted northern abolitionists as either lascivious or "Barnum-esque," capable of suckering other gullible northerners with sentimental claptrap about slaves' well-being (p. 188). In this twist the focus is no longer on slaves as witnesses, reliable or not; the trial is really about the lawyers and who will benefit. Obviously, Burwell's target audience was not northern whites but southerners.

The images in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper of the John Brown trial reveal the intellectual dead-end that DeLombard believes the trial trope had reached in 1859. Catering to a broad national audience, the newspaper's drawings told both northern and southern versions of the story, with the initially impartial court eventually giving way to suggestions that a judicial lynching of Brown was in the cards all along. Cynicism about justice inherent in Stowe's and Burwell's accounts had now flowered in popular consciousness, and trials, according to DeLombard, no longer would have the storytelling power they once had.

DeLombard's strength is in stringing together from pieces of literary evidence a chain of coded meanings. Certainly, this reviewer is unlikely to read Douglass or Stowe in quite the same way ever again. However, one wonders whether an examination of what antebellum readers, North and South, thought--drawn from their own diaries or letters--would have strengthened the argument. As it stands, literary analysis alone leaves the modern-day historian wondering whether readers of an earlier era received the same messages DeLombard finds.