With American incarceration rates higher than those of any other nation, with more than 2,000,000 people in the country behind bars, and nearly 5,000,000 more on probation or parole, the flurry of recent cultural, political, and academic attention paid to mass incarceration is fitting, and long overdue. Much of this discussion has focused on the disproportionate impact of this process that has fallen on communities of color. Examining the histories of race, criminality, and citizenship in the interplay of print and legal culture from the eve of the American Revolution through the Civil War, Jeannine DeLombard's remarkable analysis pushes back the familiar plantation-to-prison narrative and argues that African American civic identity emerged, as the title of her book suggests, In the Shadow of the Gallows.

DeLombard begins her study in the late colonial and early national period, an era when masters listed slaves alongside livestock in wills, and advertised them as commodities for sale in newspapers. Americans considered slaves—and by extension, free blacks—to be “civil non-entities capable only of criminal agency” (9). Thus, DeLombard argues, black personhood was activated almost exclusively through (real or perceived) criminality. A slave's arrest, trial, and sentencing granted him (retroactive) membership in the polity.

If the legal fiction of slaves' mixed character—as both humans and property—located black personhood in criminality, it was through the popular medium of printed scaffold confessionals that the criminous slave asserted a civic presence. Rooted in Puritan Execution Day ritual, gallows literature through the nineteenth century detailed the condemned's path to the scaffold. The convicted slave's confession, DeLombard writes, “simultaneously recounts his ascent … from the civil death of the slave, via the culpable legal personhood of the felon, to the civil standing of the self-possessed, contracting individual” (97–98). An African American criminal convicted of a property crime, for example, would be distinguished, through his confession, from the inanimate property that he was accused of stealing: a process that reinforced the black felon's personhood.

Burgeoning transatlantic print culture increasingly shifted scaffold sermons and criminal confessionals from ministers into the hands of commercial printers. Sensational gallows literature appeared in newspapers and pamphlets for a voracious public. These publications, with their expanding readership, served to (retroactively and punitively) inscribe the criminal slave's membership in American society. But they also reinforced the relationship between black civic presence and criminality. “[T]he recursive interplay of early American law and print culture,” DeLombard writes, “made it extraordinarily difficult for many in the early republic to perceive black publicity in civil rather than criminal terms” (86). The growing numbers of free blacks in the North were prevented full citizenship as a result of the “persistent misapprehension of black civic action as criminal behavior” (122). However, African American leaders took advantage of the civic (textual) presence that gallows literature created, publishing works that sought to decouple black personhood from criminality and link it instead to civic belonging.

Slave narratives—such as Frederick Douglass' autobiography—overtook gallows literature in the 1830s to become the dominant form of black literature. Used by African Americans and their white abolitionist allies to claim a non-culpable black proto-citizen, these propagandistic memoirs imputed black criminality to the white crime of slavery, casting African Americans as victims of the peculiar institution. This newly decriminalized black print persona and the emerging medicolegal literature on race and crime fortified ideas of natural black inferiority. The effect was that “of pathologizing both race and crime, binding the two more closely than ever before” (205).

As likely to quote from Frederick Douglass, Cotton Mather, or John Locke, as to quote from Melville, Poe, or Kant, DeLombard reads works of antebellum fiction and narrative against contemporary works of law, medicine, religion, and philosophy. She shows how these diverse literatures worked together to develop the dominant discourses about race, crime, and civic membership. Taking “literary” sources in the broadest sense, she draws from court records, confessions, law books, short stories, advertisements, photographs and etchings, sermons, broadsides, and pamphlets, while embedding her analysis in the historical setting of antebellum industrialization and the emergence of the prison and the asylum. Because DeLombard's source material lends itself to her study of the development of the black male subject in the context of an increasingly consolidated white male American citizenry, the development of black (and white) female civic membership is relegated beyond the frame of the book. Although historians may wonder how DeLombard's theoretical analysis mattered in the daily lives of most African Americans before the Civil War, the book effectively demonstrates that antebellum print culture and medical and legal interpretations of race and crime were in conversation, and that ideas of black citizenship were in flux. DeLombard's expertly researched book stands as a model of interdisciplinary scholarship, and her arguments on the foundational nexus of race, criminality, and citizenship offer scholars of English and history much to consider. In the Shadow of the Gallows, with DeLombard's deft analysis of early American literature, persuasively pushes back the plantation-to-prison narrative to the very founding of the nation, and demonstrates the importance of criminality in the development of early black subjectivity.