Brian McGinty's new book is the first to pay serious attention to the hasty trial that followed John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in the fall of 1859. Brown, widely considered today to be both a hero and a madman, set out to liberate Virginia's slaves with a daring and ill-conceived assault on the federal armory in Harpers Ferry and was quickly captured by federal troops, along with his small band of followers. The trial, in which Brown was charged with murder and treason against the state of Virginia, quickly resulted in Brown's conviction, hanging, and subsequent martyrdom.

McGinty is not writing for a scholarly audience, much less for academically-trained legal historians, but promises “insights and revelations” that will illuminate his subject for the benefit of scholars (19). As he puts it, he is writing “a narrative history,” and he largely succeeds in that endeavor (19). McGinty is an engaging storyteller, and he does an admirable job of recreating the emotional atmosphere of the trial. The surviving archival record is thin, and much of his detailed portrait of the trial draws from contemporary newspaper coverage. It is no small feat to have painted such a vivid picture with these sources, and McGinty makes masterful use of the accounts of the trial, reconstructing the lines of questioning and the daily happenings in the courtroom.

McGinty's central concern throughout this book is whether Brown received a fair trial, and he spends a good deal of time dissecting what it means to conduct a fair trial in light of Brown's obvious culpability. This discussion is largely ahistorical and rather bland, as McGinty acknowledges that the trial was conducted with due regard for Virginia procedure, even if the rush to judgment offends modern sensibilities.

Other issues prove more compelling, yet McGinty does not fully do them justice. Lurking at the heart of the book is John Brown's complicated relationship with the law. History has cast Brown as a religious zealot who used his trial as a means of promoting his own martyrdom for the abolitionist cause, but McGinty points out that Brown's insistence on the primacy of Christian mores did not necessarily conflict with a belief in the rule of law. Brown did not believe exclusively in a “higher law,” and often declared an affinity for “the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence. I think they both mean the same thing” (33). Brown even drafted a provisional constitution for the United States, which was to take effect after his assault on Virginia's slaveholders.

Furthermore, Brown did not affect a wholly otherworldly attitude when it came to the outcome of his trial, and he believed that he might be acquitted. He pleaded repeatedly for sympathetic counsel, and was astute enough to warn his friends “not [to] send an ultra Abolitionist” (95) who would incense the court. But by the time of his allocution at trial and his hanging, Brown called down God's vengeful justice on “this guilty land” (257). How did John Brown understand the relationship between man's law and God's law? McGinty raises this issue throughout the book, but never fully explores Brown's thinking on this point.

McGinty's analysis of the treason charge leveled against Brown is similarly problematic. A sometime Midwesterner who had lived in Maryland while planning the raid, Brown was convicted of treason against the state of Virginia. This charge McGinty rightfully characterizes as “extraordinary” (110). Brown's prosecutors advanced an improbable theory of federal citizenship in charging Brown with this offense, relying on the Privileges and Immunities Clause of Article IV to contend that Brown owed a duty of allegiance to Virginia by virtue of his United States citizenship. McGinty takes this argument more seriously than is warranted, maintaining that “the federal system had created a unified whole out of separate states, tying them together with duties and protections, rights and obligations, that all Americans shared” (202).

But the proposition that the federal constitution created a kind of loosely interchangeable state citizenship with attached duties of loyalty would have been astonishing on the eve of the Civil War, had anyone taken it seriously. As other historians have argued, interstate comity had largely broken down by the eve of the Civil War and federal citizenship was generally thought to be derivative of state citizenship, and not the other way around. Most Americans, particularly white southerners, entertained a far less robust understanding of the bonds of Union than McGinty acknowledges, thereby signaling that the court's acceptance of national citizenship was born of expediency rather than ideological agreement.

In sum, McGinty's book will not fully satisfy serious scholars, but its engaging style and strong narrative will appeal to general readers and undergraduate students.