From its origins in the mid-seventeenth century until its demise in the mid-nineteenth, slavery was inextricably tangled into the American legal system. Because enslaved people were both property and humans, slavery transcended narrow limits between civil and criminal law. A slave could be both the object of litigation (as in the Fugitive Slave Act) or the subject of it (as when accused of crime). For abolitionists, operating in an age of American litigiousness and when legal consciousness was very high, it was natural to use the law as a potent metaphor through which to brook their opposition to slavery. Using the law in this way, of course, was hardly new within anti-slavery agitation – the Somerset and Zong cases in eighteenth-century Britain were, of course, points of high legal drama that dramatized the iniquity of slavery.

But as Jeannine Marie DeLombard argues in her detailed study of the operation of the law in anti-slavery texts by Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriett Beecher Stowe and Thoreau and in a pro-slavery novel by William MacCreary Burwell, abolitionists trying to convince readers of the special sinfulness of slavery turned from looking at civil disputes over slavery to sensational cases in criminal courts in order to show that it was not so much the enslaved person who was criminal as the whole system itself. It was a deliberately subversive tactic that highlighted in dramatic fashion the adversarial nature of the process that abolitionists were engaged in. Slaves and abolitionists were being prosecuted, they argued, for criminal actions by courts that were themselves, as the Dred Scott case confirmed, aiding and abetting criminal activity. The high point, of course, came in the fatal prosecution of John Brown. Anti-slavery literature that treated slavery as being on trial prepared the reading public for the spectacle of Brown not as villain but as saintly victim.

The problem with this book, however, is that all this is not original. Lombard does provide some interesting readings (albeit in convoluted, jargon-ridden, grammatically suspect prose) that confirm the vital place of the law and of the trial in particular in antebellum culture, especially the subculture of abolitionism, but historians are likely to find her claims that “the abolitionist strategy of rhetorically criminalizing slavery entailed nothing less than a radical re-evaluation of the perceived relationships among race, nation, and citizenship in Jacksonian America” (30) overstated.