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Reviews in American History 29.4 (2001) 538-545



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Honor, Law, and Identity:
The Troubled Nature of Antebellum Slave Trials in the Deep South

Sally E. Hadden


Ariela J. Gross. Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. xi + 263 pp. Tables, illustrations, methodological appendix, bibliography, and index. $39.50.

In Double Character, Ariela Gross takes the reader upon a fascinating journey inside slave trials of the antebellum Deep South. The trials that interest her most are civil suits, primarily those about slave warranties and slave sales gone wrong, with buyer and seller going to court in order to sort out the monetary damages. Since civil suits outnumbered criminal suits by roughly four to one, her book is another welcome corrective to numerous earlier legal histories that portray criminal trials as the routine centerpiece of legal experience. Gross tries to provide an intellectual road map to explain how participants in these trials, whether they were masters, slaves, or medical experts, conceptualized their roles and attempted to shape the outcomes of trials in various ways. While whites might act to limit the moral agency of slaves, the inspection of slave bodies and the inclusion of their testimony (largely through third parties who could speak in courts where slaves could not) ultimately implicated slaves in the creation of these interpretative schema. The double character of which she writes exists on multiple levels: the doubleness of slaves, legally, as persons and property; the duplicity that slaves might employ in crafting their experiences both at the time of being sold and then being interviewed by masters, doctors, or others for indirect trial testimony; and the interwoven nature of both white and black character placed upon trial in warranty cases, where the dishonor of slaves necessarily substantiated the honor of whites who owned or supervised them.

In this detailed study of several hundred cases from across the Deep South, Gross weaves an intricate tale, and, unusually for some historians, her methodology is fully articulated (pp. 6, 159-61) on both the statistical and historiographical planes. This is a book written in the social history or "law and society" tradition of close statistical analysis at the trial level, but Gross's work is also informed by recent works on slavery and ideology, 1 Critical Legal [End Page 538] Studies 2 , and legal anthropology 3 , as well as studies of law and culture that describe "trials as performances with a constitutive role in culture" (p.170n14), such as those written by James Clifford and Richard Wightman Fox. 4 A further influence (though perhaps less obvious in the footnotes than in the general tenor of her argument) is the work of Critical Race theorists like Patricia Williams (mentioned in the acknowledgments and p.96), who have urged scholars to focus upon the centrality of race as a social and legal construction in American history while criticizing those who emphasize class and economic structures in analyzing the law of our shared past. 5 Gross knows the most recent literature in these areas and has applied that which proved useful in an eclectic fashion to the different parts of her text.

Gross's eclecticism first becomes apparent when considering how her book is organized. She created multiple databases to support her scholarship on this topic, yet the book does not feel like a numbers-driven social history in terms of charts, graphs, and percentages. Gathered from 117 trial cases in Adams County, Mississippi, and from more than 500 appellate trials in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, the information Gross compiled includes an impressive range of data on trial participants as well as case outcomes. Yet the numbers never swamp the narrative: the statistics are buried in eleven tables at the end of the book (as well as a website: www.usc.edu/dept/law-lib/agross/). Rather, Gross selectively draws upon her statistical evidence to inform the narrative and argument without letting raw data take over the structure of her book. Upon that...

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