Colonial Justice: Justice, Morality, and Crime in the Niagara District, 1791-1849 (review)

If the title of this book were Colonial Justices, it would focus attention on the book's main actors - the magistrates, or justices of the peace - who were chiefly responsible for the administration of criminal justice at the local level. The subtitle is more specific but would better convey the book's scope and character if prefaced by the words Glimpses of.

'Justice,' 'Morality,' and 'Crime' are the titles of the three parts into which the body of the book is divided. 'Justice' describes the various courts that were held in the district of Niagara and some of the people who acted in them: the magistrates, the district sheriff, the jurors, and the constables. 'Morality' is a hodgepodge. One chapter is devoted to a single moral offence, Sabbath-breaking; the other two deal with lunatics, debtors, and paupers. This is because the district magistrates, besides administering local justice, were in charge of local government and hence of dispensing public charity and disposing of the insane. Lunatics and paupers sometimes landed in the district jail alongside convicts, suspects on remand, and defaulting debtors.

'Crime' commences with a chapter surveying the gamut of local crime, including moral offences other than Sabbath-breaking, and how it was disposed of in the different courts. Another chapter focuses on how battered wives and non-white victims of crime (anachronistically called 'African Canadians') fared in the courts. Finally the book turns to two topics especially pertinent to the Niagara District as the Upper Canadian border region most readily accessible from the United States. One deals with border-related issues such as extradition, banishment, smuggling, and the apprehension of military deserters. The other is largely devoted to the story of Solomon Moseby, the fugitive slave whose attempted extradition in 1837 was thwarted by the concerted action of 'Niagara's African Canadian community,' two of whom were shot to death by the sheriff's men while aiding Moseby's escape.

The book is anecdotal rather than analytical, and the chapter on Moseby is the most satisfying. But the scholarship is problematic: there are too many erroneous premises, non sequiturs, chronological solecisms, and other flaws of intellectual organization. These are especially dense in the section on jurors. Jurors are lumped in with constables in a chapter entitled 'Servants of the Court,' an arrangement that is hard to reconcile with Tocqueville's comment (which the author quotes) on the not very different American system that the jury raised 'the people itself, or at least a class of citizens, to the bench of judicial authority.' Grand jurors and petit jurors for two different courts - quarter sessions and assizes - are discussed higgledy-piggledy. The statement that 'absenteeism was always something of a problem' (56) is backed up by a reference that proves nothing and contradicted a page later by the remark that 'Magistrates did not have to resort to coercion to find jurors until the Rebellion period.' Another statement about the difficulty of finding willing jurors after the Rebellion is supported by reference to letters written a year and a half before the Rebellion.

A similar randomness of thought is evident in what is left out. The sheriff is highlighted, but that other important local officer, the clerk of the peace, is ignored. William Hamilton Merritt crops up repeatedly without a single allusion to his main claim to fame: his promotion of the Welland Canal. Politics is especially slighted. Since the administration of justice was a subject of political contention in the Niagara District above all, this leaves the book as a whole very weakly contextualized.

Most of the material in the chapter on border issues relates to districts other than Niagara. Many of the hard data in Colonial Justice, and several of the hypotheses and conclusions, are borrowed from secondary sources, which the author cites scrupulously and repeatedly and quotes even to excess. The grand justification for the project is the...