Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 (review)

86CIVIL WAR HISTORY political and social circumstances would allow and points out that officials who drew up later draft measures benefitted by studying its weaknesses . If they proved unable to improve upon the equitableness of the Civil War draft, this may not so much be an endorsement of that measure as it is a comment on the deficiencies of all programs of wartime manpower mobilization. Richard H. Abbott Eastern Michigan University Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 17051865 . By Philip J. Schwarz. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Pp. xv, 353. $37.50.) Professor Philip Schwarz uses as his precept for this remarkable study of slaves and the criminal law of Virginia the Roman epigram, "As many slaves, so many enemies." It is an apt quotation with which to begin his analysis of over four thousand trials from local court records between 1705 and 1865, and it sets the tone for the volume. The goal is not to characterize slaves as criminal or deviant but rather to examine how often slaves in Virginia engaged in behavior defined as criminal by white authorities and to extrapolate from these courtroom confrontations some larger meaning of the complex relationship between the enslaver and the enslaved. Slavery itself and the opposition to it by many of those in bondage are constants, and these trials often entail conflicting perceptions of the same act by white and black Virginians. However, it is change over time and place that is the book's central focus and that frames the analysis. The physical extent of Virginia and the long period in which slavery existed were bound to see changes in slave society as well as free. By 1800, for example, more slaves lived in towns and cities than before, worked in nonagricultural pursuits such as mines and factories, and were hired out. Fewer slaves were Africans forcibly transported to Virginia; many more were Virginia-born, strengthening against all difficulties their own communities. They lived in the Tidewater, the Piedmont, or Southside , the western counties. It is then not only slavery as such that must be taken into account but its interaction with multiple social and economic factors and the changes in the laws and institutions that influenced and were in turn influenced by the slave behavior prosecuted in slave tribunals. Analysis of such a historical kaleidoscope presents a daunting challenge. One of the most striking innovations of American law was the law of slavery. The English common law did not provide a legal heritage for such a permanent and heritable status. American slavery was not only this particular form of property ownership but also recognized enslaved BOOK REVIEWS87 persons as human beings. Despite their legal definition as chattel, slaves were held responsible for their own actions and were therefore subject to criminal prosecution. Before the seventeenth century ended, these prosecutions were brought under a separate criminal code, tried in special judicial tribunals according to special procedures. Abundantly described are the numerous means by which this system was continually tailored in reaction to the actual or the feared behavior of slaves. No lack of sources handicaps this subject. Professor Schwarz estimates that between 60 and 75 percent of the records of all capital and noncapital slave trials are extant; his research in them is prodigious. Can these records ("white sources") be relied on as evidence for slave behavior and for the interaction of slaves with whites and with other slaves? After 1790 when courts preserved testimony of witnesses in all capital trials (slaves could not testify in their own behalf), evidence of this interaction between slaves and others becomes more concrete. Schwarz believes that the records are relatively accurate, firsthand, and cover fairly well behavior classified as felonious crime. Even allowing for the untold number of unrecorded instances in which owners could and did punish privately he maintains that statistical data composed from these public prosecutions can be seen as an indicator of the minimum number of slaves involved in the minimum number of incidents. His skillful interweaving of evidence supplementary to court records—auditor's vouchers, treasury office records, petitions to the governor, newspapers, private papers— renders possible conclusions about the behavior of some...