In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity by Jeannine Marie DeLombard (review)

Much of the academic literature on chattel slavery has centred on the commodification of humans, and in this vein the legal scholarship has focused on the contradictions that the objectification of living beings wrought in the law of property. Against this dominant historiography, Jeannine Marie DeLombard offers a fresh intervention in her examination of the paradoxes of American freedom and slavery through the figure of the criminalized slave. Through careful and poignant readings of classic texts, such as The Confessions of Nat Turner, as well as more obscure criminal confessions, DeLombard makes the stunning revelation that the association between blackness and criminality, which lingers to this day, emerged from black civic participation. DeLombard begins by arguing that legal personhood attached to black slaves only when they became criminals. Although it may seem a stretch to view the convicted slave as partaking in a “more positive form of political belonging,” DeLombard does qualify that this political membership was formal, punitive, and retroactive. During their lifetimes, slaves were nonentities, non-persons before the law. But the condemned slave entered the public sphere when giving his testimony in the brief moments before his execution and afterwards as a “print persona” through published trial transcripts and the popular crime literature.

DeLombard is especially engaging when she explores the implications of this limited black civic presence within the peculiar literary tradition of scaffold confessionals. For one thing, it shaped abolitionists’ efforts to disconnect blackness with criminality by attributing crimes committed by blacks to the dehumanization of slavery. But this strategic move raised troubling questions. According to DeLombard’s analysis, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” suggested that the denial of criminal responsibility might be tantamount to the denial of personhood. Moreover, pointing the finger at slavery’s abuses made it difficult to explain how other African-Americans, who were also subjected to slavery, could suppress the violent urges for retaliation. DeLombard maintains that it was the inability to transform civic presence at the gallows into civil standing within the greater polity that made it difficult for African-Americans to claim full eligibility as citizens.

Slavery challenged the civic identity of white Americans as well. In the final chapter, DeLombard relies on slaver narratives and legal cases to illuminate how ship captains and their merchant collaborators disclaimed their American citizenship to escape prosecution for violating federal anti–slave-trafficking laws. Just as legal culpability was crucial to black legal competence, DeLombard shows that the mariners’ and merchants’ dis-avowal of criminal responsibility consigned them to civil death. DeLom-bard further points out that the criminality of the slave trade touched all white Americans, and their refusal to accept responsibility for slavery revealed “the core emptiness” of their national political identity.

DeLombard’s writing is provocative and readable, even for this nonspecialist reviewer. The shortcomings of this commendable work are few. For instance, DeLombard at times overemphasizes the point that black slaves realized legal agency mainly as criminals; the works of Laura Edwards and Dylan Penningroth provide compelling examples of slaves as active participants in the legal culture of the South. It would also have been interesting to read about the gendered nature of legal personhood, criminality, and civility. But these are minor quibbles about a fascinating study of how race and crime became fused from the eve of the Revolution and ultimately came to inform meanings of black citizenship.