The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era by Michael A. Ross (review)

In The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case Michael Ross has written a book that manages to succeed on many different levels simultaneously. It is a historical whodunit and a social history of New Orleans during one of its most chaotic but thoroughgoing periods of progressive social change. In its re-creation of a criminal case that drew interest from newspaper readers in every part of the nation, it is also a courtroom drama cum legal history. The book also provides an accessible history of Reconstruction in a city that played an often unfortunate but central role in driving political outcomes in the nation at large. Finally, this is a book that increasingly reluctant undergraduate readers can comprehend and—dare I say it—possibly even enjoy.

The book takes its name from the kidnapping of Mollie Digby, the seventeen-month-old daughter of Irish immigrants, who was abducted in early June 1870, allegedly by two women of color. Ultimately, police identified Ellen Follin and Louisa Follin Murray as the perpetrators of the kidnapping. In many ways the two women were unlikely suspects. Raised in Alabama “as free women” before the Civil War, the sisters had “received formal educations, and learned genteel manners and taste” (89). In the face of the kidnapping allegations, their refinement, attractiveness, stylish clothes, and dignity under duress—especially during their courtroom appearances—made it difficult for many to believe that the sisters had committed such a horrible act.

Ross calls the work a microhistory that “mines a single historical moment for insights into both the history of New Orleans and the Reconstruction era” (6). Beyond creating a compelling narrative through the fascinating particulars, Ross also uses the kidnapping, the investigation, and the trial that followed “to illuminate Reconstruction’s larger possibilities and limits.” In the testimony and outcome of the sisters’ trial, the author also illuminates “moments of contingency that help explain both how Reconstruction might have succeeded and why it failed” (6). A central part of the book’s argument is that because the events in question took place in the midst of Radical Reconstruction, the outcome in the case defies common assumptions about the inability of people of color—no matter what their racial admixture—to receive a fair trial or anything that looked like a just legal outcome at any point in the postbellum era.

Because so many pivotal events took place in New Orleans during Reconstruction, virtually no synthetic study of the era ignores the city entirely. In the last decade, urban and military historians have also begun to publish monographs that foreground their analyses of the period from the point of view of New Orleans and its inhabitants. For example, Justin A. Nystrom’s New Orleans after the Civil War: Race, Politics, and a New Birth of Freedom (2010) and James K. Hogue’s Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (2006) situate their studies in the Louisiana port city. What sets Ross’s work apart from these fine studies is that it is self-consciously designed to begin with what seems—on its surface—like a nonpolitical event: the kidnapping of a “white” child by two light-skinned, mixed-race women. In reconstructing the complicated milieu in which the events occurred and closely interpreting the purpose and significance of each step in the process toward legal resolution, Ross helps the reader understand the important point that no matter how quotidian or spectacular, virtually all events were touched if not shaped by the politics of Reconstruction.

In some places Ross may overstate his case. In both the introduction and again in the epilogue, Ross asserts that the people on whom this story focuses were “significant actors in the unfolding drama of Reconstruction” (7). This seems to me a debatable point. Yet, wherever one comes down...