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  • The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era by Michael A. Ross
  • Kelly Kennington
The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era. By Michael A. Ross. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. x, 309. $27.95, ISBN 978-0-19-977880-5.)

Michael A. Ross’s tale of an 1870 kidnapping case transports the reader back to Reconstruction-era New Orleans through his gripping storytelling and the close attention to detail that characterizes the genre of microhistory. Ross uses the kidnapping of seventeen-month-old Mollie Digby as a platform to explore the complex racial politics of the Crescent City, including lengthy discussions of the place of Afro-Creoles, Irish immigrants, and Republican politicians in the city’s public spaces, private neighborhoods, and workplaces. The result is a book that deserves attention from scholars interested in race, Reconstruction, legal history, and the history of the American South.

Ross’s work emphasizes the contingency that characterized the era of Reconstruction, arguing that “reading Southern history backward from Plessy v. Ferguson [1896]” is as dangerous as engaging in the tantalizing what-ifs of counterfactual history (p. 234). To prove this assertion, Ross unravels the drama of the Digby case through ten chapters organized like a Reconstruction-era Law and Order episode—six chapters discussing the crime and investigation, and four chapters detailing the subsequent legal battles. The afterword and acknowledgments conclude the work by recounting Ross’s personal interactions with the descendants of his story’s characters. The cautious optimism and frustrated expectations that characterized the era of Reconstruction emerge through the numerous asides to the legal story. For example, Ross carefully renders the history of Afro-Creole detective John Baptiste Jourdain, a Civil War veteran whose participation in the Digby investigation represented the hopes of a Republican governor that the city’s Afro-Creoles could succeed in winning over the support of the white Democratic majority. Although Detective Jourdain proved an able investigator and a shrewd witness during trial, his keen use of aggressive questioning practices—as well as the entrenched racial attitudes of the city’s white population—ultimately kept him from realizing the promise of Reconstruction.

In addition to placing the Digby story in the context of New Orleans’s Reconstruction politics, Ross describes the investigation—and subsequent legal case—as part of a wave of highly publicized, late-nineteenth-century criminal trials. Despite being the first of several sensationalized kidnapping [End Page 949] cases, the Digby story has failed to generate the same level of attention from modern historians as the kidnapping of Charley Ross in 1874 or the Lindbergh baby in 1932. Ross’s book traces the Digby story as it gripped local and national media, which unquestionably influenced the case’s trajectory and outcome, even as it raised the importance of the trial for Republican leaders anxious to prove the success of their political experiments in Reconstruction Louisiana.

The press’s obsession with “true crime stories” produced an impressive archive of materials on the Digby case (p. 25). Ross builds his narrative using the voluminous newspaper reports from local and national press coverage, supplemented by a variety of legal records and descriptions of the case written years later by key players in the story. Finally, Ross draws on a wealth of secondary literature on topics as wide-ranging as yellow fever, Afro-Creoles, and spiritualism in Louisiana. A bibliography would have been a useful addition to more easily point the reader to Ross’s multiple historiographical contributions.

Ross has crafted a compelling story that reads like one of the true crime novels that rose to popularity during the period of Mollie Digby’s abduction. Ross’s arguments about contingency and the role of Afro-Creoles in Reconstruction-era New Orleans are convincing, if not necessarily surprising. The smooth interweaving of side stories with the main legal drama will make this book especially useful for teaching undergraduates in classes on Reconstruction, legal, or southern history, though scholars will also undoubtedly benefit from the book.

Kelly Kennington
Auburn University
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