Murder in the Shenandoah: Making Law Sovereign in Revolutionary Virginia by Jessica K. Lowe (review)

On July 4, 1791, after a brief, grog-fueled brawl, Abraham Vanhorn was mortally stabbed in Berkeley County, Virginia. John Crane, a middling but socially well-connected farmer on whose property the dispute occurred, stood accused of murder. Vanhorn’s death triggered a yearlong convoluted legal journey, from a local field through Virginia’s courts to the governor’s office, and culminated in Crane’s execution. Jessica K. Lowe takes the trial and ensuing events as an opportunity to analyze some of the most contentious debates over the role of law and the meanings of justice in a post-Revolutionary America keen to establish a new model of justice consonant with Enlightenment principles. The case’s legal machinations rippled across the Shenandoah Valley and into legal reforms already afoot as Virginians sought to embed republican principles into criminal law, a site that Lowe identifies as the “paradigmatic” interplay between liberty and state power (p. 9). By “seeing a case as an experience, instead of an outcome,” Lowe argues that law was not staid or ancillary to political development but was “created as it moves,” a perspective that captures the internal and external political and social forces that shaped the case (p. 14). Lowe brings a lawyer’s eye to the nuances of the case, analyzing seemingly minor procedural moments, such as litigating the case in a newly created district court, to reveal how new commitments to legal egalitarianism challenged traditional class hierarchies that had defined colonial Virginia.

This book would be important if only as a model for how Lowe takes scant, fragmentary evidence buried in multiple archives and develops a narrative lyrical in its prose and almost visual in its texture and analysis. In these post-Revolutionary years, legal outcomes were uncertain, as evinced by the jury’s decision in Crane’s case. After days of deliberations and while deeply concerned about the justness of public execution, the jury, interconnected through personal relationships excavated by Lowe, could only decide that Crane was responsible for Vanhorn’s death. They sent a “special verdict” to the judge, St. George Tucker, who later became one of the nation’s most influential jurists, leaving it to him to decide between life and death, manslaughter or murder (p. 7). Tucker, Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, Charles Lee, and other luminaries of Virginia’s social aristocracy made law as much as local laborers, middling social strivers, and newspaper editors.

This story intervenes in discussions about where legal power was negotiated and how broader social change happens. Was it on the ground, in a multitude of daily exchanges, providing evidence of legal plurality, or was it in more systematized appellate processes and state legislative arenas? Lowe points to legislative reforms that “brought state jurisdiction to local places,” and she sees consistency and ultimately “decentralization,” where other scholars have tracked divergence (p. 183). Many of “the same prominent men often wielded power at both the state and local levels,” and they engineered structural legal change (p. 184). It was a society steeped in a legal consciousness that informed social, economic, and political relations rather than one that preferred extralegal violence based in a culture of masculine honor.

If I had one wish for this book, it would be a greater exposition on how “making law sovereign” was imbricated in the simultaneous post-Revolutionary processes of consolidating racial hierarchy and securing white legal dominance. While law may have been “the paradigmatic example of the state’s power over the citizen,” many Virginians lived outside the boundaries of citizenship and were denied legal personhood in the Enlightenment’s “new republican reality” (pp. 9, 10). This is a quibble of degree not of substance. Lowe has written an engrossing and powerfully argued book that deserves widespread attention.