The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875 by Gordon H. Shufelt (review)

In The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875, Gordon H. Shufelt examines the specific circumstances that led to Patrick McDonald, an Irish immigrant, being convicted of manslaughter in the death of Black Marylander Daniel Brown in post–Civil War Baltimore. In so doing, Shufelt offers a methodological framework "in which to examine the social, political, and cultural characteristics that define the quality of justice in cases of police violence" (p. 6). This approach necessarily draws on what makes this case unique as opposed to representative, ultimately concluding that myriad factors at this particular place and time allowed Daniel Brown's death to be prosecuted in the manner Shufelt outlines.

The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown is organized around biographical sketches of the victim and perpetrator, with chapters on the role of the coroner's office, the politics of policing, and the trial itself. It ends with commentary on the post-trial proceedings and on the thread between this nineteenth-century case and the modern Black Lives Matter movement. The biographical chapters, "The Black Man in the Doorway" and "The Irish Policeman on the Doorstep," are solid examples of culling together individual people's lives from fragmentary evidence. Relying on census records, newspaper articles, city directories, published primary sources, and secondary literature, these chapters attempt to characterize Daniel Brown and Patrick McDonald. By the end of the first chapter, Brown is portrayed as a self-assured, literate homeowner who was "inclined to be outspoken about his rights" (p. 24). McDonald becomes an Irish immigrant who "was no stranger to street fighting" and "more willing than most men" to use "fists, clubs, and pistols" aggressively (p. 39). While these depictions are no doubt oversimplified, they provide texture and specificity to that fateful midsummer night in 1875.

After convincingly arguing for the unique cultural setting of postwar Baltimore, where residential segregation was not as complete as in the Deep South and where Irish immigrants and Black freedpeople changed the city's demographics in a relatively short span of time, Shufelt turns toward another unique feature of nineteenth-century Maryland: discretionary coroner's juries. By reasoning that a lack of precedents and formalization in the state's coroner positions shaped how cases were adjudicated, Shufelt persuasively demonstrates the importance of coroner's juries in expressing a "community's social and political norms" (p. 54). This focus on the power of this particular component of pretrial proceedings—the coroners' inquests—contributes to the growing literature on race and crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shufelt successfully demonstrates how pretrial records can provide robust insights into how criminality was adjudicated in the Jim Crow era.

At times, Shufelt's balance between the specifics of the Daniel Brown case with the broader Baltimorean context seems disproportionate. Chapters 4 and 5 are about perceptions of the police in terms of racial and political biases, respectively. The former chapter's reliance on white newspapers, without explicitly mentioning the Black press, reads like an incomplete account of how Black citizens responded to the city's police. Chapter 5's deep dive into the history of policing and corrupt politics throughout the mid-nineteenth century is a fascinating political history of Baltimore but does not make a strong case for such in-depth background information related to the Daniel Brown case specifically.

Given contemporary protests of the killings of Black men and women at the hands of the police, Shufelt's study provides a useful historical lens to understand how the convergence of nuanced factors makes each case unique.