slavery on trial studies in legal history Published by the University of North Carolina Press in association with the American Society for Legal History Thomas A. Green, Hendrik Hartog, and Daniel Ernst, editors © 2007 The University of North Carolina Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Kimberly Bryant Set in Quadraat and Quadraat Sans by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. This book was published with the assistance of the Z. Smith Reynolds Fund of the University of North Carolina Press. Parts of this book have been reprinted with permission in revised form from Jeannine DeLombard, ‘‘‘Eye-Witness to the Cruelty’: Southern Violence and Northern Testimony in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative,’’ American Literature 73:2 (2001): 245–75, © 2001 Duke University Press, all rights reserved, used by permission of the publisher; ‘‘Advocacy ‘in the Name of Charity’? Or Barratry, Champerty, and Maintenance? Legal Rhetoric and the Debate over Slavery in Antebellum Print Culture,’’ REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 18 (2002): 259–87; and ‘‘Representing the Slave: White Advocacy and Black Testimony in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred,’’ New England Quarterly 75:1 (March 2002): 80–106. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data DeLombard, Jeannine Marie. Slavery on trial : law, abolitionism, and print culture / Jeannine Marie DeLombard. p. cm. — (Studies in legal history) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8078-3086-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-8078-5812-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Slavery—Law and legislation—United States—History—Sources. 2. Slavery—United States—History—Sources. 3. Slavery in literature. I. Title. kf4545.s5d45 2007 342.7308'7—dc22 2006036296 cloth 11 10 09 08 07 54321 paper 11 10 09 08 07 54321 For my father, who read to me then and reads with me now This page intentionally left blank contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 Part I Banditti and Desperadoes, Incendiaries and Traitors 1 The Typographical Tribunal 35 2 Precarious Evidence: Sojourner Truth and the Matthias Scandal 71 Part II At the Bar of Public Opinion 3 Eyewitness to the Cruelty: Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative 101 4 Talking Lawyerlike about Law: Black Advocacy and My Bondage and My Freedom 125 5 Representing the Slave: White Advocacy and Black Testimony in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred 151 6 The South’s Countersuit: William MacCreary Burwell’s White Acre vs. Black Acre 177 Conclusion All Done Brown at Last: Illustrating Harpers Ferry 199 Notes 223 Bibliography 277 Index 309 This page intentionally left blank illustrations 1 ‘‘Fugitive Slave Law—Hamlet in Chains’’ 36 2 ‘‘Fugitive Slave Law—Hamlet in Court’’ 37 3 ‘‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother’’ 38 4 George Cruikshank, ‘‘Emmeline about to Be Sold to the Highest Bidder’’ 39 5 ‘‘Boston Court House’’ 60 6 ‘‘Night Attack on the Court House’’ 61 7 ‘‘The Way in Which Fred. Douglass Fights Wise of Virginia’’ 200 8 ‘‘Cannon Planted outside the Court-House during the Trial’’ and ‘‘Ossawattamie Brown on His Way from the Court to His Prison’’ 202 9 ‘‘Sleeping Room of the Jury at Gibson’s Hotel, Belmount’’ 203 10 ‘‘View of the Courtroom during the Trial’’ 204 11 ‘‘Portraits of the Judge, Counsel and Jurors’’ and ‘‘Carrying the Prisoners from the Armory to the Railroad Station, En Route to Charlestown, Va., for Trial’’ 206 12 ‘‘The Retreat of Our Artist from Charlestown, Virginia’’ 216 13 ‘‘The Irrepressible Conflict’’ 219 This page intentionally left blank acknowledgments With its rigorous yet caring faculty and its collegial graduate community, the University of Pennsylvania English Department of- fered a valuable model of scholarly commitment. It is typical of Penn that I now think of my dissertation readers, Houston Baker and Nancy Bentley, as good friends as well as mentors. I am also thankful to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Chris Looby, Herman Beavers, Wendy Steiner, Farah Griffin, Charlotte Pierce Baker, Peter Stallybrass, and Jim English. Penn alums Teresa Goddu, Stephen Best, Stephanie Camp, Marc Stein, Kendall Johnson, Giselle Anatol, Tony Viego, Rhonda Frederick, Crystal Lucky, Melissa Homestead, Leigh Edwards, Jeremy Braddock, Hester Blum, and Martha Schoolman have become valued colleagues and fellow travelers. On my path to Penn and this book, I benefited immeasurably from the guidance of my undergraduate and master’s thesis advisors: to this day, I hear the voice of G. Moses Nkondo whenever I read Frederick Douglass’s Narrative; through his writing, his teach- ing, and his personal example, Ngu˜g˜ı wa Thiong’o taught me the power of documentary literature. Philadelphia will always be home. Not surprisingly, then, it was at the Library Company of Philadelphia that this book first began to take shape. Thanks to Phil Lapsansky (for sharing his own research, his support, and his Reese’s Pieces); to Jim Green (for his good-natured friendship); and to Connie King (for tracking down lost sources). I will always find a way back to the LCP, but a Mellon Fellowship in American History and Culture and a Faculty Research Fellowship from the University of Puget Sound made it much easier to do so. Worcester may not be home, but it’s a surprisingly nice place to visit, thanks to the wonderful people one always finds at the American Antiquarian Society. John Hench will be sorely missed, but I look forward to tea and con- versation with Caroline Sloat and lovely evenings in the garden with Joanne xi and Gary Chaison. Through its Northeast Modern Language Association Fel- lowship and William J. Gilmore-Lehne Stipend, the AAS supported not only research on this project but its methodological development as well in the form of two summer seminars in book history. Among the great people I met at AAS, I must single out Scott Casper, Jeff Groves, Dan Cohen, Lloyd Pratt, Ann Baker, François Furstenberg, Ethan Robey, and Patricia Cline Cohen— special appreciation to the latter two for directing me to chapter 1’s indis- pensable James Hamlet illustrations. Farther east, the Massachusetts Histori- cal Society, thanks to the African American Studies Fellowship I held there, yielded some of the book’s richest archival nuggets. Out west, in San Marino, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Susi Krasnoo for helping me find a new home not once but twice while I held the W. M. Keck Foundation and Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellowship at the Huntington Li- brary. My time at the Huntington was so productive that much of this book was drafted, as well as researched, in the old reading room. For airing me out on evenings and weekends, I thank Susi, Mary Helen McMurran, Nicole Pohl, Mona Shulman, Judith Jackson Fossett, and Dian Kriz. It is impossible to imagine a more congenial intellectual home than the En- glish Department at the University of Toronto. Here one finds brilliant inter- locutors who—rarer still—are always up for dinner or a drink. Because the department is so large (and so consistently friendly and supportive), collective thanks will have to suffice. Special appreciation, though, goes to Jill Matus, Linda Hutcheon, and Brian Corman for their mentorship and, for their friend- ship, Heather Jackson, Robin Jackson, Michael Cobb, Paul Stevens, Lynne Magnusson, and Chris Warley (with Roseanne Currarino). One reason why we’re all so good-humored, of course, is the generous funding U of T faculty receive; I am tremendously grateful for a Social Sciences and Humanities Re- search Council of Canada Standard Research Grant, several SSHRC Institu- tional Grants, a Connaught New Staff Matching Grant, a Connaught Start-Up Grant, and the Dean’s Travel Grant. I’m also grateful to my research assis- tants, especially Andrea Stone. My own tendency toward isolated introspection notwithstanding, several people have informed this study with their incisive questions and ideas. For such productive collaborative moments, I want to thank Gregg Crane, Al Brophy, Dana Nelson, and Priscilla Wald (to whom I will be eternally in debt for introducing me to Seattle’s Green Lake). My participation in the Interdis- ciplinary Law and Humanities Junior Scholars Workshop was, simply put, a conversion experience in which this book was born again. Thanks to all of xii Acknowledgments those who made the 2003 and 2004 workshops so productive but especially Katherine Franke, Nan Goodman, Clyde Spillenger, Naomi Mezey, Nomi Stol- zenberg, Austin Sarat, Cheryl Harris, Robert Weisberg, Robert Post, Ariela Gross, Hilary Schor, Walter Johnson, and Jon-Christian Suggs. In addition to offering insightful feedback, Sally Gordon helped this book find a good home at the University of North Carolina Press. This study’s conclusion, on John Brown, is virtually a transcription of the richQ&Asession following my talk at the Princeton University English Department’s Americanist Collo- quium: thanks, then, to Bill Gleason and Briallen Hopper. At the University of North Carolina Press, I am deeply grateful to Chuck Grench for his patience, guidance, and commitment to this project. Special thanks to Paula Wald and Mary Lou Kowaleski for their generous, thoughtful treatment of the manu- script and its author. I am indebted to Dan Ernst, who helped formulate more clearly the book’s key legal historical concepts. It is daunting to discover that one’s anonymous readers are two of the scholars one most respects; I cannot thank Brook Thomas and William Andrews enough for providing two full sets of the most sensitive, thought-provoking feedback a writer could ask for. The carefully considered readers’ reports I received from Duke University Press also strengthened this project in the final stages.