| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Gregg D. Crane. Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature. (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, number 128.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xi, 299. Cloth $60.00, paper $22.00.

This book is not history. It is instead a reading (by a literary critic with a law degree) of the relationship between racial fiction and legal theory from 1850 to 1920. The main subjects of Gregg D. Crane's study are Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Martin Delany, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and Moorfield Storey. Crane's principal purpose is to trace how higher law reasoning (and later a rejection of it) shaped racial arguments on citizenship. Rather than rely simply on jurists or politicians, Crane identifies how fiction writers contributed to this debate. 1

Crane shows that nineteenth-century writers created imaginary characters who acted out solutions to legal problems. Stowe is Crane's model of higher law absolutism. In Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851), she uses the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Bird to demonstrate the necessity of moral and legalistic reasoning. It is the conversation between husband and wife, and their joint decision to help the fugitive slave Eliza, that makes opposition to slavery a "family matter" (p. 64). Yet Crane believes this fictional portrayal suffers from several limitations: Eliza is helped because of her racial "resemblance" to the Birds, and she is given aid, not as a matter of her consent, but through a "paternalistic ethics requiring the strong (white Americans) to care for weak (black Americans)" (p. 65). Stowe's novel played a major political role in the slavery debate, yet, according to Crane, her framework falls short, hampered by "racialist" character types. . . .

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