| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Ariela J. Gross. Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2000. Pp. xi, 263. $39.50.

Ariela J. Gross has written a valuable book on the history of slavery and the antebellum South. Through an analysis of slave cases from courts in the Deep South, Gross adds depth and complexity to our understanding of slavery's social and cultural framework, and of the tensions and contradictions slavery created in its American setting. 1

Two major themes dominate Gross's approach to her evidence and to the slave South. One is that "double character" of slavery, emphasized by its legal complexities, which provides the book's title. As Gross demonstrates, both civil and criminal proceedings regarding slavery required white southerners, almost in spite of themselves, to consider slaves not only as property but also as human beings. And she delineates the contradictions this created both for southern racial ideology and for social ideals. The other is the familiar theme of honor. Drawing heavily on ideas developed by Kenneth Greenberg in Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (1996), and Orlando Patterson in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982), Gross shows how dramas of honor and dishonor dominated discussions of slavery in southern courts. In doing so she considerably enriches our understanding of the concept of honor itself, and of its role in southern social and cultural life. . . .

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