Book Review

Canada and the United States

Christopher Waldrep and Donald G. Nieman have brought together nine essays with the shared purpose of using "a local perspective" empirically grounded in "rich but hard-to-use local records" to illuminate "how effectively law mitigated tyranny in the face of the greatest threat to American democracy—slavery and racism" in the nineteenth-century South (p. ix). These essays traverse territory from the Carolinas across the Deep South to Texas, and span the years from the 1820s through the 1880s. Collectively they show that although the law sometimes mitigated racist tyranny—especially offering hope during Reconstruction—white supremacy usually prevailed, whether through due process or homicidal mobbing.	1
As the volume's title suggests, southern law and race relations did vary significantly by locality and by state. The first essays, by Sally Hadden and Timothy S. Huebner, both deal with the antebellum North Carolina courts, and in both the state supreme court jurist Thomas Ruffin emerges as a major force. Ruffin's influence drove the law toward dehumanizing the slave, tipping the definitional balance of slave as both person and property heavily toward the latter. Hadden's analysis reveals a youthful Ruffin who apparently had conscientious scruples about treatment of slaves, but who became increasingly calloused in adulthood. He dealt in interstate slave trading in the 1820s, acquired thirty or more slaves and two plantations that "were ruled with fear and the lash" (p. 5), and concluded in his 1830 opinion for State v. Mann (in which an enslaved woman was shot in the back trying to avoid a beating) that the law of slavery did not require humane restraint on the part of the master; rather, the purpose of slavery was simply "the profit of the master, his security and the public safety" (p. 16).	2
Huebner's analysis of another North Carolina case nearly two decades later shows that even with Ruffin on its supreme court, the state's legal system offered slaves convicted of a capital crime more chance of justice than its Atlantic seaboard neighbors. Caesar, a slave convicted of murdering a drunken white man who had attacked another slave without provocation, was saved from the lower court's death sentence by the law allowing an appeal to the state supreme court. Two of the three justices supported—despite Ruffin's dissenting view that Caesar was a potential insurrectionist—a new trial, which led to conviction on a lesser offense of manslaughter and allowed Caesar benefit of clergy, a life-saving legal opportunity no longer possible in most other southern states.	3
Louisiana slave law stood in sharp contrast to North Carolina's, as Judith Kelleher Schafer illustrates in her study of slave crime in New Orleans during the years 1846–1862. Schafer demonstrates that, even for capital crimes, the special slave tribunals in New Orleans often lacked many of the procedural safeguards afforded to both whites and free blacks, such as grand jury indictment, jury trials, peremptory challenges, and right to counsel. A tribunal divided over the defendant's guilt or innocence could still inflict corporal punishment, and upon outright conviction the tribunal could mandate a public execution by any means the members chose. The system was intended to terrorize the slave population into submission, though Schafer concludes that it only produced the "illusion of control" (p. 83).	4
The last antebellum study is Ariela Gross's analysis of the connections between the law and the South's second busiest slave market (just outside of Natchez), drawing upon 177 civil cases involving slaves between 1798 and 1861. Despite the many rich planters and tightly interwoven culture of lawyer-planter-judge, Gross demonstrates that court proceedings treated whites quite democratically, while "dishonoring" slaves and leaving free blacks increasingly vulnerable to racism.	. . .