| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael Wayne. Death of an Overseer: Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation South. New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. Pp. 257. $16.95.

Michael Wayne has written a very distinctive, creative, and intriguing book that is a hybrid of several genres: part monograph, part mystery novel, and part manual for historical research and interpretive analysis. It focuses on the 1857 death of Duncan Skinner, a white South Carolinian working as the overseer on Cedar Grove, a plantation of 900 acres and eighty slaves located near Natchez, Mississippi, and owned by a widow, Clarissa Sharpe. The coroner's jury returned a verdict of accidental death, but after Skinner's brother questioned the verdict, a group of local planters, led by wealthy and prominent politician Alexander Farrar, initiated an investigation that eventuated in murder indictments, trial, conviction, and public hanging of three Cedar Grove slaves: Henderson (a carriage driver), Reuben (a carpenter), and Anderson (a field hand). The planters also publicly implicated and threatened John McCallin (an Irish-born ginwright, carpenter, and part owner of a store), who had lived in Mississippi and Louisiana for twenty years, and who defiantly denied the accusation. For Wayne, the central question "is not who killed Duncan Skinner or how, but why" (p. 66). His answer is that the three accused slaves found their own justice by killing Skinner to end his brutal tyranny over the African Americans at Cedar Grove, and that the planters' conclusion that McCallin instigated Skinner's murder was "almost certainly wrong" (p. 59).

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