| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom. By Ariela J. Gross. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. xii, 263 pp. $39.50, ISBN 0-691-05957-8.)

Professor Ariela J. Gross moves the study of slave law beyond the traditional notion that the civil law of slavery concerned slaves only as property and not as people. Gross has successfully trawled local as well as state court records to find still another dimension of slave law. She argues that slaves' character was often at issue in damage or breach of warranty claims concerning slaves. (Professor Gross has generously posted three of her databases on her Web site.) Gross's analysis of these cases is necessarily subtle and extensive because proslavery white southern litigants and courts developed sometimes tortuous intellectual constructs to deny that dishonored, subordinated people could by their intentions or behavior exercise any influence over their owners and hirers and over court cases. 1

Gross provides an illuminating explanation of "court and market" practices in Adams County, Mississippi, and other cotton South jurisdictions. Adams County lawyer-planters' "practices rested on slavery," Gross reports. "In this way, slavery shaped legal practice, and lawyers and judges became invested in the institution of slavery." Indeed, issues concerning slaves made up nearly half of the disputes argued by litigants and their lawyers in the Adams County circuit court. . . .

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