| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Rule of Justice: The People of Chicago versus Zephyr Davis. By Elizabeth Dale. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001. viii, 158 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-8142-0867-3. Paper, $23.95, ISBN 0-8142-5068-8.)

In late February 1888, Zephyr Davis, a seventeen-year-old African American, hacked to death Maggie Gaughan, a fourteen-year-old Irish American. Davis had been Gaughan's supervisor at a sweatshop that employed illegal child labor. Davis repeatedly confessed to the killing and just as often denied the popular view that he had attempted to rape Gaughan. By mid-May 1888, Davis had been captured, questioned by authorities, examined by the coroner's jury, indicted, tried, convicted, sentenced, and executed for the murder. From the available legal records, and mostly from newspaper accounts, Elizabeth Dale "uses the Davis case to reexamine law's relation to popular justice." Where other scholars either have seen the state as in control of the processes of the criminal law by this time or have portrayed lawyers as narrators who swayed juries (who were the repositories of the popular will) to their views, Dale argues that, in Chicago, "popular forces limited the rule of law," ensuring that "criminal law conformed to popular will." . . .

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