| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture. By Jeannine Marie DeLombard. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiv, 330 pp. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-8078-3086-4.)

Slavery on Trial investigates the "trial trope" in antebellum American literature. Building on legal histories by Paul Finkelman, Robert Cover, and others, Jeannine Marie DeLombard uses a variety of literary texts—including religious pamphlets, abolitionist propaganda, slave narratives, sentimental novels, and proslavery burlesques—to examine the legal rhetoric American authors used to put "slavery on trial." Writers adopted familiar juridical conventions and characters to construct a legal literary paradigm that evolved considerably from 1830–1860, as abolitionists confronted increasingly proslavery laws and judiciaries, and as proslavery authors sought new literary venues in which to defend their "peculiar institution."

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