Book Review

The study of slave law has emerged in recent years as perhaps the most innovative subfield in legal history. Over the past three decades, historians, lawyers, political scientists, economists, sociologists, and at least one rhetorician have all contributed to scholars' understanding of the relationship between slavery and the law. The eclectic mix of essays that Paul Finkelman has assembled in this volume, originally published in 1993 as a symposium in the Chicago-Kent Law Review, demonstrates the continued diversity of the methodological and theoretical approaches to the topic. They also show, as Finkelman notes in his introduction, "the centrality of slavery in American legal development" (3).	1
Finkelman divides the fourteen articles contained in the book into four sections. The first, on general theories of interpreting the law of slavery, includes William W. Fisher's "Ideology and Imagery in the Law of Slavery." Fisher perceptively notes that, although historians and legal scholars have taken a variety of approaches to the study of slave law, they have ignored the connections between the law and "southern ideology." Examining the assumptions and perceptions of white southerners—including white images of African Americans, the pro-slavery argument, the code of honor, and evangelical Christianity—Fisher concludes that southern ideology provided lawmakers "the materials and analytical tools from which they fashioned the rules that regulated the relations of masters and servants" (66). Moreover, according to Fisher, the diversity of southern ideology helps explain the "remarkable degree of inconsistency and instability in the law of slavery" (66). Because white southerners expressed so much ambivalence about, for example, the character of slaves—alternating between the image of the contented "Sambo" and the rebellious "Nat"—legal doctrine regarding slavery developed unevenly. Fisher's essay thus moves the study of slavery jurisprudence beyond scholars' previous emphases on biographical, economic, and doctrinal factors in southern appellate decision making.	2
The second section of the book, "Constitutional Law and Slavery," includes two especially insightful essays. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton's discussion of the impact of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 on African Americans shows how federal enforcement efforts constituted an "assault" on both free blacks and fugitive slaves in the North. The shared fear of kidnapping and capture bound these two groups together, according to the Hortons, a significant finding in light of some historians' claims that northern free blacks had little in common with African Americans in the South. Michael Kent Curtis also breaks new ground in his essay on the 1857 publication of Hinton Helper's antislavery book, The Impending Crisis of the South. Antebellum Republicans saw free speech and free press as essential political liberties threatened by the southern slave power, according to Curtis, and southern attempts to suppress the distribution of The Impending Crisis provoked spirited debate in Congress. When Senator Jefferson Davis introduced a series of resolutions protecting slavery in the South in 1860, Republicans ardently championed measures such as the amendment by Iowa Senator James Harlan that would have protected "free discussion of the morality and expediency of slavery" from state infringement. Although neither Harlan's amendment nor the resolutions ever passed, Curtis contends that the events and debates surrounding the publication of Helper's book helped Republicans see the need for "a national set of privileges which no state could abridge" (196). In this way, Curtis concludes that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment hoped to protect a broad scope of political liberties, including those outlined in the Bill of Rights.	3
The third section of the book, "Criminal and Civil Law of Slavery," includes Ariela Gross's essay on "slave character," as well as Thomas D. Russell's study of court sales of slaves in South Carolina. Gross examines both trial and appellate records of cases involving breach of warranty in order to discuss white perceptions of slave character. For example, many cases involving slaves who had run away hinged on whether the slave had run only to escape the excessively harsh treatment of the master (in which case the cruel master was at fault) or whether the slave was by nature a runaway. If the slave had made a habit of running away, masters would not have been held responsible for such behavior. Gross's lengthy essay provides several such examples of the ways in which the law, by defining slave behavior and character, thus "contributed to the construction of race in southern culture" (293). In contrast to Gross's cultural history approach, Russell examines quantitative data from five districts in South Carolina from 1823-1865 and concludes that court sales of slaves—including sheriff's sales and probate and equity court sales—constituted half of all antebellum slave sales in the state. Although he admits he is uncertain about whether these findings apply to the rest of the South, Russell nevertheless boldly claims that courts stood "at the center of the domestic slave trade" (329). Although he overstates his argument, Russell shows the significant role that legal agents and institutions played in the operation of the peculiar institution, at least in South Carolina.	4
The last section of the book, on comparative slave law, includes Jonathan Bush's much-needed essay on the British Constitution and the creation of the law of American slavery. During the colonial era, most matters regarding slave life—work, family, religion, torts by and against slaves—were left to the discretion of individual masters. For this reason, Bush contends, there was little "systemization" or "categorization" in colonial slave law—just various sets of police regulations. Because under the British constitutional system, according to Bush, "almost any local practice could be adopted by or made acceptable to English law," English courts saw the development of colonial slavery as a private matter subject to local custom (402). Thus, they heard only a small number of slave cases over a century. Bush's essay provides insights into the place of slavery in eighteenth-century trans-Atlantic legal thought, a topic that deserves more study.	5
Finkelman has assembled an important collection that includes work by a variety of scholars who utilize both traditional historical methods and new theoretical approaches. In addition to their contributions to the literature on slave law, many of these articles will certainly prove useful as discussion pieces in the classroom. Like any large essay collection, some unevenness exists in the quality of the essays, but nearly all of the work in this volume makes a significant contribution to the topic and demonstrates the continued vitality of slave law studies.	6
Timothy S. Huebner Rhodes College

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