America's legal consciousness was high during the era that saw the
imprisonment of abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison, the
execution of slave revolutionary Nat Turner, and the hangings of
John Brown and his Harpers Ferry co-conspirators. Jeannine Marie
DeLombard examines how debates over slavery in the three decades
before the Civil War employed legal language to "try" the case for
slavery in the court of public opinion via popular print media.
Discussing autobiographies by Frederick Douglass, a scandal
narrative about Sojourner Truth, an abolitionist speech by Henry
David Thoreau, sentimental fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a
proslavery novel by William MacCreary Burwell, DeLombard argues
that American literature of the era cannot be fully understood
without an appreciation for the slavery debate in the courts and in
print. Combining legal, literary, and book history approaches,
Slavery on Trial provides a refreshing alternative to the
official perspectives offered by the nation's founding documents,
legal treatises, statutes, and judicial decisions. DeLombard
invites us to view the intersection of slavery and law as so many
antebellum Americans did--through the lens of popular print
culture.