John Brown\u27s Trial

The Focus on John Brown in Court “A community of laws is always on trial in the courtroom of a republic of laws, literary scholar Robert A. Ferguson observes in his most recent foray into legal-cultural history, The Trial in American Life (2007). The comment was inspired by the ...

Eye-witness to the cruelity : Literary abolitionism and the antebellum culture of testimony

In A Key to Uncle Tom\u27s Cabin (1853), Harriet Beecher Stowe identifies two great foundation principles of slave jurisprudence; namely, that a slave cannot bring a suit in any case ... and that a slave cannot bear testimony in any case in which whites are implicated. Despite the official rejection of colored testimony in both Northern and Southern courtrooms, African-Americans repeatedly took the witness stand against slavery throughout the antebellum period. Presenting themselves, in Frederick Douglass\u27 words, as eye-witness (es) to the cruelty of slavery and their narratives, in Harriet Jacobs\u27 phrase, as testimony to ... what Slavery really is, African-American former slaves joined abolitionists like Stowe in indicting slaveholders before the court of public opinion. They did so by consistently employing in their antislavery writing a juridical metaphor that figured slavery as a crime, slaveholders as perpetrators and defendants, slaves as victims and eyewitnesses, abolitionists as advocates for the slave, and the American reading public as judge and jury. Although the dissertation focuses on the works of literary abolitionists Douglass, Stowe, and Jacobs, I contend that participants on all sides of the controversy used the juridical metaphor to frame their contributions to the national debate over slavery, thereby contributing to the emergence of a culture of testimony. I trace the popularity of the juridical metaphor to three sources: the power of legal discourse in the early republic, the widespread association of slavery with the law through precedent-setting court cases and landmark legislation, and the inherent inclusiveness of the trial process\u27 adversarial structure, which encouraged full (albeit stratified) participation. Reading Douglass\u27 Narrative (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Stowe\u27s Dred (1856), and Harriet Jacobs\u27 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), I consider how literary abolitionists drew on the juridical metaphor not only to indict the peculiar institution, but also to negotiate the relationship between former slaves and their white sympathizers in the antebellum culture of testimony. For African-Americans, I conclude, the witness stand proved to be at once a liberating and a confining space from which to address the court of public opinion

Eye-witness to the cruelity : Literary abolitionism and the antebellum culture of testimony

In A Key to Uncle Tom\u27s Cabin (1853), Harriet Beecher Stowe identifies two great foundation principles of slave jurisprudence; namely, that a slave cannot bring a suit in any case ... and that a slave cannot bear testimony in any case in which whites are implicated. Despite the official rejection of colored testimony in both Northern and Southern courtrooms, African-Americans repeatedly took the witness stand against slavery throughout the antebellum period. Presenting themselves, in Frederick Douglass\u27 words, as eye-witness (es) to the cruelty of slavery and their narratives, in Harriet Jacobs\u27 phrase, as testimony to ... what Slavery really is, African-American former slaves joined abolitionists like Stowe in indicting slaveholders before the court of public opinion. They did so by consistently employing in their antislavery writing a juridical metaphor that figured slavery as a crime, slaveholders as perpetrators and defendants, slaves as victims and eyewitnesses, abolitionists as advocates for the slave, and the American reading public as judge and jury. Although the dissertation focuses on the works of literary abolitionists Douglass, Stowe, and Jacobs, I contend that participants on all sides of the controversy used the juridical metaphor to frame their contributions to the national debate over slavery, thereby contributing to the emergence of a culture of testimony. I trace the popularity of the juridical metaphor to three sources: the power of legal discourse in the early republic, the widespread association of slavery with the law through precedent-setting court cases and landmark legislation, and the inherent inclusiveness of the trial process\u27 adversarial structure, which encouraged full (albeit stratified) participation. Reading Douglass\u27 Narrative (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Stowe\u27s Dred (1856), and Harriet Jacobs\u27 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), I consider how literary abolitionists drew on the juridical metaphor not only to indict the peculiar institution, but also to negotiate the relationship between former slaves and their white sympathizers in the antebellum culture of testimony. For African-Americans, I conclude, the witness stand proved to be at once a liberating and a confining space from which to address the court of public opinion