Death of an Overseer: Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation South.

By Michael Wayne. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. 257. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-19-514004-4; cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-19-514003-6.)

Michael Wayne has created an unusual text, not quite what some readers may be expecting when they pick up this book the first time. It is a murder mystery fused together with a primer for students learning about how to evaluate historical evidence for the first time. The scene: Adams County, Mississippi, in 1857, home to Natchez and cotton plantations. The corpse: Duncan Skinner, an overseer on Cedar Grove, home to Clarissa Sharpe (owner and widow) and eighty slaves. The suspects: Reuben, Henderson, and Anderson (three slaves eventually executed for Skinner's murder, a fact made clear at the end of chapter 1). Other suspicious characters: John McCallin (would-be beau of Clarissa and lover of Dorcas, a slave at Cedar Grove) and Alexander Farrar (trustee of Clarissa's estate, wealthy local slave owner, and enemy of McCallin). All the main players are on stage in the first chapter, including Wayne himself, acting partly as teacher and partly as devil's advocate. By reviewing whether the court ultimately executed the right suspects, Wayne hopes to make transparent to the beginning history student how historians reach conclusions from patchy evidence. He writes, "Our task--yours and mine--will be to determine whether they reached the right verdict" (p. 5).

The book proceeds from the basic information available (newspaper clippings and court records) and through successive chapters adds more and more secondary information (slave life and culture, the role of women, class boundaries in the 1850s) to flesh out the background behind the murder. Wayne's first-person writing style pulls the reader into this shared quest, an approach that makes the book engaging. Wayne concocts a mixture of narrative and primary-source excerpts so that the reader can see all the materials a historian would have on hand when describing the past. This mixture creates a patchy book: the narrative sections are well written, but some novices will have a tough time with the longer excerpts, such as one that lasts for eight pages (pp. 43-50). There are also four appendixes of additional documents. True beginners will also wonder whether the author needs to digress so frequently from his purpose (e.g., "I find that the doctrine of popular sovereignty is often misunderstood by students" [p. 121]) into areas that seem only marginally related to the mystery at hand.

Wayne concludes that the right people were executed, but for the wrong reasons. The bulk of the book explains what other reasons might have been sufficient to cause three slaves to murder an overseer and also explains the relationships that existed between McCallin and Farrar, Farrar and Sharpe, and McCallin and Dorcas. Furthermore, Wayne wants to demonstrate how some evidence only comes to light after years of searching; the reader is shown how interpretations, even Wayne's, can shift when new evidence appears. Wayne invites readers to continue the quest beyond the book's conclusion by examining any newly found evidence and sharing their thoughts at a website: www.deathofanoverseer.com.

In his last chapter, concluding the story of McCallin and Dorcas, Wayne explains why it is that historians cannot make up dialogue, invent fictional characters, or write history as if it were a true-crime novel. Having marked out his professional territory for defense, Wayne then proceeds to break those injunctions by presenting a piece of creative writing ("sheer fantasy," he calls it [p. 186]) to wrap up the book: a letter from John McCallin explaining from his perspective what really happened at Cedar Grove. Although a mystery needs a strong conclusion to remain compelling, one wonders whether this was the fight ending to a work of history.

Given that Death of an Overseer depicts how slaves killed an overseer in Adams County, Mississippi, in 1857, one obvious connection scholars might make is to the rumored slave revolt in the same county four years later that was described by Winthrop D. Jordan in Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (rev. ed.; Baton Rouge, 1995). Was Adams County a haven for slave revolutionaries? Not according to Wayne, who doubts that the 1861 conspiracy ever took place--he does not find Jordan's evidence for it "all that persuasive." Ever mindful that he is talking to students, though, Wayne adds, "No need to take my word for it, though. Read [Jordan's] award-winning book ... and reach your own conclusions" (p. 102).

Well-read scholars looking for new insights on slavery, class relations, or violence in the Old South will not find anything novel in the material presented here, but their students certainly might. Death of an Overseer could be a good addition to a class reading list. The book would be appropriate for all college students; it might be used in a freshman seminar, a novice-level historical-methods course, or a class on the Old South.

SALLY E. HADDEN
Florida State University