Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom.

By Ariela J. Gross. (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, Eng.: Princeton University Press, c. 2000. Pp. [xii], 263. $39.50, ISBN 0-691-05957-8.)

Historians have long noted the dual nature of slaves' legal status, but most of the literature describing this peculiarity of slave law has focused on appellate cases and legal doctrine. Ariela J. Gross takes a different tack. Interested in exploring the relationship between law and racial ideology, Gross focuses on breach of warranty and damage suits involving slave property. Included in her database are all available records of such cases appealed to state supreme courts in the Deep South, as well as a huge sample of unappealed trials from Adams County (Natchez), Mississippi. The evidence from hundreds of these local trials, she argues, reveals "the paradoxes that arose from slaves' double identity as human subjects and the objects of property relations at one and the same time" (p. 3; emphasis in original).

Gross portrays the South and slavery as both connected to the commercial marketplace and representative of a traditional code of honor, and she skillfully weaves these complexities and tensions throughout her study. Slave trials thus served not only as forums for resolving economic disputes but also as public rituals in which white slaveholders demonstrated their honor and brought dishonor to black slaves. Because slaves were the objects of these trials--during which their mental, moral, and physical characteristics were at issue--whites publicly displayed their dominance over those subject to them. The inadmissibility of slaves' testimony--or, as Gross puts it, "the law's disrespect for their words"--further confirmed white mastery in the courtroom (p. 61). On another level, though, "legal disputes became affairs of honor between white men" (p. 7). When buyers and sellers (or owners and hirers) offered competing testimony as to whether or not a slave was "defective" in some way, they challenged each other's honesty, actions, and reputation before the community. Gross's most compelling illustration of the ways in which civil disputes implicated the character of both slaves and slaveholders is her discussion of trials involving slaves who had run away. Litigants and witnesses in such trials often made a distinction between a slave who ran away because of inhumane treatment, and one who ran away simply because he had the character of a "runaway." When parties offered distinct explanations of slave behavior, the character and honor of whites was on trial every bit as much as that of the slave. "Wherever the argument that black character depended on management by a white man appeared," Gross contends, "that white man's good character depended on the demonstration that bad black character had other sources" (p. 120; emphasis in original). Finally, adding yet another layer to her analysis, Gross convincingly shows that slaves themselves, despite their absence from the courtroom, influenced trial proceedings. When whites repeated slaves' own words in court testimony, masters ran the risk of being deceived by their slaves. Thus, "putting slave character on trial allowed slaves' moral agency to intrude into the courtroom," which permitted slaves to influence the outcomes of trials in ways no other form of property ever could (p. 4).

This sophisticated and well-written work successfully bridges the divide between the legal and cultural history of slavery. Gross brilliantly depicts the ways in which the southern legal system operated within the context of a culture of honor. Her sizable evidentiary base, multitextured analysis, and careful attention to broad historiographical issues make this a first-rate work of scholarship. While the law of slavery remains the most thoroughly examined subfield within southern legal history, Gross's study reveals that historians still have much to learn from local trial records and from new ways of interpreting legal disputes.

TIMOTHY S. HUEBNER
Rhodes College