Slavery on Trial Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture |
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| Author:
| DeLombard, Jeannine Marie |
| ISBN: | 978-0-8078-3086-4 |
| Publication Date: | May 2007 |
| Publisher: | University of North Carolina Press
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| Book Format: | Paperback |
| List Price: | USD $116.95 |
Book Description:
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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. The country'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 coconspirators. DeLombard discusses how this consciousness...
More DescriptionDeLombard 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. The country'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 coconspirators. DeLombard discusses how this consciousness was evident in the "trials" over slavery found in the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, a scandal narrative about Sojourner Truth, a speech by Henry David Thoreau, fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a proslavery novel by William McCreary Burwell.