In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity

In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity. By Jeannine Marie DeLombard. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. x, 446. $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-4422-9.)

In this deeply researched study, Jeannine Marie DeLombard offers a boldly original examination of the meanings of black civic identity in the law and literature of early America. DeLombard's exploration of the legal concepts, treatises, and laws of slavery is presented in dialogue with an analysis of the execution sermons, gallows ephemera, and confessional pamphlets that were ascribed to black criminals. This strategy allows her to trace the civic presence of the black persona not by considering the figure of the escaped slave or the abolitionist politics of respectability as previously has been done, but rather through the more troubling guise of the criminal. As DeLombard argues, it was "the black malefactor," after all, "who would have been more familiar to colonial and early national audiences" (p. 4).

In order to make her multilayered argument, DeLombard revisits the legal treatment of slaves as persons and as property. Following the lead...