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The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era. By Michael A. Ross. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 320. Cloth, $27.95.)
In The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case Michael Ross has written a book that manages to succeed on many different levels simultaneously. It is a historical whodunit and a social history of New Orleans during one of its most chaotic but thoroughgoing periods of progressive social change. In its re-creation of a criminal case that drew interest from newspaper readers in every part of the nation, it is also a courtroom drama cum legal history. The book also provides an accessible history of Reconstruction in a city that played an often unfortunate but central role in driving political outcomes in the nation at large. Finally, this is a book that increasingly reluctant undergraduate readers can comprehend and-dare I say it-possibly even enjoy.
The book takes its name from the kidnapping of Mollie Digby, the seventeen-month-old daughter of Irish immigrants, who was abducted in early June 1870, allegedly by two women of color. Ultimately, police identified Ellen Follin and Louisa Follin Murray as the perpetrators of the kidnapping. In many ways the two women were unlikely suspects. Raised in Alabama "as free women" before the Civil War,...