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John Brown's Trial. By Brian McGinty. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. 350 pp. $27.95, isbn 978-0-674-03517-1.)
Despite much recent scholarship about the abolitionist John Brown and his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, this is the first extended study of Brown's trial. Brian McGinty shows that the two-week trial, set in a Charlestown, Virginia, courthouse on the "corner of George and Washington Streets," deserves the careful study he gives it (p. 90). An early example of a trial with national media coverage, it was also the first in American history that resulted in an execution for treason against a state. Moreover, it raised intricate legal questions that McGinty, an attorney, expertly elucidates.
The trials primary actors - prosecutor Andrew Hunter, Judge Richard Parker, a parade of defense lawyers, and, especially, Brown himself - were...