Burdens of Proof: Doing Justice to Antebellum Writing About Slavery

Abstract

Given voluminous scholarship about and rhetoric that opposed and defended it in United during three decades before Civil can new theoretical models and analytical tools be found that yield insights hitherto unoffered? Particular texts remain to be analyzed, of course, and studies focusing on various subgroups (African American abolitionists, women novelists) frequently question dominant views and provide new perspectives. But can innovative frameworks be discovered that illuminate discourse produced not just by particular groups or factions but culture of as a whole? Can analytical tools that emerge provide new views of rhetoric that has been researched extensively, such as Frederick Douglass's autobiographies, and/or of figures to whom many studies have been devoted, such as Sojourner Truth? Jeannine Marie DeLombard's Slavery on Trial, which offers readers fresh and engaging analyses of texts both well known and unfamiliar, demonstrates that these questions can be answered affirmatively. During three decades leading up to Civil War, DeLombard asserts, slavery was on trial in United States both in literal courts and in alternative tribunal created by the mass medium of print (p. 1). We cannot fully understand texts of period, therefore, without comprehending how the popular legal that permeated both controversy and culture in which it was conducted influenced the abolitionist movement, its visions of African American citizenship, and its contribution to American literature (p. 2). This influence was complex and not always progressive, DeLombard notes; legal language and models could reinforce black subordination within [abolition] movement and prove constraining as well as liberating (p. 3). Ultimately, though, abolitionists' appeals to popular legal consciousness and their appropriation of roles, rules, and language of adversarial trial enabled them to shift public opinion in