This review of James Campbell's Slavery on Trial recently circulated on
the H-Net discussion list H-Law:
 
From: Christopher R Waldrep <[log in to unmask]> 
List Editor: Christopher R Waldrep <[log in to unmask]> 
Editor's Subject: H-Law Review: 'Divided Justice: Slavery and Social
Control in Antebellum Richmond, Virginia' 
Author's Subject: H-Law Review: 'Divided Justice: Slavery and Social
Control in Antebellum Richmond, Virginia' 
Date Written: Wed, 10 Aug 2011 20:18:16 +0000 
Date Posted: Thu, 10 Aug 2011 16:18:16 -0400 

James M. Campbell.  Slavery on Trial: Race, Class, and Criminal
Justice in Antebellum Richmond, Virginia.  Gainesville  University
Press of Florida, 2007.  xiii + 264 pp.  $59.95 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-8130-3091-3.
 
Reviewed by Danette Turner (Arizona State University)
Published on H-Law (August, 2011)
Commissioned by Christopher R. Waldrep
 
Divided Justice: Slavery and Social Control in Antebellum Richmond,
Virginia
 
As a thriving manufacturing center in the South, Richmond, Virginia
was an anomaly among the nation's leading cities due to its
underpinnings as an urban-industrial slave society on the eve of the
Civil War.[1] Drawing from substantial numbers of slaves, free
blacks, lower-class whites, and immigrants to meet its expanding
labor demands, tensions created by Richmond's burgeoning and diverse
population presented the city with a number of dilemmas. Among those
of utmost importance were those related to crime, the maintenance of
order, and traditional hierarchical racial divides. As one of a
number of historians who focus on the discriminatory practices of
Southern legal systems during the nation's antebellum period, James
M. Campbell centers his research on a single jurisdiction. _Slavery
on Trial: Race, Class, and Criminal Justice in Antebellum Richmond,
Virginia_ examines the development of Richmond's criminal justice
institution as it evolved specifically to "support notions of white
egalitarianism and herrenvolk democracy" (p. 3). Campbell argues that
despite Virginia's best legal efforts to merge elite interests with
the city's daily legal proceedings, criminal justice in theory and
criminal justice in practice did not always reconcile with their best
interests. Rather, in an urban context, race, class, and gender
tensions often worked to subvert slaveholders' aims rather than to
support them, as race, not status, increasingly came to determine
one's legal experience.
 
Campbell is an American history lecturer at the University of
Leicester who specializes in antebellum crime and punishment. As part
of this investigation, he examined government records ranging in
dates from 1830 to 1860 to illustrate the notion that by the 1850s
escalating preoccupation with black crime and violence led to
increasingly restrictive legislation for Richmond's black society.
These actions greatly impacted the everyday lives of this segment of
the population as they were increasingly denied procedural rights and
received crueler sentences than their white counterparts.
 
As a bottom-up history, this volume offers five thematic chapters
that highlight various aspects of Richmond's criminal justice system.
Campbell begins with a brief introduction that discusses the city's
history and the effects of urbanization and industrialization on the
development of unusual cultural practices. Early chapters detail the
process through which slave masters gradually lost or relinquished
the responsibility for control of their slaves to city fathers due to
these labor and housing traditions, including slaves' self-hiring and
ability to make independent living arrangements. As these practices
became cultural norms, city police and court systems assumed
increasing responsibilities for maintaining racial divisions and a
hierarchical society.
 
Eventually allowed to travel to the city unsupervised in order to
seek employment, many Richmond slaves enjoyed the ability to select
their own surrogate masters and thereby dictate wages, which drew
much criticism from detractors. Many claimed that these practices
encouraged excessive independence, contributed to black crime, and
eroded paternalistic relations between master and slave. Despite
this, cultural practices persisted throughout the city's antebellum
years that fostered personal autonomy as slaves learned to bargain
for better working conditions and higher wages. Because many made
their own living arrangements, Richmond's slaves also enjoyed greater
privacy and social mobility in their personal lives. This small
liberty often translated into expanded educational opportunities, the
ability to build community/social support institutions such as black
churches, and offered greater opportunities for escape or resistance.
 
Subsequent chapters highlight the social interactions that occurred
between lower-class whites, immigrants, women, and free blacks in
Richmond. Fear that these associations would lead to collusion or the
encouragement of dissatisfaction among slaves regarding their own
condition was a major concern among city leadership. As a result,
city government became increasingly intrusive into the private lives
of this segment of society. This tactic backfired, however,
ultimately strengthening the influence of black social institutions
like Richmond's African Baptist churches among the lower classes.
 
_Slavery on Trial_ features various tables of criminal cases from
Richmond's Hustings Court throughout the text and in the appendix. It
also includes endnotes, and a bibliography. Additionally, Campbell's
study dovetails neatly with broader, regional, criminal justice
historical studies that also focus on race and nineteenth-century
legal systems. Some of these works include Glenn M. McNair's
_Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia's Criminal
Justice System_ (2009), and Christopher Waldrep's _Roots of Disorder:
Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817-80_ (1998).
Campbell's argument that "The stereotype of a lawless Old South where
crime was controlled by informal mechanisms ranging from lynch mobs
to slave patrols does not fit antebellum Richmond" (p. 9), also opens
his work for further discussion and comparison regarding urban and
rural slave experiences and police law. For example, Salley Hadder's
_Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas_
(2001) illustrates that slaveholders' authority, whether rural or
urban, was never complete but always problematic due to legal
challenges posed by third parties.[2]
 
Although Campbell should be commended for his work, this study is
drawn from fragmentary criminal court records, an unavoidable flaw
which the author points out early in the book (p. 14). Readers should
bear in mind that the tabulation of these types of documents over
several decades often leaves numbers statistically questionable due
to unknown variables and change over time. Even today, experts
caution researchers in the use of statistical sources considered
reliable, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime
Reports (UCR), for crime-ranking purposes or as indications of trends
in law enforcement.[3] Despite this, scholars will still value the
anecdotal importance of Campbell's work and gain a greater sense of
the disparity found between white and black defendants during this
era. Also, because Richmond's unique historic criminal justice system
is sometimes confusing to students of modern criminal justice, the
inclusion of brief definitions of the city's various courts and
enforcement organizations in the introduction might have helped to
clarify the development and duties of each agency over time.
 
Though questions regarding relationships between racism, slavery, and
legal notions remain unsettled, _Slavery on Trial_ argues
convincingly that Virginia's criminal justice system functioned in an
urban context as a tool of its slaveholding regime. Unveiling the
problematic aspects of crime control and racial tensions in an
urban-industrial setting, Campbell also successfully emphasizes the
fact that these attempts at social control sometimes met with failure
due to resistance created by interracial and class tensions. As a
political, social, and cultural case study of the city during a
critical phase of its development, _Slavery on Trial_ will appeal to
a variety of scholars and readers interested in the manner in which
an urban-industrial setting affected the slave experience.
 
Notes
 
[1]. Edward L. Ayers, _Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in
the Nineteenth-Century American South_ (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1985), 75.
 
[2]. Sally E. Hadden, _Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia
and the Carolinas_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001),
2.
 
[3]. See _Uniform Crime Reports _on the Web site of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation,_ _http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/word.
<http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/word.> 
 
Citation: Danette Turner. Review of Campbell, James M., _Slavery on
Trial: Race, Class, and Criminal Justice in Antebellum Richmond,
Virginia_. H-Law, H-Net Reviews. August, 2011.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32890
 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

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