(I wrote about Thomas Jeremiah in a guest entry for the blog Executed Today.)

The case of Thomas Jeremiah, from what little is known of it, sounds fascinating. He lived in South Carolina in the 1770s, one of only about 500 or so free blacks in the entire state. Somehow he was able to claw his way upward, profiting from his skill as a ship's pilot, and by the time of his death he was one of the richest black men in the North American colonies, worth the equivalent of $200,000 in modern money. As the epilogue notes, he "did not need to gather arms or preach revolution to undermine slavery, because his whole life was a refutation of whites' basic justification for slavery." Then he was accused of trying to incite a slave insurrection, duly framed in a slave court in spite of his status as a free man, and executed in short order.

It's a great, multilayered and tragic story, and it would make a great novel or movie. The problem is, the life and death of Thomas Jeremiah is simply not well documented enough to make a nonfiction book out of. Most of the records of his trial have been lost. We don't know anything about his personal life, who his wife was, whether she was a slave, if they had kids. There are no records about his property, either, though it is known that he was himself a slaveowner. (I wonder how he justified that to himself?)

That doesn't matter much to Dr. Harris, though, who uses the case as a jumping-off point to discuss larger issues. The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah might best be summarized like this: "This is how the sociopolitical climate was in Charleston, South Carolina just before the American Revolution broke out. Oh, and a guy named Thomas Jeremiah was hanged." The book isn't about the hanged man at all; he isn't even discussed in detail until over 90 pages in. I feel deceived.

Don't get me wrong -- this is a good history book about South Carolina around the time of the Revolution, and in particular about the slavery issue. But I didn't want to read about that. I wanted to read about a particular historical criminal case and miscarriage of justice, which is what the title and jacket flap promised and didn't deliver. ( )