The Oracle and the Curse

Caleb Smith

“In The Oracle and the Curse, Caleb Smith draws on an impressive range of resources, from legal treatises to execution sermons, criminal confessions, death sentences, blasphemy trials, debates over women’s preaching, and the agonizing self-policing of both conservative divines and radical abolitionists, weaving into his account insightful treatments of literary works such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A strikingly original and beautifully—even masterfully—written account of large-scale shifts in antebellum Americans’ understanding of the grounds of legitimacy of the law.”—Meredith McGill, Rutgers University

“Caleb Smith has composed a highly-original critical genealogy of the conflict between human law and higher law and of the nineteenth-century juridical public sphere in which it was waged. The Oracle and the Curse is sure to become an interdisciplinary classic.”—Donald Pease, Dartmouth College

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