Deviance in Nineteenth-Century American Law and Culture

Viewing slavery as a defining phenomenon of the American nineteenth century, this chapter traces the unstable and evolving relation in this era between norm or law and deviance or crime. The dynamic negotiations of the parameters of normativity of this period, not least as embodied in the law and in relation to slavery, significantly shaped American culture and society. As norms became the subject of dispute, shifting figures of deviance emerged. It is not until the end of the nineteenth century, as Michel Foucault observed, that certain practices, such as homosexual acts, come to constitute a deviant identity. ¹ Indeed, the deviant as an identity determined by an individual’s divergence from a norm does not enter into American usage until the twentieth century. ² Nonetheless, slavery – itself a contested legal and social phenomenon in this period – significantly shaped the ways normative social structures, including race, gender, and sexuality, are constructed through law in the course of the nineteenth century.