ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the importance of viewing jurisprudence as performance and highlights some of the antebellum claims that prefigured Brown's activities at Harper's Ferry. It then illuminates some of the ways various American communities responded to the trial and offers an assessment of the importance of these constructs. From the time of America's founders, legal professionals and public commentators have had ambivalent feelings about the relevance of natural law to the canons of classical liberal jurisprudence. On the one hand, many former colonists cherished the idea that liberty was something that all human beings possessed as a matter of right. Within the cultural milieu, the idiom of natural law became so overdetermined that conservatives, moderates, and radicals on many sides of the slavery question could marshal a plethora of legal arguments for contradictory persuasive purposes. Often the term "natural law" became part of a discursive tapestry that included terms like "freedom" and "independence".
