His work has appeared in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers; American Literary Realism; and the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association; as well as in the essay collection, India in the American Imaginary, 1780s–1880s, edited by Rajender Kaur and Anupama Arora.
Kelley applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Crimes Against Feeling: Piracy, Sympathy, and Ocean Politics in Antebellum American Legal Culture, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Mark B. Kelley's website.[Uncle Tom’s Cabin] does not call for civil disobedience in the name of natural law in the way that [Ralph Waldo] Emerson or [Frederick] Douglass had proposed. It also lacks the dripping resentment of her brother Charles Beecher's abolitionist legal tract The Duty of Disobedience to Wicked Laws (1851). For him, the Piracy Act of 1820 reflected the “deep instinct of every heart.” It affirmed the "intuitive sense of right our fathers felt" that they nonetheless ignored in acts of legal appeasement. Abolitionists who “resist unto blood, striving against sin," Beecher concluded, must break national law in order to protect natural law. Harriet Beecher Stowe likewise recalled the law's moral limits. But her response in Uncle Tom's Cabin squarely places the enslaved on the rack operated by piratical enslavers and calls upon her readers to watch.Page 99 provides a generally accurate if slightly narrow account of literary piracy, deep-sea enslavement, and international law in the decades prior to the U.S. Civil War. Specifically, it recounts the publication history of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854) and considers her moral resentment towards slavery relative to her contemporaries. It occurs in the heart of the book, nearly at the median of its second chapter. Its focus on the most visible antebellum woman novelist may entice readers to discover the book’s other central women (who it must be said were equally famous in their time, if not ours).
As Charles Beecher’s appeal to the “deep instinct of every heart” affirms, complicated legal theories often retained an emotional core. The passage is just one example of piracy’s contested definition as a singular moral injury whose legal character could be proven by narrations of alleged pirates’ offenses against blameless families (the “crimes against feeling” of the title). The Piracy Act of 1820 he references is the book’s central legal text, as it was the first American law to declare the deep-sea slave trade piracy (although, tellingly, no one was executed for the crime until 1862). Each of the chapters consider how authors across a political spectrum treated the law as either a first step towards piratical enslavement’s universal abolition or as itself an act of piracy against enslavers’ property rights. Stowe represented a moderate position in this debate, but I am careful not to oversimplify her (or anyone’s) politics. My brief discussion of Stowe v. Thomas (1854) on page 99, in which the author unsuccessfully sued against the published of an unauthorized German-language edition of the novel, gives us a hint that piracy of all sorts often went unpunished. Such legal defeats led Stowe and others to platform if not prescribe abolitionist violence in the years that followed. Like each of the book’s central figures, neither Beecher nor Stowe could prevent an internecine war that resulted from disputes on piracy’s legal definition and the nation’s emotional core.
--Marshal Zeringue