Lisa Kloppenberg, The Best Beloved Thing is Justice: The Life of Dorothy Wright Nelson New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 216. $39.95 hardcover (ISBN 9780197608579); ebook (ISBN 9780197608609).

Abstract

victing people of the deadly charge of treason. During the early years of the Revolution, the Supreme Executive Council and Continental Army struggled with the judiciary for the right to sentence suspected traitors in Pennsylvania. Once Chief Justice McKean helped to return this authority to the courts, juries resisted convicting defendants of treason not out of a sympathetic Loyalism, but out of an aversion to sentencing them to death. Larson proves this important insight with extensive evidence gathered from trial records, petitions, and letters. This careful study will prove invaluable to historians of Loyalists and their reintegration into American society, as well as early American historians and legal scholars.