Synopses & Reviews
In
Signposts, Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter have assembled seventeen essays, by both established and rising scholars, that showcase new directions in southern legal history across a wide range of topics, time periods, and locales. The essays will inspire today's scholars to dig even more deeply into the southern legal heritage, in much the same way that David Bodenhamer and James Ely's seminal 1984 work,
Ambivalent Legacy, inspired an earlier generation to take up the study of southern legal history.
Contributors to Signposts explore a wide range of subjects related to southern constitutional and legal thought, including real and personal property, civil rights, higher education, gender, secession, reapportionment, prohibition, lynching, legal institutions such as the grand jury, and conflicts between bench and bar. A number of the essayists are concerned with transatlantic connections to southern law and with marginalized groups such as women and native peoples. Taken together, the essays in Signposts show us that understanding how law changes over time is essential to understanding the history of the South.
Contributors: Alfred L. Brophy, Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Laura F. Edwards, James W. Ely Jr., Tim Alan Garrison, Sally E. Hadden, Roman J. Hoyos, Thomas N. Ingersoll, Jessica K. Lowe, Patricia Hagler Minter, Cynthia Nicoletti, Susan Richbourg Parker, Christopher W. Schmidt, Jennifer M. Spear, Christopher R. Waldrep, Peter Wallenstein, Charles L. Zelden.
Review
"Constitutional and legal history converge comfortably in this welcome rethinking of the southern legal heritage. Signposts is a milestone in the emergence of a more encompassing vision of the legal and constitutional history of the South."—William M. Wiecek, author of The Birth of the Modern Constitution: The United States Supreme Court, 1941-1953
Review
"This collection is truly first rate, offering essays that plow new ground or offer fresh perspectives on more familiar topics. While the individual essays are more than worth the price of admission, together they offer rich insights into the ways law shaped and was shaped by southern society. Hadden and Minter have done an enormous service to the field of legal history by bringing this outstanding group of authors together in a volume that underscores the vitality of southern legal history and sets an ambitious agenda for future scholarship."—Donald G. Nieman, coeditor of Local Matters: Race, Crime, and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century South
Review
"This exciting anthology promises to stir renewed interest in southern legal history, raising new questions, refocusing old lenses, and shaping research agendas for decades to come."—Anders Walker, author of The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights
Review
"This engaging collection of essays demonstrates just how diverse and lively the field of southern legal history has become. Signposts, from its savvy introduction to its closing essay, reminds us of myriad ways, some familiar and many surprising, that southerners used the law to define themselves and their region. This collection is destined to be a foundation for the next generation of southern legal history."—W. Fitzhugh Brundage, author of The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory
Review
“[Signposts] explore[s] everything from civil rights, succession, reapportionment, prohibition, legal institutions and their evolution, and more, and they provide much food for thought in social issues areas. The result is a scholarly collection recommended for any library strong in regional American history in general and Southern history and culture in particular.”—Midwest Book Review
Review
“Professors Hadden and Minter have given us a rich smorgasbord of essays on legal history. . . . Rare would be the person who failed to find something of value from this collection of seventeen essays.”—Walter F. Pratt, Law and Politics Review
Review
“[E]ditors Hadden and Minter seek to demonstrate the “dynamism and diversity” of scholars’ efforts in this field over the past 30 years, and they are successful in that effort. . . .[Signposts] is a valuable contribution that will be appreciated by academics and specialists in the field.”—M. R. Scherer, Choice
Review
"[T]he research presented here offers something for virtually anyone even remotely interested in southern legal history. . . . Hadden and Minter have not only assembled a worthwhile collection of essays that each stand on their own but they have also helped generate new ways of thinking about southern legal history that are sure to yield similarly fascinating efforts in the future." —Steven P. Brown, Journal of American History
About the Author
Sally E. Hadden, an associate professor of history at Western Michigan University, is the author of Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas and coeditor ofThe Blackwell Companion to American Legal History. Patricia Hagler Minter, associate professor of history at Western Kentucky University is a coauthor of the 2003 edition of Out of Many Lives, Many Stories: Biographies in American History.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter
Part I: Colonial and Early National Legal Regimes
In My Mother’s House: Dowry Property and Female Inheritance Patterns in Spanish Florida 19
Susan Richbourg Parker
The Law and Order Campaign in New Orleans, 1763–1765: A Comparative View 45
Thomas N. Ingersoll
“Using the Faculties Conceded to Her by Law”: Slavery, Law, and Agency in Spanish New Orleans, 1763–1803 65
Jennifer M. Spear
South Carolina’s Grand Jury Presentments: The Eighteenth- Century Experience 89
Sally E. Hadden
Guarding Republican Liberty: St. George Tucker and Judging in Federal Virginia 111
Jessica K. Lowe
Part II: Law and Society in the Long Nineteenth Century
The Shades of Loyalty: Elisha W. Chester and the Cherokee Removal 137
Tim Alan Garrison
The Material Conditions of Dependency: The Hidden History of Free Women’s Control of Property in the Early Nineteenth- Century South 171
Laura F. Edwards
Democracy, and Lynching, in America 193
Christopher R. Waldrep
The World Made by Laws and the Laws Made by the World of the Old South 219
Alfred L. Brophy
Peaceful Revolution and Popular Sovereignty: Reassessing the Constitutionality of Southern Secession 241
Roman J. Hoyos
Strategic Litigation and the Death of Reconstruction 265
Cynthia Nicoletti
Homestead Exemption and Southern Legal Culture 289
James W. Ely Jr.
Part III: Constitutionalism, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties
A Place for Themselves in the Modern World: Southern Women and Alcohol in the Age of Prohibition, 1912–1933 317
Lisa Lindquist Dorr
Race, Property, and Negotiated Space in the American South: A Reconsideration of Buchanan v. Warley 345
Patricia Hagler Minter
Race, Law, and Southern Public Higher Education, 1860s–1960s 369
Peter Wallenstein
The Southern Roots of the Reapportionment Revolution 393
Charles L. Zelden
Defending the Right to Discriminate: The Libertarian Challenge to the Civil Rights Movement 417
Christopher W. Schmidt
Contributors 447
Index 453