Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex & the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (review)

BOOK REVIEWS341 Marxian emphasis on class rather than immersing himself in the writings ofthe soldiers themselves. Yet Logue is much more interesting and convincing when describing the life ofthe veteran. Historians are onlyjust beginning to pay attention to the postwar experiences of Civil War soldiers, and Logue provides a very sound and helpful survey of the conclusions and lines of argument that have been developed to date. His discussion of the Southern veteran is by far the best part of his book, taking on a wide range of topics from marital difficulties to attitudes regarding segregation. His chapters on the veterans could easily serve as a starting point for those interested in further study of the subject. The primary purpose of this book, published as part of Ivan R. Dee's American Ways Series, apparently is to serve as a reading assignment in college-level courses. It would have to be used with discretion, for many ofLogue's interpretations fall very far short of doing justice to the varied experience of fighting the Civil War. Earl J. Hess Lincoln Memorial University Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex & the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South. By Peter W. Bardaglio. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. 335. $4500.) In 1970, in her pathbreaking book The Southern Lady, Anne Firor Scott suggested that the emancipation of the slaves emancipated more than the slave population of the South; it also "opened every door" for elite white women of the South. According to Scott, the multiple losses that white men suffered in the war in the loss of the actual or potential right to slave ownership, military defeat , and economic loss combined to undermine their dominant patriarchal position in the Southern household. Historians of Southern white women have argued this "watershed" thesis pro and con, while historians ofAfrican Americans have also debated the extent to which the freedpeople really gained any substantive freedom from the domination of white Southerners in the wake of changes that occurred during the war and in its immediate aftermath. It is perhaps surprising that the now-extensive literature that surrounds this issue of the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the status of white women and the freedpeople has so rarely employed legal sources or considered the particular ways in which the Southern legal structure promoted, reflected, or retarded the extent and nature of social change in the postwar South. In his extensively researched, cogently argued, and lucidly written book, Peter Bardaglio breaks new ground in this now-old debate by offering a comprehensive social history of changes in the Southern legal order. As a legal historian, Bardaglio's position on the "watershed thesis" can be most succinctly stated as the more things changed, the more they remained the same—with one hardly 342CIVIL war history inconsequential exception: the power of the state to intervene in the domestic lives of all Southerners, regardless of their race, gender, or class position, increased in the postwar era. According to Bardaglio, while white Southern men certainly did lose direct power over their household dependents as a consequence of the Civil War and emancipation, what the patriarchal household head could no longer control in his own right, the state now stepped in to defend. The result was a basic shift from the patriarchal household structure of the antebellum Southern slave system to a capitalist market system predicated upon a legal structure of state paternalism. The emphasis in Bardaglio's work is on the persistence of white male domination rather than on the tactics and strategies of those groups who presumably forced the development of the new form that white male domination took in the postwar period. That is to say, this is a book that focuses on social control and those members of the social order who were in a position to continue to exercise that control, rather than a social history of those groups whose agency made new forms of social control necessary. Thus, while this book offers a much-needed general history ofchanges in the legal order, and in the process makes a powerful case for the ways in which recourse to the legal system allowed white men to...