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Laura F. EDwarDS Reconstruction and North Carolina Women’s Tangled History with Law and Governance Women were no strangers to North Carolina courts during Reconstruction. They had little choice but to appear when they were the ones charged with crimes. That had always been the case, even before the upheaval of war and emancipation. But women—even African American women—regularly initiated complaints themselves during the Reconstruction era with the expectation that they would be heard and their concerns resolved. These cases surprised me when I began research on the political culture of Reconstruction. The presence of African American women was particularly unexpected because of all the legal barriers that stood in their way. These women nonetheless persevered, seeking out the assistance of the legal system—through the Federal army, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and then state courts—even before they were formally emancipated or granted civil rights. Their stories challenged me to think about the period differently by highlighting connections between the “private” domestic realm and “public” matters of labor, government policy, and party politics.1 MaybeitwasbecausetheirpresencewassounexpectedthatIinterpreted these women’s actions as unique to the period, a break with the past. That presumption found support in both historical events and historiographical debates. It is hard to overstate the dramatic impact of emancipation on Reconstruction-era policy changes, particularly the extension of civil and political rights to African Americans. Why would women’s legal actions not be part of those upheavals? Yet the emphasis on discontinuity raises other questions: If there was so little in the experience of women—particularly enslaved women—to encourage faith in the legal system, why would they seek its assistance during Reconstruction? What of white women’s use of the legal system? And what of all these women’s apparent familiarity with the process? These questions percolate beneath the surface of other recent scholarship, including my own, which explores freedpeople’s use of the legal system but not the reasons for it. Although historians connect g 156 } L a u r a F . E D w a r D S such actions with changes in federal or state policies, they also emphasize that African Americans’ efforts to use the legal system preceded changes in federal or state policy. Such top-down change also provides a less compelling explanation for freedwomen’s legal actions, since Reconstructionera legislation did not extend civil and political rights to them.2 I never thought I would find answers to those questions in North Carolina’s slave past, although recent scholarship does root freedpeople’s activism in the period before the Civil War.3 Building on that literature, this essay argues that North Carolina’s legal culture before the Civil War is crucial in understanding women’s use of law afterward. The point is not to discount or dismiss the dramatic effects of top-down Reconstruction-era initiatives. Rather, the essay highlights understudied aspects of the existing legal culture that shaped how North Carolinians experienced those changes. The procedural practices and the conceptual logic of that legal culture have much to tell us, particularly in the area of law that dealt with public matters . In the parlance of the times, such matters concerned the maintenance of the peace, not the protection of individual rights. In this area of law, nuisances such as wandering livestock or redolent latrines shared quarters with violent neighbors, abusive husbands, recalcitrant slaves, and those accused of felonies, such as rape and murder. North Carolinians had regular, direct contact with such matters, because the legal process was so localized that it involved people—including women of both races—who did not have the rights necessary for participation in other legal matters and at other levels of the legal system. Even if they were never directly involved in a case themselves, most North Carolinians, black and white, witnessed such hearings and trials on a regular basis.4 This localized legal culture provides the context for understanding the post-emancipation period. Like other North Carolinians, women were familiar with the legal process and viewed the system in terms of the maintenance of the peace, not just the protection of individual rights. Those expectations explain why they thought that they could make use of the legal system after the Civil War, even when they could not claim the individual rights that historians now identify as its basic foundation. The essay is divided into three parts. The first section explores women’s relationship to the daily process of localized law in the...

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