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Reviewed by:
  • Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History ed. by Sally E. Hadden, Patricia Hagler Minter
  • Steven Harmon Wilson
Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History. Edited by Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Pp. 488. Illustrations, figures, notes, index.)

For a quarter-century, students, teachers, and scholars of southern and legal history have relied upon David J. Bodenhamer and James W. Ely Jr.’s Ambivalent Legacy: A Legal History of the South (1984) and Kermit L. Hall and Ely’s An Uncertain Tradition: Constitutionalism and the History of the South (1989) for expert guidance [End Page 79] about how to begin work on a topic or where to go next with an interesting question. Like those pioneering collections, Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History, co-edited by Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter, brings together wide-ranging scholarship that both maps the known terrain and points the way forward. The editors have arranged the seventeen diverse chapters within three temporal and topical sections: “Colonial and Early National Legal Regimes”; “Law and Society in the Long Nineteenth Century”; and, “Constitutionalism, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties.” Introducing the current selections, Hadden and Minter suggest that Signposts is broader, both topically and geographically, than the path-breaking earlier volumes.

A more important difference, perhaps, is although issues of slave law dominated the earlier volumes, slavery plays a less central role in Signposts. James Ely (co-editor of both earlier volumes) here surveys the long evolution of a homestead exemption in property law in relation to changing southern culture. Other contributors view property law through a gendered lens, including Laura F. Edwards’s consideration of free women’s control of property in the early nineteenth-century and Susan Richbourg Parker’s examination of dowry property and female inheritance patterns in Spanish Florida. Still other authors study broad legal institutions and even specific individuals through their interactions with southern culture and politics. This emphasis also describes Hadden’s own contribution on South Carolina Grand Jury presentments, Alfred L. Brophy’s thoughts on the intellectual development of judges and lawyers in the Old South, Tim Alan Garrison’s review of lawyer Elisha W. Chester’s efforts during Cherokee Removal, and Jessica K. Lowe’s study of St. George Tucker and “Judging in Federal Virginia.” Thomas N. Ingersoll’s chapter on the law and order movement in late colonial New Orleans and Lisa Lindquist Dorr’s essay on southern women’s experiences during the alcohol prohibition era both review the growth of state and police powers while necessarily touching on issues of race, class, and gender.

The legacy of slavery and the issue of race remains relevant to any study of the South, and several authors in this volume confront these topics, although in diverse ways. Hence, Minter reconsiders the residential segregation case of Buchanan v. Warley (1917) in light of “Race, Property, and Negotiated Space,” while Christopher W. Schmidt examines how the libertarian response to the Civil Rights Movement led to a shift from the language of white supremacy vs. equality to a more nuanced but problematic discourse of liberty vs. equality. More familiar ground is covered in Jennifer M. Spear’s chapter on slavery law in Spanish New Orleans, Christopher R. Waldrep’s observation on democracy and lynching in America, Peter Wallenstein’s essay on race, law, and southern public higher education in the century after the Civil War, and Charles L. Zelden’s timely review of the southern roots of what he calls the “Reapportionment Revolution.”

That these diverse approaches in subject and source materials can sit so comfortably and so usefully alongside each other in a single volume shows that the once distinct currents of legal and constitutional history have mostly converged during the last twenty-five years. Intended as a complementary rather than a replacement volume, Signposts deserves to join the two classics on the southern historian’s essential bookshelf. The latest title is strikingly confident: although in the acknowledgments they pay homage to the two pioneering works, Hadden and Minter want readers to know that the field of southern legal history is no longer [End Page 80] ambivalent or uncertain...

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