The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (review)

This brilliant, provocative, sometimes quirky, but consistently engaging book is filled with striking insights about, and careful readings of, courthouse documents and appellate opinions from post-Revolutionary North and South Carolina, but its significance ranges far beyond that period and those locales.

Edwards distinguishes between localized law and state law. The former was implemented and experienced in the towns and courthouses of several counties in the Carolinas. The latter was articulated in statutes and textbooks and applied by appellate courts in the states' capitols. Edwards' central argument is that localized law was markedly different from state law for much of the antebellum period, and that the region's elites engaged in an incompletely successful project to create state law that would displace localized law. "Even as state law acquired institutional mass over time in the form of statutes and appellate rulings, the people who tended localized law kept to their own paths, absorbed by what they encountered there and largely oblivious to events at the state level, despite efforts to attract their attention" (4).

The value of Edwards' approach is most clearly evident in her discussion of the role of "credit"—credibility—in localized law. Edwards shows how neighbors deployed their considerable knowledge about each other to judge the extent to which their actions preserved or disrupted the localized peace, a term that sometimes encompassed more than violations of state law. In drawing those conclusions, localized law allowed people to give more credit to testimony by women, free blacks, and slaves than state law appeared to allow. Edwards' achievement in bringing localized law to the foreground helps to explain why "the social constraints" on slave owners—as well as the notorious case of State v. Mann—that served as a substitute for legal constraints on them in North Carolina, should be understood as the constraints imposed by localized law. She also shows how congregations in churches responded to breaches of the peace in ways similar to the responses in localized law.

When Edwards turns to the elite project of constructing state law, her argument sometimes seems forced. She argues that state law sought to displace localized law by offering a vision of rights lodged in abstract individuals who lacked the person-specific characteristics producing the credibility on which localized law turned. She presents creative readings of the invocation of rights in the nullification controversy, but the connection that she sees between those discussions and the displacement of localized law seems too thin.

The People and Their Peace may well transform the study of antebellum law, and not merely that dealing with the South. Edwards unobtrusively consults a wide range of interdisciplinary theory, from legal sociology's emphasis on the law in action to semi-autonomous legal fields and modern critical legal theory. Scholars interested in legal and Southern history will profit enormously from engaging with its arguments.