Signposts: New Directions in Southern Legal History ed. by Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter (review)

The legal history of the American South has always had a distinctive flavor. The region maintained a separate body of laws for slaves and free people decades after (usually gradual) emancipation schemes had ended legal bondage in the northern states, and it had always exhibited a greater tolerance for extralegal violence—dueling and lynching being critical examples—than other parts of the nation.

The subject of this fine collection—eighteen chapters by important contemporary legal scholars and an editors’ introduction—is the legal history of the South as a distinctive region. Divided into three parts—“Colonial and Early National Legal Regimes,” “Law and Society in the Long Nineteenth Century,” and “Constitutionalism, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties”—Signposts begins with eighteenth-century Florida and New Orleans, the South as outpost of the eighteenth century Spanish Empire, and ends with the South of the 1960s, the most dramatic battlefield in the fight for civil rights. The chapters cover a complex range of issues—slavery, race, crime and punishment, married women’s control of property, the role of the grand jury, the importance of the Homestead Exemption in southern history, the secessionist constitutional perspective, etc.

A few of the chapters illustrate the quality of the volume as a whole. The introduction by Hadden and Minter skillfully frames the historiographical canvas against which many modern historians paint their portraits of the law’s role in the region’s development. Its detailed footnotes provide a valuable overview of the field. Two of the chapters in the first section deal with the colonial and early national periods—Thomas Ingersoll’s “The Law and Order Campaign in New Orleans, 1763–1765: A Comparative View” and Jennifer M. Spear’s “‘Using the Faculties Conceded to Her by Law: Slavery, Law and Agency in Spanish New Orleans, 1763–1803.” Together they contribute to the ongoing debate about differing legal regimes and their impact on the brutalities and the prospects for freedom inherent in the various slave systems.

Other chapters examine the importance of the legal regime for the economic well-being of free people. Laura Edwards’ “The Material Conditions of Dependency: The Hidden History of Free Women’s Control of Property in the Early Nineteenth Century South” views women’s control of home-made textile products as a challenge to traditional notions that married women had no legally recognized property rights in the early nineteenth century. James W. Ely’s “Homestead Exemption and Southern Legal Culture” studies how the South’s history as a debtor region played a part in the region’s development of homestead legislation during the nineteenth century. Homestead exemptions protected homes and other core familial property from creditors. Ely is especially helpful in his discussion of the tensions between homestead exemptions and the larger American tendency to treat land as a commodity, capable of easy purchase and sale.

Regarding the pivotal theme of race, Minter’s “Race, Property, and Negotiated Space in the American South: A Reconsideration of Buchanan v. Warley” explores how lawyers for the fledgling naacp were able to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to rule unanimously in 1917 that a Louisville Kentucky ordinance prohibiting white homeowners from selling to blacks was unconstitutional. Historians have long recognized Buchanan as an important stepping stone to the Supreme Court’s desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, but Minter shows further that Buchanan was critical in blocking any constitutional justification for an officially sanctioned system of apartheid in the United States.

Not all of the chapters in Signpost present so dire an alternative course of history as does Minter’s discussion of Buchanan, but all of them are well-crafted examples of scholarship that advance the field of southern legal history.