Brophy on Slavery and Jurisprudence at Washington College and VMI

Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina School of Law, has posted The Jurisprudence of Slavery, Freedom, and Union at Washington College, 1831-1861:

In the thirty years leading into Civil War faculty and students at Washington College and the Virginia Military Institute discussed ideas about adherence to Union, the legal justification of slavery, slaves’ claims to freedom, and jurisprudence. Their discussion of jurisprudence included the need for adherence to law, and the roles of morality, sentiment, and utility in law. This article draws upon public addresses, like graduation speeches, at Washington College and VMI, to recover the sophisticated legal ideas in circulation in Lexington.

Washington College was a place of Whig values of Union, adherence to law, and concern for utility. Speakers supported common Whig ideas, including the need for republican government to check excesses of democracy and a focus on the ways that a well-ordered society and respect for property and Christianity led to moral and economic progress. It also moved from a place where faculty held Enlightenment ideas about freedom – even if circumscribed by economic reality – to a place where slavery was embraced, partly because it was part of the Constitution.

By contrast, at the Virginia Military Institute, pro-slavery and pro-secession ideas were more prevalent. The constitutional visions at moderate Washington College and pro-secession institutions at more radical places, like the University of Virginia, William and Mary, and the College of Charleston, reflected the wide range of Southern ideas about Union, slavery, utility, sentiment, Republicanism, and constitutionalism. Those ideas framed the Southern response to political changes, as Southerners discussed the mandates of jurisprudence and the Constitution in the years leading into War.

Farbman, "Reconstructing Local Government"

Just out in the Vanderbilt Law Review: "Reconstructing Local Government," by Daniel Farbman (Climenko Fellow, Harvard Law School). Here's the abstract:

After the Civil War, the South faced a problem that was almost entirely new in the United States: a racially diverse and geographically integrated citizenry. In one fell swoop with emancipation, millions of former slaves were now citizens. The old system of plantation localism, built largely on the feudal control of the black population by wealthy white planters, was no longer viable. The urgent question facing both those who sought to reform and those who sought to preserve the “Old South” was: What should local government look like after emancipation? This Article tells the story of the struggle over the answer to that question. At the center of that struggle is an untold legal history of local government reform during Reconstruction. In the years immediately after the Civil War, idealistic Yankee reformers went south with the explicit aim of remaking the “fabric of southern culture” by rebuilding the South in the image of their northern homes. Specifically, in North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina, these reformers rewrote state constitutions to replace the plantation and county court with townships modeled on the New England town. Southern conservatives resisted the new townships, understanding them as foreign impositions targeted to destroy their old way of life. Within a decade they had dismantled the new townships and built the foundations of a new Jim Crow local order rooted in the county and approximating a return to the plantation. By telling this new history, this Article contributes to present scholarship in at least two ways. First, the story highlights a binary struggle between “communitarian” localism embodied in the civic participation of the New England town and “proprietary” localism embodied in the private power of the plantation owner. This struggle was framed with crystal clarity during Reconstruction, but it remains a powerful analytic tool for understanding today’s debates and struggles over local government. Second and relatedly, this history reveals the extent to which racial anxiety shaped and continues to shape local institutions. The communitarian township experiment was fueled by a vision of racial equality—and the white supremacist response to it was fueled by resentment and resistance to that vision. When we think about localism and racial inequality, we tend to think about the responses to school desegregation in the mid-twentieth century when racial resentment and fear during the “Second Reconstruction” drove white flight and contributed to resegregation through suburbanization. This Article shows that we may be looking at the wrong Reconstruction. In fact, the pathologies of local government, racial segregation, democracy, and protection of property were framed after the Civil War, in the crucible of a direct conflict between utopian racial egalitarianism and white supremacy.

Full text is available here.

Gross and de la Fuente in LAPA Workshop

Today in Princeton’s Law and Public Affairs Workshop: Comparing Law, Race, Slavery and Freedom in the Americas: Freedom Suits in Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia, 1763-1803, by Ariela Gross and Alejandro de la Fuente:

Enslaved people across the Americas made claims on legal institutions in order to gain their freedom or improve their lives. Many shared legal knowledge across broad networks that crossed boundaries of nation and empire. Yet those borders made a difference; the varying trajectories of legal regimes helped set the terms within which free and enslaved people of color operated. Our book is a transnational and comparative study of the ways in which people of color challenged the boundaries of slavery and freedom, black and white, using Cuba, Louisiana and Virginia as case studies over several centuries. Unlike older comparative studies, our work uses the techniques of cultural-legal history, studying the interactions of ordinary people with law in their everyday lives. The chapter we will present focuses on freedom suits by enslaved people during the Age of Revolution, 1763 to 1803.

Walker on Why Carolyn Bryant Lied about Emmett Till

Anders Walker, Saint Louis University, draws upon his forthcoming book, The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Paradox of Diversity (Yale University Press) for the post, Why Did She Lie about Emmett Till? on HNN.

Journal of Southern Legal History, Vol. 14

I was thrilled to see, when volume 24 (2016) of the Journal of Southern Legal History landed in my mail folder this week, that it included an article by one of my students, Blake B. Hulnick, Georgetown Law Class of 2015.  Here's the TOC:

Jared McClain, "An Analysis of Charles Pinckney's Contributions at the Constitutional Convention of 1787"

Blake B. Hulnick, "Consumer Crusader: Hugo Black as Senate Investigator"

David Franham, "'A High and Delicate Trust": How Ignorance and Indignation Combined to Expand President Lincoln's Claimed Power to Suspend Habeas Corpus in the Case of John Merryman"

Dalton Windham, "'The White Ribbon Army': Politics and Race Relations of the Georgia Women's Christian Temperance Union from 1880 to 1907"

Jack L. Sammons, "Brainerd Currie at Mercer: Two Versions"

Huebner's "Liberty and Union"

Timothy S. Huebner, the Irma O. Sternberg Professor of History at Rhodes College, has just published Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism with the University Press of Kansas.  Saith the press:

“This book is about the relationship between the Civil War generation and the founding generation,” Timothy S. Huebner states at the outset of this ambitious and elegant overview of the Civil War era. The book integrates political, military, and social developments into an epic narrative interwoven with the thread of constitutionalism—to show how all Americans engaged the nation's heritage of liberty and constitutional government.

Whether political leaders or plain folk, northerners or southerners, Republicans or Democrats, black or white, most free Americans in the mid-nineteenth century believed in the foundational values articulated in the Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the Constitution of 1787—and this belief consistently animated the nation's political debates. Liberty and Union shows, however, that different interpretations of these founding documents ultimately drove a deep wedge between North and South, leading to the conflict that tested all constitutional faiths. Huebner argues that the resolution of the Civil War was profoundly revolutionary and also inextricably tied to the issues of both slavery and sovereignty, the two great unanswered questions of the Founding era.

Drawing on a vast body of scholarship as well as such sources as congressional statutes, political speeches, military records, state supreme court decisions, the proceedings of black conventions, and contemporary newspapers and pamphlets, Liberty and Union takes the long view of the Civil War era. It merges Civil War history, US constitutional history, and African American history and stretches from the antebellum era through the period of reconstruction, devoting equal attention to the Union and Confederate sides of the conflict. And its in-depth exploration of African American participation in a broader culture of constitutionalism redefines our understanding of black activism in the nineteenth century. Altogether, this is a masterly, far-reaching work that reveals as never before the importance and meaning of the Constitution, and the law, for nineteenth-century Americans.

Jonathan Lurie, Rutgers University, blurbs: “At last, a brilliant, imaginative, and original re-examination which synthesizes the histories of the Civil War, of constitutional and legal development, and of the African American experience. The result is a masterful and beautifully written study that will stand out as a superb contribution.”

Tarter on Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia

New from the University of Virginia Press: A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia (July 2016), by Brent Tarter (Library of Virginia). A description from the Press:

In the lead-up to the Civil War, Virginia, like other southern states, amassed a large A Saga of the New South delves into the largely untold story of the decades-long postwar controversies over the repayment of that debt. The result is a major reinterpretation of late-nineteenth-century Virginia political history.

public debt while striving to improve transportation infrastructure and stimulate economic development.

The post–Civil War public debt controversy in Virginia reshaped the state’s political landscape twice. First it created the conditions under which the Readjuster Party, a biracial coalition of radical reformers, seized control of the state government in 1879 and successfully refinanced the debt; then it gave rise to a counterrevolution that led the elitist Democratic Party to eighty years of dominance in the state's politics. Despite the Readjusters’ victory in refinancing the debt and their increased spending for the popular new system of free public schools, the debt controversy generated a long train of legal disputes—at least eighty-five cases reached the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, and twenty-nine reached the Supreme Court of the United States. Through an in-depth look at these political and legal contests, A Saga of the New South sheds new light on the many obstacles that reformers faced in Virginia and the South after the Civil War.

A few blurbs:

"A Saga of the New South is a remarkable piece of highly original scholarship on a hugely important topic in Virginia history. Brent Tarter's treatment—thorough yet provocative, a vintage Tarter production—goes far to explain the ferocious struggle and historical discontinuity of late-nineteenth-century Virginia politics, a struggle that reverberated from Reconstruction down through the years of Harry F. Byrd to Massive Resistance." -- Peter Wallenstein

"No one knows Virginia's political history better than Brent Tarter. With expert skill, he traces the twisting path of Virginia's debt controversy through the tumultuous decades after the Civil War, revealing fault lines that endure to today." -- Edward Ayers

More information is available here.

Brophy's "University, Court, and Slave"

Out this month from OUP is University, Court, and Slave: Pro-Slavery Thought in Southern Colleges and Courts and the Coming of Civil War, by Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina School of Law:

University, Court, and Slave reveals long-forgotten connections between pre-Civil War southern universities and slavery. Universities and their faculty owned people-sometimes dozens of people-and profited from their labor while many slaves endured physical abuse on campuses. The profits of enslaved labor helped pay for education, and faculty and students at times actively promoted the institution. They wrote about the history of slavery, argued for its central role in the southern economy, and developed a political theory that justified slavery. The university faculty spoke a common language of economic utility, history, and philosophy with those who made the laws for the southern states. Their extensive writing promoting slavery helps us understand how southern politicians and judges thought about the practice.

As Alfred L. Brophy shows, southern universities fought the emancipation movement for economic reasons, but used history, philosophy, and law in an attempt to justify their position. Indeed, as the antislavery movement gained momentum, southern academics and their allies in the courts became bolder in their claims. Some went so far as to say that slavery was supported by natural law. The combination of economic reasoning and historical precedent helped shape a southern, proslavery jurisprudence. Following Lincoln's November 1860 election, southern academics joined politicians, judges, lawyers, and other leaders in arguing that their economy and society was threatened. Southern jurisprudence led them to believe that any threats to slavery and property justified secession.

Bolstered by the courts, academics took their case to the southern public-and ultimately to the battlefield-to defend slavery. A path-breaking and deeply researched history of southern universities' investment in and defense of slavery, University, Court, and Slave will fundamentally transform our understanding of the institutional foundations of pro-slavery thought.

Professor Brophy discusses his book here.  TOC here; endorsements after the jump.

Aucoin, "Thomas Goode Jones: Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South"

New from the University of Alabama Press: Thomas Goode Jones: Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South, by Brent Aucoin (Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary). A description from the Press:

This first comprehensive biography of Thomas Goode Jones records the life of a man whose political career reflects the fascinating and unsettled history of Alabama and the Deep South at the turn of the twentieth century. . . .

Born in 1844, Jones served in the Confederate army and after the war identified as a conservative “Bourbon” Democrat. He served as Alabama's governor from 1890 to 1894 and as a federal judge from 1901 until his death in 1914. As a veteran, politician, and judge, Jones embodied numerous roles in the shifting political landscape of the South.

Jones was not, however, a reflexive conformist and sometimes pursued policies at odds with his party. Jones’s rhetoric and support of African American civil rights were exceptional and earned him truculent criticism from unrepentant racist factions in his party. His support was so fearless that it inspired Booker T. Washington to recommend Jones to Republican president Theodore Roosevelt as a federal judge. On the bench, Jones garnered national attention for his efforts to end peonage and lynching, and yet he also enabled the establishment of legalized segregation in Alabama, confounding attempts easily to categorize him as an odious reactionary or fearless progressive.. . . 

More information is available here.

Adkins's "Making Modern Florida"

It’s the official publication date for Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution (University Press of Florida), by Mary E Adkins, University of Florida Levin College of Law:

Mid-twentieth-century Florida was a state in flux. Its explosive growth could be seen in rapidly burgeoning cities and suburbs, the development of the Kennedy Space Center during the space race, and the impending construction of Walt Disney World. Florida’s antiquated 1885 constitution was no match for the dramatic changes that took place in the makeup of the state during this time.

Many people recognized the shortcomings of the old constitution and worked to overhaul it. However, a small group of rural legislators known as the “Pork Chop Gang” controlled the state and thwarted several attempts to modernize the constitution. But through court-imposed redistribution of legislators and the hard work of state leaders, the constitution was modernized and the executive branch was reorganized.

In Making Modern Florida, Mary Adkins goes behind the scenes to examine the history and impact of the 1966–68 revision of the Florida state constitution. With storytelling flair, Adkins uses interviews and detailed analysis of speeches and transcripts to vividly capture the moves, gambits, and backroom moments necessary to create and introduce a new state constitution. This carefully researched account brings to light the constitutional debates and political processes in the growth to maturity of what is now the nation’s third largest state.

Endorsements after the jump:

Brown on Property Ownership among Former Slaves

Eleanor Marie Brown, George Washington University Law School, has posted On the Evolution of Property Ownership Among Former Slaves, Newly Freedmen, which is forthcoming in the
Journal of Law, Property, and Society.

One might think of the slave property system of provision grounds (or “provisioning”) in the West Indies as a happy coalition of interests between planters (who wanted to provide slaves incentives to feed themselves), Westminster (who wanted well-fed slaves to ensure the productivity of the sugar sector, a hefty tax contributor to the Exchequer), and slaves (who saw the advantages of a system which ensured that they were fed and encouraged private enterprise). Yet while this was generally true, notably, not all members of the plantocracy viewed these developments as positive. An outspoken minority feared that the roots of the ultimate failure of plantation society would lie in the slave provisioning system. Moreover, they pointed to the resistance of the plantocracy in the U.S. South to private enterprise among slaves as the preferable course. The views of this outspoken minority ultimately proved prescient, as a struggle over true ownership of provisioning plots played out against the backdrop of Emancipation in the British colonies.

I focus on the era immediately after British Emancipation. During slavery planters were willing to grant slaves provisioning plots because the planters themselves exacted a benefit from doing so; they essentially “outsourced” the job of feeding the slaves to the slaves themselves. Once labor became free, this benefit vanished. Planters began to wonder how to handle ex-slaves farming provision grounds. Although provision grounds were de facto (perceived to be) slave property, typically these lands were instead de jure planter property (plots at the edge of the plantations for which the planters held title).

The issue became particularly acute in the aftermath of Emancipation, when planters sought to “tie” former-slaves-turned-freedmen to the plantations to secure a reliable workforce. Newly freed, the former slaves had no obligation to accept planters’ “offers” of employment on the plantations.

Property acquisition during slavery (when there were no formal protections) turned out to be singularly important in determining who continued to remain in the employ of the plantation post-Emancipation. The irony is that the extensive nature of the provisioning system (which acculturated slaves to a form of “property-and-contract-lite”) made it less likely that ex-slaves continued to remain in the employ of the planters once leaving became a viable choice. West Indian freedmen who already had a taste of property ownership were typically not enamored with long-term plantation employment.

Following this logic, one might predict that planters in the U.S. South would ultimately prove more successful in maintaining a long-term plantation-like society (even after the abolition of slavery) than their West Indian counterparts because they never allowed provisioning to develop. This prediction is spot-on. In particular, the early demise of status relationships that undergirded plantation society in the West Indies had much to do with the general failure of share tenancy (and its most popular iteration, sharecropping) in the West Indies.

In a system of sharecropping, a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on the land. This significantly reduces the strain that up-front labor costs place on a plantation’s cash-flow. Although now most widely associated in the popular American imagination with the U.S. South, sharecropping has a long historical heritage that pre-dates Southern plantation society. Sharecropping was attractive to the West Indian planter for the same reason that it was attractive to the Southern planter – primarily as a mechanism of tying slaves to the plantations while saving on labor costs.

In summary, both planters in the West Indies and the U.S. South sought to institutionalize sharecropping arrangements. But it is largely because of the provisioning system that West Indian planters fail in their efforts, while Southern planters succeed. West Indian slaves opted instead in large numbers to use the money that they had accumulated from contracting at food markets during slavery to buy their own land and become de jure property owners.

The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case

As part of its series “Tripod: New Orleans at 300,” New Orleans’s NPR station (WWNO) has recently aired an interview with Michael Ross, University of Maryland, on his book The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case: Race, Law, and Justice in the Reconstruction Era (Oxford, 2015).  The podcast and accompanying story are here.  From the standpoint of confederates, Professor Ross explained, Reconstruction was the world turned upside down.  "White men and black men could serve together on a jury and reach a unanimous verdict of acquitting two African American women of a sensational crime because they believe the government did not prove its case.”

Oast's "Institutional Slavery"

Although we didn’t realize it until quite recently, even before news about Georgetown and its slaves broke, Jennifer Oast, Associate Professor of History at Bloomsburg University, Pennsylvania, had published (with Cambridge University Press) a book that provides some context, Institutional Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges, and Businesses in Virginia, 1680–1860:

The traditional image of slavery begins with a master and a slave. However, not all slaves had traditional masters; some were owned instead by institutions, such as church congregations, schools, colleges, and businesses. This practice was pervasive in early Virginia; its educational, religious, and philanthropic institutions were literally built on the backs of slaves. Virginia's first industrial economy was also developed with the skilled labor of African American slaves. This book focuses on institutional slavery in Virginia as it was practiced by the Anglican and Presbyterian churches, free schools, and four universities: the College of William and Mary, Hampden-Sydney College, the University of Virginia, and Hollins College. It also examines the use of slave labor by businesses and the Commonwealth of Virginia in industrial endeavors. This is not only an account of how institutions used slavery to further their missions, but also of the slaves who belonged to institutions.

Here’s the TOC:

Introduction
1. 'Unlawful for any Christian': slave-owning Anglican churches in Virginia
2. 'The legacies of well inclin'd gentlemen': slave-owning free schools in Virginia
3. 'The worst kind of slavery': slave-owning Presbyterian churches in Virginia
4. 'So large a family as the college': slavery at the College of William and Mary
5. 'Faithful and valuable': slavery at Hampden-Sydney College, the University of Virginia, and Hollins College
6. 'To make a trifle for themselves': industries as institutional slaveholders
Conclusion.

Romeo on "Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri"

New from the University of Georgia Press: Gender and the Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War Missouri, by Sharon Romeo (University of Alberta). A description from the Press:

Gender and the Jubilee is a bold reconceptualization of black freedom during the Civil War that uncovers the political and constitutional claims made by African American women. By analyzing the actions of women in the urban environment of St. Louis and the surrounding areas of rural Missouri, Romeo uncovers the confluence of military events, policy changes, and black agency that shaped the gendered paths to freedom and citizenship.

During the turbulent years of the Civil War crisis, African American women asserted their vision of freedom through a multitude of strategies. They took concerns ordinarily under the jurisdiction of civil courts, such as assault and child custody, and transformed them into military matters. African American women petitioned military police for “free papers”; testified against former owners; fled to contraband camps; and “joined the army” with their male relatives, serving as cooks, laundresses, and nurses. 

Freedwomen, and even enslaved women, used military courts to lodge complaints against employers and former masters, sought legal recognition of their marriages, and claimed pensions as the widows of war veterans. Through military venues, African American women in a state where the institution of slavery remained unmolested by the Emancipation Proclamation, demonstrated a claim on citizenship rights well before they would be guaranteed through the establishment of the Fourteenth Amendment. The litigating slave women of antebellum St. Louis, and the female activists of the Civil War period, left a rich legal heritage to those who would continue the struggle for civil rights in the postbellum era.

And a blurb:

This is a landmark book. Rather than simply resulting from the work of lawmakers who ratified the Fourteenth Amendment during Reconstruction, the concept of ‘citizenship’ emerged out of the innumerable actions carried out by African Americans in the slaveholding states during the Civil War. Romeo shows that in war-torn Missouri, black women petitioned Union officers for their freedom, filed lawsuits against their former owners in military courts, and claimed widows’ pensions after the deaths of their veteran husbands. By documenting black women’s activism in a state where the Emancipation Proclamation did not even apply, Romeo forces us to reexamine precisely how and why constitutional and legal change occurred during this period.” —Timothy Huebner

More information is available here.

Henderson on Slave Property and Policing in the American South

Taja-Nia Y. Henderson, Rutgers-Newark Law, has posted Property, Penality, and (Racial) Profiling, which appears in Stanford Journal of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties 12 (2016): 177-211    

This Article historicizes societal associations of “blackness” with criminality through an examination of the peculiar property security role of criminal law enforcement mechanisms (and spaces) in the service of slavery in the early American South. Drawing on archival and other historical source material to illuminate previously understudied functions and functionaries of law in a slave society, the Article demonstrates how the "mass incarceration" of slave property in penal facilities for matters falling entirely outside the dictates of the criminal law — whether for discipline, “safekeeping,” or sale — was a central element of the everyday law of slavery in early America. These practices not only shaped law enforcement in this period, but also helped to cement the cultural entwinement of race and criminal suspicion in the region.

Weekend Roundup

• HNN collects much historical and historically inflected commentary on Justice Scalia's legacy and the appointment of his successor here.  Along similar lines, Wednesday's New York Times ran a piece by Emily Bazelon and John Fabian Witt (Yale Law School) on "Senate Republicans and the Supreme Court: Where Is This Headed Exactly?"

• From the Rome News Tribune: “The Georgia Legal History Foundation will present a workshop in Rome on March 3-4 that will revisit ‘Georgia’s Last Frontier: The People, Lawyers and Judges of Northwest Georgia-Cherokee Country.’”

Roger B. Taney (credit)

• Randall Lesaffer, Professor of Legal History at Tilburg Law School, reviews the history of Dutch-Belgian land swaps on OUPblog.

• Seth Barrett Tillman, in the Baltimore Sun, on whether Ex parte Merryman speaks to whether Taney’s statue (right) should remain on public view 

• Paul Finkelman on HuffPo on whether Ted Cruz is a “natural born citizen.”

• We all know that in 2013 US tax historians rose to the occasion of their great centennials, that of the Sixteenth Amendment and the Revenue Act of 1913.  Now come the Canadians: “Osgoode Hall Law School of York University and the Canadian Tax Foundation are planning a special centennial publication to mark the 100th anniversary of the Income Tax Act,” writes Canadian Legal History Blog. 

• The Library of Congress has digitized its collection of Rosa Parks's papers and put them on-line.

• The legal historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Kenneth Mack participated in a discussion at the Harvard Law School on “an international legal effort now underway in the Caribbean to hold European nations that engaged in that region’s slave trade accountable to the modern-day descendants of those slaves.”  H/t: Harvard Gazette

• Princeton University's School of Architecture is sponsoring a series of lectures called Detroit 101.  It asks, "Is the contemporary narrative of Detroit based on a fact or fiction?"  The topics are Arts & Image, Urbanism & Design, The Arts of Urban Transition, Philanthropy & Public Policy, and History, Race and Real Estate, a topic upon which Thomas Sugrue, NYU, will, with others, address.

• ICYMI: the Washington Post ran a lovely, illustrated story on FSA photographers and the Great Depression; NPR ran one on The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict, "the earliest known prison memoir by an African-American writer."

 Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Keppel, "Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture"

New from Louisiana State University Press: Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture: Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation, by Ben Keppel (University of Oklahoma). A description from the Press:

Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legally sanctioned segregation in American public schools, brought issues of racial equality to the forefront of the nation’s attention. Beyond its repercussions for the educational system, the decision also heralded broad changes to concepts of justice and national identity. “Brown v. Board” and the Transformation of American Culture examines the prominent cultural figures who taught the country how to embrace new values and ideas of citizenship in the aftermath of this groundbreaking decision.

Through the lens of three cultural “first responders,” Ben Keppel tracks the creation of an American culture in which race, class, and ethnicity could cease to imply an inferior form of citizenship. Psychiatrist and social critic Robert Coles, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning studies of children and schools in desegregating regions of the country, helped citizens understand the value of the project of racial equality in the lives of regular families, both white and black. Comedian Bill Cosby leveraged his success with gentle, family-centric humor to create televised spaces that challenged the idea of whiteness as the cultural default. Public television producer Joan Ganz Cooney designed programs like Sesame Street that extended educational opportunities to impoverished children, while offering a new vision of urban life in which diverse populations coexisted in an atmosphere of harmony and mutual support.

Together, the work of these pioneering figures provided new codes of conduct and guided America through the growing pains of becoming a truly pluralistic nation. In this cultural history of the impact of Brown v. Board, Keppel paints a vivid picture of a society at once eager for and resistant to the changes ushered in by this pivotal decision. 

More information is available here.

Vanderford on "The Legacy of St. George Tucker"

New from the University of Tennessee Press: The Legacy of St. George Tucker: College Professors in Virginia Confront Slavery and Rights of States, 1771–1897, by Chad Vanderford (University of Texas of the Permian Basin). The Press describes the book as an effort to "isolate[] the different ideological strands in southern political thought of this era" and "understand these ideas in the context of their time." More from the Press:

St. George Tucker (1752–1827), Founding Father, professor, and political theorist, saw clearly that slavery runs against the grain of the values articulated in the Declaration of Inde­pendence. Under certain narrowly construed circumstances, however, he thought it necessary to tolerate slavery. He viewed secession as an extreme step, but one that the Declaration of Independence left open as a possibility for all free states.

St. George Tucker’s arguments hinged on a modern view of natural right that builds on the premise that political power can only be legitimate if it rests on the consent of the governed. He believed that equally free and independent individuals constructed a voluntary union of equally free and independent states. His son Henry Tucker (1780–1848), and grandson, John Randolph Tucker (1823–1897) sought to defend this ideology of modern natural right against fellow professors, North and South, who tended to replace it with the ancient ideology of natural right: the view that wisdom gives one the title to command. Many southern intellectuals came to believe that individuals are not equally free and independent by nature; many northerners came to argue that the states had never been equally free and independent. These disagreements contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War.

And a blurb (cribbed from the book's amazon page):

“In The Legacy of St. George Tucker, Chad Vanderford provides a cogent longitudinal explication of how Virginia intellectuals constructed and defined proslavery ideology and state rights. He reminds twenty-first-century readers that in order to judge late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century thinkers fairly, they must position basic political ideas within the context of their day, not ours. Vanderford’s book will prove valuable not only for students and researchers of political theory, but also of southern intellectual life and the political worlds of the Colonial, Early National, and Old South.”
--John David Smith

Brophy on a Confederate History in the YLJ

Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina School of Law, has posted A Confederate History in the Yale Law Journal.

This essay revisits Yale history professor Allen Johnson’s article “The Constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Acts,” which appeared in the Yale Law Journal in December 1921. Johnson wrote about a law that had been nullified by the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment nearly 70 years before. His article was part of the scholarly reconsideration of the origins of Civil War designed to reconcile North and South. Northerners, especially Northern scholars, blamed the Civil War on fanatics on both sides and in some ways exculpated Southerners for their role in the War.

While scholars of memory have explored the rewriting of history in the early twentieth century, no one has noticed how it stretched outside of history books and into the pages of the distinguished Yale Law Journal. The efforts to re-write constitutional history and to defend the south’s case for one of the most reviled acts in American history reached into territory and to scholars we had not previously known. This essay thus implicates a wider stretch of legal and historical writing than we had known in the efforts to defend the proslavery south. 

Downs and Masur, eds., "The World the Civil War Made"

New from the University of North Carolina Press: The World the Civil War Made, edited by Gregory P. Downs (University of California, Davis) and Kate Masur (Northwestern University). The TOC suggests that there's lots of material here that should interest our readers. From the Press:

At the close of the Civil War, it was clear that the military conflict that began in South Carolina and was fought largely east of the Mississippi River had changed the politics, policy, and daily life of the entire nation. In an expansive reimagining of post–Civil War America, the essays in this volume explore these profound changes not only in the South but also in the Southwest, in the Great Plains, and abroad. Resisting the tendency to use Reconstruction as a catchall, the contributors instead present diverse histories of a postwar nation that stubbornly refused to adopt a unified ideology and remained violently in flux. Portraying the social and political landscape of postbellum America writ large, this volume demonstrates that by breaking the boundaries of region and race and moving past existing critical frameworks, we can appreciate more fully the competing and often contradictory ideas about freedom and equality that continued to define the United States and its place in the nineteenth-century world.

Contributors include Amanda Claybaugh, Laura F. Edwards, Crystal N. Feimster, C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Steven Hahn, Luke E. Harlow, Stephen Kantrowitz, Barbara Krauthamer, K. Stephen Prince, Stacey L. Smith, Amy Dru Stanley, Kidada E. Williams, and Andrew Zimmerman.

More information is available here.