The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South [ペーパーバック]

Laura F. Edwards' The People and Their Peace argues that between 1780 and 1840 the government that mattered most to ordinary people did not happen at the federal or even the state levels. To borrow from John Murrin, both federal and state governments were "midget" institutions in a giant land. Instead, ordinary people looked to local government within their county juridictions; here, magistrates (justices of the peace), utilizing local knowledge, the "credit" of individuals in the community, and a kaleidoscopic amalgam of legal principles, upheld the "peace" of the community. Legal decisions were designed to maintain the interpersonal relationships of the community, not to uphold some abstract notion of individual rights. In this system, dependents in the patriarchal household (women and slaves) exerted some pressure on the patriarchs in the name of the peace, though such pressure never guaranteed protection or ended their subordination. Preserving the peace did not require judicial consistency. By the 1820s, legal reformers began pressing for centralization of legal authority, codification of judicial decisions, and the creation of a "state" framework to impose consistency upon legal activities. In the context of the Nullification Controversy in South Carolina (1830-1833) and the revision of the North Carolina Constitution (1835), legal reformers were able to solidify the position of the state by linking the defense of freemen's liberties to the state. The result was some erosion, but not the effacement, of the localized legal world of keeping the peace. Winners were individualized, rights-bearing white men. Losers were women and slaves. This line of analysis poses several interpretive challenges to histories of early America. The old "states' rights" framework seems less central to the history of early America as Edwards elevates the truly local community to the center of analysis. Edward's insistence on the coexistence of these two legal worlds also deserves further parsing out -- to what extent did the "state" as a separate identity in the early American republic share space with the localized world? Would we see a blending of these two worlds in other areas of governance besides adjudication of criminal and civil matters? For example, what we would do with town petitions sent to North Carolina's General Assembly in the 1790s asking for a legislative stamp of approval of very specific local regulations? Edwards' provocative analysis has certainly caused me to rethink my own work on early national North Carolina, and, no doubt, I will have to think about her arguments as I finish my dissertation. This book will appeal to historians of law, those interested in the construction of patriarchy in the early republic, the legal lives of women and slaves, and students of governance in the early American republic.

The amount of research is commendable, but the writing style and structure lacked. Too much focus on local courts vs. state courts.