Vol. 9 No. 1 (January 1999) pp. 34-36.

ROOTS OF DISORDER: RACE AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH, 1817-80 by Christopher Waldrep. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. 267 pp. Cloth $45.00. Paper $18.95. ISBN 0-252-02425-7.

Reviewed by Richard Lowe, Department of History, University of North Texas. Email: lowe@unt.edu.

In an effort to understand popular attitudes toward law and legal institutions, the author, associate professor of history at Eastern Illinois University, focuses on Vicksburg and surrounding Warren County, Mississippi, in the mid-nineteenth century. Although scholars have usually examined statute law and state and federal Supreme Court decisions to approach this general topic, Waldrep studies local magistrates, grand jurors, sheriffs, and county courts ö and how black and white Vicksburgers reacted to them. Using many previously untapped primary sources, the author has produced a valuable account of how law worked, or did not work, in one nineteenth-century community of the American South.

Organized in seven chapters (with an introduction, a conclusion, and an appendix), the book complements the usual examinations of elite attitudes at the state and national levels by analyzing the behavior of men and women at the grass-roots level of Mississippi society. The author begins by laying out the history of Vicksburg and Warren County, emphasizing the more cosmopolitan and individualistic nature of the city, where formal law was more important, and the countryside of small plantation communities, where informal agreements among whites maintained order and justice as defined by whites. Waldrep then examines law enforcement in a slave society in more detail, showing that white Mississippians did everything possible to handle slave misconduct (and sometimes interpersonal relations among whites) with localized, informal procedures. Whippings on the plantation or duels between gentlemen ö rather than appearances before judges and courts, where due-process rights "interfered" with justice as defined by the dominant white class ö were the preferred methods of maintaining order.

A third chapter demonstrates that as Vicksburg matured as an antebellum community, formal law increasingly intruded on the lives of Warren Countyās citizens. More infringements of public order came under the control of formal judicial procedures, and judges and lawyers increasingly insisted on the protections of defendantsā due-process rights, even for slave defendants. This development was unpopular among most white citizens, who "approached the law understanding that ultimately it could not do what they wanted done" (p. 58).

The authorās examination of law in Vicksburg during the Civil War necessarily stresses the disruptions and dislocations caused by siege, Confederate surrender, and occupation by the United States Army. Under the pressure of war and an overpowering enemy presence, white citizens tended to downplay their antebellum social and political separations and pull together in a defensive posture. Jews and Irishmen, even women and poor illiterates, were welcomed into established white circles as fellow victims of Yankee outsiders. This process, begun during the war, would continue in a much more pronounced manner during Reconstruction.

In his chapter on Reconstruction under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, Waldrep throws new and interesting light on the Black Codes, those postwar state laws designed to regulate and control the former slaves. Although historians have almost uniformly described these laws as an attempt to recover some of the power over freedmen that slavery had formerly provided, Waldrep detects an ironic twist. By bringing the former slaves under the control of formal law, white southerners had also extended to the former servants the protections of the law: habeas corpus, protections against forced confessions, the necessity to cross every T and dot every I in legal procedures, etc. The Black Codes "opened a world where whites had to follow due process when disciplining laborers" (p. 113). This was entirely unsatisfactory to men accustomed to handling black miscreants without outside interference.

Congressional or "radical" Reconstruction came to Mississippi in 1867 and brought with it citizenship and political rights for the former slaves. The author demonstrates clearly that the freedmen embraced formal law as a protection of their rights. They demanded no additional rights or legal protections, only those promised in the federal and state constitutions and in formal legal procedures. Meanwhile, whites increasingly viewed local and county courts as agencies to protect property rights. "They must have doubted that impoverished blacks would capably guard the property of their former owners" (p. 132).

As former slaves asserted their rights and won election to local and state offices under the congressional plan of Reconstruction, Vicksburgās white population completed the racial unification they had begun during the Civil War. Urban Irishmen and Jews joined hands with Confederate (and Yankee) veterans and rural dirt farmers ö and white Republicans linked arms with white Democrats ö to stand against the new order of black political power. Whether bitter whites blamed their troubles on corrupt black officeholders (and there were a few) or on the failure of law and courts to protect their property, they agreed that formal legal procedures were not up to the task of insuring a traditional, orderly society. Only the old ways, the informal and personal discipline of the antebellum plantation or the power of the mob, could return Vicksburg and Warren County to peace and order and rule by those more suited to leadership. Armed conflict between former slaves and Warren County whites in December 1874 resulted in several dozen deaths (mostly African Americans), the forced resignations of some leading black officeholders, the end of Reconstruction in the county, and the return of white rule. "Whites had learned something from their experiences in slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction: Law could never be made oppressive enough to effectively control African Americans" (p. 174).

Research sources for this study included case files for the county circuit court, criminal court, and county court. These records sometimes included transcripts of testimony, depositions, jural instructions, and maps. In addition, the author gathered information from minute books, docket books, and U.S. census records as well as from personal papers, diaries, newspapers, and secondary sources. In short, Waldrep has gone where few scholars before him have gone, and the result is an impressively researched and convincing interpretation of local law in one nineteenth-century southern community. Similar studies for communities in other sections of the United States should provide a deeper understanding of how formal law and informal, personal enforcement of public order have shaped the evolution of law.

Given the bookās strengths, it may seem quibbling to point out a few rough spots. Although the subtitle claims coverage of the years from 1817 through 1880, the book focuses mainly on the period from the 1830s to 1875. The subtitle is problematic in another way as well: the book examines race and criminal justice in one city and county of Mississippi, not in the entire American South.

The author occasionally makes sweeping statements that imply a universal pattern, something historians are generally loath to do. For example, Waldrep writes that "every white southerner understood what keeping African Americans Īdownā meant and what it did not mean. It did not mean going to law; it did not mean relying on a police state. It meant vigilante violence and lynching" (p. 1). Although they were regrettably few and often overlooked, some white southerners did speak out against mob law, whether in the antebellum period or later. Similarly, the author contends that "the tension between constitutionalism and extralegal violence is a central paradox of American society" (p. 15). That tension, of course, has never been limited to the United States. Incautious statements like these, although bothersome, detract only marginally from this innovative study of an important topic.

Copyright 1995