New South-New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South

This otherwise excellent book's greatest weakness, however, is methodological. Certainly no one has done as complete an analysis of the appellate cases on agricultural credit and tenure. On the other hand, the judicial reports from which Woodman draws his evidence offer only the slightest glimpse of the social forces which generated the conflicts that came before the courts. As Woodman first noted in 1979, "a full study of the law and southern agriculture would ... require an analysis of both formal and informal law."(2) One wishes that he had consulted the manuscript sources which often lie behind the courts' distillations, sources which might tell a more complex story than that afforded by Southern jurists' summary of the facts at hand. And, as Woodman himself acknowledges, judges only rarely made "their assumptions concerning social change explicit."(p. 101)

Woodman is correct, I think, to emphasize that Southern law reflected the politics of class conflict far more than it represented some detached interpretive process on the part of jurists. Yet the constricted scope of New South-New Law reduces the terrain of this conflict to the judicial chamber, leaving it all somewhat bloodless. How did the various classes - merchants, landowners, agricultural laborers - act to advance their position outside the courtroom, both in the realm of politics and day-to-day social practices? Why did judges privilege one set of interests over another? These larger questions await a fuller treatment, perhaps one to be provided by Woodman himself.

Alex Lichtenstein Florida International University

ENDNOTES

1. Harold D. Woodman, "Post-Civil War Southern Agriculture and the Law," Agricultural History 53 (January 1979): 319-37.

2. Ibid., p. 321.

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