A different take on 19th-century law

On H-Net, Timothy S. Huebner reviews Laura F. Edwards's new book The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South,
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). The book is based on micro-research in six counties in North and South Carolina. This passage from the review caught my attention, and it wouldn't surprise me if something similar were true in other regions, especially near the frontier:

Courts developed around magistrates in order to deal with more serious
offenses, but Edwards convincingly shows that in the final analysis
the people wielded considerable power within this system.  Possessing
a deep sense of their responsibility to the community, as well as a
basic understanding of local legal processes, men and women--whether
black or white, rich or poor--routinely brought complaints against
others for breaching the peace.  Such complaints empowered individuals
at the same time that they preserved existing hierarchy.  "Local
officials considered complaints on a case-by-case basis, righting
specific wrongs done to the metaphorical public body without extending
additional rights to any category of dependents," Edwards explains (p.
110).  Thus, local officials responding to complaints could "undercut
the domestic authority of one husband or one master" without making
any generalized rule that affected husbands or masters (p. 110).

I haven't met up with the book itself yet, but I hope to soon.

She fought the law, and sometimes won

H-Net has a very handy review of A. Cheree Carlson's new book from University of Illinois Press, The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law. Carlson tells the stories of six prominent 19th- and early 20th-century cases involving women. Reviewer Tamar Carroll highlights the case of

Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard, a Presbyterian minister's wife who drew her husband's ire when she took up Swedenborgianism, a mystical philosophy "at odds with traditional Christianity," and tried to convert to Methodism, more amenable to her newfound spiritual beliefs (p. 24). Before she could do so, Rev. Packer had her confined in the "maniac" ward of the Illinois State Hospital, where she remained until the superintendent released her three years later . . . . Upon her release, her husband took away Packard's clothes and locked his unrepentant wife in the nursery of their house; she managed to slide a note out the window frame to a neighbor, who sought judicial intervention.

What happened next? Read the whole thing. Sometimes clever lawyers were able to use 19th-century notions about feminity to win their clients' freedom.

For those of us who graze the banquet table of history, the review usefully contrasts and compares other books and articles on the legal perils of 19th-century women.

Hat tip to Legal History Blog.

Got Eugenics?

If this pseudo-science crops up in your research, check out this H-Net review of two new books on its history. (Indiana was the first state to mandate sterilization of supposedly defective individuals.)

Eavesdrop on the historians

Need some quick reconnaissance on the latest historical books? Check out H-Net Reviews. You won't always find the titles you want, but when you do your colleagues will wonder how you got to be the first to know.

Also keep an eye on the online historical magazine Common-Place, which is doing additional reviews now. Matthew Mason highlights Charles Ball's 1837 autobiographical account of the internal US slave trade. Readily available on line, it "matches better-known slave narratives both in the adventure of his escapes and the power of his testament to slave resistance," and it reinforces current scholarship which focuses more on this trade than on the plantation.

Microhistory and genealogy meet on US 20

How, exactly, did people get from Connecticut to Ohio's Western Reserve in 1817? Over at H-Net, Alden O'Brien of the DAR Museum posted on some of his research, conducted "poring over historical maps on one side of my computer screen with Google maps on the other," as well as some other interesting sources. Part of the route is close to present-day US 20, but that's a gross oversimplification.

This post was on H-Connecticut, "a communications center and discussion forum for Connecticut’s history and heritage communities" sponsored by the Office of the State Historian. This is just one of roughly 150 different history discussion networks (email lists) on the overall site, hosted at Michigan State University. There are lists for Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as the Holy Roman Empire and the culture of industrialization in the South. Check 'em out.