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Grace be to you and peace from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
--- On Sat, 2/19/11, lorenzo kibler <justcoolinout@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: lorenzo kibler <justcoolinout@yahoo.com>
Subject: And Today
To: "ASKDOJ justice" <ASKDOJ@usdoj.gov>
Date: Saturday, February 19, 2011, 5:59 PM
African Americans' use of the legal system is important, given the trajectory of Reconstruction. The same Reconstruction-era lawmakers who extended civil and political rights to African Americans also made other changes that were not as democratic. Legislation in the late nineteenth century centralized state authority and systematized a body of state law around the concept of individual rights. Those changes built on trends from the late antebellum period, spearheaded by reform-minded southern lawmakers who tried to move governing authority away from local jurisdictions and create a uniform body of state law that slotted individuals into generic categories. Ironically, the efforts of these southern statesmen were not fully realized until after the Civil War, as part of the systematic reform of the region under the terms of the congressional Reconstruction plan and the dramatic revision of state constitutions under Republican rule. The institution of capitalist labor relations and the extension of individual rights to former slaves required a hierarchical legal system, which construed law as a set of universal rules, consistently applied within defined categories. Although most southern legal reformers who lived through the Reconstruction era bitterly opposed the abolition of slavery, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, and other changes that came with Republican rule, their basic vision of the legal system was similar to that of Reconstruction-era Republicans. It is no coincidence that Democrats left these changes in place when they took over after Reconstruction.51
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For more perspective on the significance | 45 | | Within the political context of the post-Reconstruction era, this new version of state authority did not necessarily work to the benefit of most southerners. Consider the experience of African American men during and after Reconstruction. The extension of civil and political rights to them also formally linked possession of those rights with citizenship—in the broader sense that civil and political rights were considered essential markers of citizenship and, more than that, prerequisites to participation as full members in the polity, whether at the state or the national level. That link between individual rights and citizenship actually redefined the basis of participation in law and governance. As Redemption and Jim Crow rolled back the legal changes of the Reconstruction era, the subsequent denial of those individual rights had devastating effects for men, denying them what had become the only entry to law and governance. That outcome highlights the problems of relying on the conventional, theoretical legal subject—a (masculine) individual with an unrestricted array of civil and political rights—as the historical standard against which to measure historical change. In legal practice, most men were more like women, in the sense that they never enjoyed the full array of rights associated with that theoretical individual. Assessing change in those terms—that is, the acquisition or loss of individual rights—fails to capture the complexities of most Americans' legal status and the radical changes they experienced in that regard. Moreover, the trajectory of change in the Reconstruction-era South suggests the limits inherent within legal changes that emphasized individual rights and that usually are associated with democracy and political progress. Although individual rights held great promise, they arrived with new legal institutions that undermined other forms of access to law that had existed within a localized system. In that localized system, a person's subordination and lack of rights were not always a barrier either to making claims on the community or to participation in the basic processes of community governance. | 46 | The emphasis on southern legal culture and African Americans' position within it thus reveals an important historical counternarrative, one in which individual rights were only one way to imagine and produce claims on the state. African Americans' persistent use of the legal system reveals not just the fight to obtain individual rights, but also the presence of a broader legal culture in which citizenship and participation in governance were not defined exclusively in those terms. Local court records indicate that many white southerners approached the legal system and other institutions of state governance before and after the Civil War laden with the same expectations.
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Voting is underway in Uganda's presidential and parliamentary elections Friday as President Yoweri Museveni seeks a fourth term in office. VOA's Vincent Makori talks to Daniel Arap Moi, who is a political reporter White women marched off to local officials to demand redress for the various problems in their lives. During the Civil War, they sent off missives to state leaders and Confederate officials, with every expectation that the government would deal with their personal problems. White men did so as well, requesting favors, transfers, and leaves as if the war should accommodate their desires. Even though white men could rely on their individual rights for access and could assume that their interests were central in defining the social order, they were accustomed to operating in a legal system in which individual rights were not the only way to define justice. Of course, white southerners' conceptions of that public order were very different from those of African Americans. But the way they viewed the process of achieving that order—however it might be defined—was strikingly similar. Turning our attention to people at these local levels provides a different understanding of legal and political history. In this history, ordinary men and women without civil and political rights would have more substantive roles. This history also would be based in a different narrative of political development, one defined through expansive historical contests over the content of the public order, instead of the acquisition of individual rights. | 47 |
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This article first appeared as a paper for the Fourth Avignon Conference on Slavery and Forced Labor, Avignon, France, October 2002. I would like to thank Michael Grossberg, Robert Schneider, and the reviewers for the AHR, whose thorough, thoughtful critiques challenged me to clarify the central arguments in this piece. I thank Priscilla Wald, Dylan Penningroth, Giovanna Benadusi, Joe Miller, Chris Tomlins, Adrienne Davis, Gunther Peck, Jolie Olcott, the audience at the Jean Gimbel Lane Humanities Lecture at Northwestern University (2006), and the participants at the Political History Workshop at the University of Chicago (2006) for their invaluable comments. The biggest debts are to John McAllister, whose insights were crucial in shaping the article, and to Jacquelyn Hall, who read innumerable drafts and whose thoughts on writing and history have been an inspiration. I also thank Kirsten Delegard, Kelly Kennington, and Alisa Harrison for research assistance. A National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the Newberry Library, and leaves from Duke University provided time to research and write.
Laura F. Edwards is Professor of History at Duke University. She is author of Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (1997) and Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women and the Civil War Era (2000). She is currently working on a new book project, The People and Their Peace: The Re-constitution of Governance in the Post-Revolutionary U.S. South.
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