| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

In the Wake of Slavery: Civil War, Civil Rights, and the Reconstruction of Southern Law. By Joseph A. Ranney. (Westport: Praeger, 2006. x, 199 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-275-98972-0.)
Few legal systems have successfully faced the challenge that confronted southern state courts after the Civil War. The land was in ruins. A large minority of the population, who had been kept propertyless and illiterate, had just been granted citizenship. Meanwhile, many of the former social and political leaders were traitors who had waged war against the United States. Joseph A. Ranney's In the Wake of Slavery details the role of law in helping to guide those fractured states back into the Union.	1
This work examines the crucial legal issues of Reconstruction and looks at each state's reaction to those issues. For instance, the most immediate postwar problem was how to merge the newly freed population into the body politic. The Deep South states tried to limit the rights of the freedpeople by passing Black Codes that severely limited freedpeople's rights. The northern reaction to the Black Codes was to establish military rule in the Deep South, to pass civil rights acts, and, eventually, to force the South to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The Reconstruction legislatures and courts granted full political rights to the ex-slaves.	. . .

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