| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Peter Wallenstein. Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law—An American History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2002. Pp. xii, 305. $35.00.
With its landmark 1967 decision, Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned statutes in sixteen states that outlawed interracial marriage, officially ending three hundred years of what Peter Wallenstein calls the "antimiscegenation regime." Wallenstein charts the history of that regime in his extensive study of the legislative acts and court decisions that dramatically shaped the slave labor system before the Civil War and then race relations through the civil rights movement. This legal history, replete with vignettes of the families that sparked the lawsuits, tells a compelling if twisted tale of race in America.	1
Wallenstein's main focus is the century after 1865, when each state determined what—if anything—the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment might mean for its marriage laws. Seven southern states loosened their laws for a short time before cracking down again on interracial marriages, and Wallenstein leaves no doubt that inconsistent state court decisions during and after Reconstruction stemmed directly from the shifting political fortunes of Democrats and Republicans. The U.S. Supreme Court clinched the rollback of Reconstruction innovations with two critical rulings in the 1880s. In Pace v. Alabama (1883), the highest court ruled that state antimiscegenation laws did not contravene the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause as long as they restricted and punished black and white partners equally. In Maynard v. Hill (1888), the Supreme Court placed the jurisdiction of marriage securely within the purview of individual states, making the regulation of marriage not a federal matter at all. Furthermore, as marriage was not a contract protected by the "full faith and credit" clause of the Constitution, states need not accept the marriage laws of other states. By the end of the nineteenth century, southern states had fully regained the ability to outlaw and prosecute interracial marriages.	. . .

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