| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Elizabeth Lee Thompson. The Reconstruction of Southern Debtors: Bankruptcy after the Civil War. (Studies in the Legal History of the South.) Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2004. Pp. xvii, 198. $39.95.
The story of the federal government's efforts to reconstruct the society and economy of the devastated South is well known to most historians. Elizabeth Lee Thompson's book adds an interesting and new dimension to this familiar story. Her discussion of the 1867 Bankruptcy Act and its consequences sheds light on the persistence of southern landholders after the war, attitudes toward federal power, and gender relations in the postwar South.	1
Most southern legislators originally perceived the law as a possible extension of federal power, but they tempered their opposition for a number of reasons. They understood that the law would benefit individual southerners and, more importantly, viewed the law as separate from Reconstruction and therefore not punitive. In short, southerners finessed their typical protection of state authority and supported the bill. Southern citizens were quick to take advantage of the law's provisions. Approximately thirty-six percent of the cases were filed in the South, at a time when southerners comprised about one quarter of the population. Most of those filing came soon after the war and many of them were intended to remove debts incurred to northern merchants.	. . .

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