| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–80. By Christopher Waldrep. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. xvi, 267 pp. Cloth, $45.00, isbn 0-252-02425-7. Paper, $18.95, isbn 0-252-06732-0.)

Christopher Waldrep's close reading of approximately four thousand criminal court cases from Warren County, Mississippi, explores the social context of law enforcement. After establishing the antebellum legal culture wherein slavery molded public opinion toward the law, he examines how that culture changed during the Civil War and Reconstruction as a result of slave emancipation. Roots of Disorder brims with fresh insights. 1

Before the war, slave masters resented judicial infringement on their right to control and punish their slaves. Beginning in the 1840s, southern judges, particularly those serving on circuit courts, began acknowledging that common law safeguards such as those protecting procedural due process applied to slave defendants. Free persons also benefited from these developments. Waldrep notes, for instance, that the precedent-setting cases concerning forced confessions heard by the Mississippi state supreme court "all involved slave defendants." Yet most white observers concluded only "that law could not effectively discipline African Americans." . . .

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