Book Review

In this outstanding book, Christopher Waldrep builds on his earlier work on vigilantism and popular justice in the American South. Waldrep has previously explored the forces that drove farmers in early twentieth-century Kentucky and Tennessee to extra legal violence (Night Riders: Defending Community in the Black Patch, 1890–1915 [Durham, N.C., 1993]). In Roots of Disorder Waldrep searches for the sources of the vigilante tradition and its connection to racial violence in the American South. He goes further, however, and presents a thoughtful portrait of the limitations of the legal system in maintaining social order or promoting social change.	1
The heart of Waldrep's work lies in his longitudinal study of the courts in Warren County, Mississippi, from the early nineteenth century through the 1870s. A decade ago Lawrence Friedman called for scholars to undertake such studies, though he was uncertain of what they would reveal (Lawrence M. Friedman, "Opening the Time Capsule: A Progress Report on Studies of Courts over Time," Law and Society Review 24.2 [1990]: 229–40). The work demanded by such a study is daunting, as anyone who has engaged local court records can testify. Waldrep, however, managed to look at six decades of records from several different courts. Then he adeptly correlated the information from thousands of cases with census schedules, tax digests, juror lists, Freedmen's Bureau reports, and local newspaper accounts of community political and social events to weave his tale of law and social change in Warren County, Mississippi.	2
Some of what he learned might have been predicted, but other elements are quite new. During the four decades before the Civil War he found that Warren County's citizens relied increasingly on the legal system to resolve conflict. Early Vicksburg and Warren County were rife with frontier style violence and vigilante actions to protect the local community. Over time, Waldrep found that the economic and social development of the county produced ever greater reliance by whites on the formal mechanisms of the law to protect community values. By the 1850s this increasing reliance on the legal system even began to reshape local understandings of honor, so that attorneys began to conflate honor with scrupulous adherence to due process and proper procedure in their work. At the heart of this transformation lay the belief that the legal system sufficed to protect community norms, and thus extralegal vigilante violence began to lose its legitimacy. Even the legal processes that were used to control slaves in the public sphere became more formalized and procedurally bound.	3
The slaves, however, played a central role in the destruction of this antebellum legal culture. The Civil War and emancipation brought violence and chaos to Warren County. Federal occupiers closed the courts and sometimes seemed capricious in their administration of justice. More importantly, emancipation tore away the curtain of domesticity that had shielded and hidden the violence used to control slaves within the private sphere. Mississippi's white elite faced the prospect of controlling the freed people only through the public mechanisms of the law. Such a prospect, it was feared, would prove time consuming, costly, and uncertain. Special county courts and a Black Code did not relieve white elite concerns about the problems of controlling the freed people. Instead, perhaps ironically, the Black Code increased and legitimated the freed people's claim to due process and the full procedural protections of the law.	4
From the viewpoint of the white elite worse difficulties came in 1867 with the registration of black men as voters. Political participation by the black majority would allow freedmen to influence or even control the justice system. Apparently, ever larger numbers of whites feared that this would result in the destruction of their values and their world. Black and white Republicans did gain control of many local political offices in Warren County, and corruption among a few of these officials was the final straw for many whites in the community. Concluding that the legal system could not provide the necessary control over the black majority, many whites began to organize armed bands to achieve by force what they could not achieve by law.	5
The result was a literal showdown on December 7, 1874, in the streets of Vicksburg, virtually in front of the courthouse. There, white militia attacked black Republicans who had gathered in support of a corrupt Republican sheriff. Officially, two whites and fourteen blacks died in the fighting, though there is evidence that casualties were much higher. Then terror swept Warren County as bands of armed white men killed, beat, or drove out black opponents. As a result, black political power was virtually destroyed in the county. At the same time, whites confirmed their belief that the only effective means for controlling black people lay outside the law, not within it.	6
Waldrep recognizes that his story involves only one community in Mississippi, but he suggests that it is reflective of experience throughout the South. The roots of white southerners' reliance upon "Judge Lynch" to control black southerners and for the protection of their community values lies in this legacy of slavery and emancipation. More importantly, Waldrep never forgets that law is made by people acting together, and while it can be bureaucratized and regularized it only functions so long as the leaders and members of a community recognize its legitimacy. When that legitimacy is lost, so too is the law.	7
Jonathan M. Bryant Georgia Southern University

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.