Book Review

Historians of nineteenth-century America often grapple with the subtle relationship between nationalism and sectionalism, forces that both unified the nation and sent it spiraling into Civil War. Timothy S. Huebner boldly explores the topic in The Southern Judicial Tradition: State Judges and Sectional Distinctiveness, 1790–1890. Comparing the public and private lives of six southern judges from various parts of the South, Huebner presents a nuanced analysis of how jurisprudence, politics, and cultural identity influenced those jurists and institutionalized their sectional concerns.	1
At first glance, Huebner's chapters, each focusing on the contributions of a single judge, seem to offer little more than detailed biographical sketches of a few noteworthy southern jurists. On closer investigation, however, Huebner examines the judges' opinions on six prevailing themes: homicide, economic growth and development, community interest, Federalism, race and slavery, and paternalism and sectionalism. Their opinions illustrate how judges developed sectional affiliations and reflected national political and social trends. Huebner's thoughtful reading of the judges' decisions within the context of their social milieu breathes life into the sterile court reports upon which he so closely relies.	2
Setting the book within the crucial century between 1790 and 1890, Huebner recounts a South that moved from the forefront of American nationalism from the era of the "Virginia Dynasty" through alienation, defeat, reconstruction, and ultimately a reincarnation as the "New South." During those periods, American judges defined and redefined the very conception of their courts, their roles in state and national affairs, and their relationships with both the people and companion branches of state government. For state judges, the tasks also required exploration of a malleable notion of the bond between the states and the national government. The southern states slipped from a position of primacy in the Union to that of a threatened minority jealously guarding their states rights. Judicial thinking, though, evolved as rapidly as the nation itself with its market and transportation revolutions, and rapid western expansion. The judges of Huebner's study straddled the borders of this dynamic transformation, challenging themselves and their constituents as well as historians struggling to interpret their careers. Huebner accepts the challenge quite well.	3
Huebner brilliantly succeeds in choosing a representative sample of judges and opinions from the plethora of available candidates. Wisely leaving out the border states, which no doubt warrant similar study in their own peculiar context, Huebner focuses on six prominent and influential jurists: Spencer Roane of Virginia, Tennessee's John Catron, Georgian Joseph Henry Lumpkin, the irrepressible John Hemphill of Texas, North Carolinian Thomas Ruffin, and Alabaman George W. Stone. The choices as well as their arrangement in the narrative provide marvelous case studies of the development of Huebner's six essential themes.	4
His analysis of Spencer Roane includes a complicated and masterful discussion of how Roane's own views on the importance of a strong, independent judiciary molded him into a champion of state sovereignty and pitted him against fellow Virginian, Chief Justice John Marshall. As Roane expanded the role of the courts within Virginia, he denounced the Marshall court's expansion of power on the national level. John Catron's career forced him to deal with the rollicking ideals of frontier violence and southern honor as well as the expanding role of the marketplace in transforming Tennessee's pioneer society. Catron's initial sympathy to native Americans ultimately wore away as his relationship with Andrew Jackson blossomed. Joseph Henry Lumpkin emerges as a jurist committed not only to the sort of social reform predicted by Georgia's eighteenth-century proprietors with their views of temperance and antislavery, but also to the evangelical and reformist fervor that awakened all parts of America in the mid-nineteenth century. His decisions on violence and market development closely mirrored those of his northern counterparts. Lumpkin's initial antislavery impulse gave way to the paternalism fostered by proslavery ideologues, a position that placed him firmly in the growing southern evangelical tradition. Texan John Hemphill provides perhaps the most fascinating sketch in Huebner's study. Committed to American ideals of liberty and justice, Hemphill attempted to bring law and order to the disorderly and violent Texas frontier. From a juridical standpoint, Hemphill's Texas forms the most complicated jurisdiction in Huebner's analysis. Its legal traditions are a mixture of common law and civil law, and its judicial milieu is that of a frontier weak in legal education and published authorities. Hemphill drew on what he knew of nationalistic principles regarding law and order and violence while his judicial opinions reflected Spanish attitudes toward debt, inheritance, and slavery. Thomas Ruffin's decisions steadfastly expanded on South Carolina's ardent states rights' approach to constitutionalism; however, his opposition to the Ku Klux Klan in his declining years revealed that his commitment to southern honor and southern constitutionalism clearly favored legal over extralegal means to resolve social problems. George W. Stone's role in the postwar resettlement of Alabama revealed his identification with the Civil War generation from which he hailed, while at the same time, his grappling with expanding railroads, changing southern attitudes toward race, and the rise of late nineteenth-century commercialism thrust him squarely into the world of the New South.	5
The scope of Huebner's study and the consistency of thematic development is remarkable in a first book. His neglect of Louisiana under the mistaken assumption that it was a civilian jurisdiction--it was a mixed jurisdiction though much more sophisticated than frontier Texas--is unfortunate. Inclusion of a Louisiana jurist such as François-Xavier Martin would have greatly aided his analysis of John Hemphill. Judith Kelleher Schafer's recent discussion of Louisiana's laws of slavery would also have complemented Huebner's analysis of that important aspect of southern sectionalism. But these are minor quibbles. Huebner's fine study of the intersection of local, sectional, and national interests in the state judiciaries marks an important contribution to nineteenth-century historiography.	6
Mark F. Fernandez Loyola University New Orleans

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