An Uncertain Tradition: Constitutionalism and the History of the South [Book Review]

Abstract

Comparisons across time or space are merely incomplete casual explanations, small descriptive steps on the path to analysis, historians’ conventional rhetorical substitutes for more comprehensive empirical generalizations. If the South has had a legal "legacy of ambivalence,” if its "spokesmen frequently sought to be in the federal order without being of it" (p. 6), as Kermit Hall and James Ely assert in their introduction to this collection of essays from a 1987 symposium, just what produced that ambivalence, assuming, as the editors do implicitly, that the South was more mentally divided than the North was? If courts in colonial Virginia were clerk-dominated, locally-oriented, and concerned overwhelmingly with procedures, not substance, as David Konig contends in the chronologically earliest essay in this volume, how, precisely, does that colony's experience compare to that of others, or of Virginia later, and what factors explain the variations? If eleven of the fifteen states that failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment were southern, as Mary Bonsteel Tachau points out in a stimulating, if necessarily skeletal essay on the largely unexplored topic of southern women's legal history, what accounts for the greater degree of opposition to women's rights in the South? How, if at all, do the causes of these contrasts relate to slavery, segregation, fundamentalist Protestantism, climate, modes of production, "culture," or whatever?