The American Legal History Podcast

In this the first of three episodes on American law in the Gilded Age, we will examine American law after the Civil War. Specifically in regard to the rise of truely national coporations, the plight of industrial workers and farmes, a mode of opinion writing known as clasical legal thought, and the recrafting of the Fourteenth Amedment by the Supreme Court for the benefit of property and business interests. We will also take a close look at the first important case concerning the Fourteenth Amendment, the Slaughterhouse Cases, and it enduring legacy.

In Part II of my interview with Professor Dylan C. Penningroth, author of Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, we will discuss the three categories of rights as they were understood in the 1860's; how and why access to the law of everyday life was so important in the lives of former slaves; the little-understood phenomenon of the rise in Black property ownership in the South after the Civil War; the surprising relationship of African Americans and local courts in the South: how activists of the modern civil rights movement bequeathed to historians three flawed assumptions and much more.

In this, the first of two episodes, we will talk to Professor Dylan C. Penningroth, author of Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights. In this groundbreaking work, Professor Pennigroth explains how former slaves gained the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, and hold and convey real property. Using what he terms "the law of everyday life", African Americans created a legal culture that was little known before the publication of this important work.

In this concluding episode on the Civil War and the Constitution we will dicuss the 15th Amendment and the end of Reconstruction. We will examine the many factors that made the crafting of the 15th so difficult, the ratification process, and the efforts to undermine its effectivneess. We will also look at the reasons and circumstances that led to the end of Reconstrution in 1877, and how it has been interpreted by American historians since the end of the Civil War.

In this episode we will talk about the Civil Rights Act of 1866, but primarily we will dicuss the most impactful of the Constitution's Amendments, the Fourteenth. Specifically, the circumstances in the post-war south that compelled its creation, the role it played in Reconstruction, the men who drafted it, the many purposes it was meant to serve, the enacting statutes, and its early interpretation.