Bibliograph

Bridging revolutions, the lives of Chief Justices Richmond Pearson and John Belton O'Neall, Joseph A. Ranney

Type

Label

Bridging revolutions, the lives of Chief Justices Richmond Pearson and John Belton O'Neall, Joseph A. Ranney

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references (pages 255-265) and index

resource.biographical

collective biography

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Bridging revolutions

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

1317841265

Responsibility statement

Joseph A. Ranney

Series statement

Southern legal studies

Sub title

the lives of Chief Justices Richmond Pearson and John Belton O'Neall

Summary

"Bridging Revolutions examines the lives of North Carolina chief justice Richmond Pearson (1805-1878) and South Carolina chief justice John Belton O'Neall (1793-1863) and their impact on the South's transition from a slave to a free society. Joseph A. Ranney documents how the two judges fought to preserve the Union and protect basic civil rights for both white and Black southerners before and after the Civil War. Pearson's and O'Neall's lives were marked by contrarianism and controversy. Prior to the Civil War, they took important steps to soften slave law during times marked by calls for more discipline and control of slaves. O'Neall, a committed Unionist, resisted his state's nullification movement during the 1830s and put an end to that movement with a crucial 1834 decision. Pearson was the only southern supreme court justice whose service spanned the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction eras. During the Civil War, he stoutly defended North Carolinians' civil rights against incursions by the central Confederate government. After the war, he urged the South to accept "the world as it is" rather than oppose civil rights for freed slaves, and he did more than any other southern judge to protect those rights and to reshape southern state law. Examined in conjunction, the two judges' colorful public and private lives illuminate the complex relationship between southern law and culture during times of deep crisis and change"--, Provided by publisher

Table Of Contents

Introduction -- Formative years in the Piedmont -- Early storms : nullification and O'Neall's freedom quintet -- Wrestling with slavery and state sovereignty -- Disputes corporate and domestic -- Leges inter arma : the judges' civil war -- Reconstructing Southern law -- The Kirk-Holden war and the crisis of reconstruction -- Final years -- The judges' legacies

Classification