At Freedom's Door: African American Founding Fathers and Lawyers in Reconstruction South Carolina

by James Lowell Underwood, W. Lewis Burke Jr., Eric Foner

Overview

A telling reevaluation of African American roles in government and law during Reconstruction

At Freedom's Door rescues from obscurity the identities, images, and long-term contributions of black leaders who helped to rebuild and reform South Carolina after the Civil War. In seven essays, the contributors to the volume explore the role of African Americans in government and law during Reconstruction in the Palmetto State. Bringing into focus a legacy not fully recognized, the contributors collectively demonstrate the legal acumen displayed by prominent African Americans and the impact these individuals had on the enactment of substantial constitutional reforms—many of which, though abandoned after Reconstruction, would be resurrected in the twentieth century.

James Lowell Underwood, in a reexamination of the Constitutional Convention of 1868, recounts the critical role African American delegates played in the drafting of the state's first truly democratic constitution. In a pair of essays, J. Clay Smith and Belinda Gergel offer much new biographical information about Joseph Jasper Wright, the first African American to serve on a state supreme court bench. They discuss Wright's jurisprudence, approach to judicial decision making, role in the Dual Government Controversy of 1876, and coerced resignation from the court. In essays that explore the role of African American attorneys in South Carolina, W. Lewis Burke considers an all-but-forgotten phase in the history of the University of South Carolina Law School—the education and graduation of Black students in the 1870s—and John Oldfield sheds light on a law school administered by and for African Americans in post-Reconstruction South Carolina. Michael Mounter tells the story of Richard T. Greener, the first African American graduate of harvard and the first African American professor at the University of South Carolina. The eminent Reconstruction historian Eric Foner opens and concludes the volume by placing in national perspective the lives of these African Americans and the events in which they participated.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781570035869
Publisher:	University of South Carolina Press
Publication date:	05/05/2005
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

James Lowell Underwood is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the School of Law, University of South Carolina. He is the author of four volumes on the constitution of South Carolina and a nationally recognized book on civil litigation. Underwood lives in Columbia.

What People are Saying About This

Orvilla Vernon Burton

At Freedom's Door: African American Founding Fathers and Lawyers in Reconstruction South Carolina is a significant achievement. Identifying the heretofore mostly unremembered African American leaders of nineteenth-century South Carolina, the authors break important new ground in the history of the state. An appendix of information on all the African American attorneys in the nineteenth century is invaluable. Even more notably, the authors tell the stories of such men as Jonathan J. Wright and Francis L. Cardozo and how their influence lives on today.

Bernard E. Powers

Skillfully linking social, legal, and political history to examine the growth of an African American legal community, At Freedom's Door is an impressive work of diligent scholarship, affording rare insight into a unique and underappreciated aspect of America's 'unfinished revolution' following the Civil War.

Randall Kennedy

At Freedom's Door began as a remarkable two-day symposium to explore and honor the history of African American jurists in South Carolina. That symposium has now been wonderfull and permanently memorialized by this collection of essays. The product of careful, balanced scholarship that is accessible to experts and general readers alike, At Freedom's Door reveals aspects of southern, legal, and African American history that have long been englected but are essential to a sophisticated understanding of America's multiracial past, present, and future.

Editorial Reviews

This book makes a contribution that extends beyond the history of Reconstruction (or African Americans). For those who teach U.S. history survey courses, the essays in this collection provide a wealth of anecdotes and incidents that can help illuminate the period and put a human face on its events.

Journal of Southern History

A surprisingly accessible history of politics and race in Reconstruction-era South Carolina.

-- "Kirkus Reviews"

This book makes a contribution that extends beyond the history of Reconstruction (or African Americans). For those who teach U.S. history survey courses, the essays in this collection provide a wealth of anecdotes and incidents that can help illuminate the period and put a human face on its events.

-- "Journal of Southern History"

From the Publisher

A surprisingly accessible history of politics and race in Reconstruction-era South Carolina. It is not often that regional history has much appeal to anyone beyond the scholars who write it and those who are being written about. But here is an exception, seven essays on the role black leaders played in the rebuilding of South Carolina following the Civil War. Its editors, Burke (Law/Univ. of South Carolina) and Underwood (Law/Univ. of South Carolina), offer strong proof that scholarship need not be dry and uninteresting, anymore than regional history need be marginal history. This is especially true when the subject matter is Reconstruction, which here is reexamined, less as a playground for corruption and incompetence, and more as a "glorious failure." Why South Carolina? South Carolina had more black officials (315) than any other state during Reconstruction because it had the largest black population. Indeed, at one point in the 1870s South Carolina had six black congressmen, a figure that hasn't been matched since. Many of these men however, died embittered, impoverished, or both. Richard Greener, for example, was the first black professor at the University of South Carolina. A diplomat and a domestic government official, he held numerous postings in a long career that included a position as the US Consul in Vladivostok, Russia. But what is best remembered about him, and what saves him from total obscurity, is the fact that he was the first black Harvard graduate. Justice Jonathan Jasper Wright, the first black to serve on a state supreme court, was forced to resign over unproved allegations he accepted a $2,500 bribe. Many of these accounts have a somewhatsaccharinequality to them that could easily descend to bathos, but Underwood and Burke exercise enough restraint in their narratives to prevent that. In the end, good writing and good scholarship triumph.

Kirkus Reviews