ABSTRACT
The business conducted in Southern courthouses during and immediately after the Civil War tells a fascinating story. The cases heard speaks to a history of complicated legal contortions, African American attempts to press for change and a slaveholding society forced to come to grips with not only emancipation, but also the destruction of an institution that had propped up Mississippi’s entire social and legal system. Many historians have looked to the history of the Southern legal system for clues about how struggles for social, political and legal power played out all over the emancipating South. A Warren County slave, Brooks had been locked up in the county jail for more than a year, awaiting the hanging that was to be his sentence after having been found guilty of murder. The precedent that typically guided the hands of justices in cases such as Harrison Brooks’s pertained mainly to the question of financial restitution.
