The Legal Fraternity and The Making of a New South Community, 1848-1882 [Book Review]

Abstract

The first half of this short study of Guilford County, North Carolina, aims to test the thesis that after 1865 a new entrepreneurial class replaced prewar planters as holders of social, economic, and especially political power in the South. Finding that attorneys were comparatively more important after than before the Civil War, O'Brien in the second part of the book intensively analyzes the economic and political activities of a small group of particularly important men. The author concludes that southern leadership did not change much and that it was never "precapitalist." Her conclusions, however, are partly undermined by problems in research design.

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