Family, Law, and Inheritance in America is an excellent example of the new legal history that brings law and legal culture alive through the experiences of average people who, for better or for worse, found themselves and their lives recast through the prism of nineteenth century courts and legal categories. Pitts examines hundreds of wills drawn in two counties in Kentucky during the nineteenth century to see how testamentary bequests revealed complex social and familial relationships. The data from these wills reveal interesting patterns that reflect on familial relationships and gendered and racialized norms around inheritance and testamentary capacity. In addition to studying the wills, Pitts analyzes a relatively small but comprehensive set of wills challenged by legal heirs on the basis of the mental incapacity of the testator. She traces these cases through jury trials, appellate review, personal family records, and local newspapers to uncover how expectations of dependency, mental and physical capacity, aging, medicine, law, and property rights intersected and changed over the century.

Pitts begins with a lengthy introduction that explains why Kentucky, why wills and inheritance, and why mental capacity. She claims that “[i]ntergenerational property transfers link relationships in the intimate familial realm to the public, legal, and economic worlds . . . . Whether decedents transferred property through a will, according to intestate laws, or informally among family members, inherited property publicly encoded value judgments about relationships between individuals” (3). Focusing on mental capacity challenges, Pitts draws out how local juries punished testators who deviated from behavioral norms, and how the “grammar of capacity” explained relationships between testators and their families (15). The nineteenth century was also a time during which understandings of insanity, aging, moral insanity, imbecility, and lunacy were undergoing tremendous changes, with the growing acceptance of a medical discourse of disease that was closely tied to gendered and racialized norms. Nineteenth century Kentucky also proved to be a dynamic borderland: between the North and the South, between the East and the West, between territory and state, between the rural and the industrialized. In some sense, Kentucky was exceptional for its lack of exceptionalism.

The book begins by examining changing expectations about parent/child relationships, as testators wrote wills to “enforce punishments, rewards, and obligations” involving their children (32). Children who married against their parents' wishes would often be disinherited whereas children who provided caregiving would be rewarded. Prior to the Civil War, testators often left property to be used to care for older slaves, and, occasionally, they acknowledged their mixed-race offspring. They sometimes even manumitted their slaves, or provided for their manumission after the death of their surviving spouses. After the Civil War, however, testamentary gifts to black servants or caregivers dropped dramatically as white Kentuckians no longer viewed their families as including their slaves and servants. Pitts uses these cases to explore changing conceptions of family and aging as slavery declined and caregiving shifted from servants/slaves to family members. Will challenges provide a lens for viewing different narratives of appropriate family responsibilities. When local juries knew the facts about specific testators who were infirm, eccentric, moral reprobates, or business failures, they often sided with legal heirs who felt betrayed by unequal bequests.

Pitts also explores the changing role of the medical profession as experts in capacity challenges. We tend to think of the influence of medical professionals in society and in law as a one way movement toward the professionalization and medicalization of infirmity and criminality, but Pitts reveals the ambivalence of judges throughout the century who hesitated to give credence to medical opinions on capacity.

She continues her analysis of how litigants often linked physical infirmity with mental infirmity by focusing on the physical body, especially in relation to evolving legal understandings of imbecility, idiocy, and lunacy. She concludes the book with a chapter on gender norms, and the significant barriers to women's testamentary capacity. Women, although not barred from making wills, were often found to lack mental capacity simply because they acted beyond gender expectations. Pitts concludes by contrasting the law's and society's willingness to protect white, male testamentary freedom when it could be explained as being the result of commonplace opinions and experiences, and the lack willingness to protect that freedom for women or men who transgressed social and familial norms.

The one point of analysis that could have been explored further in this book is the identity of the legal professionals involved in these cases. Appellate level judges often overturned local juries with what Pitts claims was a concern for the structure of the integrity of the legal doctrines of testamentary freedom and capacity. Because the specific cases were drawn from two Kentucky counties, I was curious whether there was overlap in the attorneys in these cases or in the judges and, if so, whether any conclusions could be drawn about their broader views of family and testamentary capacity. This does not detract from the excellent and insightful analysis Pitts provides, but was a lingering question as I read about the myriad cases Pitts used as examples. As a book about the legal and social history of family relationships and cultural expectations of family support through property rights, Family, Law, and Inheritance in America provides a fascinating view of nineteenth century family life and expectations that transcends the relatively narrow subject of mental capacity and inheritance to reveal broad insights about social and individual expectations and norms.