"Fathers of Conscience makes a valuable contribution to the literature on slavery, race, and the law in the antebellum South by recognizing the complex considerations of antebellum jurists and arguing for the importance of geography in determining judicial treatment of will contests...Through her careful detailing of cases of disputed wills that involved the inheritance rights of children of white slaveholders and enslaved women, Jones adds to our understanding of the interplay of family relations, community pressures, and racial hierarchy in antebellum America."
—Civil War Book Review

"An outstanding work that will be an important contribution to the monographic literature on the law of slavery in the United States."
—Mark V. Tushnet, author of Slave Law in the American South: State v. Mann in History and Literature

"Fathers of Conscience is an important contribution to the study of property, slavery, and freedom in the U.S. South. Anyone interested in law, marriage, and race in the nineteenth-century South will benefit from reading it."
—Ariela Gross, author of Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom

"Fathers of Conscience provides a beautifully nuanced analysis of an extremely difficult topic, an area of law where the sexual exploitation made possible by slavery also had the potential to undermine the institution. While tracing the law’s development, Jones never loses sight of the high social stakes or the humanity of those involved, using the rules of inheritance to explore the construction of power, the dynamics of race, and the complexities of personal relationships in the antebellum South."
—Laura F. Edwards, author of The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South

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