Stacy Pratt McDermott - The Jury in Lincoln’s America

The Jury in Lincolns America

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Law, Society, and Politics in the Mid west

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The Jury in Lincolns America, by Stacy Pratt McDermott

STACY PRATT MCDERMOTT

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2012 by Ohio University Press
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McDermott, Stacy Pratt.

The jury in Lincolns America / Stacy Pratt McDermott.

p. cm. (Ohio University Press series on law, society, and politics in the midwest)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8214-1956-4 (hc : alk. paper)

1. JuryIllinoisHistory19th century. 2. JuryIllinoisSangamon CountyHistory19th century. 3. JuryMiddle WestHistory19th century. 4. Justice, Administration ofIllinoisHistory19th century. 5. Justice, Administration ofIllinoisSangamon CountyHistory19th century. 6. Justice, Administration ofMiddle WestHistory19th century. I. Title.

KFI1742.M37 2012

347.773'0752dc23

2011047249

Plates

Sangamon County Courthouse, Springfield, Illinois

Abraham Lincoln, February 1857

Jury instruction in Fairchild v. Capps and St. Clair, September 1859

Jury verdict in Fairchild v. Capps and St. Clair, September 1859

Jury room, federal court, Springfield, Illinois, 184155

Figure

Through an examination of the jury and of the law in the vibrant and dynamic environment of antebellum Illinois and through an analysis of the jury trials of the states most famous son, this book seeks to demonstrate the importance of the jury and, by extension, the law to nineteenth-century Americans. Abraham Lincoln and his contemporaries exhibited a commitment to the rule of law that not only shaped their understanding of society but also influenced their individual roles within their communities and the world at large. Lincoln stands in history as an iconic figure of the American past, but he was not born ready to lead his nation through a bloody civil war. His development as a man and a national leader took place in the courthouses of antebellum Illinois during a legal career that spanned three decades. The legal environment that shaped Lincoln provides the context of this book, and Lincolns experiences with the law as an attorney, a litigant, a judge, and a juror provide a fascinating human connection to the history of the law in preCivil War Illinois, the Midwest, and America.

Antebellum Springfield and Sangamon County, Illinois, were home to Abraham Lincoln, and therefore, they are the site of this community study of the midwestern legal experience and analysis of local jury composition.

Second, the county contained elements of both urban and rural mid-nineteenth-century America. Sangamon County was agriculturally based, and farming was central to its economy. Yet Springfieldthe county seat, state capital, and home to 29 percent of the countys residents in 1860was a bustling commercial center with a population of more than nine thousand people. Political, legal, social, and economic systems were in place, and in Springfield and Sangamon, as in many other midwestern towns and counties, churches, civic and literary organizations, professional associations, and schools were numerous. By 1850, Sangamon County had none of the exceptional, frontier-related characteristics (such as absent or makeshift legal institutions or transient populations) that might skew such a study of jury composition. And for its part, Springfield was a typical town in the emerging Midwest.

Finally, the surviving antebellum legal records of the county are abundant. A nearly complete run of the docket books, court records, and fee books of the circuit court during the antebellum period is available to the scholar. As well, county histories and newspapers from that era are plentiful, and manuscript materials compiled by the countys residents are exceedingly rich. From these copious resources, it is possible to reconstruct a demographic picture of jury composition in Sangamon County. Most significant for the current study given its focus on Abraham Lincoln, the county was the home base for this successful midwestern attorney: it provided the social, political, economic, legal, and physical context in which he developed his law practice. In Springfield and in the other county seats of central Illinois, he handled more than fifty-two hundred cases in a legal career that spanned nearly twenty-five years during the most formative era in the history of both American law and the emerging Midwest. This study fully utilizes the records of Lincolns law practice. Statutes, legal treatises, newspapers, periodicals, manuscript sources, and demographic data collected in the 1850 and 1860 U.S. censuses enhance the richness of the hundreds of trial and appellate case documents examined for this volume. History, environment, people, and power relations that existed within antebellum midwestern communities are never far from the discussion.