Legal History of the Colonial South: Assessment and Suggestions

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. T X SHE court and the law were at the very center of life in the colonial South. Rhys Isaac and A. G. Roeber argue that the county courts in Virginia were arenas in which legal knowledge was transmitted and legal authority was enforced or challenged.' The convening of court also had a social dimension. Lorena S. Walsh writes that court day played an important role in maintaining community ties in Maryland,2 and Virginia county courts, according to Peter S. Bergstrom, were keepers of the "collective memory" of the county.3 The county court and the law, Elizabeth S. Haight maintains, brought stability to life on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.4Why then, one might reasonably ask, given the importance assigned to the court and the law in the lives of southern colonists, have historians paid little attention to what transpired in court? Legal historians have analyzed the sources of southern law and the relationships between its development and external factors such as social structure and, to a lesser extent, economics. They have described the ways in which the law was an instrument of social control used by the gentry to establish and preserve their hegemony. But important subjects remain understudied. There is a lack of research on litigants and litigation: we may be certain that the county court was a central institution in the colonial South, but we know little about its caseload. There are also omissions. The late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century period needs more investigation, and the court Terri L. Snyder is a member of the Department of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. She wishes to thank Wayne K. Hobson and the contributors to the Forum for their helpful criticisms and suggestions I9 actions of free blacks, women, indentured servants, and small to middling planters require further analysis. Additionally, little work has been done on the legal systems of native Americans.The most frustrating part of assessing the legal history of the colonial South has been acknowledging how much work needs to be done and, therefore, how few generalizations can be made. It is difficult to understand how the law and legal institutions changed in the South over the course of the colonial period, simply because of the insufficient number of studies. Because we do not adequately understand the general developments in the legal history of the colonial South, our ability to make intercolonial comparisons is also quite limited.Having lamented the current state of affairs, let me suggest why it exists. First, except for studies of slavery, legal historians have concentrated on New England. Second, source materials for legal history in the South can be very limited. Coun...

Court-day crowds in colonial Virginia

“…Either way, his and Gordon's comments suggest that attendance during colonial Virginia court days is another legal issue about which historians assume much and know little. Despite repeated scholarly calls for close quantitative examination of legal procedures generally, many court functions remain mysterious (Henretta and Rice 1993;Konig 1993;Snyder 1993).…”

Intimidation, Violence, and Race in British America

“…It was perhaps the wealthiest planters and merchants who best exemplified the creation of authority by transforming their economic success into social and political influence. Terri Snyder maintains that Southern planters used the law “to fashion an economy of slavery that served their needs and to shape a distinct social structure”; she and other legal historians have demonstrated that in the mainland's southern colonies “law reinforced the interests of the dominant class.”…”

Slave Ownership in Early Georgia: What Eighteenth-Century Wills Reveal

“…In particular, see Suzanne Desan (2004) 2. See Snyder (1993). Snyder suggested that such will studies might contribute much to Southern history.…”