Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 North and South
- 2 Illinois: “We Were Determined to Have a Rail-Road”
- 3 “The Memory of Man Runneth Not to the Contrary”: Cases Involving Damage to Property
- 4 “Intelligent Beings”: Cases Involving Injuries to Persons
- 5 The North: Ohio, Vermont, and New York
- 6 Virginia through the 1850s: The Last Days of Planter Rule
- 7 The Common Law of Antebellum Virginia: The Preservation of Status
- 8 Virginia's Version of American Common Law: Old Wine in New Bottles
- 9 The South: Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky
- 10 Legal Change and Social Order
- Index of Cases
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Illinois: “We Were Determined to Have a Rail-Road”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 North and South
- 2 Illinois: “We Were Determined to Have a Rail-Road”
- 3 “The Memory of Man Runneth Not to the Contrary”: Cases Involving Damage to Property
- 4 “Intelligent Beings”: Cases Involving Injuries to Persons
- 5 The North: Ohio, Vermont, and New York
- 6 Virginia through the 1850s: The Last Days of Planter Rule
- 7 The Common Law of Antebellum Virginia: The Preservation of Status
- 8 Virginia's Version of American Common Law: Old Wine in New Bottles
- 9 The South: Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky
- 10 Legal Change and Social Order
- Index of Cases
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In order to see how the development of law in Illinois reflected a response by a dominant political culture to the challenges of transformative technology, it is necessary to review some of the politics that shaped the state prior to 1850. It was not the case, in Illinois as elsewhere, that when railroads appeared they confronted a ready-made political culture set to welcome them, nor a previously identified group of interested and empowered actors poised for action. Instead, the political culture of Illinois grew in significant part around the experiences of railroad development in the 1830s and 1840s. In the process, individual actors acquired interests and became powerful by virtue of their roles in railroad development. Institutions, ranging from political parties to the state government and the courts, both guided and developed in response to the emergence of a rail-based political economic system. Interests, ideologies, and institutions were mutually constitutive elements of the environment that in 1850 would enable and encourage the Illinois Supreme Court to undertake the project of remaking the common law.
Antebellum Illinois was divided north to south into three sections, geographically, demographically, and culturally. On crucial political questions, however, the middle section itself divided, resulting in a nearly perfect bisection of the state. Reflecting the issues that divided the nation, northern and southern Illinois were split on questions of slavery, states' rights, and the role of the national government.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Creation of American Common Law, 1850–1880Technology, Politics, and the Construction of Citizenship, pp. 44 - 62Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004