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
10 - Legal Change and Social Order
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
The argument of this book has been that the creation of the American system of common law in the antebellum North, exemplified by Illinois in the 1850s, expressed a shift in the dominant conception of American citizenship. An emerging model of citizenship was translated into law by judicial elites with ties to both the emerging political economy and the political systems in their states. That conceptual shift was itself the product of a confluence of technological developments, the political economy that they engendered, and a political culture receptive to the idea of change. A drastic expansion in the scope of the traditional legal concept of salus populi invested the pursuit of private interests with profound public consequences, leading to the creation of duties owed by everyone – farmers, industrial workers, travelers, shippers of goods – to a universal, collective interest in technology-driven progress. These universal, uniform duties were the legal articulation of standards for conduct and virtue that defined a model of citizenship suited to the needs of the railroad economy.
In Virginia, as in the South generally, none of these factors was present prior to the Civil War. Both legal and political institutions were dominated by conservative elites committed to preserving an essentially pre-industrial economy based on slavery, and the political and social order that had given them power. Political elites prevented incursions by interstate railroads, thereby limiting the challenge that new economic forms posed for the established order.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Creation of American Common Law, 1850–1880Technology, Politics, and the Construction of Citizenship, pp. 259 - 272Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004