4 - The Courts, 1790–1920

Summary

INTRODUCTION: COURTS AND DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

With independence, Americans achieved one of the crucial goals of the Revolution: direction over their economic future. The process of economic transformation and the social and political changes that accompanied it quickened over the next century. Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s observed that the quest for “profit” had become “the characteristic that most distinguished the American people from all others.” Signs of economic transformation dotted the landscape. By 1920, trains knitted the continent together; steamships plied the interior lakes and rivers and extended into international commerce; airplanes extended warfare to the skies; the telegraph and the radio provided unprecedented levels of communication; smoke belched from scores of new factories; cities such as Chicago and San Francisco thrived; and a great torrent of immigrants swept over the nation’s borders. The personal, informal, and local dealings that typified the colonial economy yielded in the nineteenth century to an impersonal national and international market economy. Increased trading among private individuals for profit was one of the central developments of the period from the nation’s beginning through the Progressive Era.

Social and political changes accompanied the nation’s accelerating economy. At the middle of the nineteenth century slavery posed a massive contradiction to the underlying proposition that all men were created equal. Perhaps even more importantly, as the nation spread across the continent, slavery raised serious political questions about how free and slave labor could coexist. After the Civil War the nation had to wrestle with the fate of 4 million persons of African descent previously held in bondage.