Everyday Justice in Pre-Confederation Canada: The Ledger of Thomas Burrowes, JP of Kingston Mills

Amy Kaufman

doi:10.33137/pbsc.v58i0.33253

Abstract

    This essay combines close bibliographical analysis of the 1856–66 ledger of Thomas Burrowes, Justice of the Peace for Kingston Mills in what is now Ontario, with a wide-ranging discussion of what the document can reveal about its owner and about the practice of everyday justice in a small mill town in the years leading up to Canadian Confederation. It considers the effect of reading about law in manuscript versus printed form. It follows the intriguing evidence contained within the ledger to consider its possible uses by subsequent owners after Burrowes’s death, tracing the ledger in its circular journey from Kingston Mills to the Queen’s University Archives in Kingston via Detroit and Indiana.   

Highlights

This essay combines close bibliographical analysis of the 1856–66 ledger of Thomas Burrowes, Justice of the Peace for Kingston Mills in what is Ontario, with a wide-ranging discussion of what the document can reveal about its owner and about the practice of everyday justice in a small mill town in the years leading up to Canadian Confederation
It considers the effect of reading about law in manuscript versus printed form. It follows the intriguing evidence contained within the ledger to consider its possible uses by subsequent owners after Burrowes’s death, tracing the ledger in its circular journey from Kingston Mills to the Queen’s University Archives in Kingston via Detroit and Indiana
McKenzie’s definition of bibliography as “the discipline that studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception,”[2] this essay will explore the contents of the ledger along with its characteristics and provenance to provide a fuller picture of this historical legal object

Summary

Introduction

This essay will examine the 1856–66 ledger of Thomas Burrowes, a Justice of the Peace (JP) for Kingston Mills, Canada. There had been the recent introduction of a general right of appeal from “convictions before individual magistrates,” a change Keele noted with approval, for it would “stimulate the presiding justice to a vigilant and impartial discharge of his duty on the one hand, and, on the other, afford just and proper relief in those cases which, through some error in judgment, may require revision.”[23] At the same time, JPs were protected from irregularities or defects “in the form of their proceedings” as long as they were “grounded upon good causes, and where [JPs] have acted without malice.”[24] These measures allowed people not trained in the law to vary in their individual practices as long the more formal written aspects of their administration of justice, such as sending in returns of convictions, conformed to prescribed forms and rules.

A Window into the Processes of Local Justice

Conclusion