Legal History of the Colonial South: Assessment and Suggestions

Abstract

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.4 Why 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