The Jury in Lincoln's America by Stacy Pratt McDermott

Author:Stacy Pratt McDermott [McDermott, Stacy Pratt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, General, State & Local, Midwest (IA; IL; IN; KS; MI; MN; MO; ND; NE; OH; SD; WI), Law, Legal History
ISBN: 9780821444290
Google: yNCsh88xOvkC
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2012-01-23T15:59:52+00:00

The Bar

[Lawyers are the] highest political class and the most cultivated circle of society.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, 183531

By the time de Tocqueville published that praise of lawyers in Democracy in America in the 1830s, the legal profession was still gaining in status. For the most part, attorneys had overcome the widespread negative opinions associated with their field in the colonial era; they had emerged from the American Revolution with a new professional purpose. However, they were still evolving, comprising only one of many professional classes that were acquiring greater social, political, and economic prominence.32

Ambitious young men in the first half of the nineteenth century saw a career in the law as a vehicle for self-advancement and upward mobility. Because the profession was in its infancy and without particularly strict educational and admission requirements, it offered opportunity to men without great financial means. In an effort to democratize the bar, many state legislatures “redefined professional standards, scaling down educational requirements for lawyers or eliminating them altogether in such states as New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Indiana.” Suddenly, every citizen of “good moral character” was entitled by statute to engage in legal practice, and many lawyers who gained prominence at the bar during this time were men of very modest economic backgrounds. Abraham Lincoln was a quintessential example. Born into a farming family of limited means, Lincoln, with practically no formal education, used the law to achieve middle-class status. Through a career at the bar, he earned a middle-class income, married a wealthy and socially prominent woman, developed personal ties with elite members of society, and established and maintained a career in politics: as a lawyer, he became a member of the professional, economic, and social elite. The money he earned and the contacts he developed at the bar were absolutely critical to his achievements in politics as well as in society.33

The upward mobility of lawyers such as Lincoln and the enhanced status of the bar directly corresponded with the rise of the middle class. But the growing prominence of the field also stemmed from a conscious effort on the part of the legal profession broadly and lawyers more specifically to distance themselves from the general population. Legal scholar Roscoe Pound viewed this period as a time of decline in the bar, which he blamed on the democratization of the profession: the infusion of “illiterates,” he believed, contributed to the falling status of lawyers in society. Conversely, other research has argued that lawyers in this era were committed to competence and expertise. Members of the bar were trying to justify their status and preserve the power they were gaining by developing professional expertise, and their eloquence brought spectators to court to hear their well-crafted arguments. Though most lawyers during this era did not attend colleges or law schools (of which there were very few), an examination system was taking shape at the local level. The profession attempted to grant law licenses to individuals who had at least a rudimentary understanding of law and legal pleading and practice.

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