Toulmin & Hitchcock

Hitchcock's life was attended by family tragedies. These included the loss of two sons in infancy; two beloved sisters in his household claimed by yellow fever; and chronic invalidism, drug addiction, and delusional behavior on the part of his mother. Private enterprise began to serve him even less well. In Mobile he turned his legal talents largely to real estate and commercial property development. By 1836 he was reputedly the richest man in the city. By 1837, caught politically and financially in the middle of Andrew Jackson's bank panic, he was wiped out. By the time he died of yellow fever two years later, his affairs were in court receivership.

THUS WE READ BACK OUT FROM the historical citations of names and titles the stories of the twinned lives and careers of Harry Toulmin and Henry Hitchcock, strange and colorful frontier aspirants to their own versions of the American dream of success-a dream of personal achievement and of public reputation and respectability. They are stories of itinerancy, ambition, and industrious self-engineering. But in the legal and judicial arena, they also bespeak typical frontier stories of the more than occasional elbowing and clawing toward pay and position amidst the hubbub and bustle of backwoods politics and the economics of boom and bust.

In the particular realms of law and the administration of justice, they foreshadowed the world of antebellum Alabama statehood soon to be depicted in such raffish, freewheeling works of humor and satire as Johnson Jones Hooper's Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1846) or Joseph Baldwin Glover's The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853). Indeed the true-life cases of these two pioneering jurist-politicians join the works of their literary successors as allegories. Herein we find a world in which law and order were frequently read off by the seat of the pants and often enforced through a contest between the shifty mettle of the legal or judicial functionary and that of the litigant or litigants standing before him.

In this larger sense, they also thus become allegories of an early national era when the burden of social polity rested on codes of law and justice made accessible in two volumes of legal and judicial administration. And if the functionaries were a dubious lot, they were at least a step ahead of the raffish and untidy citizens they might be called upon to defend, prosecute, judge, acquit, or sentence as part of their casework.

It was an era celebrated most memorably by an exact contemporary of Toulmin and Hitchcock: Washington Irving. Irving himself presents as a deeply conflicted Anglo-European American, a Son of the Revolution, always playing "Jonathan Oldstyle" or "Diedrich Knickerbocker" or "Geoffrey Crayon"-not to mention a lawyer who created himself as a writer who in turn used the printed word to invent a culture.

As Irving himself knew, slick self-taught lawyers and illiterate justices in 1819 were hardly a thing of the past anywhere in America, even in New York. His point, indeed, was how central they were to the design of the present. And nowhere was this truer than along what was deemed the lead edge of civilization itself, the territories of the advancing frontier. This was Jacksonian America. And if some small political history had occurred through which Americans might enjoy a kind of genial, if less than proud, relationship with early attempts at make-it-as-you go law and order, a lot was still to come. In this respect, Irving was quite unhappily prophetic.