Toulmin & Hitchcock

Both Toulmin's and Hitchcock's law-and-order volumes reflected the new state's attitudes toward the institution of slavery. In Toulmin, one full section was devoted to "Negroes and Mulattoes, Bond and Free." In Hitchcock, a comparable inclusion-simply entitled "Slaves"-lodged itself between "Schoolmasters" and "Strays." Both sets of codifications devoted themselves to an array of specific legal issues, ranging from limits on slave travel, assembly, and the admissibility of slave testimony in courts of law, to patrols and runaways. Of particular note to the modern reader were strict guidelines rendering the process of manumission difficult, if not impossible, save in the most unusual of circumstances. Thus were laws written to fortify the "peculiar institution" from the top down.

This granted, albeit without the vanity of our own moral hindsight, Harry Toulmin and Henry Hitchcock still deserve our full share of historical interest and respect. They wrote the laws. Together, they answered the need for basic legal and judicial print resources-in many ways, the original LextsNexis, we could call it-creating the system of justice that continues to operate to the present day. They wrote the foundational versions of the texts that line the shelves in any law library in Alabama-and that now pop up on computer screens for any lawyer, judge, court clerk, paralegal, or litigant with access to major databases. In the Toulmin-Hitchcock archive, we recover the basic institutional architecture of the justice system symbolized by those two old, battered, early books reposing in country stores or town meeting halls or outdoor squares and somehow eventuating into courthouses and a state supreme court building-the story, for good or ill, of Alabama and the early Republic.

Copyright University of Alabama Press Summer 2006
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