Gentlemen of the bar : lawyers in colonial South Carolina

This study of the early South Carolina bar examines the several elements which shaped the development of the legal profession: system, patterns of legal education, provincial politics, legal practice. and the social structure. The first four chapters analyze the court in which system in provincial South Carolina as the formal environment lawyers practiced their profession, Lawyers involved themselves in the several—often bitter—conflicts political process early by engaging in over control of the judicial system. A central source of conflict throughout contorts in the interior out the period was the absence of permanent of the colony, This limited the expansion of justice and worked to keep for the entire the legal profession small and centered in Charleston colonial period. The chief justices of the colony provided another source of conflict. Unlike other colonies, many of the Carolina chief justices were trained lawyers-a tradition which began with Nicholas Trott in I703. Their legal training made them less compliant with House encroachments on royal control of the judiciary and at times enabled them to raise questions about the constitutional relationship of the legislative and judicial branches of government and about the proper constitutional ties between the mother country and its colonies.

An analysis of legal education occupies the next two chapters. Historians and other writers have long acknowledged the contribution of South Carolina to the English Inns of Court, but the central feature of legal training in the colony was a diversity of routes to the bar. As in other American provinces, apprenticeships with practicing attorneys either at home or abroad were widely used and proved more valuable to practitioners than did their attendance at the Inns. Education in Eng land, on the other hand, represented the Carolinians' efforts to Anglicize the colony by emulating the best features of English life and by providing their sons with a classical British education.

The variety of educational paths to the bar indicates that the profession was relatively easy to enter. Court records (examined in Chapter VIl), however, show that professional success was at best difficult to attain; only one-third of the colony's lawyers engaged in their practice long enough and steadily enough to earn a comfortable living. Economically and socially, most lawyers were the sons of merchants. planters and professional men and married the daughters or widows of their social equals (Chapter VIIl). Thus, the law remained a profession which provided some horizontal but little vertical social mobility. In the quarter-century before the American Evolution, lawyers be came an established class which competed and shared power with planters and merchants. Lawyers did not join the revolutionary movement belatedly but participated on both sides of the controversy from the start. Chapter IX examines the South Carolina lawyers and the coming of the Revolution. Lawyers were motivated to become Whigs largely in reaction to the British policy of using placemen to fill numerous colonial administrative and judicial positions. While lawyers did not necessarily seek these governmental positions for themselves, increasingly they cane to see the British appointees as one of the central issues in the revolutionary crisis—as portentous as Parliament's claim to legislate for the colonies. In power, the patriot lawyers helped to keep the revolutionary movement in South Carolina within the narrow bounds of political change. seeking to prevent any accompanying social upheaval. The bar's political leadership during and after the Revolution was motivated by the growing belief of its leading members that public service and knowledge of the law were the best means of preserving the virtues of the republicanism which had triumphed in the war with England.