Contextual essay about an 18th-century American legal formulary created by Jared Ingersoll

Fraas, Arthur Mitchell

English

ScholarlyCommons@Penn

University of PennsylvaniaScholarlyCommonsUnique at Penn Penn Libraries10-24-2012More than FormulaicArthur Mitchell FraasUniversity of Pennsylvania, fraas@upenn.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://repository.upenn.edu/uniqueatpennPart of the History Commons, and the Legal History CommonsFraas, Mitch. "More than Formulaic" Unique at Penn (Posted 24 October 2012):http://uniqueatpenn.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/more-than-formulaic/This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/uniqueatpenn/19For more information, please contact libraryrepository@pobox.upenn.edu.Fraas, Arthur Mitchell, "More than Formulaic" (2012). Unique at Penn. 19.http://repository.upenn.edu/uniqueatpenn/19More than FormulaicAbstractContextual essay about an 18th-century American legal formulary created by Jared Ingersoll.KeywordsLegal History, Book History, Supreme Court, PhiladelphiaDisciplinesHistory | Legal HistoryCommentsFraas, Mitch. "More than Formulaic" Unique at Penn (Posted 24 October 2012):http://uniqueatpenn.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/more-than-formulaic/This working paper is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/uniqueatpenn/19More than Formulaic | Unique at Pennhttp://uniqueatpenn.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/more-than-formulaic/[5/8/2014 5:52:41 PM]TagsUPenn Ms. Codex1628As a legal historian I thought I would share something this weekfrom Penn’s collections that demonstrates both the frustrations andexcitement of working with legal historical sources. A few weeks ago,the curator of manuscripts brought to my attention an uncatalogedvolume from the stacks which was known only to be some sort of“legal formulary” (now fully cataloged by Amey Hutchins as UPennMs. Codex 1628). Formularies, as their name suggests, are formbooks used by lawyers or others to record the particular languagerequired for various legal proceedings. A formulary might theninclude forms for writing out deeds, conveying livestock, issuing asummons, etc. These might be taken from printed books of formsintended to guide lawyers or from manuscript documents used inactual practice and copied for later use [1]. From this description it’seasy to see why formularies don’t receive a lot of attention. They areoften absurdly dull tomes full of a mishmash of legalese never meantto be read front to back but dipped into for templates by a practicinglawyer. I’m excited by nearly anything having to do with 18thcentury law but I have to admit having low expectations when Idecided to investigate.What I found instead was an ideal window onto the practice of lawin the crucial period betweenthe end of British rule inPennsylvania and the rise ofthe new United States.The very first page of theformulary (illustrated right) helped identify its owner and sometimeauthor: Jared Ingersoll, Jr. (1749-1822). Ingersoll was one of themost prominent lawyers in the early American republic as well as asigner of the Constitution and later Attorney General of Pennsylvania.Originally from Connecticut, Ingersoll graduated from Yale andmoved to Philadelphia around 1770 where he lived for the rest of hislife except for 5 years in London (1773-78). Ms. Codex 1628♣ WELCOMEWelcome to Unique at Penn,part of the family of Universityof Pennsylvania Libraries blogs.Every week this space willfeature descriptions andcontextualization of items fromthe collections of the Universityof Pennsylvania Libraries. Thesite focuses on those materialsheld by Penn which are insome sense “unique” - drawnfrom both our special andcirculating collections, whethera one-of-a-kind medievalmanuscript or a twentieth-century popular novel withgenerations of student notespenciled inside.♣ RECENT POSTSA Founder’s BookReading Chaucer throughDryden’s EyesFabulously Illustrated andEasy to CarryAlways checkthe endpapersIndian diaries at Penn♣ ARCHIVESApril 2014February 2014January 2014December 2013November 2013October 2013September 2013August 2013July 2013June 2013ABOUTPOSTED BY MITCH FRAAS IN POSTS ≈ LEAVE A COMMENTMore than FormulaicWednesdayOcT 201224 Follow “Unique atPenn”Get every new post deliveredto your Inbox.Join 60 other followersFollowMore than Formulaic | Unique at Pennhttp://uniqueatpenn.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/more-than-formulaic/[5/8/2014 5:52:41 PM]includes writing in several different hands but it seems more thanlikelythat the first 153 pages (all in the same hand) were written byIngersoll himself as a young lawyer [2].One doesn’t have to look much further than the opening page(above) to understand what kinds of material ended up in an earlyAmerican form book. This first page contains a template to be usedby the customs officer of Philadelphia for filing a bill to seizeenslaved Africans brought to Pennsylvania without customs dutiesbeing paid. Note above the highlighted portions where particularnames are omitted by Ingersoll for the template (e.g. “a certain shipcalled the ____”).The appearance of documents like the one above raises a trickyquestion about what we can say based on a formulary. Does thepresence of this form mean that young Philadelphia lawyersexpected to deal with a number of slave-importation cases, or is itmore emblematic of a desire to exhaustively document extant legalprocedure no matter how common? In addition, while it seemsreasonable to assume, given the presence of some specific dates inthe form, that it was copied by Ingersoll from an actual bill filed forthe seizure of enslaved persons, formularies also contain formsprepared for use but never actually used. The information containedwithin them then cannot always be taken at face value.A more telling example of this problem comes on page 103 of themanuscript which  contains a form for an “information” (similar to anindictment) for use by the “Negro Court” of Philadelphia.  It may ormay not record the details of an actual case before this specializedcourt. It includes placeholders for the names of the six white andproperty owning ‘jurors’ who were to try the case. The form doesinclude specific language for a plausible crime,  the theft of “oneworsted pocket book” on the streets of Philadelphia, but includesMay 2013April 2013March 2013February 2013January 2013December 2012October 2012September 2012August 2012July 2012June 2012May 2012♣ AUTHORSadminuatpaAlexander DevineDianne MitchellJacqueline BurekRegan KladstrupMarissa NicosiaMitch FraasMichael P. WilliamsRichard GriscomNancy ShawcrossPushkar Sohoni♣ LINKSPenn's Apps on TapPenn's Rare BooksCataloging BlogPenn Libraries Catalog(New Franklin)Penn's Rare Book andManuscript LibraryDigitalPennPenn in HandSchoenberg Database ofManuscripts♣  LATEST FROMPENNRARELeonard B. Meyer papers,“Information quitam etc. for the recovery of a Negro importedcontrary to the act of Assembly passed A.D. 1760″ UPenn Ms.Codex 1628, p.1—Information for Felony in the Negro Court of Philadelphia County(UPenn Ms Codex 1628, p.103)—Power d by WordPress.comMore than Formulaic | Unique at Pennhttp://uniqueatpenn.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/more-than-formulaic/[5/8/2014 5:52:41 PM]Ingersoll’s note “here insert the Goods Stolen & their Value.”However, historians can’t discount the evidence such a formpresents. For instance, while we know that these courts wereestablished by the Pennsylvania legislature in 1700 for the trial of all“Negro” offenders whether enslaved or free, historians have largelyfailed to find evidence relating to their actual practice or when theywere convened [3]. Ingersoll’s copied form provides then one ofperhaps the only windows onto the operation and persistence ofthese courts.More interestingly, not all of the content copied into the formularyfits this template model. Ingersoll’s manuscript also includes fulltranscriptions of ephemeral documents that are not recorded inother surviving sources.The document above comes from a period in the 1790s whenIngersoll was a practicing lawyer in front of the new U.S. Supreme1935-2008 May 6, 2014The Joseph G. Rosengartencollection April 30, 2014Old Friends Reunited April24, 2014♣ SUBSCRIBE TO UNIQUEAT PENN“…that a certain Male Negro Called Weed the Slave of MM late ofthe County of Philadelphia Gentlewoman the 8th day of JanuaryA.D. 1768 at Philadelphia County aforesaid & within theJurisdiction of this Court with force & arms &c one WorstedPocket Book of the value of 4/(here insert the Goods Stolen &their Value)…”—“John R. Livingston & Brockholst Livingston of the City ofNew York in the State of New York Greeting. Whereas therehas issued from the Supreme Court of the United States aWrit of Error bearing date the twenty seventh day of Aprilin the year of our lord one thousand seven hundred andninety three…” UPenn Ms. Codex 1628, p. 192—More than Formulaic | Unique at Pennhttp://uniqueatpenn.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/more-than-formulaic/[5/8/2014 5:52:41 PM]Court in Philadelphia. This section of the manuscript includes severalwrits, orders, and other documents copied from Ingersoll’s day-to-day work at the Court. Entered into the formulary here is a 1793notice seemingly sent from the Supreme Court notifying two partiesin a case that the judgment in their favor by a Circuit Court inPennsylvania (Livingston v. Swanwick) was being reviewed by thehigh court [4]. The early U.S. Supreme Court has been well-studiedbut to date no trace of the Court’s review of the Livingston caseexists outside of this manuscript [5]. One reason for this omission isthat the note above may not ever have been sent as we know thatthe Court did not end up hearing an appeal in Livingston’s case.Ingersoll perhaps had copied the draft letter before a decision onproceeding had been made. Note below the conclusion of the letterand the lack of a date or signature in the copy, details included inother Supreme Court documents copied in the volume.This is all to say – manuscripts like Ingersoll’s formulary whichappear dense, tedious, and of little value on the outside often beardividends under closer examination.*Update: 4 March 2013, a full facsimile of Ms. Codex 1628 is nowavailable at Penn in Hand:http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/medren/detail.html?id=MEDREN_5839540 *———–[1] For more on early modern copying and legal practice see HaroldLove, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford,1993) and Richard Ross, “The Memorial Culture of Early ModernEnglish Lawyers: Memory as Keyword, Shelter, and Identity, 1560-“You therefore the said John R. Livingstone and BrockholstLivingston are hereby notifyed of the said Writ of Error andof the filing of the same as aforesaid and cited to appear ifyou see cause at the Supreme Court of the United States tobe held at Philadelphia on the first monday of August next tomake an answer thereto. Given under my hand this day of –in the year of our lord one thousand seven hundred andninety three—-” UPenn Ms. Codex 1628—More than Formulaic | Unique at Pennhttp://uniqueatpenn.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/more-than-formulaic/[5/8/2014 5:52:41 PM]Twitter Facebook1640,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10 (Summer 1998),pp. 229-326.  There is also an accessible and decent wikipedia entryarticle on medieval and Roman formulary traditions.[2]Dating the manuscript presents some difficulty, the latest datementioned in the text is 1813 so it seems likely to have beendiscontinued after Ingersoll’s death. The first 106 pages consist offorms dating from the period of British colonial rule with no mentionsof the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. This might place the originsof the formulary in Ingersoll’s first period in Philadelphia (1770-3)but given the consistency in hand and Ingersoll’s tenure in England,it is also more than possible that he began the manuscript on hisreturn in 1778. In addition, the volume, bought as a blank book ismade up of paper bearing the watermark of the William and Levispapermill in Chester County, Pa. which operated 1775-1800. SeeDard Hunter, Papermaking in pioneer America (Garland, 1981),p.158.[3]This bill to establish “Negro courts” first passed the Pennsylvanialegislature in 1700. These were abolished during the Revolution in1780. See Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom byDegrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (Oxford,1991), p. 12.[4] Livingston v. Swanwick as heard in April 1793 in thePennsylvania circuit is reported at 2 U.S. 300 (1793).[5] A team of legal historians spent  several decades combingarchives for papers relating to the U.S. Supreme Court prior to1800. The results of this extraordinary research project werepublished in the 8 volume Documentary history of the SupremeCourt of the United States, 1789-1800 (Columbia, 1985-2007). Alsoin UPenn Ms. Codex 1628 is a writ (pp.189-90) issued on 18September 1792 by Justice James Wilson in the U.S. Supreme Courtcase Pagan v. Hooper that was not located by the editors of theDocumentary History – see v. 6 p. 259.Share thiS: Loading...RELATEDPoems from UPenn Ms.Codex 1552: Before andAfter ManuscriptA Rocket Cat? Early ModernExplosives Treatises at PennAlways check the endpapersIn "Posts"In "Posts"In "Posts"More than Formulaic | Unique at Pennhttp://uniqueatpenn.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/more-than-formulaic/[5/8/2014 5:52:41 PM]About Mitch FraasMitch Fraas is the Scholar in Residence at the Kislak Center for SpecialCollections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of PennsylvaniaLibraries. He is also the interim director of the Penn digital humanitiesforum. At Penn, Mitch works on a variety of projects cutting acrossgeneral and special collections, with a special focus on digital humanities.He holds doctoral and master's degrees in history from Duke Universityand earned his bachelor's degree at Boston College. His doctoraldissertation examined the legal culture of British India in the 17th and18th centuries, arguing for the existence of a unified early modern Britishimperial legal culture whether in Philadelphia, Bombay, or London.View all posts by Mitch Fraas »← Previous post Next post ←The conclusions and views presented on posts within“Unique at Penn” reflect those of their writers and do notrepresent the official position of the University of Pennsylvania or the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.Blog at WordPress.com. Customized Chateau Theme.LeaVe  a  rePLYEnter  your  comment here...

More than Formulaic

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