'No respecter of persons': Law and the American Renaissance

Between 1780 and 1860 new relationships among American businessmen in a mercantile economy required a new interpretation of the purpose of law and a new posture in its implementation. In response Federalist jurists transformed the common law into an instrument of economic development framed on a mercantilist model. Taking its impetus in part from the rediscovery of the Puritan past and the structure of covenant theology, American jurisprudence shifted from its roots in the natural law principles of the Declaration of Independence to the positive instrumentalism enunciated in contemporary case decisions, policy statements, and legal treatises. The most influential and revealing of these include Alexander Hamilton's "First Report on the Public Credit," Judge William Cooper's A Guide in the Wilderness, William Paley's The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, and Lemuel Shaw's decisions in Farwell v. The Boston and Worcester Rail Road Corporation and the Thomas Sims Case. Law, which had once been anchored in moral philosophy, became utilitarian, scientific, formalist, and procedural. The inevitable result was the subordination of individual rights to the economic demands of public benefit. The transformation necessarily begged for a structure of equity to counterbalance its severe legal effects. When the principles of equity disappeared into the procedures of the nineteenth-century courts of law, demonstrable arguments for the necessity of equity in the legal culture were taken up by literature. Brockden Brown in Wieland; Fenimore Cooper in The Pioneers; Emerson in Nature, "Self-Reliance," "Politics," "The Fugitive Slave Law," and "John Brown;" Thoreau in "Civil Disobedience," Walden, "Slavery in Massachusetts," and "A Plea for John Brown;" Hawthorne In The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables; and Melville in "Bartleby the Scrivener" and Billy Budd wrote in recognition of and opposition to the emerging American legal system. A close reading of their work within its legal context reveals what emerges as the necessary relationship between any culture's law and its literature. In part, that is why these authors comprise the early canon of American literature, and why their work has had the most lasting significance of any from that period.