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James Campbell, Stacy Pratt McDermott. The Jury in Lincoln's America., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Pages 854–855, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.854
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Extract
Stacy Pratt McDermott draws on county court records, appellate rulings, and the legal papers of Abraham Lincoln to assess the law, composition, and performance of juries in antebellum Illinois. Focusing particularly on Sangamon County, a location shaped by northern and southern cultural influences and encompassing the town of Springfield, McDermott shows that juries were sometimes controversial and jurors were mostly comprised of social elites and rarely representative of the wider community. The jury was, nonetheless, recognized in Illinois as an important link between the people and the law and, in McDermott's analysis, juries were invariably competent and their decisions mostly fair.
The book contains an introduction that outlines national debates about the institution of the jury in the antebellum era, and four thematic chapters. Chapter one examines the development of jury law. The jury was enshrined in the constitution or bill of rights of all midwestern states. It was understood as a central element of American democracy, but before the Civil War the priority for legislators was to ensure that juries were competent rather than inclusive. As a result, there were always significant limits on jury service, including race, age, gender, citizenship, and property ownership qualifications. In practice, the discretion exercised by court officials in selecting jurors and the difficulty of securing the attendance in court of many rural residents narrowed the jury pool still further. As McDermott illustrates in chapter two, in Sangamon County only sixteen percent of the population were even potential jurors once qualification rules were enforced. Drawing on census and county tax records to present a composite biography of 1,410 jurors who served in the county in the years 1850 and 1860 and a further 2,680 jurors in cases involving Abraham Lincoln's legal practice, McDermott shows that grand jurors in particular were drawn from elite society, were considerably older and wealthier than average Illinoisans, and had surprisingly deep roots in the local area given the transience of western populations at this time. Jury service was therefore a means by which propertied white men displayed and reaffirmed their social status. But McDermott notes, too, that many also had experience of law from the other side of the dock (particularly in civil cases) and commonly had personal ties to the litigants who appeared before them.
