The Jury in Lincoln's America by Stacy Pratt McDermott (review)

Stacy Pratt McDermott's The Jury in Lincoln's America adds dynamic and invigorating insight to the ever-growing collection of scholarship on the importance of the antebellum Midwest. Similar to recent regional works, such as Stacey Robertson's Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest, McDermott's work stresses the influence of the Midwest on the rest of the United States, particularly the region's impact on the development of nineteenth-century American law. Using an impressive number of primary sources, which include twenty-five years of records from Abraham Lincoln's Springfield, Illinois, law practice, McDermott examines the jury and the law in the antebellum Midwest and demonstrates their importance to and impact on American society and community. McDermott's analysis of the jury as "a democratic and political institution" seeks to illuminate the status of individual jurors as it applied to their social standing and to their interpretation of cases, and in doing so fills an important gap in the topic's scholarship (x). Divided into an introduction and four chapters, The Jury in Lincoln's America embarks on a highly detailed and impeccably researched analysis of the place of the law in the antebellum Midwest. McDermott's work is not simply a study of the law. Rather, it is an insightful examination of the power, competence, professionalism, and honor of jurors in a region forging its own path in a long-standing and inherited legal tradition.

In her introduction, McDermott contextualizes her work and richly illustrates the social, cultural, and legal spheres in which Abraham Lincoln lived and practiced law in the first half of the nineteenth century. Importantly discussing the jury's position as an idealized symbol of democracy in nineteenth-century law, McDermott stresses the centrality of juries to the Americans' conceptions of the judicial system in spite of the constant risk of jurors' fallibility. McDermott's first chapter, "Jury Law and Tradition in the Antebellum Midwest," analyzes jury-related statutes and case law in several midwestern states during their first years of statehood. To compare these states' interpretations of legal tradition, McDermott establishes their collective "reverence for the institution of the jury" based in the desires of having competent jurors within a successfully functioning jury system (52). Through the presentation of demographic and quantitative analysis of the county's jurors, chapter 2, "The Composition of Juries in Sangamon County, Illinois, 1830-1860," focuses specifically on the county in which Abraham Lincoln practiced law before his tenure as president. McDermott creates a narrative of personal experiences and worldviews, demonstrating that juries were institutionalized as bodies whose perceived competence required them to be engaged and connected community leaders who, more often than not, were established amongst the community's elite. Chapter 3, "The Work of Jurors in the Antebellum Illinois Courtroom," focuses on what it meant to be a juror in antebellum Illinois and how juror status affected trial verdicts. Finally, chapter 4, "The Struggle for Legal Power in Lincoln's America," discusses the extremely interesting and important influence of jury authority on nineteenth-century law. McDermott adroitly points out the power relationships among judges, attorneys, and jurors in nineteenth-century America and particularly offers significant insight into how the institution of the jury was perpetuated by repeat jurors who represented the ultimate level of competence.

Overall, The Jury in Lincoln's America is an excellent piece of scholarship. McDermott succeeds not only in illuminating the nineteenth-century Midwest legal system, but also in presenting how this complex and storied institution permeated everyday society and culture. Beyond the value of its argument, McDermott's work is a valuable resource for scholars interested in the development of American law in the nineteenth-century and in law, society, and culture in the Midwest. It fills an important gap in the scholarship on the history of the Midwest and lends important evidence for the influence of the region on the development...