Lawyers In Politics; Mid-Nineteenth Century Kentucky As A Case Study

This Book explores the mid-nineteenth century legal profession through a study of the 1848 to 1852 Kentucky bar and examines those lawyers’ relationship to politics. The Author chose Kentucky as the lens in which to explore this topic for a number of reasons, including a noticeable gap in research on the bar of those states bordering New England and the Middle Atlantic states during that time period. A random sample based on the 1850 Federal Census reveals the bar was composed of men who were greatly disparate in wealth, age, slaveholding, geographic identification, and education. Through an examination of contemporary comments about the bar published in the newspapers and periodicals which circulated in Kentucky during that period, the Author establishes there was less anti-lawyer sentiment and more ambivalence about lawyers than is commonly believed. This Book compares lawyers who were politicians with lawyers who were not politicians and examines the pervasiveness of bar participation in the state’s politics, as officeholders, speakers, lobbyists, and political editors. This Book includes a number of tables and some long appendixes, reporting much of the data upon which the Author based his interpretations