"Routine Debt Collection and the Making of the Early American Legal Profession"

In the United States in the 1790s, the dearth of specie and lack of cash forced businessmen to rely on promissory notes and other forms of commercial paper in order to facilitate exchange. The resulting webs of debt often led to default. Using the work of Roger Minott Sherman as a case study, this paper examines the debt collection work that lawyers performed on behalf of commercial clients in late-eighteenth century and early nineteenth century Connecticut. This work depended on the legal doctrine that lawyers learned in law school or apprenticeships, but their application of law in practice was not always as neat or orderly as the law in the books suggested. Nevertheless, collection work played a critical role in supporting exchange in the early Republic. When neither the state nor the federal government provided enough currency for trade, it was lawyers who played a vital role in allowing a substitute system based on promissory notes to function. This role was hidden, however, by a developing professional ethos of client service that distanced the practice of law from its economic consequences. Understanding the significance of this seemingly inconsequential debt collection work provides a new perspective on the role lawyers played in the early American economy. Liquidity was central to economic exchange and lawyers were vital to providing liquidity. They managed to encourage exchange, even before the doctrine of negotiability—normally seen as key to the usefulness of private notes—had been widely adopted.