Poor Justice: Class, Crime, and the Courts in Jacksonian-Era Rural Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT Scholars of Pennsylvania’s antebellum criminal justice system have argued that private prosecution and juries stocked with ‘common men’ provided urban working people power over a legal system that was ostensibly designed to control them. To test these conclusions in a rural setting, this essay considers the class contours of criminal justice in Jacksonian-era Cumberland County. Organized around the experience of a poor laborer named Alexander Grimes, and drawing on ten years of court and tax records, the article constructs a social profile of defendants, complainants, and jurors. From there, it considers what justice looked like for the poorest defendants and examines how class influenced the nature and outcomes of legal proceedings. By moving to a rural setting and engaging in close analysis of the key players, the article both confirms and troubles longstanding assumptions about working people’s influence over Early American justice and the courts.