Rebels at the Bar

by Jill Norgren

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  Historian Rebecca Edwards has written that the Confederate surrender ending the Civil War “did not so much restore the old nation as create a new one, reshaped by not only the war but by economic and political changes that had begun earlier.”77 Years before Jefferson lamented a nation overrun by business and banking. By the end of the Civil War, the small agrarian communities that he so admired had given way to teeming cities, clattering factories, new forms of business financing, and boom-and-bust economic cycles. Law practices built on debt collection and land conveyance adjusted to the new economic age and joined in tackling the complex issues spawned by the frenzied growth of industrial capitalism. Generalists remained, but increasingly men began to see the need, excitement, and profit of specialization. Well before the war William H. Seward, New York governor and later U.S. secretary of state, became an expert in patent law, transforming a small country litigation practice into one of national importance.78 Railroads, corporate finance, veterans’ pensions, and the growth of government regulation expanded and reshaped legal practices. Before the war, Seward’s New York firm worked on the financing of railroad consolidation. In the decades after the war few lawyers passed up an opportunity to be general counsel of a railroad. The position marked them as esteemed, as did appointment to railroad and corporate boards.79

  For some lawyers this transformation brought splendid opportunities, large fees, or, among some railroad and corporate lawyers, attractive fixed salaries. Yet, despite the rise of specialization and the growth of large law firms, throughout the nineteenth century law remained a tiered profession with room for single attorneys and small firms. As in earlier years, however, in the last quarter of the century, not everyone did well practicing law. In the 1880s, of fifteen hundred Philadelphia lawyers “less than one third were said to be self-supporting and not more than 100 were thought to have an income over $5000 a year.”80 Still, ambitious, optimistic young men were not deterred. The number of law school programs increased, and the ranks of the profession swelled.

  Women sought to join the profession of law for many, but not all, of the reasons that men had come to the legal bar. Like men, most women needed a source of livelihood. Some applicants were teachers but saw legal work as more interesting, with greater promise of good money and advancement. Several of the earliest women lawyers were attracted by the intellectual challenge of reading law. Others saw the possibility of using law to further reform movement objectives. A small number of optimistic women hoped to establish themselves in elective politics, or as a member of the judiciary. Nearly all of the earliest women lawyers in the United States believed that the nation’s ideals of equality, liberty, and justice entitled them to the opportunity to prove that, like men, they could be good members of the legal profession. For all of these reasons, they asked to join with men in the practice of law.

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  Myra Bradwell

  The Supreme Court Says No

  Lex Vincit

  —Myra Bradwell, Chicago Legal News

  IN 1894, WHEN IT MATTERED VERY LITTLE, the men of the Illinois State Bar Association showered praise on Myra Bradwell. A quarter of a century before she had sought their professional favor and many of them had withheld it. Now she lay on her deathbed receiving tender expressions of respect.

  Attitudes had loosened and tempers cooled since 1869 when the Chicago businesswoman, wife of Judge James Bradwell, sought to be licensed as an Illinois attorney. Born in Manchester, Vermont, in 1831, Myra Colby had a New England pedigree and, from the age of twelve, under the watchful eye of four older siblings and activist abolitionist parents, an Illinois upbringing. She attended various schools until the age of twenty, taught briefly, and in 1852 eloped with Bradwell, who, scraping by as a manual laborer while working at a legal apprenticeship, was not viewed by the Colby family as a promising prospect.1 For a short time the couple ran a school in Memphis, Tennessee, and James continued to read law. Two years after their marriage the Bradwells moved, with their first child, to Chicago. In 1855 James was admitted to the Illinois bar.

  In the mid-1850s the people of Chicago were busy, with the help of the railroads, building their young city into an important metropolis. Transplanted New Englander Mary Livermore, later a friend of Myra Bradwell’s, described Chicago at that time as a “somewhat astonishing [place] in which mud, dust, dirt, and smoke seem to predominate.” Only Michigan Avenue was paved and had decent sidewalks.2 The impact of the railroads, however, transformed Chicago from a muddy, rough place whose people thought of themselves as part of the West into a vibrant urban crossroads soon known, humorously to some, as “Hog Butcher for the World.” A five-thousand-mile network of tracks, reaching in all directions brought business, industry, and ambitious newcomers like the Bradwells. Myra and James were anxious to tap into the economic and social possibilities of a town free from the confining mores and practices of America’s older cities.

  Myra Bradwell (1831-1894). (Reprinted from A Woman of the Century, ed. Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore [Buffalo, NY: C. W. Moulton, 1893].)

  James Bradwell initially formed a law partnership with Frank Colby, his brother-in-law. In the years before the Civil War, despite the birth of two more children, Myra helped James in the office and made the decision to read law with him. She did not wish to become “an independent practitioner.”3 Rather, Myra said, it was the separation of interests and work that drew couples apart.4 She wanted to remain close to James and argued that divorce courts would not be needed if couples labored side by side, with wives jointly supporting the family. James, always proud of Myra, felt the same way.

  Bradwell’s professional aspirations made her the target of gossip, but it took a war to alter her path. At the start of the Civil War Myra stopped reading law, became pregnant with her fourth child, and joined other women in war relief work. She presided over the Chicago’s Soldiers’ Aid Society, an organization that raised money for Union soldiers and their families.

  Bradwell also volunteered to help Mary Livermore and Livermore’s friend Jane Hoge when they proposed that the women of Chicago could organize and run a giant two-week-long fair that would benefit the wartime medical care provided by the Union’s Sanitary Commission. In Chicago and the nation’s capital, the women met disbelief that their “fair sex” would be capable of carrying out so grand and complicated an enterprise. Livermore reported that the men of the commission “laughed incredulously at our proposition to raise twenty-five thousand dollars.”5

  In fact, at the end of the 1863 Northwestern Fair’s two-week-run, net receipts reached eighty thousand dollars.6 The women had commandeered buildings all over Chicago. They ran a wildly popular art gallery, sold donated goods from all over the United States that included rare fabrics, laces, mowing machines, reapers, ploughs, food, and much more. The most noteworthy item was the original manuscript of Abraham Lincoln’s “Proclamation of Emancipation,” which the president gave as a token of his goodwill. It sold at auction for three thousand dollars.7

  As her contribution, Myra Bradwell persuaded her husband to turn over the use of the supervisor’s hall in the courthouse. James Bradwell, now a judge, adjourned his court for two weeks in order that his wife might transform the hall into the fair’s “Curiosity Shop.” In this museum-like space Bradwell laid out shackles and neck irons used on slaves, mounted the battle-torn flags of Illinois regiments, the Union flags unfurled at Vicksburg and Bull Run, and captured rebel weapons and flags—“trophies of victory.”8

  The demands of war gave Bradwell, like other women, the opportunity to show her talents in public and to be in the company of working women, many of whom who were puzzling through questions of woman’s proper role and rights. Some of these women were quite political. This included the young Anna Dickinson, a spokeswoman for the Republican Party and an influence on Bradwell, who came to Chicago under sponsorship of the fair and mesmerized audiences talking about the imperative of a Union victory.

  Bradwell
did not write about how the war affected her political thinking, but her friend Mary Livermore did. In the late 1850s Livermore’s husband had become the owner of a small Chicago publishing house as well as The New Covenant, the Universalist newspaper of the Northwest. The energetic Livermore, mother of several children, including an invalid daughter, took on partial management of the paper and became associate editor. She was in charge of several departments and was active as a reporter, which brought her the distinction of being the only newspaperwoman to cover the 1860 Republican Party convention that nominated Lincoln for the presidency.

  Livermore wrote that before the war she “kept the columns of … the paper ablaze with demands for the opening to women of colleges and professional schools [and] for the repeal of unjust laws that blocked [women’s] progress.”9 She had publicly argued that women could achieve these goals without suffrage. The war, however, opened her eyes. During business transactions she personally felt the sting of Illinois’ married women’s property laws, by which the state kept her from entering into contracts. She also found foolish excluding half the population from important responsibilities. “I became aware,” she said, “that a large portion of the nation’s work was badly done, or not done at all, because woman was not recognized as a factor in the political world.”10 She had come to appreciate the degradation of disfranchisement and women’s subsequent inability to act on causes of reform because they could neither vote nor promulgate policy as legislators.

  Livermore picked up the banner of suffrage, setting an example for Myra Bradwell and other Chicago women. She wrote pro-suffrage columns in The New Covenant and spoke out in Chicago’s daily papers and in public lectures. She was well known and highly respected for her war relief work and drew large audiences, expressing views on suffrage, she said, that many men and women had held but not expressed.11 At one lecture, it was suggested that she arrange Chicago’s first suffrage convention. She subsequently filled the platform with prominent woman suffrage advocates from the East who sat alongside important local clergymen and public officials. Judge Bradwell was one of these local dignitaries. During the convention he was called to the podium, where he spoke in favor of women’s right to vote and jousted with audience members who opposed such change.12 In January 1869 Livermore took the additional step of establishing a woman suffrage paper, The Agitator.

  Myra Bradwell had been a professionally ambitious woman before the war. With the Union victory in 1865 she was free to resume her law apprenticeship with James. However, the experience of her wartime philanthropic work and the company of women like Livermore, Hoge, and Dickinson had enlarged her world, her self-regard, and her opinion of women’s civic and political due. Bradwell still intended to take the Illinois bar examination. The objective of sitting beside James as his office helpmate, however, had somehow dulled as she responded to the larger ideas and demands of the women’s movement forming around her. It was now Myra’s genius to shape a new plan, one in which she would use her training in law as well as management skills acquired during the war to build a national publishing empire specializing in legal materials. The enterprise, built around the Chicago Legal News, would make her wealthy while providing a place for the advocacy of women’s rights.

  Myra Bradwell was an entrepreneur, not an innovator. After the Revolutionary War and beginning early in the nineteenth century, various men in the American legal community had produced law digests and journals, including John Hall’s well-known American Law Journal.13 The number of law journals increased significantly by the mid-1840s and, critically, changed in focus. Earlier publications had printed speculative articles and essays of general interest to an educated community. These essays offered theorizing on the law as well as broad discussion of politics. In the two decades before the Civil War, hoping to improve the profession’s negative, and often politicized, image, publishers discarded the old format, now giving over the bulk of every issue “to the bare reporting of recent court decisions, in advance of their appearance in official volumes of reports, with heavy emphasis upon law-as-it-is rather than law-as-it-ought-to-be.”14 Not all of these papers survived. They were sometimes the efforts of men who had been scraping by as attorneys, lawyers in search of additional income. California’s Bay Area was especially hard on owners of specialized legal newspapers, with one in mid-century lasting only fifteen days and two others failing to last one year.15

  The October 3, 1868, issue of the Chicago Legal News (CLN) launched Bradwell’s business. The masthead bore her name and title, “Myra Bradwell, Editor,” along with the motto “Lex Vincit” (Law Conquers). Behind the scenes she was also the paper’s owner and business manager. She had watched Mary Livermore work as an associate editor on Daniel Livermore’s newspaper and now took professional independence one step further. She would be in charge and answerable only to herself. The money for the paper came from her savings, with some investment, also, from James.

  The News was an immediate success, quickly building a solid subscription list. On the front page of her first issue Bradwell wrote that it was her objective to do everything “to make it a paper that every lawyer and business man in the Northwest ought to take.”16 CLN published news of the Chicago and Illinois legal communities along with summaries of important judicial decisions.

  The Chicago Legal News did not ignore the social and political world of post-war America. Bradwell shaped the News into an important trade publication that also ran articles on controversial issues such as corruption in the court system. She poked and prodded yet never reached beyond intelligent moderation. She was a savvy businesswoman who did not miss opportunities to expand her enterprise. She, therefore, invited only modest risk in the service of reform, thereby keeping this, and later, publications in the mainstream.

  As a first act of operating her business Bradwell successfully petitioned the Illinois legislature for a special charter that permitted her to sign contracts in her name and retain her earnings rather than turning them over to James as required by married women’s property laws.17 This action gave her a necessary but unique legal status.

  The married women’s property laws had long attracted the wrath of the women’s movement. Bradwell, like Mary Livermore, wanted to see Illinois laws changed to put women on an equal footing with men, using legislation to mandate the full benefits of the law for women as well as equal obligations. Four weeks after publishing the first issue of the CLN, Bradwell used her position as editor to champion reform that would help all of the state’s women. She urged changes to the 1861 married women’s property law that would protect a woman’s earnings as her sole and separate property. In the same editorial Bradwell recommended that mothers be assured of equal guardianship rights to their children.18 She used her pen repeatedly to attack irresponsible husbands, but tempered the discussion by also printing letters asking for reforms that would protect a husband’s liability for his wife’s debt as well as the defense of honest creditors.19

  These editorials won her support in the women’s rights community and among liberal male reformers. She also criticized conditions at the county poor house, and at the courthouse. Bradwell was always careful, however, to limit the number of social-commentary articles and to focus on the trade side of information.20 She used her knowledge of Illinois’ courts and legislature, along with the professional comments of James and his colleagues, to fashion services that would make the paper indispensable. For example, like many trade paper owners, Bradwell realized that the substantial lag in time between the enactment of laws and the state’s official publication of these laws created an enormous problem for judges and attorneys. To be knowledgeable about newly enacted statutes, law professionals had to journey to the capital at Springfield to read that session’s work.

  Confident that she could do better, Bradwell arranged with Illinois officials to receive copies of newly enacted legislation immediately after adjournment. In something of a marketing coup, in March 1869 she also received a special charter from the
legislature that recognized the laws printed in the CLN to be valid as “evidence of the existence and contents of such laws before all courts in Illinois.”21 For more than two decades Bradwell traveled at the end of each legislative session to the office of the state’s secretary of state in Springfield to make certain that her galley proofs reprinting these statutes contained no errors.22 Intent upon marketing the News nationally, Bradwell also entered into agreements to receive and reprint federal court opinions, including those of the Supreme Court of the United States.

  Within a decade of its founding Bradwell could write that the Chicago Legal News had become the most widely circulated legal newspaper in the country.23 In addition to Illinois and federal court opinions, the paper printed court notices, including chancery and land titles, commentary on recent cases, and ads for attorney services and legal books. In time the high court decisions from nearby states were also picked up and reported. Bradwell, never sentimental when it came to business, even capitalized on the community’s losses in the great Chicago fire of October 1871. Realizing that the law libraries of several hundred attorneys had been destroyed, she reeled in advertisements from law book publishers and printed them in the CLN. Again working her lobby skills on the state legislature, Bradwell also won the right of her paper to be the official site for the publication of all court records, including land title notices, destroyed in the fire but subsequently recreated. Attorneys and property owners would have to subscribe to the CLN in order to learn if any title proceedings had been carried out under the “Burnt Records Act.”24

  Bradwell stepped into the legal publishing business at a particularly felicitous time. She grasped how the changes underway in post–Civil War America would impact the legal community and, therefore, the significance of the business she was building. Government was expanding, laws were passing at record rates, and law offices were growing in number. Bradwell appreciated how these changes were essential to the growth of the News, but she quickly saw other profitable opportunities that could expand her publishing empire.