I am a friend to the preservation of the rights of property…but I believe in the subordination of those rights to the public good…. I deny that the people of my Province are insensible to or careless about the true principles of legislation. I believe they are thoroughly alive to them, and I am content that my rights of property, humble though they are, and those of my children, shall belong to the Legislature of my country to be disposed of subject to the good sense and right feeling of the people of that Province.

Edward Blake made this declaration about property in 1882. Presumably his beliefs were widely shared by Canadian lawyers, for he was the leader of the Liberal party, the Treasurer of the Law Society of Upper Canada (Ontario), and one of the leading counsel. We seek to explore his beliefs and to reconstruct the understandings of rights in late nineteenth-century Canada, and especially the understandings of common-law lawyers.

The American officials who assumed control of the Louisiana Purchase territory were quite certain about the Spanish legal system they were displacing. “[T]he laws, rules of justice, and the forms of proceeding,” Amos Stoddard reported from St. Louis two weeks after receiving possession of Upper Louisiana on behalf of the United States, “were almost wholly arbitrary—for each successive Lieut. Governor has totally changed or abrogated those established by his predecessor.” Under “the despotism of the Dons,” as Frederick Bates described the preceding four decades of Spanish government in St. Louis and the surrounding area, the residents “knew that they had no rights and that they were absolutely dependent, in all things, on the will and pleasure of the Governor.” In New Orleans Governor William Claiborne described a legal “system in most points incongenial with the principles of our own Government,” one in which “the executives of the collony have often exercised a dispensing power over th[e] Laws, and the people consequently have been habituated to the uncertain operation of rules occasionally modified by the wisdom or caprice of those in power.” In short, this was a government of men, not laws; the task at hand was to get rid of it as soon as possible. As Bates explained to future governor (and ex-explorer) Meriwether Lewis, “we are endeavouring to establish the empire of the laws; and to substitute those laws in the place of the arbitrary Rescripts of proconsular Agents.”

In the fall of 1865, North Carolina lawmakers gathered in Raleigh to draw up a new constitution. Despite the absence of the most extreme secessionists, those in attendance were still a remarkably homogeneous group of planters, businessmen, and professionals—white men of the same wealthy families that had always governed the state. Yet faced with the sweeping changes wrought by war and emancipation, they anticipated a difficult session. Edwin Reade, who delivered the opening address, tried to set a positive tone, assuring the assembly that the future would be easy compared to the hardships of the past five years. The metaphor he chose was that of a homecoming. “Fellow citizens,” he intoned, “we are going home”: “Let painful reflections upon our late separation, and pleasant memories of our early union, quicken our footsteps towards the old mansion, that we may grasp hard again the hand of friendship which stands at the door, and, sheltered by the old homestead which was built upon a rock and has weathered the storm, enjoy together the long, bright future which awaits us.”