Trunks, Legal Texts, and the Materiality of Law in the Nineteenth Century

To say that everyone had a trunk in the nineteenth century is an overstatement, but only just. Even the enslaved and married women had trunks. Within those trunks were things that their owners called their property, which may seem odd, given that many of the trunks’ possessors did not have the rights considered necessary to own anything at all. As this article shows, trunks enabled legal claims to property and connections to place. Those principles, which were attached to the material world, existed alongside others that are more familiar to historians: those memorialized in writing and generated by legal professionals at various levels of government. While revealing the inseparability of law and material culture in the nineteenth century, trunks also trouble the conceptual distinction between the two in the historiography. It is now difficult to imagine trunks as legally resonant objects because of changes that severed law from material culture. Those changes, which began before the Civil War era, elevated legal texts over other material forms as the primary repositories of law. But the legal principles elaborated in those texts did not capture the full range of law. Notably absent were the legal principles attached to material objects, particularly trunks.