Law in the Colonial South‪.‬

WHO GOVERNED? AND BY WHAT WARRANT DID GOVERNORS RULE? THE English who founded Jamestown in 1607, along with every other European who colonized the southern portions of North America, confronted those fundamental questions whenever founder and settler alike wrestled with ways of devising "Just laws for the happy guiding and governing of the people there inhabiting." (1) This quest for "Just laws" fits hand in glove with the creation of entire legal architectures that gave figure and adornment to the provincial societies that sprang up between the 1560s and the 1750s from the Chesapeake Bay to Florida and the Gulf Coast. Those designs, their differences from colony to colony, the inspirations that undergirded them, the way they worked--in short, the manner of their fashioning and by whom--were prominent features in the South's beginnings, but they are obscure subjects. (2) What accounts for the obscurity? To explain it, some might point to the impositions of a documentary record thinned by losses from neglect and war and whose mastery demands adeptness with earlier forms of English, French, and Spanish; antique handwriting; and command of an arcane nomenclature of ancient legal vocabularies. There is no gainsaying that such evidentiary impedimenta pose formidable obstacles, although they have never proved much of a deterrent to determined researchers. The existing historiography testifies as much. Mulling it over and reflecting upon its creators suggest how legal history grew into a field of southern studies and why it continues to stand in need of tending.