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The Faculties of Law: Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee as Legal Fiction

This essay situates Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) amid debates over the law of persons in Jacksonian America. It attends particularly to two crises of personhood central to Pennsylvania’s 1837-38 Constitutional Convention: the legal status of corporations (artificial persons) and the political inclusion or exclusion of African Americans. (Delegates considered but rejected making corporate charters revocable by the legislature; they also disenfranchised black Pennsylvanians by limiting the franchise to “white freemen.”) I argue that Sheppard Lee’s persistent focus on bodies—natural or artificial, legally aggregated or medically dismantled—juxtaposes the legal personhood of corporations with the political personhood and depersonalization of African Americans, and thus explores surprising analogies between issues that were separated in political debate. Lee’s “faculty of reanimating dead bodies,” I contend, looks less like a supernatural fantasy than a legal thought experiment—with consequences Bird himself found difficult to accept.