Traveling the beaten trail

"Charles Tait is one of those fascinating figures of the Old Southwest. Like Harry Toulmin, his most distinguished predecessor in dispensing frontier justice, Tait came to Alabama as a Jeffersonian Democrat of long-standing and excellent connections. The world such men came to know was that of plantation socety in embryo. Its leading inhabitants were slaveowners, self-consciously so, but not yet caught up irrevocably in the centrifugal forces that would disrupt the Union. In 1820s Alabama, the federal government spoke to citizens with several voices, perhaps most distinctly through the grand jury addresses of Judge Charles Tait. A very old device of common law tradition, the grand jury insured routine citizen participation in law enforcement. Yet grand jurors during Tait's years on the bench were asked to consider matters far from routine: suppression of the international slave trade, piracy in the Caribbean, security of the U.S. mail and of government records. Traveling the Beaten Trail, the eight of the Occasional Publications of the Bounds Law Library, will examine Tait's career with particular emphasis upon his delivery of grand jury speeches in 1822, 1824, and 1825, followed by edited transcripts of those speeches. The author/editors conclude with a list of Tait's law library in 1818, just prior to his migration to Alabama". -- PREFACE.