In the 18th and 19th centuries, most young people became lawyers by apprenticing in the office of an established lawyer, where they would engage in clerical duties such as drawing up routine contracts and wills, while studying standard treatises. The apprentice would then have to be admitted to the local court in order to practice law.
In 1844, Macon Bolling Allen passed the bar exam, making him the first African American licensed to practice law in the U.S. Allen then went on to become the first African American to hold a judicial position as Massachusetts Justice of the Peace in 1848.
Historical chart shows that congressmen's salary was $5,000 per year in the 1880s. Source: Congressional Research Service. Compares wage rates for convict labor to that for free labor available near the prisons, by state and by sex. Source: U.S. Commissioner of Labor, 2nd annual report.
This doesn’t sound right for the 1870’s. According to accounts people (laborers) were paid 9 pence a wèek. What was the real story? Reply Jim Ulvogsays:
If you worked in manufacturing (as many did during this period of mechanization), you could have expected to make approximately $1.34 a day in 1880, which adds up to $345 annually for an average 257 days of work in a given year.
On the low end of the spectrum, manufacturing workers earned just $8 a month, compared to the more than $166 workers at the top-paying firms would make during the same period in 1880.
In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Thurgood Marshall as the first African American Supreme Court Justice. Prior to his judicial service, he successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education with United States District Court Judge Constance Baker Motley, the first African American female federal judge in the U.S.
In 1844, Macon Bolling Allen passed the bar exam, making him the first African American licensed to practice law in the U.S. Allen then went on to become the first African American to hold a judicial position as Massachusetts Justice of the Peace in 1848.
As a young Black lawyer, Gray provided legal counsel during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, defending Rosa Parks. He also worked closely with the NAACP and defended civil rights cases such as Gomillion v. Lightfoot and Dixon v. Alabama.
Charles Hamilton Houston spent his career fighting against Jim Crow throughout the South and successfully challenged segregation at the University of Maryland Law School. He was also the first Black editor of the Harvard Law Review and fought in multiple cases before the Supreme Court. He mentored Thurgood Marshall, who carried on his fight.
Before he was elected the first African American president in 2008, Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law School and, as a community organizer, helped rebuild Chicago neighborhoods that had suffered as a result of the fall of the steel industry there.
This index to California state government publications shows where one can find wages for various occupations such as teachers (1850s-1880s), railroad employees (1870s-1880s), farm workers (1890s), miners and lumbermen (1902), sailors (1904) and more. If you need assistance tracking down publications listed in this source, do not hesitate to contact us.
The trade journal Carpentry and Building shows the wages made by carpenters, masons and painters in various cities and states.
This is an index to topics covered in all labor statistics bureaus, both state and federal and even some foreign countries. There are ten pages of entries under "Wages" listing wages shown in state and federal reports. Find report abbreviations spelled out here. The strategy for using this source is to identify a report you want to track down and then look for it in Hathi Trust's online digital library. Contact us if you would like assistance with this.
Detailed wages for Germany are reported in this U.S. Consular report, published 1885. The data is printed on pages 195-586.
Good discussion. Update 1-31-15: Found another interesting resource: History of Wages in the United States from Colonial Times to 1928. Written in 1929, updated in 1934, and republished in 1966. It has been preserved by the Google Booksproject.
I UNDERSTAND Civil War pensions were about $24.00 a month in 1890 after the veteran had fought for thirty years to get compensation.
The chart shows a carpenter in 1890 at a little over 32 cents per hour and $19.32 per week. Laborers are shown at just over 15 cents per hour and $9.06 per week, so laborers are shown to make more than 3 times the wage of a soldier.
1893 he shoveled coal for $30/month, working horrendous hours, seven days a week, I believe.
However, the federal minimum wage for non-agricultural workers in 1970 was $1.45, which works out to about $240/month at 40 hours/week, or almost twice the minimum soldier salary. Of course the draftees had additional benefits, free food, occasional 24 hour work days, and funeral benefits.
I’ve also read that in the 1700s, old unneeded buildings would be burned down in order to salvage the nails.
Corollary, employers may have used the speed up at times, which would supposedly lessen labor costs. Article in ENGINEERING AND CONTRACTING, March, 1921 cites the # of brick laid per 8 hr day per worker in four similar industrial buildings in the Chicago area:
In 1900, there were 108,000 lawyers and judges in the U.S., the great majority of whom were white men. Opportunities for women remained strictly limited. For example, Isabel Darlington was admitted to Pennsylvania's Chester County Bar Association in 1897. She was the only female attorney in the heavily populated suburban county until the shortages of men in World War II opened the system …
In New York City during colonial times, legal practitioners were full-time businessmen and merchants with no legal training. Instead, they would watch court proceedings and piece them together with snippets of English law. Court proceedings were informal, for the judges had no more training than the attorneys. By the 1760s, the situation had dramatically changed. Lawyers were essential to the rapidly growing international trade, dealing with questions of partnerships, …
In the 18th and 19th centuries, most young people became lawyers by apprenticing in the office of an established lawyer, where they would engage in clerical duties such as drawing up routine contracts and wills, while studying standard treatises. The apprentice would then have to be admitted to the local court in order to practice law. Frank B. Kellogg (1856-1937) is an unusually successful example of this route. Starting as a farm boy in Minnesota who dropped out of the lo…
In American slang, a "white shoe" firm is a long-established, high-prestige, typically White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) business. Such firms hired well-tailored people, usually male, and often outfitted with white buckskin shoes with red soles, inspiring the moniker, who possessed useful family connections and degrees from top law schools, such as Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. White shoe firms emerged in the late 19th century, and were usually based in New York, Boston, or Phil…
The COVID-19 pandemic had a unique and major influence on many business practices within the legal profession, impacting most members of the profession from March 2020 onward. In 2021, Thomson Reuters published a joint study of Georgetown University Law Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession and the Thomson Reuters Institute, "2021 Report on the State of the Legal Market", which states:
• History of the legal profession
• The American Lawyer, monthly magazine published since 1979
• The Green Bag, popular magazine for lawyers
• Jurist
1. ^ Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: the democratic experience (1958) pp 195-202.
2. ^ Gary B. Nash, Class and society in early America (1970) pp 130-131.
3. ^ James A. Henretta, The evolution of American society, 1700-1815 (1973) pp 207-208.