Call Number:

Item 0034

Repository:

University of Delaware Library Special Collections

Extent:

1 volume (428 pages)

Language:

English

Preferred Citation:

MSS 0096, Item 0034, James Patriot Wilson n docket book, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware.

Date:

1792-1800 (inclusive)

Creator:

Wilson, James P. (James Patriot), 1769-1830

Form:

Dockets and Account books

Abstract:

James Patriot Wilson (1769-1830) was a Delaware lawyer and Presbyterian minister. The James Patriot Wilson docket book, also known as Wilson's Red Book, is a small, red leather notebook of approximately 430 handwritten pages recording Delaware court cases from 1792 to 1801, argued before the Court of Common Pleas, Court of Quarter Sessions, Delaware Supreme Court, Court of Oyer and Terminer, Court of Chancery, and the High Court of Errors and Appeals.

James Patriot Wilson was born in Lewes, Delaware, in 1769. His father, Matthew Wilson, was a Presbyterian minister and physician. Wilson graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania, declining an invitation to join the faculty and returning instead to Lewes to teach and read for the law. Wilson began practicing law in 1790 in Sussex County, and in 1793 was admitted to practice in Delaware's Supreme Court.

Wilson continued practicing law in Delaware until 1806, when he ceased his law practice and studied to become a minister. He was licensed as a Presbyterian minister to preach in 1804, and served multiple congregations in Delaware until 1806, when he accepted a call to the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. His move to Philadelphia was encouraged in part by his friend Benjamin Rush. Wilson continued preaching until his death in 1830.

Dawson, John M. "Wilson's Red Book." University of Delaware News, Winter 1971-1972, page 9.

The James Patriot Wilson docket book, also known as Wilson's Red Book, is a small, red leather notebook of approximately 430 handwritten pages recording Delaware court cases from 1792 to 1801, argued before the Court of Common Pleas, Court of Quarter Sessions, Delaware Supreme Court, Court of Oyer and Terminer, Court of Chancery, and the High Court of Errors and Appeals. At the end of the book, there appears to be a topical index and an alphabetical list of cases. The flyleaf reads "James P. Wilson's Notes of Cases, Written without revision or correction from 1793 to 1800."

The Red Book represents a handwritten summary of court cases tried in Delaware in the last decade of the eighteenth century. At the time, courts did not, as a rule, create written reports on the proceedings of various courts. Instead, lawyers and judges would record the proceedings in their own hand and make such personal records available to others in the legal community. Volumes such as Wilson's Red Book thus became the record for Delaware legal precedent for the common lawyer until 1837, when the first volume of legal reports for Delaware was printed. There is evidence that the Red Book was copied, in its entirety, by at least one other lawyer.

The Red Book was used by Professor Daniel J. Boorstin of Harvard Law School in 1943 for a two-volume work,