Sarah Blackstone’s Fortune and Misfortunes

Two years before his death, William Blackstone wrote to his brother-in-law James Clitherow to suggest a new investment strategy for his wife Sarah Blackstone’s jointure. An earlier investment in a loan to a Welsh mortgagor would soon come due, and William proposed that Sarah’s money should be invested in a new mortgage on William’s own properties. The “said £7000” that would be coming in when mortgagor Thomas Lloyd made repayment should be assigned to him, William explained, to “be secured by a mortgage of the several parcels…the greatest part of which have been purchased by me since the settlement which I made in 1764.” William explained that he desired this mortgage loan for “a very eligible Purchase of Lands which I have in my contemplation.”Footnote ¹⁶

As this letter signals, William Blackstone, like many eighteenth-century husbands, was engaged in the ongoing management of his wife’s jointure. Like others, he tried to evaluate new financial opportunities, weighing the benefits and risks for his wife while keeping his primary focus on the general expansion of Blackstone and Clitherow family fortunes. From early in the marriage, William worked closely with his brother-in-law on investment strategy. In this letter he recalled that in 1764, just three years into his marriage, the two men agreed to “assign and transfer” a significant proportion of Sarah’s separate property—consisting of investments in South Sea stocks, Bank of England annuities, and turnpike tolls—to William in consideration of an annuity of £120 a year that he procured for his wife. This transfer ensured that William had closer control over Sarah’s property and that she became more dependent on his decision-making. Mortgage was critical in this early decision too since William Blackstone had raised an annuity for his wife by “mortgaging his newly-acquired property at Wallingford.”Footnote ¹⁷ William surely believed that his control and Sarah’s dependence were welcome and expected developments since, as he explained in his legal writings, the limited legal capacity of a feme covert was beneficial for both the woman and the family.Footnote ¹⁸ A husband was, he knew, obliged to protect his wife, and William actively exercised that responsibility. He and James negotiated, renegotiated, and invested Sarah Blackstone’s jointure multiple times over the course of her nineteen-year marriage to William. The parchment of their marriage settlement was littered with addenda, “scrawled,” as William himself described them, over its multiple folds. William Blackstone was fully engaged in the typical activities of an eighteenth-century patriarch and was an assiduous household “oeconomist.” Careful reading of the settlement and addenda shows that in his married life, William acted out the principles of what scholars call a “benevolent paternalism” articulated in his famous Commentaries on the Laws of England (1766).Footnote ¹⁹

When the Blackstone-Clitherow marriage settlement was first drawn up in April 1761, the amount of Sarah’s portion was set at £4000. This total value was standard for a family like the Clitherows. Proud occupants of a manor house at Brentford, the Clitherows’ wealth was originally derived from merchant interests and then invested in a landed estate in the 1670s.Footnote ²⁰ Sarah’s brother James was expected to produce a specified amount of her marriage portion by mortgaging part of the Clitherow estate. Sarah’s father, James Clitherow II, had included this mortgage proviso in his last will and testament, and it was also stipulated in Sarah and William’s marriage settlement.Footnote ²¹ The reliance on a mortgage to raise Sarah’s portion was unremarkable since long-term mortgages were a regular feature of what was known as the “strict settlement.” This was a method of estate planning that aimed to prevent the sale or alienation of family property by structuring inheritance so that an entailed property would pass to the eldest son and subsequent male heirs.Footnote ²² While primogeniture, this passage of wealth to the eldest son, was protected, families like the Clitherows did borrow against the estate in order to provide for daughters and younger sons. They depended on debtor protections in eighteenth-century mortgage doctrine to ensure that they would be able to preserve the family property against sale or alienation.Footnote ²³ They too adhered to property law and inheritance practices that were justified in William Blackstone’s own influential works like the Treatise on the Law of Descents in Fee Simple (1759) and his Commentaries on the Laws of England.

The monies raised by her brother James through mortgage were supposed to be invested for Sarah in stocks and funds. In addition, the Blackstone-Clitherow marriage settlement afforded Sarah a £1000 investment in Bank of England annuities. Further, James’ and Sarah’s mother, Philippa Clitherow, out of “natural love and affection for her said daughter,” provided her with several more annuities and a £1200 investment “in a mortgage on the tolls and receipts of the Brentford Turnpike.” Finally, this whole portion was to be vested in “certain trusts” to be administered for the benefit of William Blackstone, his intended wife Sarah, and any children of their marriage. According to the settlement document, Sarah Blackstone agreed to accept the “dividends, interest, produce and profits” generated by investment of “the said several stocks and funds as aforesaid for and during her life as and for her jointure and in barr of her dower.”Footnote ²⁴ Originally defined as a “joint estate, limited to both husband and wife,” jointure was now, again according to Blackstone’s analysis, commonly acknowledged to be that “sole estate limited to the wife only” which would provide her support “in case she survived her husband.”Footnote ²⁵ The investments specified here, administered by trustees, would help to support William and Sarah’s family. In time they were meant to provide an annual income, a jointure, to support Sarah in her widowhood.

This kind of agreement to jointure in lieu of dower, the widow’s old common-law right to a one-third interest in her husband’s estate, was a typical feature of eighteenth-century marriage settlements. The establishment of a trust to protect Sarah’s separate property was also a familiar way to “circumvent” some of the restrictions that coverture placed on married women.Footnote ²⁶ William Blackstone was notably silent on the subject of trusts in his Commentaries, and some modern scholars suggest that he was suspicious of trusts and other equitable protections for married women, fearing that they would undermine the certainty of common law coverture.Footnote ²⁷ In practice, however, William signed a marriage settlement that included the creation of a trust. This was likely necessary since the administration of Sarah’s portion was already part of a lengthy process of family accounting regarding the Clitherow estate. Her fortune was intertwined with the fortunes of her three sisters and one younger brother, already subject to other family trusts, and just recently part of further negotiation at the marriage of her brother James to Ann Kemeys in 1757.Footnote ²⁸ In negotiating the settlement of marriage and trust, William agreed with his wife’s family on the choice of her brother and his friend, James, as Sarah’s trustee. It was usual for a male relative like James to remain involved in the management of a trust, just as it was expected that the bride’s portion would be invested “for the benefit of the new family created by the marriage.”Footnote ²⁹ Additional male family friends would also be tasked with oversight, and William and James chose men with legal training to provide this assistance. Sarah’s additional trustees were their friends Richard Bagot and Paul Feilde, both barristers of Lincoln’s Inn. Paul Feilde was already a named trustee in the Clitherow estate, and Richard Bagot had been a fellow with William and James at All Souls, Oxford, in the 1750s and could be expected to follow their lead.Footnote ³⁰ By forming this male community, attached to broad professional and kin networks, Blackstone, like other men, hoped to guarantee some measure of economic security and success in the management of this trust. Like others, he also pursued strategies that privileged male authority and prioritized his own investment schemes, thereby assimilating this trust, conceived of as an area of equitable protection for his wife, to the “benevolent paternalism” of common law coverture. His actions were informed by an ideology of patriarchal power that favored patrilineal descent and protected elite wealth.

During the period of their marriage, William’s investment of Sarah’s funds traced a notable shift away from her original mixed portfolio, which included both company stocks and government debt, towards investment in mortgage loans. As we’ve seen, early in the marriage, many of Sarah’s stocks, bank annuities, and turnpike tolls were transferred to William in exchange for a promised annuity derived from his estate. At the same time, other securities were still retained in the trust administered by her brother and his male friends, under her husband’s guidance. New money that Sarah inherited from her mother and from another female relative was similarly “laid out in the public stocks and funds.”Footnote ³¹ By 1770, according to her trustees’ account, Sarah’s money was largely invested in Reduced Annuities sold at the Bank of England. Given the fact that the 1760s were a period of economic growth in Britain, other investments might have produced more sizable gains, but these kinds of state annuities were generally regarded as a safe bet; they could be easily sold and bequeathed and were “the most popular investment for women in the eighteenth century.”Footnote ³² In the fall of 1772, however, after a decade of following this safe path, the trustees decided to sell all of Sarah’s annuities, realizing a small profit of less than £100. At William’s direction, the trustees changed investment strategy: they took the proceeds from the sale, added a few hundred pounds advanced by William, and placed the total of £7000 in a mortgage loan to a Welshman named Thomas Lloyd.Footnote ³³ Why this strategic change? The context of economic turmoil is illuminating here. The men made this decision at a time of widespread financial crisis in Britain and across the empire. It was a period when credit was dramatically unstable, and, given the recent failure of the Ayr Bank in Scotland, even investment in Bank of England annuities might have appeared uncertain.Footnote ³⁴ Six years later, at another moment of economic and imperial volatility, William Blackstone and James Clitherow forged the new agreement that William outlined in his letter. Again, they deviated from the original investments in stocks and annuities and, at William’s direction, they invested Sarah’s money in another mortgage—this time in a loan to her own husband.

Many people in eighteenth-century Britain regarded mortgage as a viable investment strategy. It was popular with lenders as well as borrowers, and growing numbers of lawyers and brokers forged networks to facilitate mortgage loans in imperial as well as domestic ventures.Footnote ³⁵ So it is not wholly surprising that Sarah’s property was invested in this way. Families like the Blackstones and Clitherows knew that investment in mortgages, like investment in joint-stock companies and bank annuities, was a useful way of providing income for female dependents. Indeed, over time, more of these daughters, widows, and wives had become independent investors in the expanding credit economy, and these women’s portfolios included mortgage loans as well as company stocks, state lotteries, and government annuities.Footnote ³⁶ Many female lenders relied on a steady income coming in and preferred to get ongoing mortgage interest payments rather than to call in the loan or, in the case of default, to pursue foreclosure. Many women were even more attracted to public stocks and securities than mortgage and private securities precisely because such investments were increasingly regarded as reliable—and potentially more remunerative.Footnote ³⁷ In this period, not only single women but also married women, like Sarah, were actively involved in markets and money management. As much recent scholarship has shown, women’s investment decisions and economic activities “enabled and contributed to the domestic economy, to developing national commercial economies, and to global colonial commerce.”Footnote ³⁸

Sarah Blackstone, however, was not among those women who were active, engaged investors. William called attention to this fact in the 1778 letter proposing the new mortgage investment strategy to his brother-in-law. He said, in conclusion: “I have only to add, that Your Sister authorizes me to say, that she acquiesces in this Proposal, as far as she is able to understand it; but refers it intirely to Your Discretion & mine.”Footnote ³⁹ What did it mean for Sarah to “acquiesce” in William’s plan? While we have no evidence of Sarah’s own reaction to the proposal, the one surviving letter to her from William does underscore his paternalistic attitude and hints at the ways he may have encouraged dependency in his wife. Writing to his “dear Sally” from the Lent assizes in March 1775, William struck a didactic and comforting tone. He knew that his wife recently had “a little shock” when she learned about the sudden and grave illness suffered by his fellow judge on circuit, George Perrott. William offered Sarah a solemn lecture on her necessary submission to the “Hands of Providence” and warned her not to indulge the anxiety of “a mind so tender & so susceptible of Alarm as Yours.” He assured her that he “applaud[ed] & rejoice[ed]” in the fact that she endeavored to “amuse” herself “by [her] Saturday Walk.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Of course, this single letter should not be used to characterize the whole of their marital relationship as one of dependence and subordination. It is true that in several other surviving letters to relations and friends, we can see William briefly referring to his wife as a companion who shared his sentiments and sent her compliments.Footnote ⁴¹ And near the end of his life, when he penned his last will and testament, he included Sarah alongside her brother James and his own brother Charles Blackstone as executors of his estate.Footnote ⁴² Yet other clues also speak to William Blackstone’s firm exercise of authority and highlight his notoriously nasty temper.Footnote ⁴³ This evidence calls into question conventional claims about the Blackstones’ marital harmony and the couple’s “purest domestic and conjugal Felicity.” Such claims about his happy marriage were first made by William, repeated by his friend and her brother James, and they have too often been uncritically accepted by modern scholars.Footnote ⁴⁴

In evaluating these claims, it is worth considering, for example, that while Sarah Blackstone was pregnant throughout the first ten years of their marriage, “enduring a total of nine confinements between 1762 and 1771,” her husband was also often confined to bed because of poor health. “After a partial breakdown in 1758, the last twenty years of Blackstone’s life were marked by frequent attacks of gout and vertigo,” his biographer Wilfrid Prest explains, “to which growing corpulence, dislike of physical exercise, and what one contemporary categorized as his ‘temperate use’ of port all doubtless contributed.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The entire period of Sarah and William’s marriage thus coincided with these “frequent attacks” of gout and vertigo. Perhaps the challenges of eighteenth-century childbirth and her husband’s illnesses meant that Sarah became more dependent on the advice of her brother and her husband and less capable than other women of becoming involved in financial decision-making. Perhaps the illnesses and confinements also intensified William Blackstone’s bad humor. As Prest further notes, Sarah “presumably learned to deal with his notoriously short temper,” and, if we trouble the simple narrative about marital happiness projected by William, we can interpret Sarah’s acquiescence to her husband in a different light.Footnote ⁴⁶ She could have decided, or been persuaded, that it was easier to trust rather than to counter his financial methods and plans. Her agency was limited in this marriage to a man, twelve years her senior, who expressed decided views about male authority and female dependence in his legal texts and also applied them to his own intimate relationship.Footnote ⁴⁷

Finally, Sarah’s agency was also inhibited by the specific ways in which her separate estate was first generated by the Clitherow family and then invested by her husband, brother, and trustees. When women’s property was placed “in safe and relatively inflexible investments, such as irredeemable annuities, bank stock, or land,” Margaret Hunt explains, it “had the effect of elevating the notion of the family as refuge over that of the woman who was first and foremost a conduit for investment funds. It also left both middle and upper-class women with diminished freedom of action with respect to ‘their’ money.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The Blackstone-Clitherow marriage settlement, declaration of trust, and other financial records demonstrate that Sarah Blackstone served as a “conduit” in this way. Her husband and trustees intended to provide her with income, but at the same time, her assets were used to pursue other economic interests. The mortgage investment that William proposed on his own property was intended to increase family fortunes, and his investment goals, like other men’s, were represented as beneficial. There was always a danger, however, that instead of increased wealth, such investment plans might dissipate the capital that was supposed to be used for a wife’s support.Footnote ⁴⁹

William Blackstone understood his wife’s potential vulnerability in this situation, and he sought to defend his own probity against likely objections to his mortgage scheme. Chief among those objections would be the charge of self-dealing, or unfair advantage: would Blackstone be seen as one of those unscrupulous men who wanted to employ his wife’s money in order to enrich himself at her expense? Ian Doolittle, another of Blackstone’s modern biographers, has suggested as much, asserting that it was, in fact, “Blackstone’s marriage to Sarah Clitherow [that] gave him access to capital.” And Doolittle concluded with the kind of remark that Blackstone likely feared: this “advantageous marriage,” Doolittle explained, was at least part of what enabled Blackstone to amass an estate worth £25000—“a striking achievement for an orphan and academic who never prospered at the Bar.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This image of William Blackstone as a failed barrister has often been tied to his reputation as a misanthrope who was irritable, intimidating, and unkind. Such a view of Blackstone was widespread in his own time, and he and his brother-in-law tried to respond to such critiques by creating that narrative of William as a devoted family man. James Clitherow publicly rejected the charges of evil temper and small-mindedness after William’s death, extolling William Blackstone as a successful and self-made man: “a bright example of a man, who without fortune, family interest or connexions, raised himself.”Footnote ⁵¹ This emphasis on self-reliance in Clitherow’s Memoirs of His Life, which was based on William Blackstone’s own autobiographical notes, may be indicative of William’s particular sensitivity to the idea that he had benefited from a strategic marriage and had used his wife.

William could counter these kinds of contemporary attacks on his character by installing Sarah as his mortgage lender in 1778, since this might enhance her claim to his estate after his death. If Sarah were one of William’s creditors, she would have additional protection at a time when the payment of debts, funeral costs, and related expenses typically undermined a widow’s economic security.Footnote ⁵² William knew that his own mother had faced great challenges when her husband died, leaving her a young widow with three infant children and significant business debts.Footnote ⁵³ Indeed, in his letter to his brother-in-law, William articulated his concerns about Sarah’s widowhood and openly acknowledged that an “obvious objection” to his mortgage proposal was “that the Security is too scanty, nay (in case of a 4s. Land Tax) is really deficient, to answer Lady B’s proposed Annuity during her Survivorship of me, of £280 per annum, being the Interest of her £7000 at 4 per cent.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Another objection, unremarked by William, would have been that the proposed four percent interest rate was too low. The late 1770s was a period of widespread enclosure in Britain, which generated “a substantial demand for capital” among landowners, making mortgage lending more lucrative. It was also a period of warfare, when interest rates on government debt witnessed a sharp increase.Footnote ⁵⁵ Sarah’s money might have attracted a better rate if it were placed in a different investment.

William Blackstone realized the conflict between his projected use of her capital and the intended provision of her support. He laid out two safeguards in his letter to James: first, he promised that his real estate would be “charged to the full of its produce…so that your sister be no sufferer thereby.” Second, William promised to give a bond to the trustees that would be worth double the investment’s value and that would be secured by all of his property.Footnote ⁵⁶ These assurances were premised upon a valuation of Blackstone’s properties, which, he knew, might not be wholly reliable. In his last will and testament, composed just nine months after he obtained this mortgage loan, Blackstone noted that the “rents and profits of my estates” might be insufficient to meet several payments outlined therein for his wife, children, and one devoted servant. In a further admission of uncertainty, Blackstone made sure to indemnify his executors and trustees from liability for investment losses or account deficiencies resulting from their own “bona fides” decisions in the management of his estate.Footnote ⁵⁷ What would shield Sarah from loss or deficiency?

William’s detailed justification of his mortgage plans demonstrated his legal knowledge and his approach to responsible investing. This letter also contributes to a better understanding of Blackstone’s masculine focus and of his struggle to navigate the credit economy. It was an expression of his understanding of a husband’s power and application of ideas about the effective use of mortgage, marriage, and inheritance laws to increase wealth. William’s eagerness to allay suspicion and to affirm that he was ready to provide adequate support for his wife and family was also an expression of concern about his own reputation. William Blackstone was notoriously sensitive to questions about his personal integrity, and he plainly endorsed traditional ideas about patriarchal authority.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the end, however, his careful planning and repeated assurances did not result in financial security for his widow. When William died in February 1780, he left an estate that was inadequate to support Sarah and their seven surviving children as intended.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the face of this “undeniable uncertainty,” William’s friends and colleagues stepped in, using their influence to secure a crown pension for Sarah Blackstone of £400 per year.Footnote ⁶⁰

Like other women of her status, Sarah remained vulnerable and reliant upon the good behavior of men. These women were not simply disadvantaged by their limited property rights as daughters and wives. Women could also be subject to coercion, undue influence, and sometimes outright deceit by men who sought to mortgage family property—or sometimes their wives’ separate property—in order to cover their own debts or pursue new financial schemes. The danger that men were engaged in risky speculation and deceits led some jurists, like Blackstone’s friend John Eardley Wilmot, puisne justice on the King’s Bench (1755–1766) and Chief Justice of the Common Pleas (1766–1771), to rely on the “separate examination of a married woman” in cases where a husband risked family well-being by seeking to use an estate as security in a mortgage loan.Footnote ⁶¹ In other areas of law, too, it was recognized that a husband’s control might harm his wife. A chancellor would direct a chancery master to open an inquiry in a trust dispute if there was concern that a wife had been compelled by her husband to use her separate property against her own best interests.Footnote ⁶² In criminal trials women sometimes had recourse to the “presumption of marital coercion” as a defense against culpability. As certain procedural rules and rules of evidence were developed to prove such coercion, however, that presumption became easier to rebut.Footnote ⁶³ These different legal practices demonstrate that jurists were aware of the ways in which intimacy and dependence operated within marriage and were structured in the law. There was an expectation of “men behaving badly,” as the modern feminist legal scholar Rosemary Auchmuty terms it, but a limited legal response.Footnote ⁶⁴

Some jurists, including Blackstone, offered rationalizations, arguing that a husband’s authority and responsibility under the law afforded benefits and protection to a wife. A new reading of the manuscript sources has revealed how William applied such arguments to his own family fortunes. Appreciating his paternalistic actions and attitudes will similarly provide a new lens for reading his courtroom judgments. As we’ll see, Blackstone made these kinds of arguments from the bench as well as in his private letters and in his widely known Commentaries. Further contemporary argument stressed the economic advantages of male control, cautioning against female capriciousness and treachery. Within the logic of capital accumulation, it was understood to be as important to preserve men’s right to use women’s property as it was to protect women from coercion.

William Blackstone’s “Jurisprudence of Masculinity”Footnote ⁶⁵

William Blackstone encountered many similar examples of women’s economic dependence and vulnerability in his professional work as a lawyer and judge. He documented some of these examples in the Reports of Cases Determined in the several Courts of Westminster Hall, from 1746 to 1779, Blackstone’s voluminous case notes that were edited by James Clitherow and published posthumously in 1781. These Reports—the “sole continuous” and “most comprehensive record of proceedings in Common Pleas” in the 1770s—were, of course, intended to be a record of the opinion of the court and not a register of Blackstone’s personal opinions.Footnote ⁶⁶ Yet these Reports can provide some insight into his approach to legal issues. Since Blackstone, “like other amateur eighteenth-century reporters, did not attempt to produce a verbatim account of what passed in court,” Emily Kadens observes, “his version of a case could emphasize what he thought was important.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The Reports were written in the language of common law and, in the first instance, demonstrate adherence to rules of pleading, citation of authorities, and to the values of system and tradition.Footnote ⁶⁸ But Blackstone, like other eighteenth-century jurists, was also informed by enlightened trends, especially developments in print culture and in historical writing.Footnote ⁶⁹ Further, as the Blackstone-Clitherow manuscripts also show, he was well aware of eighteenth-century commercial change, including, for example, new ways in which women were reliant on investment income and involved in the mortgage market. When read together, the published reports and Blackstone’s letters, marriage settlement, and other personal documents illuminate one another: the manuscripts reveal some of his desires and concerns, while the publications indicate the scope of his professional experience and suggest which legal practices and ideas informed his family financial strategies.

Given the expense of litigation at the central courts and the kinds of actions usually heard at Common Pleas, it is unsurprising that William Blackstone reported on numerous cases about the marriage settlements, inheritance plans, mortgages, jointures, and annuities of propertied English families.Footnote ⁷⁰ His case notes chronicled the many ways in which the court upheld rules of primogeniture, protected entails, and enforced the responsibilities of trustees. There were familiar disputes between male heirs and female claimants and between creditors and widows.Footnote ⁷¹ Some cases involved questions about marital coercion: in Lindsay v Gray (1775), for example, there was suspicion that a husband had pressured his dying wife to sell property in order to pay off a mortgage and other debts.Footnote ⁷² In general, the reporting shows Justice Blackstone’s emphasis on the importance of male authority and responsibility under the law. For example, in the case of Loane v Casey (1775), an action brought against the widow Casey as executrix of her husband’s estate, Blackstone’s report detailed the original agreements made between Casey’s father and husband over her marriage portion and promised annuity. Here, Blackstone highlighted the “benevolent paternalism” at the heart of common law doctrine, repeating several cited precedents where the court had enforced a husband’s responsibility to provide for his wife. Among the precedents referenced in the courtroom that Blackstone chose to include was one that foreshadowed his own actions: this was an early eighteenth-century case where a husband mortgaged his wife’s jointure, despite his promise to preserve it “free from incumbrances,” leaving his widow economically vulnerable. In that instance, Blackstone reported, the Kings Bench had protected the widow against her husband’s “breach of covenant.” In the case now before his court, Blackstone explained, widow Casey’s entitlement to her annuity, founded in her marriage settlement, was also to be preserved because it could be regarded as “the discharge of a debt” and “equivalent to a recovery on an action of covenant.”Footnote ⁷³ The court’s ruling for the widow Casey was, then, in line with principles of inheritance and contract law that underlay a patriarchal order, were justified in Blackstone’s published treatises, and, as we’ve seen, were followed in his own marriage settlement.

Similar disputes over mortgaged jointures were heard in the English Chancery in the 1750s and 1760s. In these cases, Alison Tait affirms, chancellors also concluded that when a wife’s property was used as collateral for her husband’s debts, she would be recognized as a creditor of his estate. Tait argues that these kinds of cases were an essential part of Chancery jurisprudence; like other historians, she regards these developments in the law of equity as critical to the recognition of women’s individual agency under English law.Footnote ⁷⁴ In many ways common law jurisprudence, especially the doctrine of coverture, could be a barrier to those developments, and Justice Blackstone’s attention to the protection of wives’ and widows’ financial interests in these Common Pleas cases should not be read as an endorsement of women’s economic autonomy. Blackstone certainly knew from his own legal training and personal experience in administering his wife’s trust that equity and common law afforded married and single women some rights to property. However, he maintained his insistence on the importance of male control according to law. Many of his case reports convey ideas about the economic benefits of female dependence and defend what he described as the special protections afforded women under English marriage and inheritance law.

Indeed, Blackstone suggested that recent changes in English marriage law might have undermined those special protections and disadvantaged women in some ways. In 1753 an Act for the better preventing of Clandestine Marriages had established new statutory guidelines for valid marriage, including requirements of public notice and parental consent for the marriages of minors.Footnote ⁷⁵ Blackstone agreed with legislators’ claim that marriage should be publicly regulated, and he shared the “patriarchal and materialistic” aims of this law, which sought to prevent secret marriages that undermined “transmission of property among the elite.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Yet Blackstone also shared the misgivings of those who thought that the new law would make women more susceptible to seduction and deceit, Mary Sokol explains, “because promises to marry could no longer be enforced by the church courts.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Judgments in the common law courts, Blackstone believed, should protect women against the predations of seducers. In his Reports Blackstone expressed such paternalistic attitudes by including his own arguments that underlined the fact of male culpability for seduction.Footnote ⁷⁸

Finally, Blackstone’s courtroom judgments articulate his growing concern about challenges to wives’ security and husbands’ authority that were caused by new developments in commercial credit and improvements in the bankruptcy process. A major area of contemporary legal dispute was the status of “married women as consumer debtors”: when married women engaged in business as femes sole or when they obtained goods on credit while separated from their husbands, were they liable for their debts?Footnote ⁷⁹ Demands by creditors for debt repayment involved attacks on the doctrine of coverture and were frequently heard in the courts of Kings Bench, Requests, and Admiralty, as well as in Blackstone’s Common Pleas. Jurists in these courts generally accepted the principle of coverture and did not question its paternalistic claim to provide women with security through subordination in marriage. But some of these men also sought to promote “the benefit of commerce,” in Justice Wilmot’s words, and to grant women freedom to access credit and become liable for debt since, in Justice Mansfield’s words, “modern fashions have altered the old law.”Footnote ⁸⁰ William Blackstone reported on his involvement alongside fellow justices in these disputes and again highlighted his own insistence upon male control. In the case of Hatchett v Baddeley (1776), for example, Justice Blackstone denied that defendant Sophia Baddeley could be held liable for the debts she incurred with coachmakers Hatchett and Boyes. “His views of the rights of married women remained fixed,” James Oldham avers, pointing to Blackstone’s words in Hatchett: “I am clearly of the opinion,” Blackstone reportedly stated, “that in no case can any feme covert be sued alone, except in the known excepted cases of abjuration, exile and the like, where the husband is considered as dead, and the woman as a widow or else as divorced a vinculo; Co. Litt. 133 a.”Footnote ⁸¹

It is worth noting that just before making this traditional and learned statement, with its citation to the foundational authority of Sir Edward Coke, Blackstone slipped some pointed social commentary into the record. The Reports state that Justice Blackstone saw “no hardship” in the fact that these coachmakers lost their money when they “furnished a coach to the wife of a player” who they knew had run off from her spouse. Further, Blackstone expressed his conventionally masculine bias when he suggested that enforcing the law of coverture against such merchants would have the added benefit of keeping wives safely at home: “If this were universally known to be law, it would be difficult for such women to gain credit; and this would consequently reduce the number of wanderers.”Footnote ⁸² Blackstone understood that these cases were critical for the preservation of male power through economic dominance, and he was certainly not the only one to recognize that women’s economic independence could spell trouble for men. Oldham quotes manuscript sources indicating that Chief Justice De Grey made a similar statement in the courtroom: “This difficulty of procuring credit will oblige women to their duty. The making the separation easy would only induce them to desert their husbands.”Footnote ⁸³ From these men’s perspective, liability might lie with the male tradesman who extended credit to a married woman, and responsibility might lie with the man who seduced her to leave her husband. Under English law, however, no legal action could be taken against a feme covert. These “wanderers” had limited agency; these women were to remain under the restrictions and retain the protections entailed by marriage. “The contrary doctrine militates against the first principles of English law,” Blackstone added, incorporating the language of his own Commentaries into his Reports, “which considers the woman’s powers—nay almost her very being, as suspended during the coverture.”Footnote ⁸⁴

This is just one of the many ways in which the Reports echoed arguments about women and families, marriage and inheritance, that William Blackstone made in his legal treatises and applied in his own household. Reading Blackstone’s Reports alongside his manuscript marriage settlement and mortgage proposal more fully illuminates his engagement with laws regarding women’s property. Such reading can also reveal his appreciation for points of tension within the patriarchal, capitalist structures of English law that he did so much to define and defend in his Commentaries on the Laws of England. In that earlier influential work Blackstone famously described marriage as a “civil contract” in English law and positioned himself in opposition to those theorists who asserted the natural inferiority and subordination of women.Footnote ⁸⁵ At the same time he endorsed the “disabilities which the wife lies under” once the marriage contract was made because, he claimed, the restrictions imposed by coverture actually benefitted women: by law husbands became responsible for wives’ well-being, affording them property and protection.Footnote ⁸⁶ In defending this paternalist logic Blackstone further characterized the purpose of marriage as legitimate procreation. That claim was tied to his argument that controls over reproduction and female sexuality were necessary in order to enforce male responsibility for their own offspring—that is, the obligation of “the parent to provide maintenance for his child.” From that obligation Blackstone derived core principles of English inheritance law, such as primogeniture.Footnote ⁸⁷

In his Commentaries and his case reports Blackstone’s analysis of male responsibility was always tied to a strong endorsement of male rights. Throughout, Blackstone relied on historical narrative, as well as references to legal and philosophical authorities, to persuade readers of the legitimacy of women’s legal dependence.Footnote ⁸⁸ These were the argumentative strategies Blackstone used to assert the social utility of English marriage and property law. In all of these ways Blackstone laid the foundations for a modern “jurisprudence of masculinity,” defined by the contemporary feminist legal scholar Melissa Murray as “a jurisprudence that prioritizes, both explicitly and implicitly, men’s rights, even as it diminishes and constrains women’s rights.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Justice Blackstone upheld these same principles in his most famous judicial opinion, the judgment on the case of Perrin v Blake (1772). This was a significant and long-running controversy over a widow’s jointure that had been secured on a major Jamaican estate known as Dean’s Valley plantation.Footnote ⁹⁰ When this widow’s claim was being debated at Westminster, the controversy not only engaged questions about marriage settlements and inheritance law, but it also involved disputes over colonial appeals and the jurisdiction of English common law. As such, Blackstone’s arguments about the scope of men’s authority over family property had the potential to exert a wide influence given their ramifications for colonial properties. And the import of any judgment on this widow’s jointure was surely heightened by the fact that the case was heard in the Exchequer Chamber in the very same year that Justice Mansfield heard wide-ranging debates over colonial jurisdiction, enslaved property, marriage, and contract in the case of Somerset v Stewart. In the controversy surrounding Somerset too, William Blackstone’s published work was deemed relevant: for example, the abolitionist Granville Sharp used his Commentaries to refute key arguments that theorists used to justify the legality of slavery. Blackstone was apparently sympathetic to some anti-slavery critiques of empire, although in his Commentaries and his professional statements he remained cautious about undermining the legitimacy of colonial slavery or the extent of slaveholders’ power in the colonies.Footnote ⁹¹ In 1772, Mansfield, Blackstone, and other English judges and British legislators were adjudicating questions about planters’ authority and imperial sovereignty in multiple and significant ways.

Francis Hargrave, who successfully argued on behalf of the enslaved plaintiff James Somerset in Mansfield’s court, later published Blackstone’s opinion in a pioneering edition of modern legal manuscripts in 1787.Footnote ⁹² In Perrin v Blake, “the subject of the case from the beginning,” Hargrave noted, “was the validity of a jointure of 1000l a year claimed by a Mrs. Williams out of a Jamaica estate said to be about three times that yearly value.”Footnote ⁹³ Dean’s Valley was a large plantation located among dozens of other sugar works in Westmoreland Parish, where, by the 1760s, ten thousand enslaved people labored.Footnote ⁹⁴ Decades of litigation over the property pitted the claims of the widow Sarah Williams against those of her deceased husband’s sisters and their families. For many years Sarah Williams remained unsure whether the marriage settlement negotiated by her father, the prominent Jamaican planter James Knight, would be enforced.Footnote ⁹⁵ As she waited, she was reliant upon the good will and assistance of her brother and her friends in London, “without which,” her lawyers claimed, “she would have ‘been reduced to a State of Want.’”Footnote ⁹⁶ In Jamaica her sisters-in-law similarly depended upon the legal and financial strategies pursued by their husbands and sons and upon extraction of plantation profits. Over the long course of litigation these families faced threats of ejectment, and Dean’s Valley was mortgaged at least once.Footnote ⁹⁷ Prominent lawyers who later became judges, including Mansfield, De Grey and Charles Yorke, offered changing advice to Sarah Williams as they interpreted the different ways English marriage and inheritance law prioritized the rights of fathers, husbands, and sons. Multiple courts struggled to resolve the conflict between these women’s interests in the slave plantation as daughters, sisters, and wives.

In this case, as in other jointure disputes recorded in William Blackstone’s Reports, justices confronted evidence of women’s vulnerability to men’s schemes. They likely also encountered evidence concerning the operation of this plantation in Jamaica since their hearing followed prior litigation over the property that had been recorded in colonial courts. The justices kept a close focus on the implications of this case for property titles in England.Footnote ⁹⁸ In Perrin, as in the Somerset case heard that year, English judges exercised caution, not only expressing fear that colonial law might undermine British law but also that their rulings in colonial cases might generate new threats to imperial markets at a time of economic turmoil. While Perrin was the culmination of years of disputes litigated in multiple jurisdictions, Hargrave later explained, in the Exchequer Chamber it was deliberately framed “in order to have the point determined as if the estate actually was situate in England.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Legal argument concentrated on the intentions of the original male testator, William Williams, who left these extensive Jamaican sugar works to his descendants.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Justice Blackstone’s opinion was joined by six other judges. In it he assimilated the facts of the case to established English testamentary practices by applying the rule in Shelley’s Case to the interpretation of planter Williams’ will. Shelley’s Case, a dispute heard in the sixteenth century, was famously recorded by Coke in his seventeenth-century Reports, and his account was regarded as a longstanding rule of testamentary interpretation. Blackstone relied on that account to explain that despite the likelihood that “the testator [Williams] intended to restrain his son from disposing of his estate for any longer term than his life,” the words used in his will actually gave the son greater powers, and the judges did not have discretion “to override the technical meaning of the language the testator had used.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ John Williams, eldest son of planter William Williams, thus inherited an entailed estate, an estate that could be alienated, not merely a life estate. John, following the established practice of common recovery, “could break [the entailed estate] and convert it to fee simple out of which Sarah could have her jointure.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Justice Blackstone’s analysis has often been presented as evidence of his conservatism or narrow insistence upon traditional rules, and it is true that his opinion did offer a long and learned discourse on the sixteenth-century leading case.Footnote ¹⁰³ In employing what some commentators term a “strict constructionist” approach, it is also true that Blackstone maintained his masculine bias and described the proper application of law in terms of the exercise of male authority. Further, Blackstone recognized that adherence to the old rule in Shelley’s Case might be attacked as “narrow and illiberal,” and he claimed to reject that critique. Just as he insisted that the paternalistic logic of English marriage law actually benefitted English wives, here he argued that the old testamentary rule was key to the positive development of property rights enjoyed by Englishmen; he even suggested that it had in fact facilitated credit relations, contributing to British economic growth.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The law should not “be an infringement of that liberty of disposing of a man’s own property,” Blackstone proclaimed at the outset of his opinion, which is “the most powerful incentive to honest industry and…therefore essential to a free and commercial country.” Blackstone echoed the language of “honest industry,” “liberty,” and “commerce” prevalent in contemporary works of political economy. At the same time, he explained, English law offered vital protections since it established boundaries, provided security, and prevented each man from making his own law.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Blackstone’s opinion endorsed men’s authority to exercise their liberty within what he described as the wise and proper bounds of law. The law’s confidence in male authority, he thought, along with adherence to established rules—such as those regarding entail and primogeniture, jointure, dower, and coverture—protected English families and property and could also be consonant with liberal and commercial values.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Through these statements in Perrin v Blake, and in conjunction with his other published works, Blackstone crafted an influential argument about the benefits and benevolence of Englishmen’s power.

The Judge and the Planter: Financial Interests and the Family Man

William Blackstone was adamant in his belief in the force of law as a safeguard against harm. And yet as much as he defended the justice of English inheritance, marriage, and property doctrines, he was not blind to the shortcomings of the law. He saw where it failed to protect women and where stated rules could be in tension with law’s broad aims.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ He was also aware of the emerging challenges to English law and the increased risks faced by women like Sarah Williams, whose marriage settlements were controlled by men involved in highly speculative ventures that diverged from honest and responsible husbandry. It was widely understood at the time that there was a special danger of excessive speculation and deceit in the management of colonial properties since planters engaged in clandestine financing, allowed multiple liens on plantation assets, and fought over profits and losses in remote colonial courts. When contests over colonial estates were litigated at Westminster, they could challenge established property and inheritance laws, potentially undermining the whole edifice of male authority.

Lawsuits like Perrin v Blake were known beyond the halls of Westminster and discussed in publications beyond the justices’ case reports. There was keen interest in sensational reports, and stories about families ruined in these kinds of disputes circulated in newspapers and novels. Authors traded on contemporary interest in personal as well as political corruption as they crafted tales of debauched heirs and rapacious planters or reported on courtroom proceedings and colonial affairs.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In the course of providing insights into law and commerce, these texts also articulated commonplace ideas about male authority. They drew upon an important discourse of “oeconomy” or “good husbandry” that dominated discussions of masculine identity in the eighteenth century. “Oeconomy was the practice of managing the economic and moral resources of the household for the maintenance of good order,” Karen Harvey explains.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ “Oeconomy” was a concept that “derived from the classic Aristotelian model of oikos,” Harvey adds, with its associated ideas about hierarchy in human relations and about the fundamental links between household and polity. Women were expected to contribute to the maintenance of good order, albeit from a subordinate position under the direction and care of a masculine head. These ideas were strengthened and extended in eighteenth-century discourse, helping to further claims about men’s civic as well as social identity in nineteenth-century Britain.Footnote ¹¹⁰

As we’ve seen, William Blackstone clearly aspired to these masculine ideals of economy and industry. When he emphasized the importance of male responsibility in his published texts, and when he defended his own management of family resources, he endorsed contemporary gender ideology. All of Blackstone’s biographers have noted his determined industriousness and careful record-keeping, his sense of duty and interest in charity and improvement. “He was a faithful friend;” James Clitherow recalled, “an affectionate husband and parent; and a charitable benefactor to the poor; possessed of generosity, without affectations, bounded by prudence and oeconomy.”Footnote ¹¹¹ By the last decades of the eighteenth century, when Clitherow composed these words of praise, the masculine ideals of “prudence and oeconomy” were associated not only with augmenting the wealth and happiness of an individual household, but they were also connected to the promotion of national and imperial success.Footnote ¹¹² A global network of credit underpinned that success, and credit was a notoriously volatile thing—often described in gendered terms, credit was the “potent changeable lady” of modern finance.Footnote ¹¹³ A man’s credit, or a nation’s, was founded upon a reputation for good management, for honesty and honor; it relied on the exercise of trust within close as well as far-flung networks; and credit necessarily operated within an environment of risk-taking and adventure.

Ten months after he ruled on the jointure dispute in Perrin v Blake, William Blackstone took that first risk with his wife Sarah’s fortune and shifted her money into the single Welsh mortgage loan. This transaction did not produce a clear profit for the Blackstones, but William took responsibility for a new strategy that deviated from the original investment plans negotiated with his wife’s family. He may have considered this mortgage to be a low risk at a time when the press was reporting on widespread panic in the markets, and rumors were spreading about dramatic shifts in the behavior of the financial establishment, including the Bank of England.Footnote ¹¹⁴ William also promised to hedge Sarah’s male trustees against any risk. Richard Bagot and her brother James Clitherow would be held harmless and indemnified for any “losses,” “damages,” or “expenses” accrued when they invested Sarah’s money “upon real security instead of vesting or placing out the same in some of the public funds according to the strict letter of the provisoe contained” in the marriage settlement of April 1761.Footnote ¹¹⁵ James Clitherow might have requested this indemnity not only because of general financial uncertainty at the time but also because, in recent months, he had become entangled in tense negotiations involving financial losses accumulated by another brother-in-law, John Gardner Kemeys. Like the families who litigated before Justice Blackstone in Perrin v Blake, the Clitherow family was now engaged in disputes that involved questions about control over Jamaican plantation wealth, responsibility for debt, and protection of a male heir’s rights.

John Gardner Kemeys was, by contemporary accounts, the opposite of William Blackstone: imprudent, wasteful, combative, unaccountable, and with, in Clitherow’s words, a “scheming not a calculating head.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Kemeys was a planter who had inherited considerable holdings in the Plantain Garden River Estate in St. Thomas-in-the-East, Surrey, Jamaica.Footnote ¹¹⁷ By virtue of his marriage to Jane, the sister of James Clitherow’s wife Ann, John Gardner Kemeys also had authority over an estate that his wife had inherited in Monmouthshire, Wales. In the 1756 settlement between Jane Kemeys and John Gardner, the Welsh estate and the bulk of the Jamaican properties were also charged with a jointure for Jane and portions for their children. Trustees were appointed to oversee and protect these family interests.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Among the trustees was barrister Paul Feilde, a close friend of James Clitherow, who had also been appointed as a trustee for Sarah in the Blackstone-Clitherow marriage settlement. In the Gardner-Kemeys settlement too, families relied on male community members attached to professional and kin networks. They adhered to coverture, primogeniture, and other property law and inheritance practices endorsed in William Blackstone’s reports and treatises. Their choices were informed by an ideology of patriarchal power that prioritized male authority and protected elite wealth.

John Gardner Kemeys’ exercise of power involved risk and exploitation and led to extensive litigation in both Jamaica and England.Footnote ¹¹⁹ By the spring of 1772, he was in deep trouble, and his wealth was almost gone. Kemeys had amassed enormous debts amounting to more than £40,000. He had borrowed above £30,000 of that in speculative attempts at improving his property and increasing his slaveholding on his Jamaican plantation. Like other men in this period of credit crisis, Kemeys turned to the British parliament for a private act; this act consolidated his debts, placed his estates in trust, and allowed him to secure a massive mortgage loan. The loan was structured with the intention of protecting the estates for the benefit of Kemeys’ eldest son during his minority. But that protection was elusive because Kemeys’ risk-taking and self-interested behavior only increased after he took up permanent residence in Jamaica in 1774.Footnote ¹²⁰ Since the private act had named James Clitherow as one of the Kemeys’ trustees, James now became deeply implicated in the financial affairs of his brother-in-law’s family and their Jamaican plantation. Over the next two decades James struggled to contain fallout from his brother-in-law’s continued deceptive accounting and secretive behavior. James’ exercise of this responsibility as trustee betrayed a familiar masculine bias: his major preoccupations were, first, to limit his own financial liabilities and, second, to try to help preserve family properties for Kemeys’ son and heir. The claims of Kemeys’ wife to her jointure, to financial support for her other children, and to a voice in financial decision-making came a distant third.

Like Sarah Blackstone, Jane Gardner Kemeys’ economic security depended upon her husband’s mastery over fortune as well as his trustees’ accounting expertise. Unlike Sarah, however, Jane did not simply depend upon these men’s knowledge or acquiesce in their proposals. Instead, she actively demonstrated her superior understanding of estate management, loan agreements, and legal processes in copious correspondence with her husband and her brother-in-law.Footnote ¹²¹ Yet, Jane could not overcome the fact that she was reliant on them and on other men like William Blackstone, who were enlisted to provide support and advice. These other men, too, prioritized male interests and the rights of the male heir. For example, Blackstone took part in an effort to advance Kemeys’ heir by helping to find him a place at Oxford.Footnote ¹²² This effort was seen as vital and indeed was requested by Jane since she was well aware that it might help to protect her family’s property and thus further her own interests.Footnote ¹²³ More than a decade later, her son, as lawful heir, did successfully assert his right of redemption to the mortgaged estates. But in those intervening years Kemeys’ creditors initiated the foreclosure process in the English and Jamaican Chanceries, and Jane Kemeys was subject to dispossession and eviction.Footnote ¹²⁴

The legal and social structures of male authority that gave control but also responsibility to husbands, trustees, and sons were supposed to provide protection and benefit to a woman like Jane Kemeys. But there was no benefit when Jane’s husband took on new debts in Jamaica and diverted money to his own separate uses. There was no benefit when her trustees mismanaged finances, bungled lawsuits, fell behind in mortgage interest payments, and defaulted on the loan. Throughout the mounting crisis Jane Kemeys continued to work to defend herself and her children. Her letters provide an unusually extensive record of the overt subordination of women’s claims. Jane begged the men to protect her interests and to uphold her right to jointure and trust income. In a critical letter of January 12, 1778, after providing James Clitherow with an overview of his responsibilities as trustee, Jane reminded him of his promise to “take everything” out of her husband’s hands and of his stated intention to preserve her Welsh estate. Jane also offered to petition the mortgagees herself.Footnote ¹²⁵ Finally, in this letter Jane expressed her suspicion that her husband had another family in Jamaica—she feared that John had taken up with another woman and cared for other children who would threaten his English family’s legitimate property claims. Years later Jane’s suspicion was confirmed by Kemeys’ Jamaican will: like other planters, John left resources to a “mistress,” Elizabeth Asserley Morgan, and to their two children. Morgan was likely a free or enslaved woman of color, and any claim she had to this legacy was fiercely opposed by James Clitherow as well as Kemeys’ heir. The anxiety these men felt about this threat to inheritance and descent and the actions they took to deny Elizabeth’s claims are indicative of the ways in which ideas about white supremacy also featured in the ideology of male control.Footnote ¹²⁶

A little more than a week after Jane sent that remarkable letter, full of despair but also authority and rebuke, James Clitherow received another letter. This one came from William Blackstone, and it proposed the new mortgage scheme that would eventually jeopardize his own wife Sarah’s wealth. Blackstone tried to reassure Clitherow and their shared community of male friends that his mortgage scheme posed no risk. He likely sought to distinguish his plan from mortgages contracted by men like Kemeys who were so far in debt and so deeply implicated in the evils of empire. Indeed, when William Blackstone wrote to James Clitherow in 1778, Britain’s imperial success was dramatically uncertain; it was a period of heightened anxiety when many Britons reflected on the costs of empire. What kinds of corruption had perverted British society and law, they wondered, and what kinds of degradation had Britons imposed on others in the pursuit of imperial wealth?.Footnote ¹²⁷

These contexts of empire, economy, and family are essential for understanding William Blackstone’s actions, ideas, and influence. As we’ve seen, Blackstone was concerned about the particular risks that women faced, especially, but not exclusively, because of economic and imperial change. In the courtroom and in his own family, he saw that men’s legal dominion over property, including the operation of coverture and primogeniture, could disadvantage women in distinct ways. Sisters were deceived by brothers who made clandestine mortgages on family property, and wives by husbands who misrepresented their profits and plans. Women were also subjected to financial and emotional manipulation by those same relatives or by trustees, who tried to exploit their ignorance or acquiescence. In light of these dangers, William Blackstone still maintained his endorsement of female dependence. A gendered ideology, which positioned male authority as central to the success of household, state, and empire, furnished the framework within which Blackstone excused such harms, justified the operation of law, and directed his own actions as head of his family.

In many ways, William Blackstone’s expression of what it meant to be a “family man” was clearly different from the ideas of a Jamaican planter like John Gardner Kemeys. Blackstone was a prominent jurist and successful legal writer who was concerned with preserving a traditional and sound reputation. He was also more conservative in his investments and opinions, and he took his gender roles seriously. Yet if we can recognize some of the connections and commonalities between William Blackstone and a planter like Kemeys, we will better understand the intentions behind Blackstone’s actions and the influence of his words. These men were members of a family that, like many British families, was eager to benefit from Britain’s economic growth but also anxious about the risks entailed in her imperial success. William Blackstone’s published treatises and reports helped to justify British property and power; his actions as well as his words justified the exercise of male authority. Such justifications were widespread but not universal, and they were shaped in turn by late eighteenth-century debates over economic, social, and imperial change. A better understanding of William Blackstone’s familial and financial contexts lays bare his polemical purpose—his part in these debates—and sheds new light on the ways in which he influenced modern conventions regarding male power. Blackstone was a jurist, politician, and educator, and at the same time, he was a husband and friend who, like Kemeys, relied on a great mortgage to try to get ahead and who put male schemes ahead of female security. Or, to put it another way, in William Blackstone’s family, women’s economic subordination and emotional vulnerability came first.