Continuing our recap of the prizes and awards announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we now turn to the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Dissertation Prize. The prize is "awarded annually to the best dissertation in any area of American legal history, including constitutional and comparative studies, although topics dealing with the colonial and early national periods will receive some preference." This year's winner is Alyssa G. Penick (Ph.D., University of Michigan), for “The Churches of Our Government: Parishes, Property, and Power in the Colonial and Early National Chesapeake." The citation:
In a beautifully rendered and sweeping dissertation, “The Churches of Our Government: Parishes, Property, and Power in the Colonial and Early National Chesapeake,” Alyssa G. Penick tells a revisionist history of disestablishment—how “the legal concept of an establishment of religion evolved from dismantling the established church.” This ambitious dissertation covers a century spanning the late colonial period through the early republic while homing in on specific localities to reveal the myriad ways the Anglican church stood at the center of civic life. Employing an expansive understanding of religious influence, Penick demonstrates the role of statutory and common law in maintaining the church’s powers. Her insightful writing brings alive how the church engaged in everything from policing the public good, to meting out social welfare, to executing law. The manner of disestablishment determined the degree to which it would continue to do so. Disestablishment, Penick insists, was a fundamentally “material process.” Methodologically creative and deeply grounded in archival materials, the dissertation details the church’s substantial wealth, garnered not only through glebes but also through other types of real property, taxation, and enslaved persons. The key to maintaining this wealth, Penick contends, was a common law corporate status: “Vestrymen and church wardens came and went, but parishes existed in perpetuity as corporate entities.” Revolutionaries inverted the meaning of “establishment,” from enforcing orthodoxy, to a new sense of “using state power to protect religious freedom.” That new meaning, in turn, elicited different state-level responses, which Penick brilliantly teases out through a comparison of how Virginia and Maryland, neighbors with distinct patterns of church property-holding, translated the abstract idea of “disestablishment” into concrete legislation with real-world consequences. Disestablishment thus not only changed the structure of the church, it also rearranged the material landscape, loosening church control of white people’s moral conduct while tightening surveillance of the poor and free Black people and changing property relations and social welfare programs. By challenging common individual-rights narratives of religious freedom, this provocative and inventive dissertation gives us a new history of disestablishment but it also provides intellectual grist for our own times.
Congratulations to Alyssa Penick!
-- Karen Tani
