it was 12,380. Little Rock was enthusiastically anti-Union at the outbreak of the Civil War. In February 1861, the United States Arsenal was seized by the state authorities. In September 1863 the Federal generals William Steele (1819–1885) and John W. Davidson (1824–1881), operating against General Sterling Price, captured the city, and it remained throughout the rest of the war under Federal control. Constitutional conventions met at Little Rock in 1836, 1864, 1868 and 1874, and also the Secession Convention of 1861. The Arkansas Gazette, established at Arkansas Post in 1819 and soon afterwards removed to the new capital, was the first newspaper published in Arkansas and one of the first published west of the Mississippi.
LITTLETON (or Lyttelton), EDWARD, Baron (1589–1645),
son of Sir Edward Littleton (d. 1621) chief-justice of North Wales,
was born at Munslow in Shropshire; he was educated at Oxford
and became a lawyer, succeeding his father as chief-justice of
North Wales. In 1625 he became a member of parliament
and acted in 1628 as chairman of the committee of grievances
upon whose report the Petition of Right was based. As a member
of the party opposed to the arbitrary measures of Charles I.
Littleton had shown more moderation than some of his colleagues,
and in 1634, three years after he had been chosen recorder of
London, the king attached him to his own side by appointing
him solicitor-general. In the famous case about ship-money
Sir Edward argued against Hampden. In 1640 he was made
chief-justice of the common pleas and in 1641 lord keeper of
the great seal, being created a peer as Baron Lyttelton. About
this time, the lord keeper began to display a certain amount of
indifference to the royal cause. In January 1642 he refused to
put the great seal to the proclamation for the arrest of the five
members and he also incurred the displeasure of Charles by
voting for the militia ordinance. However, he assured his friend
Edward Hyde, afterwards earl of Clarendon, that he had only
taken this step to allay the suspicions of the parliamentary
party who contemplated depriving him of the seal, and he undertook
to send this to the king. He fulfilled his promise, and in
May 1642 he himself joined Charles at York, but it was some
time before he regained the favour of the king and the custody
of the seal. Littleton died at Oxford on the 27th of August
1645; he left no sons and his barony became extinct. His only
daughter, Anne, married her cousin Sir Thomas Littleton,
Bart. (d. 1681), and their son Sir Thomas Littleton (c. 1647–1710),
was speaker of the House of Commons from 1698 to 1700,
and treasurer of the navy from 1700 to 1710. Macaulay thus
sums up the character of Speaker Littleton and his relations to
the Whigs: “He was one of their ablest, most zealous and most
steadfast friends; and had been, both in the House of Commons
and at the board of treasury, an invaluable second to Montague”
(the earl of Halifax).
LITTLETON, SIR THOMAS DE (c. 1407–1481), English judge
and legal author, was born, it is supposed, at Frankley Manor
House, Worcestershire, about 1407. Littleton’s surname was
that of his mother, who was the sole daughter and heiress of
Thomas de Littleton, lord of Frankley. She married one
Thomas Westcote. Thomas was the eldest of four sons of the
marriage, and took the name of Littleton, or, as it seems to have
been more commonly spelt, Luttelton. The date of his birth
is uncertain; a MS. pedigree gives 1422, but it was probably
earlier than this. If, as is generally accepted, he was born at
Frankley Manor, it could not have been before 1407, in which
year Littleton’s grandfather recovered the manor from a distant
branch of the family. He is said by Sir E. Coke to have “attended
one of the universities,” but there is no corroboration
of this statement. He was probably a member of the Inner
Temple, and lectured there on the statute of Westminster II.,
De Donis Conditionalibus. His name occurs in the Paston Letters
(ed. J. Gairdner, i. 60) about 1445 as that of a well-known
counsel and in 1481/2 he received a grant of the manor of
Sheriff Hales, Shropshire, from a Sir William Trussel as a reward
for his services as counsel. He appears to have been recorder
of Coventry in 1450; he was made escheator of Worcestershire,
and in 1447/8 was under-sheriff of the same county; he
became serjeant-at-law in 1453 and was afterwards a justice
of assize on the northern circuit. In 1466 he was made a judge
of the common pleas, and in 1475 a knight of the Bath. He
died, according to the inscription on his tomb in Worcester
cathedral, on the 23rd of August 1481. He married, about
1444, Joan, widow of Sir Philip Chetwind of Ingestrie in Staffordshire,
and by her had three sons, through whom he became
ancestor of the families holding the peerages of Cobham (formerly
Lyttelton, q.v.) and Hatherton.
His Treatise on Tenures was probably written after he had been appointed to the bench. It is addressed to his second son Richard, who went to the bar, and whose name occurs in the year books of the reign of Henry VII. The book, both historically and from its intrinsic merit, may be characterized as the first text-book upon the English law of property. The law of property in Littleton’s time was mainly concerned with rights over land, and it was the law relating to this class of rights which Littleton set himself to digest and classify. The time was ripe for the task. Ever since the Conquest regular courts of justice had been at work administering a law which had grown out of an admixture of Teutonic custom and of Norman feudalism. Under Henry II. the courts had been organized, and the practice of keeping regular records of the proceedings had been carefully observed. The centralizing influence of the royal courts and of the justices of assize, working steadily through three centuries, had made the rules governing the law of property uniform throughout the land; local customs were confined within certain prescribed limits, and were only recognized as giving rise to certain well-defined classes of rights, such, for instance, as the security of tenure acquired by villeins by virtue of the custom of the manor, and the rights of freeholders, in some towns, to dispose of their land by will. Thus, by the time of Littleton (Henry VI. and Edward IV.), an immense mass of material had been acquired and preserved in the rolls of the various courts. Reports of important cases were published in the “year books.” A glance at Statham’s Abridgment, the earliest digest of decided cases, published nearly at the same time as Littleton’s Tenures, is sufficient to show the enormous bulk which reported cases had already attained as materials for the knowledge of English law.
Littleton’s treatise was written in that peculiar dialect compounded of Norman-French and English phrases called law French. Although it had been provided by a statute of 36 Edward III. that viva voce proceedings in court should no longer be conducted in the French tongue, “which was much unknown in the realm,” the practice of reporting proceedings in that language, and of using it in legal treatises, lingered till a much later period, and was at length prohibited by a statute passed in the time of the Commonwealth in 1650. Unlike the preceding writers on English law, Glanville, Bracton and the authors of the treatises known by the names of Britton and Fleta, Littleton borrows nothing from the sources of Roman law or the commentators. He deals exclusively with English law.
The book is written on a definite system, and is the first attempt at a scientific classification of rights over land. Littleton’s method is to begin with a definition, usually clearly and briefly expressed, of the class of rights with which he is dealing. He then proceeds to illustrate the various characteristics and incidents of the class by stating particular instances, some of which refer to decisions which had actually occurred, but more commonly they are hypothetical cases put by way of illustration of his principles. He occasionally refers to reported cases. His book is thus much more than a mere digest of judicial decisions; to some extent he pursues the method which gave to Roman law its breadth and consistency of principle. In Roman law this result was attained through the practice of putting to jurisconsults hypothetical cases to be solved by them. Littleton, in like manner, is constantly stating and solving by reference to principles of law cases which may or may not have occurred in actual practice.
In dealing with freehold estates Littleton adopts a classification which has been followed by all writers who have attempted to
