Rare Book Monthly
Book Catalogue Reviews - September - 2008 Issue
Recent Acquisitions in the Law from The Lawbook Exchange
Hastain's plat plans of the Creek nation.
Church and state faced off in this 1813 New York case, described in The Catholic Question in America: Whether a Roman Catholic Clergyman be in Any Case Compellable to Disclose the Secrets of Auricular Confession. The case against one Daniel Phillips for receiving stolen property depended upon a confession he supposedly made to his priest. The District Attorney claimed reluctance to even pursue the case, but the Catholic Church wanted it to go forward to establish a principle. It did, and the Church was pleased. The court recognized the sanctity of the confessional, whereby Phillips was acquitted on lack of evidence. Item 87. $450.
Item 39 is Hastain's Township Plats of the Creek Nation, published in 1910. It helped to delimit boundaries of what was once part of Creek lands in the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). The "Five Civilized Nations" of natives, one of which was the Creeks, had been uprooted from their eastern homelands and sent to Oklahoma in the first half of the 19th century. By the end of that century, pressure from white settlers led the government to dissolve the authority of the tribal governments, and turn over the land to individual members of the tribe and settlers. Thus what was once common tribal land became the subject for a plat map. $1,000.
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