ABSTRACT
The main interests of the country in the following decades turned from issues of racial justice and federal-state relations to issues of economics. Rapid industrialization created huge concentrations of wealth as well as a huge urbanized working class increased by a swelling tide of immigration. Field's actions in the Turner affair were characteristic: he hated fiercely and long, and was tireless in his efforts to avenge himself on those who had crossed him. Field's opinions on the commerce clause illustrate the markedly ideological character of his judicial stance. He tended to see legal problems as symbolic of ideological conflicts and to analyze them primarily on that level. Increasingly, the Fourteenth Amendment came to be the focus of judicial activity and controversy on the Court in the late nineteenth century. This amendment had been enacted in a period when race relations and civil rights were social issues of first priority in America.
