ABSTRACT
A notable feature of nearly all the assault cases in the late eighteenth and into the early nineteenth centuries was that they rarely resulted in prison terms at either the county jails or the state prison, even when the State itself brought charges of criminal assault. A new feature of assault trials of those under the age of twenty-one in the early part of the nineteenth century was a change in the way minors defended themselves. In an assault case in 1780 that may have been the precursor of a murder case six years later, the legal system provided only cursory protection to two African-American children charged with assaulting a seven-year-old child. By the 1790s the New London Courts at all levels were becoming more careful to make a specific identification of minor defendants in assault cases and to notify the child’s father or to provide a court-appointed guardian even in cases seeking relatively minor amounts for damages.
