ABSTRACT
The Civil War gave impulse to powerful new economic forces; it also released political ideas of nationalism no less important in their practical consequences. From 1789 down to the Civil War the lower federal courts were, in the main, designed as protection to citizens litigating outside of their own states and thereby exposed to the threatened prejudice of unfriendly tribunals. For law and courts are instruments of adjustment, and the compromises by which the general problems of federalism are successively met determine the contemporaneous structure of the federal courts and the range of their authority. Lyman Trumbull himself started the ball rolling by a bill which coalesced the district and the circuit courts into a single court of first instance and established nine intermediate courts of appeals with final jurisdiction in a large class of cases. The Davis Bill which established the circuit courts of appeals received the President's approval on March 3, 1891.
