Series of short, humorous sketches of author’s experiences as a frontier lawyer. A Whig party supporter, Joseph Glover Baldwin, offers satirical but realistic biographical outlines and frontier tales of his life and work in Alabama and Mississippi in the 1830s and 1840s. Illustrating the humor of the Old Southwest, the book represents a gallery of backwoods lawyers, gamblers, con men, and tellers of tall tales. They give an unusually vivid picture of the bench and bar in the "shinplaster" era. The courts had their honorable men, some of them educated, polished jurists, some rough but honest backwoods lawyers. Litigants before the courts included murderers, thieves, crooked gamblers, liars, crooks, and jack- legs of the law. There were also the hangers-on, the people to whom a session of court was both drama and forum. Trials hitched along, affording plenty of time for men like Baldwin to practice the art of telling anecdotes and tall tales.