Joel Prentiss Bishop

Who was Joel Prentiss Bishop?

Joel Prentiss Bishop was an American lawyer and legal treatise writer referred to by more than one commentator as "the foremost law writer of the age."

Bishop was born in a "small log house in the woods" in Oswego County, New York. His mother died shortly thereafter, and he and his father farmed sixty acres in Paris, Oneida County, New York. His rural schoolmasters recognized his gifts and urged his father to allow him to get further education. At sixteen he began supporting additional study by teaching in public schools, but his health broke, and he was forced at 21 to find a less strenuous occupation.

Bishop had grown to maturity during the Second Great Awakening in the "Burned-over district" of Upstate New York, and throughout his life he retained a commitment to evangelical Protestantism. For seven years, he worked as general business manager, publishing agent, and assistant treasurer of the New York Anti-slavery Society and assistant editor of the Friend of Man, an abolitionist newspaper. In 1842, he "drifted to Boston" where he edited the Social Monitor and Orphan's Advocate and began working in a law office. Within sixteen months he had been admitted to the bar and opened a law office.