In the decade before the Civil War, just as the states of the North demonstrated variations on Illinois' theme of forming new doctrines around an expanded conception of public duties, the states of the South displayed versions of Virginia's resistance to change in the name of preserving the order of slave society. The review that follows of Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky cases illustrates both the points of difference and the underlying unity in the pattern of antebellum southern common law development. Similarly, in the years following the war, these states followed versions of Virginia's pattern of first resisting, and then finally adopting, rules imported from outside sources without significant efforts at explanation and without grounding in the political culture or conditions of the time and place. One point of difference among southern states was whether railroad cases were, or were not, initially seen as driving the development of other doctrines. Regardless of the significance that was attached to railroad cases, however, the consistent pattern that emerges is one of resisting any unification in common law doctrines by making the facts of rail expansion fit, however awkwardly, into traditional analytical categories.

Damage to Property: Stock and Slaves

Above all, what provoked conflicts in Georgia's system of jurisprudence in the 1850s was the simultaneous existence of railroads and slaves. In 1850, a slave named Jacob boarded a train operated by the Macon & Western line, “for the ordinary fare for negroes, from Macon to the eight mile post above.