You have been recommended to this office as a prompt, efficient and reliable practicing Lawyer, and we beg, therefore, to tender you the enclosed certificate of appointment. [Not present]…Arrangements are now about perfected, whereby the Association hopes to secure for its members the greater portion of the collecting and other legal business of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Mobile, New Orleans and the other principal cities. In addition therefore to the convenience of having a faithful correspondent at every point in the Union, you will receive from all quarters the greater part of such business as may require attention in your vicinity. We have sent to your address the Law Register by which you will see what Lawyers are at present connected with the Association…the Association confines itself strictly to its legitimate business. To the collecting or security of debts, claims, legacies and inheritances throughout the Union; to the purchase or disposal of lands in any of the State or Territories; the Payment of Taxes on lands, and the investigation of titles; and to the transaction of any business requiring the intervention of an Attorney or Counsel…If you shall accept the appointment, please remit to the undersigned five dollars, the required fee of membership for two years…”

     Martindale-Hubbell, now the standard American directory of lawyers, was first published in 1868; the American Bar Association was not founded until ten years later.

Decades earlier, before the Civil War, John Livingston, whose accomplishments as “cultural entrepreneur” are recorded in M.H.Hoeflich’s 2010 book, Legal Publishing in Antebellum America, created the short-lived precursors of both the directory and the A.B.A.,  his American Legal Association being one of the first “attempts to forge a loose national alliance of lawyers who would serve the increasing needs of banks and merchants for legal services”, making him “a visionary who understood the impact that Manifest Destiny and the national transformation of the original colonies would have on the legal profession.”