By contrasting the thought of three late nineteenth-century legal scholars, this paper seeks to connect the development of classical legal thought with general developments in Gilded Age thought, and, in particular, the development and decline of historical evolutionary consciousness in American social theory. The three legal scholars are Joel Bishop, Francis Wharton and John Chipman Gray, all of whom lived and wrote in Boston in the 1880s.

This paper also seeks shed to light on classical orthodoxy's rise, acceptance and longevity in Gilded Age America by depicting its compatibility with contemporary religious thought and its vision of law as embedded in, and reflective of, society's moral life. This paper seeks to demonstrate that classical legal thought had a number of variants, variants that themselves reflected the transition of the foundation of American social thought from the religious to the secular. It also suggests that our current identification of classical thought with the jurisprudence of the Gilded Age Harvard Law faculty masks much of the source of classicism's appeal.