In the following decades the party slowly would evaporate, absent from the ballot box, but still present for a while in the judiciary. In 1807, for example, Theophilus Parsons (Harvard, 1769), the Federalist chief justice of Massachusetts, ruled that not all citizens were equal before the law in the case at hand, a slander charge, because “rank and condition” affected the degree of injury caused by act.57 The judge seems not to have understood that America was rapidly becoming a nation where the notion of social rank no longer existed.
