Definition
In law, deliverance has two distinct procedural meanings, both rooted in the common law of property and civil practice:
1. Verdict. The formal finding rendered by a jury. In this sense, deliverance is simply the jury's decision delivered to the court — the act of giving verdict.
2. Replevin and distress proceedings. The writ or judicial order restoring wrongfully seized goods to their owner. In an action of replevin, deliverance is the process by which the distrained property is returned to the plaintiff, typically upon the plaintiff's giving security (sureties or pledges) to prosecute the claim and return the goods if the court ultimately finds against them.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The act of setting free or extricating from danger, imprisonment, bondage, or evil; also, the act of conveying something, or delivery in childbirth.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act of delivering or freeing from restraint, captivity, or peril; rescue. Webster also notes archaic senses of bringing forth children and the act of speaking or utterance.
The gap matters. In ordinary English, deliverance is charged with moral and religious weight — rescue, liberation, salvation. In law, the term is procedural and neutral: a jury speaks its verdict, or a court orders property restored. A researcher encountering "deliverance" in an old pleading or writ should resist the ordinary connotation and read it as a technical term of civil practice.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Second Deliverance. A writ available to a plaintiff in replevin who has suffered judgment against them — by default or nonsuit — on the defendant's motion for return of the goods. Second deliverance allows the plaintiff to have the same distrained property returned to them a second time, upon giving the same security as before, so they may renew their suit on the merits. Blackstone describes this writ at 3 Bl. Comm. 150; Stephens echoes it at 3 Steph. Comm. 668. It was a remedy of last resort against a procedural defeat that would otherwise leave the wrongfully dispossessed plaintiff without recourse.
Gager Deliverance. A related procedural mechanism in distress actions. Where the distraining party has been sued and has not returned the cattle or goods distrained, they were required not only to avow the distress (justify it) but also to gage deliverance — to put in surety or pledge that the distrained goods would be delivered. See Fitzherbert, Natura Brevium 67. This is the act of pledging, not the act of returning.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in early American and English common law materials will encounter deliverance primarily in three contexts: replevin pleadings, distress records, and jury practice. The term's ambiguity — jury verdict on one hand, property-restoration writ on the other — can create confusion when the procedural context is not immediately clear. Old reporters and form books rarely flag which sense is meant; the surrounding pleadings must supply the answer.
The Rapalje & Lawrence entry is terse and cross-referential, directing researchers to REPLEVIN without defining the term independently. Researchers using Rapalje as a starting point will need to pursue the replevin chain to reconstruct the full procedural picture. The New York and Wisconsin case citations in Rapalje (2 Wend. 345; 49 Wis. 697) suggest active use in early American state courts, but these must be consulted directly — Rapalje gives no substantive gloss.
Second deliverance is the subtype most likely to appear in American equity and common law records through the mid-nineteenth century. As formal replevin practice was absorbed into consolidated civil procedure codes — particularly after the Field Code reforms of 1848 and subsequent state adoptions — second deliverance as a named writ largely disappeared. Researchers in post-code jurisdictions will rarely find it as a live procedural term, but it persists in older treatises and reporters cited well into the late 1800s.
The jury-verdict sense of deliverance is largely archaic. Modern practice uses "verdict" exclusively. Finding "deliverance of the jury" in colonial or early republic records should be read as a stylistic variant of verdict, not a distinct legal act.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's first and second editions agree on the core definitions — jury verdict and replevin writ — though both entries are compressed and the second edition adds the Second Deliverance writ with citations to Blackstone and Stephens, giving it marginally more doctrinal substance. Neither edition addresses the gager deliverance form, which appears only in Rapalje & Lawrence, where it is likewise handled by cross-reference rather than explanation.
None of the historical dictionaries address the decline of these forms under code pleading, which is the most practically significant evolution for a researcher situating a source in time. The silence is telling: dictionary drafters of the era were describing a still-functioning practice. The researcher must supply the historical endpoint from other sources.
Jurisdictional Note
Second deliverance as a formal writ was an English common law remedy transplanted into American colonial practice. Its survival and abolition varied by state depending on when and how each jurisdiction adopted code pleading. In jurisdictions retaining common law forms longer (e.g., some Southern states into the late nineteenth century), the writ may appear in local reporters after it had effectively vanished elsewhere.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Replevin (for the broader action in which deliverance operates as a remedy); Distress (for the seizure proceedings that deliverance reverses).