Whether justly or not, Rhode Island claims the honor of leading the way in such changes. In 1844, the Hon. Wilkins Updike introduced a bill into her legislature, securing to married women their property under certain regulations. The step was in the right direction. In 1847, Vermont passed similar enactments. In 1848-9, Connecticut, New York, and Texas followed; in 1850, Alabama; in 1853, New Hampshire. In 1855, Massachusetts passed an act of a still more comprehensive kind. It was essentially the same as that introduced into her Senate, in 1852, by the Hon. S.E. Sewall. It was not wholly satisfactory to those who prepared it, but was the best it was thought possible to pass.[42] In 1856 and 1857, the Legislatures of Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Maine, altered their property-laws,--Rhode Island advancing somewhat on her first step.[43] Wisconsin and Iowa have followed; and it is not likely that any new States, unless they should be slave States, will repeat the old barbarisms. I have given Rhode Island the precedence she claims; but there are certain statutes of the State of Illinois, as early in date as January, 1829, which deserve to be alluded to, on account of their unusual liberality. If married, and over the age of eighteen years, a woman in Illinois may, _in spite_ of her husband, devise her real estate, and bequeath her personal estate, to any one for ever. The wife may administer on her deceased husband's estate, in preference to all others, if she apply within sixty days. On her husband's death, she inherits one-half of his real estate in fee-simple, absolute; and the whole of his personal estate, with her rights of dower in addition. The wife has not _legally_ the first title to the guardianship of her child on the demise of her husband; but she has it by a kind of _comity_, the consent of public opinion and the courts. In reference to the wife's inheriting from the husband, my correspondent, the Hon. William H. Herndon, says,-- "You will perceive a difference in the two sections relating to the wife and husband as inheriting from one another, favorable to the wife apparently. In the twenty-second section you will find, that, in case of the wife's death without children, the husband inherits one-half of her real estate in fee-simple, absolute; but nothing is said about her personal. This is because the common law has already given him her personal estate on her marriage." So we see that the State of Illinois did not quite divest itself of the barbarisms of the common law. In a later letter, Mr. Herndon continues:--