This dissertation constructs a genealogical feminist account of legal personhood. It examines how the discourse of law articulates personhood and determines who counts as a subject of law and how they were counted by judges, lawyers, legislators and legal commentators, those individuals who bore the primary responsibility of making and interpreting the law of legal personhood in the United States during the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th Centuries. The project interrogates the relationship between legal personhood, the recognition of entities, individuals, and collectivities as viable legal subjects, and the body. It starts from an examination of legal persons on the margins, those whose legal personhood existed in a liminal space where some rights, capacities, entitlements and privileges were possessed but others were denied. Examining these persons on the margins, corporations, enslaved African Americans, and women bound by coverture, reveals the importance of the body and of raced and gendered embodiment in the discursive construction of legal personhood in law in the Anglo post-colonial tradition of the United States before the 20th century. This genealogical account of legal personhood shows that while there was no cohesive universal conception of legal personhood, judges, lawyers, and treatise writers constructed these contested conceptions of legal personhood in reference to the bodies and the perceived and imagined raced and sexed embodiments of the individuals seeking the legal recognition afforded by personhood. And that these conceptions of legal personhood, even for the most marginalized persons recognized by law, entailed a capacity for relationality. Persons, no matter how they were bound by status and incapacitated to act, were recognized as potentially relational, possessing some limited capacity to contract in equity and to be part of a collective family or household.