USA > Arkansas > Biographical and pictorial history of Arkansas. Vol I > Part 22
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This field of learning, and profound scholarly investigation, embraces not only all the living Aryan races, and a knowledge of their languages, but also includes, necessarily, a knowledge of the ancient Sanskrit and all other fossilized languages of the Aryan family of nations. The ancient Sanskrit, was the literary and sacred dialect of India, but for ages, has been numbered with the dead languages. Philologists tell us, it has been more per- fectly preserved in its primitive purity, than any other dead lan- guage, and that it is closely allied to the modern Hindoo, the Persian and the principal languages of Europe, including the dead Latin and Greek languages, and that all have sprung from the Sanskrit, as a common ancestor or mother. Often the link between the living and the remote dead races and languages, is found in nothing but similarity of language.
Our great Philologist, Ethnologist and Oriental scholar fol- lows up these linguistic monuments, through the dim and mys- tic shadows of the remote past, and tells us their relation to the races of to-day. The field is as intricate, as vast, and is only
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equaled, by the genius which has undertaken to compass it. He is not only great in this field, but in all he undertakes is ALBURTUS MAGNUS. He is the grand commander of the thirty-third degree Scottish Rite Masons, the provincial grand master, of the grand lodge of the royal order of Scot- land, and the most eminent Mason in the western hemisphere and, perhaps, of the world. He has contributed very largely, to the learned literature of the order, and is the author of several unpublished, manuscript volumes, of profound com- mentaries on Masonry.
He was an ardent supporter of the Confederacy, and was led in that direction, by nothing more than his great love for right, founded on constitutional sanctions. The non-observance of these sanctions, by the north, as manifested in nullification statutes and resistance to the fugitive slave law drove him into secession. He viewed aggressive abolitionism, as the in- evitable forerunner of war. When constitutional barriers were deliberately broken down, he could see no protection for the south, except that confided to the god of battles, and the chivalry of a heroic race. He was not choice or technical, as to whether the appeal to arms was called secession or revolution, as the sword was to be the umpire in either case.
He had served with distinction in the Mexican war, and was no stranger to arms. The secession convention of Arkansas in May, 1861, accepted his services, and sent him to treat with the five civilized tribes on our western border, and to attach them to the south. He partially succeeded, and soon recruited a brigade of Cherokees, which he led in battle at Pea Ridge. The treachery and desertion of John Ross, the Cherokee chief, rendered it necessary for the south to keep an influential diplo- mat, to look over, and negotiate with the Indians, and General Pike was assigned to this service. For a short period, during the civil war, he was on the supreme bench of Arkansas, and the few opinions he delivered, are luminous expositions of law. His heart is a fountain of affection for his friends, whom he never forgets or neglects. Whilst these friends are not always chosen from the higher walks of life, they are all dis- tinguished for fidelity to friends, and an unswerving devotion to principle.
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Who, clothed with man's true and better nature, can read his touching letter, so full of noble and exalted inspiration, to his dying friend, the late Doctor Thruston of Van Buren, without having the fountains of his heart stirred - without the generous tribute of a tear to man's worth ? It was Damon, speaking to Pythias, in his expiring moments, lighting his soul in a halo of love and light in its flight from the world. The humble and the great, meet on a common platform to pay trib- ute to the genius and exalted worth of Albert Pike. He is venerated in Arkansas. This was touchingly illustrated to the author at Danville, in August, 1886.
Learning that there was an old blind gentleman in the ancient village, who knew General Pike when he first came to the territory, I called on him at night, having more leisure at that hour, and was introduced to John Howell. Ancient pines studded the yard, and lifted their plumage high, to meet the gorgeous field of silver light, which came flooding through the soft, waving foliage. We retired to seats beneath the pines, that we might enjoy our commune withont interruption. The quaint, garrulous, good, little, old man, bearing the burdens of three score and ten, blossoming for the great fruition beyond the dark river, with the windows of the soul forever closed against the world's light, embraces that profound Socratic philosophy which makes him the master of misfortune. He was delighted to hold converse with the friend of Albert Pike, and spoke of his humble and unpretending advent into Ar- kansas, dwelt on the Casca papers, Crittenden's visit to the young school teacher, his opinion of the brilliant young man, Christopher North's opinion of "Hymns to the Gods," his admission to the bar, and rapid upward flight to a seat where giants dwell, his advent in the supreme court of the United States in 1856, and the high eulogy passed on him by Daniel Webster, one of his auditors. Continuing, he said : " Arkansas had big guns in those days, more brains than any other given amount of population on the continent; there was Absalom Fowler, the knotty old Coke of the bar ; David Walker, who carved his way with sledge-hammer force to the front rank of his profession ; and Sam Hempstead, too ; he was no orator, but a deep thinker ; he builded a monument out of the statutes of
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descents and distributions now so deeply rooted in our system ; and there was old John Linton, too, huge and rough, whose memory was an index, unerring, to the whole range of legal literature, a foeman to be dreaded and respected in any field ; and there was Chester Ashley, a man of great depth and scope of comprehension, who carved his way from poverty to fame and high distinction; and there was old John Taylor, the cynic, the accomplished lawyer, whose satire and withering irony would make Juvenal blush; and there was Jesse Tur- . ner, a rising young man, as proud as Lucifer, as brave as Cæsar, and the soul of honor. Billy Cummins was there too; he could hold his hand with the best of them. Robert Crittenden, too, here in early times; he was the greatest orator Arkansas ever had, but he passed off the stage as Pike was coming on. Old Ben. Johnson, the just judge, came in '21 and staid on the bench until death canceled his commission in 1848."
Here the old man's heart filled up, and the call of the old roll was suspended. The moon crept softly, down through the interstices of bright foliage above, into those rayless eyes, and kissed a tear on his furrowed cheek. His voice grew mellow and tremulous, as his memory spanned the years gone, and called up the few living and the many. dead, in panoramic procession before his mental vision. Pausing, he said : " We all loved Pike ; he is one of the truly great men of this country." I would rather be baptized in the civic fame which inspired that tear from its crystal fount, than to have won the fields of Austerlitz, Marengo, Borodino, Lodi, Wagram, Leip- sic and Eylan. Such homage as that, to true worth and unpre- tending greatness, is worth more to just fame than the pyra- mids; in comparison, shafts of marble and spires of brass, dedicated to martial fame, retire into the background.
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JUDGE J. M. HOGE, FAYETTEVILLE.
Judge Hoge was born in McMinnville, Warren county, Ten- nessee, in 1806. He was a sprightly, promising boy, and from an early age manifested a lively interest in public affairs. The events and results of the war of 1812, aroused an intense patri- otic feeling in the boy far beyond his years. He was always at the post-office on the arrival of the semi-occasional mails of
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those days; and, when news came of Jackson's great victory on the 8th of January, 1815, it threw the boy into the wildest ecstacies of delight, and he ran home from the post-office twirl- ing his hat in the air and shouting at every jump: "Jackson has given the British hell !"
This was but typical of the great.national heart, an echo of the universal joy of the nation, which was never satisfied, until the hero of that great event, was made president of the country he had glorified. This incident attracted the attention and admiration of the celebrated Felix Grundy, who was afterward a senator in congress and member of General Jackson's cabi- net, being his attorney-general. Grundy recommended a classi- cal education for the boy, and he was sent to the best institu- tions of learning in the State, and was graduated at college in Nashville, Tennessee, in his nineteenth year.
After graduation, Mr. Grundy invited him to his office, and he read law under him, and was admitted to the bar in 1827, and came to Washington county, Arkansas, the same year. He taught several sessions of school at Cane Hill, and then opened an office in Fayetteville, where he remained actively engaged in his profession for many years. In 1835, Judges Sneed and Hoge, were engaged on opposite sides in the trial of a cause at Fayetteville, in which much interest and feeling was manifested by both, each being equally zealous and fearless. This culmi- nated in a severe fisticuff in open court and two pairs of dam- aged eyes. Judge Archibald Yell was on the bench ; he con- sidered each equally particeps criminis, and imposed a fine on both commensurate with the offense. Each was high spirited and generous to a fault. As soon as their faces were washed and their impulsive tempers cooled, they made friends, shook hands, and proceeded to the bar of the court to crave its in -. dulgence and purge themselves of the flagrant contempt. Judge Hoge, for both, addressed the court and said : "If the court please, I have come here to confess, that I have acted like a great fool in the episode last evening, which has so deeply offended and wounded the dignity of the court ; and Mr. Sneed, assures and authorizes me to say, that he did in all things dupli- cate my conduct and folly before this presence; and now we both, in sackcloth and ashes, deep humiliation and contrite sub-
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mission, beg and crave pardon for our offense, and as money is, to us, an unknown factor, of which we have only learned by tradition handed down to us by our fathers, we hope the court will not persist in requiring the performance of impossible conditions. In fact, we feel assured, that the court will much better conserve its own dignity and fame, by remitting the onerous fine for which each have already been punished, and thus repel the implied assumption, that the court was imposed on in the indulgence of a violent presumption, that finance ever troubled or burthened either offender before the court, or any of their proximate or remote ancestors. We have been taught to shun money as a vice, and its possession as an unfor- tunate burthen."
Judge Yell's heart was always full of sympathy and the milk of human kindness, and no man had a finer or keener appreciation of wit, irony and sarcasm. Coming as this did, beaming and sparkling in humor and pleasantry, it inspired a like response from him, and he said with a smile : "The court fully appreciates, and concurs in every thing you have said in such terse and appropriate language, and as you appealed to its judicial knowledge, and invoked a liberal interpretation of the lex non scripta, the judgment of the court is, that you go hence without day, and be no further impleaded in this matter; the equanimity of the court being restored to its normal functions. This, I believe, exhausts the jurisdiction of the court. If it could, it would gladly remove those organic and constitutional disabilities to which you so touchingly alluded in the opening of your case, but you must go before another tribunal for that. Mr. Clerk, call the next case." Each of the actors in this episode afterward became judge of the court - Sneed in 1844; Hoge in 1840.
In 1837, Judge Hoge was elected to the legislature as a demo- crat. He yielded adhesion to that party through life. In 1840, the legislature elected him judge of the fourth circuit, a posi- tion he filled with honor and credit, both to himself and the State, four years. He was brought up in the shadows of the Hermitage, and was deeply imbued with patriotic love for the Union and Jackson's hatred of Calhoun's nullification doctrine. With such associations, education and antecedents, he could
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scarcely be any thing but a Union man in the late civil war. He was honest and sincere in his convictions and actions. He could not wage war against the Union he so dearly loved from early youth, nor could he take up arms to strike down the peo- ple of his native south.
When the portentious clouds were lowering to burst in the great civil war, he sought neutrality in California, and there sup- ported himself with his facile pen as a correspondent for various journals, but chiefly the Sacramento Daily Press. When the Virginia convention was in session, he wrote from Sacramento to his son, Doctor James M. Hoge of Fayetteville : "Secession is war, and war is ruin. I hope the convention may be inspired with a lofty sense of duty and patriotism, and realize to the fullest extent the ruin secession involves." When the war was at its height, when great armies were moving by command of great gen- erals in the field, " by States wheel into line," he was far off, careworn and dejected, mourning the ruin of the country he so dearly loved. Like Marius, sitting in the ruins of Carthage, his soul was filled with sorrow in contemplating the mutability of all things human. Who that fought on, or espoused either side, at this distant day ; who now, after the passions that ruled the stormy hour, have gone down in eternal rest, bap- tized in the world's best blood, can abuse or harshly criticise the motives of either? I care not whether it be directed at a fallen Confederate, or martyred Union soldier, the same noble inspiration animated both, and both are MY COUNTRY- MEN. Just, impartial mankind, will award, a rose to the one, a laurel to the other. That sickly sentimentality, which seeks to arouse the passions of the people on either side for selfish ends, is unworthy the confidence and countenance of a great people. A tendency, a resort to these methods to secure office is the bane of American politics, confined not to this, but spanning every age, having for its foundation the infirmities of mankind.
Judge Hoge was a fine conversationalist. He had dark hair, a sparkling hazel eye, weighed one hundred and eighty pounds, and was five feet eleven inches high. Ile died on Easter Sun- day, 1874, in Custar county, Colorado, where he had gone on a visit to his son, a large cattle-dealer, and was buried at Ulay in Wet Mountain valley.
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In the fall of 1876, the author, coming out of San Juan, crossed the main range of the Rocky mountains, and descended into Wet Mountain valley by way of Ulay. As I descended the eastern slope of the mighty range, through a dense forest of tall pines, the hurrying wind, swept a dirge through its evergreen foliage, as mournful as the sorrow which swept and stilled the heart of Niobe. I awoke from a refreshing slumber in the valley, as the sun was climbing the loftiest peaks of the range, and pouring his golden floods over the world as it rose from darkness and rest. As I was preparing to depart a friend said : " You are a Tennesseean ; that mound yonder guards the re- mains of another son of your native State." I wended my pil- grim way to the grave, and stood over the tomb of the friend of Grundy and Jackson, and there the heart felt the touch of chastening sorrow, which inspired thoughts that traversed the realms lighted by the sun, and with electric speed, sped the portals of the stars, up to the bright fruition of promised im- mortality. The tribute of a pilgrim's tear was dropped on that lonely grave by a fellow mortal.
JUDGE THOMAS JOHNSON, LITTLE ROCK.
Thomas Johnson, a native of Maryland, moved to Arkansas and settled in Batesville in 1832. In 1835 he was elected prosecuting attorney for the Batesville district. He married Miss Crease, a relation of the influential Conway family, and in that way embraced powerful aid to promote his advance- .
ment. This influence elected him judge of the third circuit in 1840, and at the expiration of his term as circuit judge in 1844, it elected him chief justice of the State, over Chief Justice Daniel Ringo, a whig, politics being the determinate factor in favor of Johnson. In person he was tall and slender ; was six . feet high, had dark hair, and a dark hazel eye, and weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. In 1856, he was elected prosecut- ing attorney for the Little Rock circuit, and in virtue of that election became attorney-general of the State. He was not related to the Hon. Robert W. Johnson. There was more fortune than genius or brilliancy in his professional career, but nature did much for him, in impressing the seal of honesty on his life and character. He died in Little Rock in 1877.
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THOMAS JOHNSON.
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JUDGE RICHARD SEARCY, BATESVILLE.
Richard Searcy, a native of Tennessee, came to Arkansas in territorial times and settled in Batesville in 1820, where he continued to reside until his death in 1832. He was educated and accomplished in literature and law. He was tall and slender, had dark auburn hair, a piercing gray eye, and weighed one hundred and forty pounds. In 1823, he was appointed and confirmed judge of the territorial court, and assigned to the Batesville circuit. When John Quincy Adams succeeded to the presidency, Judge Searcy's official head attested the succes- sion, and James Woodson Bates was appointed in his place in 1825. He was a good writer, a fine advocate before a jury, a good lawyer before a court, and a pleasing, effective speaker to the people. His accomplishments rendered him a formidable opponent. Judge Bates lived also in Batesville until 1828, when he married the widow of Dcotor Palmer in Crawford county, where he removed, after his marriage into this influential fam- ily. Judges Bates and Searcy were whigs, and warm personal friends, until estranged by a newspaper controversy, which in- creased in intensity and bitterness until it forever separated, and made them enemies through the remainder of their lives. This episode is only mentioned, to indicate the great results which it caused in staying and checking the ambition of Judge Searcy.
In 1827, Henry W. Conway, the delegate in congress, was killed in a duel with Robert Crittenden, and Ambrose H. Sevier, and Judge Searcy became rival candidates for the va- cant seat, early in 1828.
Each was a foeman worthy of his adversary, an exciting and spirited canvass followed, and Judge Searcy would have been victorious, but for the defection of Judge Bates, who threw all of his influence to Sevier, and secured his election by a small majority. In. 1829, the contest was renewed between these champions with great spirit and energy, and again Judge Searcy was defeated, by one hundred and thirty votes, through the defection and active opposition of Judge Bates. The defection of one man in his own party, thus for- ever destroyed the dream of his ambition. Judge Searcy never married. He died in Batesville, on December 29, 1832, 'a man of much ability and greatly beloved.
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MAJOR ELIAS RECTOR, FORT SMITH.
This quaint, historic character, the original of "THE FINE OLD ARKANSAS GENTLEMAN," a parody by General Albert Pike on the "OLD ENGLISH GENTLEMAN," will be remembered as long as the early history of Arkansas is preserved. The youngest son of Wharton Rector, one of the nine Rector brothers, who were soldiers in the war of 1812; brother to Wharton Rector, pay- master in the United States army, who figures so conspicuously in our early history ; cousin to Governor Henry M. Rector, and to the Governors Conway, nephew to the celebrated Ann Rector, wife of Thomas Conway, and cousin to General Early Stein, who fell in the battle of Prairie Grove. He was born in Fauquier county, Virginia, September 28, 1802, but was raised in St. Louis county, Missouri, and educated at Lexing- ton and Bardstown, Kentucky. .
Without relish for books, he cared nothing for literature; nature, simple and unostentatious, was his guide, the practical world his theater, where he gathered a fund of knowledge and wisdom, adapted to the necessities of the frontier, where he spent a long, active and useful life. The habit of wearing his hair, tucked up with a comb, like a woman, singled him out from the common herd with marked individuality.
He came to Arkansas in 1825, as surveyor under his uncle, Elias Rector, the surveyor-general of Illinois and Missouri. His capital consisted of the limited education, acquired by contact and absorption in the schools named, and vigorous independence and individuality, wedded to great energy and tenacity of pur- pose. In 1837, he moved to Fort Smith, where he resided until his death, save an interim of four years, when he was floating on the ebbs and currents of civil war.
General Jackson appointed him United States marshal of the Indian, and Arkansas territories, and he held the position of marshal for the unprecedented term of sixteen years, being first superseded in 1846, by his cousin, Governor Henry M. Rector, under President Tyler's administration. Under Presi- dent Pierce's administration, he was again appointed marshal. He knew the Indian " as the mariner knows the sea," and be- cause of great skill in their management, he was sent to Florida
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MAJOR ELIAS . RECTOR.
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by the government, and put an end to the Seminole war. The Seminole chief, Billy Bowlegs, and his followers were removed from Florida to the Indian territory, by him, for which service congress voted him a resolution of thanks and $10,000. He was superintendent of Indian affairs for many years, and held that office when the civil war commenced. The fortunes and traditions of his race, were intimately connected with the government, and he looked on the union of the States, with great reverence, and their dissolution as a great calamity; but he could not take up arms to strike down the people of his native section. A refugee, he found shelter in Texas until the war closed, after which he returned home to find a large fortune lost in the wreck of war, and the Federal authorities in posses- sion of his once princely home, where he had, for a long cycle of years, dispensed hospitality with the lavishness of a Norman lord ; himself a descendant in the maternal line of the old English cavaliers, whose blood made Virginia "the mother of States and statesmen."
Age and accumulated misfortunes, came in the winter of life, to chill his declining years, and he met the inevitable with a moral heroism, which imparted a charm to his manhood. He died in his old home on the 22d of November, 1878. General Albert Pike, his warm personal friend, for more than forty years, wrote after his death : "There are not many of us left who were men in Arkansas, when it became a State, and those whom death smites, not for yet awhile, are more and more alone in the world, as one after another goes away, into that unknown land, from which no voice of the dead ever speaks to the living, who yet linger behind."
I first met Elias Rector in the year 1835. There were great men in Arkansas in those days- Ben. Desha, Sevier, Robert Crittenden, John Pope and others - and the territory was the arena of strife between two parties. Among the friends of Ambrose H. Sevier, two of the most efficient and prominent were the brothers, Wharton and Elias Rector, both men of singularly striking appearance, keen-eyed, quick, alert and reso- lute, of vigorous intellect, great force of will and individuality of character, and withal generous and magnanimous. I was not of their political party, but in 1833, even, the old bitterness
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betreen men had begun to die out, and personal conflicts no more occurred. Circumstances brought me into association with those gentlemen, and made them my friends, and that friendship with Elias Rector, grew and strengthened with the years, and continued undiminished until his death. At his own home, often in the better days before the war, at Wash- ington, and traveling, I was much in his company for many years, and few knew him better than I did. He was a man who leaped to conclusions without resort to logic, and acted promptly upon his impulses and convictions.
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