USA > Arkansas > Biographical and pictorial history of Arkansas. Vol I > Part 7
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Neither is there in this any thing to be with reason com- plained of. For, also, to those of us who went to Arkansas no earlier than 1832 or 1836, the men who had lived and died there before us were but the mere shadows of names, in the history of whose lives we felt no interest. We put ourselves to no trouble to have the names kept in remembrance, but un- concernedly permitted them to glide away from us into oblivion, no record of their words or deeds remaining ; and with what right can we complain, if we, too, the dead and living alike, are to the men of to-day only as those are who lived and died in other lands, when the world was not by a thousand years so old as it is now.
Moreover, there is not much of adventure or action to be told of these men, that can make what may be written of them otherwise than wearisome to read. The things that chiefly interest us in our daily lives are of no interest afterward to any one, and if recited they seem tame and trivial. When one has but little to tell and that little is in regard to those for whom most of the living care nothing, it would be wiser to be silent; yet if what he may write will give pleasure to one or two, here or there, to whom the holy Dead are of consequence, he ought not to let the general indifference prevent his writing.
WASHINGTON, May 25, 1887.
ALBERT PIKE.
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HISTORY OF ARKANSAS.
ROBERT CRITTENDEN.
BY GENERAL ALBERT PIKE.
The information that I am able to give in regard to this eminent man cannot be of any considerable interest or value.
I first saw him in 1833, on Little Piney, then in Pope county, where I was teaching a small school. Abram G. Smith with whom I was boarding, went one day in the fall to Spadra, where the candidates for office were to speak, and on his return in the evening he brought Robert Crittenden with him to stay over night, and out under the trees near the house I talked with him until late bed-time. What I could tell him of the plains and buffalo, of New Mexico and its Indians and the Spaniards, inter- ested him, and he was kind, indulgent and gracious ; and as he was one, to know whom was an honor and to hear whom a pleas- ure, to meet him so was quite an event in my life.
He thought well enough of me to advise Mr. Charles P. Ber- trand of Little Rock to employ me as assistant editor of the Arkansas Advocate, and it thus came about that I went to Little Rock in October of that year, where I went into the Advocate office, and occasionally met Mr. Crittenden at his house, and elsewhere.
He was a man of fine presence and handsome face, with clear bright eyes, and unmistakable intellect and genius, frank, genial, one to attach men warmly to himself, impulsive, gener- ous, warm-hearted, an abler man, I think, than his brother John J. Crittenden.
The passions and animosities of the leaders of the two par- ties in the territory had before then led to encounters, collis- ions and duels; but they had become less violent and bitter after the elections of 1833, and no collisions or duels of prominent men occurred afterward.
Mr. Crittenden had, some time before, fought a duel with Mr. Conway, delegate to congress. I was told by one who knew, that Crittenden had no skill with the pistol, while Con- way was a fine shot. Crittenden's friends insisted on his practic- ing, and he reluctantly consented ; but, after firing three shots and each time missing a big tree, he threw the pistol on the ground, said he would not practice for the purpose of enabling 9
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himself to kill a man, and never shot again until the signal was given on the ground, when his first shot killed Conway, he him- self being untouched.
I never heard him make a political speech, or any speech except one to a jury, in defense of Stewart, a tall gambler, for assault with intent to kill. I was on the jury, for the first and only time in my life. He was a graceful, persuasive, impres- sive and eloquent speaker, one to take an assembly of men off their feet. But the case was too plain a one, and we fined Mr, Stewart $100.
Mr. Crittenden's death at Vicksburg, in the fall of 1834, de- prived the anti-Jackson party in the State of its leader ; for no one was able to take his place, while too many wanted it. I remember him chiefly as a man whom it was a great pleasure to know and converse with, as a very gracious and agreeable host, and in every way a thoroughly well-bred Kentucky gen- tleman, a sagacious and well-informed man, who would have done honor to Arkansas, if, as was talked of before our admis- sion as a State, the first two senators had, by common consent, been Sevier and Crittenden.
But this could hardly have been brought about ; and it may be that by an early death he escaped from the disappointments, mortification and embitterment which would have made miser- able the life of an ambitious man, conscious of his own great- ness, and condemned to struggle in a hopeless minority all his life against an invincible majority.
NOTE.
The following letter is from the widow of Robert Crittenden, and as it illustrates the difficulties under which the author has labored in a great number of cases, it is given with the writer's consent:
FRANKFORT, KY., Nov. 16, 1886.
JOHN HALLUM, Fort Smith, Ark .:
DEAR SIR - I have deferred answering your letter of the 6th of Oct. in order to get a copy of the portrait of my husband, but the photographer here was unable to reproduce it, which I regret very much.
Robert Crittenden, youngest son of 'John Crittenden, a major in the revolutionary war, was born near Versailles, Woodford county, Ky., January 1, 1797, and died in Vicksburg, Miss. (whither he had gone on business), December 18, 1834.
He was married to Ann Innes Morris October 1, 1822, near Frankfort, Ky. He left four children, three daughters and one son, all born in Little Rock, Arkansas.
He was educated by and read law with his brother, John J. Crittenden, in Rus- sellville, Ky. His father died when he was twelve years of age, leaving a large family of children.
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I know that Mr. Crittenden as secretary, in the absence of Governor Miller, organized the territorial government of Arkansas.
I suppose the records will disclose all further information required.
Wishing you much success.
Yours, most respectfully, ANN I. EDGAR.
This letter was by the author submitted to the Hon. Jesse Turner, who is now taking steps to have the portrait of Robert Crittenden copied for preservation in our capitol.
SAMUEL S. HALL. BY GENERAL ALBERT PIKE.
Among the lawyers who were of the Little Rock bar while Arkansas was a territory, one of the most amusing was Samuel S. Hall, a rather small, dried-up, old man of some sixty years, queer and quaint, who came there from Satartia, in Mississippi, a lawyer pretty well read and.not without ability, but whose peculiarities were often the cause of merriment.
He knew nothing about Latin, but was fond of picking up and using scraps of it. Once, I was told, in a case before Judge William Trimble, in which Parrott, who died before 1833, was opposed to him as counsel, Judge Hall, as we always called him, fired off at the jury all the scraps of Latin that he could remember; and when Parrott replied he uttered half a dozen long sentences in Choctaw. Hall appealed to Judge Trimble against this, insisting that Parrott should only use a language fit to be quoted from and which others understood. Parrott gravely replied that the language which he had used was Latin, and it was not his fault if Judge Hall did not understand it. Hall resented this and indignantly denied that the gibberish used by Parrott was Latin; and Parrott proposed to leave it to the court to decide, to which Judge Hall consented; and the judge decided that, to the best of his knowledge, Parrott's Latin was as good as Hall's.
The old gentleman told some of us once that he intended soon to retire from the bar, and to travel through the United States incog.
He exploded some of his Latin against me once, I think it was these lines from Horace, which, whether he used them on that particular occasion or not, he was fond of repeating ore rotundo :
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"Si quem mobilium turba Quiritium, Certat tergeminis tollere honoribus."
And in replying to him I repeated, knowing he would not understand it, the passage said in "Ten Thousand a Year," or "The Diary of a Physician," to be in Persius, but which is not to be found there :
" Eandem semper canens cantilenam, Ad nauseam usque."
This staggered and confounded the old gentleman, and after court adjourned he had me to write it down for him, with a translation, and it afterward did him good service.
In the trial of a man in the circuit court of Pulaski county, Judge Hall, for the defense, in his speech to the jury, inveighed with some sharpness, at the expense of Absalom Fowler, who had been hired to prosecute, and who had, of course, done it savagely, against the taking of money by counsel to prosecute innocent men for their lives, and was evidently well satisfied with himself and the supposed effect of that part of his speech upon the jury. Fowler, a hard, harsh, dry man, listened apathetically, and following Hall, spoke so long before allud- ing to his denunciation of hired counsel, that the judge became radiant with the conviction that he would not venture to com- ment upon it, when, all at once, Fowler coldly and slowly said, "you have heard, gentlemen of the jury, what one of the counsel for the defense said in regard to the impropriety of counsel consenting to be employed to assist the officer of the State in the prosecution of persons guilty of crimes, the punish- ment of which is hanging. I remember that the same gentle- man, a few years ago, was hired to prosecute, and did prosecute an innocent and poor countryman indicted for murder. He fulfilled his contract to the utmost of his ability, while I defended the prisoner, whom he did his best to hang, and who was acquitted. He earned his wages, gentlemen, and he received them, according to the contract of hiring, in the shape of a little, old, scrawny, roached-mane, bob-tailed, clay-bank pony, which with great pride he led from the court in Saline county to his home in Little Rock." Discomfited by what he could not deny, the judge collapsed.
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He rode, wnen going upon the circuit, an old, white, lean mare, that could seldom do more than strike a slow trot for a few minutes at a time, then subsiding into her usual walk. Once I left Little Rock with him, to go to the court at Greenville, Clark county, where, I remember, landlord Sloan fed us on boiled fresh pork, corn bread without butter, and sweet potatoes for a week. The judge rode the old mare, and I my sorrel horse Davy, as well known on the roads to Washington and Van Buren as I myself was. During the first day I stayed with the judge as he plodded along, to the immense weariness of myself and the great disgust of my horse, it taking us all day to ride to Mrs. Lockhart's on the Saline. The next day after we had got out of the horrible bottom of the Saline, and were upon the gravel hills beyond, I said to the judge, " my horse is fretting, and I will ride ahead for a piece, and wait for you to come up ;" and without waiting for an answer put Davy to his best pace and let him enjoy himself. At the end of a ride of five or six miles I stopped, and sitting down upon a log waited nearly an hour until the judge came up, and I jogged on with him a few miles further, and then left him again with a simple "good-bye." Again he overtook me, and we rode on for five or six miles until he saw that I was about to repeat the performance, when, wheeling his old mare across the road in front of me, he said, " see here ! you are a young man, and I am an old one. Let me tell you something. I used, in my younger days, to push and hurry to get to court and be there before it opened, and I always found that I might just as well have taken my time on the road, for my business would not have suffered if I had not hurried. So I used to ride hard, as soon as court adjourned, to get home ; and it never happened that Mrs. Hall did not say to me when I got home, ' why, judge, I did not look for you until to-morrow or next day.' Now you take my advice and remember that nobody ever makes any thing by hurrying through life. You'll always get to the end of your journey soon enough, and may-be be more welcome if you don't get there too soon.".
I kept the old man company until we reached Greenville, and I remembered his advice always afterward; but I never rode in company with Judge Hall again.
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I see the good, honest, honorable, fair old man now, as I often saw him arguing to court or jury. He would begin with his feet close together, and holding in one hand a piece of tobacco, from which, as he talked, he would pick off a small bit, put it into his mouth and forthwith spit it out, his feet gradually far- ther and farther apart from each other until he would have to bring them together again to keep himself from toppling over. Then he would pause, look with shrewdly twinkling eyes at judge or jury, and say, " how does my case stand now ?"
JOHN TAYLOR.
BY GENERAL ALBERT PIKE.
This man was hardly entitled to be considered "of the bar" of Arkansas. He was a nomad, an Ishmaelite, who came to the State, in what year I do not remember, but after 1836, to tarry for a little while and then seek new pastures. He came from Alabama, where, it was said, he once ran against William R. King, for a seat in the senate of the United States. He was a tall, lank man with hair of a dirty red, and repulsive countenance, small and malignant eyes, an unsocial, repellant churl, with not a drop of the milk of human kindness in his whole body, a thoroughly read lawyer, especially in the old books, of which his library chiefly consisted. He had a command of words surpassing that possessed by any man whom I have ever known, and the greatest possible fluency of speech and skill in the construction of his sentences, his single fault in that respect being a fondness for long words derived from the Latin, sometimes, however, eschewing these and confining himself to the shorter Saxon, in terse, compact phrases and sentences. He was indeed a skillful master of the English language, and famil- iar with English literature and the Latin.
He brought with him and always used, and the supply lasted as long as he remained in Little Rock, a quantity of old, coarse, rough brownish foolscap paper, the sheets long and un- trimmed, on which he wrote with great rapidity, in a running hand, the like of which I have never seen anywhere; but it was perfectly legible. All the forms of pleading, process and entries he knew by heart ; and he had an accurate and retentive memory, which never failed him when referring to authorities.
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HISTORY OF ARKANSAS.
When he first appeared in Little Rock, and took an office in Ashley's brick one-story row, on Markham street near Pitcher & Walters' corner, we all at different times called upon him and tendered him the usual courtesies of the bar, to which he was grimly unresponsive, shutting himself up in the shell of his cold exclusiveness. He rented a house on the edge of the town, beyond Judge Feilds', where he lived with his wife, hav- ing no child [fortunately, as Tristram Burgess said in the senate to John Randolph, monsters are incapable of propagat- ing their species], in impenetrable seclusion. I never met any one who had seen his wife. He never, I am sure, crossed the threshold of any house in Little Rock except his own ; and no visitor ever crossed his. We made but one advance each, toward friendly relations with him; and he never had any with any member of the bar. He would never ride in com- pany with any other person, or converse with any one except on business ; and licking his lips with his tongue as he spoke (reminding me always of a venomous snake), his eyes gleaming with malignity, as he hissed out poisoned sarcasm and vitu- peration, he seemed to delight in making enemies. No one who heard it, I think, ever forgot his terrific excoriation in Ozark, of Alfred W. Arrington, who had imprudently ven- tured with a wealth of barbaric ornamentation in words, to assail him in debate.
He was the most hateable man I ever knew. At one term of the court in Pope county, he procured himself to be em- ployed by members of one family to bring suits against mem- bers of another, for slander ; and at the next term he brought like suits for those defendants against those plaintiffs, all the suits standing for trial together, and the parties being chiefly women.
I should not devote so much space, or indeed any, to this nomad (who always carried into the court-rooms, in the pockets of his long coat, two large pistols, one of which I twice saw fall out upon the floor, and who at last fancied and pro- claimed that the lawyers of Little Rock had poisoned his well, and thereupon left the State and went to Texas), but for the two romances published by Arrington, one of a trial in Con- way county in which he represented him as figuring ; and the
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other of his volunteering to defend, at Clarksville in Texas, a young woman charged with murder, whom Sargeant S. Pren- tiss of Mississippi, Chester Ashley and myself had been em- ployed to prosecute there. Both stories were pure fictions ; I never prosecuted any woman charged with any offense, any- where; I never saw Sargeant S. Prentiss in a court-house ; he was never engaged with Chester Ashley anywhere, and was never, I think, nor was Ashley, in Clarksville in his life; I never was in Clarksville until the fall of 1861; and there was never any such case or trial anywhere.
THE SUPERIOR COURT. BY GENERAL ALBERT PIKE.
The judges of the superior court of the territory of Arkan- sas in 1831 were Benjamin Johnson, of Kentucky, and Eskridge and Clayton, of Mississippi. I never saw either of the two last. In 1834, when I first saw the court in session in a room of the brick hotel on the bank of the river, which Charles L. Jeffries kept, the judges were Benjamin Johnson, Edward Cross, I think, and Thomas J. Lacy. When the State government commenced its action Judge Johnson was appointed by the president judge of the district court of Arkansas, and Judge Lacy was elected judge, with Daniel Ringo chief justice, and Townsend Dickinson, of Batesville, also judge of the supreme court of the State.
I knew Judge Benjamin Johnson long and well. . He was a man of excellent ability and of much reading in the law, read- ing a new volume of reports with as great a zest as a devourer of fiction reads the latest novel. I think that I gained his regard by purchasing the late reports of several States and of the circuit courts of the United States, and placing them at his disposition in the small brick office before then occu- pied by Robert Crittenden, on the corner of the block on which his residence stood, which Judge Johnson purchased after his death. At any rate, I became greatly attached to him, always esteeming and honoring him until his death, and he was invariably kind and indulgent to me. It was my great good fortune, indeed, while a whig, and the warm friend of Robert Crittenden and Ben. Desha and William Cummins and
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others of the whig leaders, to count also among my friends from the beginning, Judge Johnson, Ambrose H. Sevier, and Wharton and Elias Rector. There never lived a more honest, upright, honorable or generons man than Benjamin Johnson. Hle was petulant, sometimes, on the bench ; and for personal reasons, on account of an attempt in 1832 or 1833 to impeach him, he was not kindly disposed toward William Cummins and Absalom Fowler, but I always found him impartial and earnestly desirous to decide in accordance with law and weigh impartially the facts. He was a single-minded man, of great simplicity of character, which made him sometimes seem eccen- tric ; but he was not wanting in shrewd and sturdy common sense. Sometimes he would explode in sudden anger, as when, in 1835, in the last room to the westward of Ashley's brick row, where he was holding court, when Samuel Daviess Black- burn, summoned as a juror and asked if he had formed or expressed an opinion in the case, said in a pompous way, "I have formed and expressed a problematical opinion." " A what opinion ?" sharply asked Judge Johnson. " A problematical opinion, may it please your honor." " A problematical opin- ion !" cried the judge. "Now, sir, do you get yourself prob. lematically out of this court-house," and Daviess incontinently fled.
Sometimes, as I said, he was nervously petulant. Something had one day made him so in the same court-room, and looking round for something on which to expend his vexation, he saw Colonel Ashley splitting off with his pocket knife a sliver from a post of the railing which inclosed the bar. "Colonel Ash- ley," sharply cried the judge, " I wish you would quit cutting the court-room to pieces." Ashley looked calmly up and said: " I don't know, may it please your honor, who has a better right to cut this court-room to pieces than I have ; it's mine."
When Judge Peter V. Daniel first came to Little Rock to sit in the circuit court Judge Johnson was evidently possessed and subdued by a profound reverence for him as a judge of the supreme court of the United States. But this in a day or two began to wear off, and on the third or fourth day when an argument was concluded, he began at once to say in his quick and off-hand fashion, what his opinion on the question was. But 10
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Judge Daniel checked him, and with sententious dignity said : "Judge Johnson, the court will consult, and then the justice of the supreme court will deliver the opinion of the court." Thus reproved, Judge Johnson sank back in his seat with an air of pious resignation, gave a low whistle unconsciously, and patted the floor vigorously with one foot, which we could see below the short curtain that hung in front of the judges' seats.
A day or two afterward, another case was argued on demur- rer, and when it was submitted, Judge Daniel commenced giv- ing his opinion. But Judge Johnson, laying his hand on his arm, said loudly " the court will consult; - and, THEN, the justice of the supreme court can deliver the opinion of the court." And then his foot patted the floor, and his eyes twinkled with fun which the justice of the supreme court did not seem to share.
There came on then, on the next day, a case in which I had brought suit on a bill of exchange, made in Arkansas and in- dorsed there by the payee, and then indorsed in succession by an individual and a bank in Mississippi, and then by a house in New Orleans, where it was payable. The notary had given notice of protest to that house only, and it had in turn given notice to the bank, and it to the individual in Mississippi, and he to the indorser in Arkansas, and he to the maker there - each notice having been made out by the notary, and all of them sent to the house in New Orleans. Fowler moved for a non- suit, and insisted that the law required the notary to send notice to each indorser and maker direct within the legal time. I said that he was entirely mistaken, that the notices were properly sent, and that each indorser had a day in which to send notice to the last preceding indorser, and the first indorser a day to send to it the maker.
Judge Daniel very positively said, "that is not the law, the law in Virginia is, and always has been, as the counsel for the defense claims." Judge Johnson patted with his foot and whistled to himself ; and I said, "may it please your honor, I am quite sure that the law is as I have stated it." "No, it is not," said Judge Daniel, " there never was any such law, you are altogether mistaken." Then Judge Johnson leaned toward him and said, in a half whisper, loud enough for every body to hear, " you had better not be too positive, if he says the law is
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so, it's mighty apt to be so." And I said, " since your honor is to very positive that I am mistaken, I say that I know the law to be as I have stated it ; and if the court will wait until I can send to my office and get a book on bills of exchange, I will prove it." The court waited, and I did prove it, of course, and I took my verdict.
After the adjournment of the court for the day, I met Judge Johnson, who, putting his hand on my shoulder, said, " these judges of the supreme court of the United States think they know all the law, don't they ? But if we don't know all the law, we know where to look for it, don't we?" And with a hearty laugh he went home to dinner, having sent Judge Daniel there in his carriage.
Ashley, an old time New York lawyer, who had not studied the books for many years, had for some years great influence with Judge Johnson, who had the highest opinion of his ability and knowledge, and his entire accuracy in references to the books. But at length, when I had been some years at the bar, the judge discovered that Ashley had misled him, and he never trusted him afterward. "Colonel Ashley," he said to him, one day, "I don't want to hear any more arguments, any ingenious man can make an argument, if you've got any authorities on the pint, you had better bring them here, I would rather have one authority than fifty arguments."
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