USA > Connecticut > New London County > A modern history of New London County, Connecticut, Volume I > Part 47
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county in the great Civil War period. Of his contemporaries in 1862 only two are left: ex-Consul Day of Colchester, and former Governor Waller ; both octogenarians going serenely down the declivity of life. The rest have from this mortal forever disappeared. They were among the greatest law- yers this county has produced. In the presence of these men Mr. Thresher did not, himself, seem so great and, doubtless, by some he was overshadowed. But, all things considered, he was a master in his profession and deserves to be classed with the great lawyers of his time.
He was essentially a self-made man. Lacking some early advantages, he, nevertheless, by close application, attained to a degree of learning hardly surpassed by many academically trained. He was conversant with the fundamental principles of the common law. He knew its sources, its possi- bilities and its limitations. He was a skillful pleader under the old regime when pleading was a fine art, and knew the value of concise and lucid state- ment. He knew, likewise, the importance of careful preparation-the utility of assembled facts and forces and abundant material. He knew that the law, like the God of battles, is often on the side of the heaviest battalions. He was a competent examiner who extracted information from varied sources, from the willing, the hesitant and the unwilling. In argument he was ready and fluent, often with a voice, both quaint and droll, that revealed his Puritan lineage and traits and Yankee derivation; but he was forceful, impressive, convincing, sometimes psychologic. He was a man of positive convictions always firmly entertained and frankly avowed and stoutly defended.
In his strong personality there were three main characteristics: The humorous, the stoical, and the optimistic. He was a lover of comedy and the drolleries of the stage. A reader of Mark Twain, whom he slightly resembled, he had the blessed sense of humor that chloroforms trouble and makes us forget. In disaster he was undaunted, calm and evenpoised. Though misfortune came to him as it comes to all, he met it unflinchingly, with no demonstration of weakness, and of suffering he gave no outward sign. Above all he was optimistic. He had the rare faculty of inspiring confidence in desperate situations, often finding loopholes which others had missed. And so, it was not always a false hope he raised. In litigation he was as successful as the average trier. He early cultivated the acquaintance of hope, and, in all his career, hope never deserted him. It abided with him in affliction and trouble. It was with him in sickness and health and in joy and sorrow. It sat by him at the bed of death and, when the end was reached, he and hope stepped into the shadows, hand in hand. He has crossed the boundary line of the great unknown, and will long be missed from this broken circle.
AUGUSTUS BRANDEGEE-Augustus Brandegee, youngest of the three sons of John and Mary Ann (Deshon) Brandegee, was born in New London, Con- necticut, July 12, 1828, died at his home in Pleasant street, in the city of his birth, November 10, 1904. John Brandegee was a cotton broker of New Or- leans, Louisiana, when war broke out a second time with Great Britain, and fought with Jackson at that famous battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815. Mary Ann Deshon was of Huguenot ancestry, a daughter of Captain Daniel Deshon, who in 1777 commanded the armed vessel "Old Defense," which was built by the State of Connecticut.
After attendance at Union Academy, New London, Augustus Brandegee finished preparing at Hopkins Grammar School, New Haven, entered Yale in 1845, and was graduated fourth in his class in 1849. He then pursued
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professional study at Yale Law School for one year, then entered the law office of the eminent Andrew C. Lippitt, and after admission to the New London coutny bar in 1851 became Mr. Lippitt's partner. They dissolved partnership in 1854, when Mr. Brandegee was elected to represent New Lon- don in the Connecticut Legislature.
The Whig party was then in the throes of dissolution after the disastrous political campaign under General Scott, and the proposed repeal of the Mis- souri Compromise had stirred the moral sense of the nation to its foundations. Mr. Brandegee, with the ardor of a young and enthusiastic nature, threw him- self into the anti-slavery movement. Although the youngest member of the House, he soon developed talents of a very high order as a parliamentarian and debater and became its leader. He was appointed by Speaker Foster, afterward Senator, a member of the judiciary committee, also chairman of the select committee to carry through the "bill for the defense of liberty," a measure the practical effect of which was to prevent the enforcement of the "fugitive slave" law in Connecticut. He was also chairman of the com- mittee on the Maine Law, and as such carried through the Assembly the first and only prohibitory liquor law ever passed in Connecticut. Mr. Brandegee was largely instrumental in the election at that session of Speaker Foster and Francis Gillett to represent the anti-slavery sentiment of Connecticut in the United States Senate.
Returning to his practice, Mr. Brandegee was elected judge of the city criminal court of New London. In the enthusiastic campaign "for free speech, free soil, freedom and Frémont" which followed the anti-Nebraska excite- ment, he took an active and conspicuous part. He made speeches in the principal towns and cities of Connecticut, and soon became noted as one of the most popular and well known campaign orators of his party. He was chosen as one of the electors of the State on a ticket headed by ex-Governor Roger S. Baldwin, and with his colleagues cast the electoral vote of Con- necticut for the "Pathfinder" and first presidential candidate of the Re- publican party-John C. Frémont.
In 1858 Mr. Brandegee was again elected to represent the town of New London in the Connecticut House of Representatives, and in 1859 he was a third time chosen. Although selected by his party then in a majority as their candidate for speaker, he was obliged to decline the office on account of the death of his father. In 1861 he was for a fourth time elected to the House, and was honored by being chosen its speaker. This was the first "War" session of the Connecticut Legislature. The duties of a presiding officer, always difficult and delicate, were largely enhanced by the excited state of feeling existing between the two great parties, and the novel requirements of legislation to provide Connecticut's quota of men and means for the sup- pression of the rebellion. The duties of the chair were so acceptably filled by Speaker Brandegee that at the close of the session he was presented with a service of silver by Henry C. Deming, the leader of the opposition, in the name of the members of both political parties, without a dissenting vote.
In the stirring events of the period of 1861-65, Mr. Brandegee took an
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active part. His services were sought all over the State in addressing patriotic meetings, raising troops, delivering flags to departing regiments, and arousing public sentiment. In 1863 he was elected to the Thirty-eighth Congress as representative from the Third Connecticut Congressional District, and in 1865 he was re-elected. Although the youngest member of the body in which he sat, he took a prominent position, and was selected by Speaker Colfax as a member of the committee on Naval Affairs, at that time, next to Military, one of the most important committees. He was also a member of the com. mittee on Naval Accounts, and chairman of a special committee on a post and military route from New York to Washington.
Mr. Brandegee continued a member of the national House of Repre- sentatives during the reconstruction period, acting with the most advanced wing of the party, and was trusted and respected by his contemporaries, among whom were Garfield, Blaine, Schenck, Conkling, Dawes, Winter Davis and Thaddeus Stevens. He was admitted to frequent and friendly inter- course with President Lincoln, who always manifested a peculiar interest in Connecticut, and who was wont to speak of Governor Buckingham, its execu- tive at that time, as the "Brother Jonathan" upon whom he leaned as did Washington upon Jonathan Trumbull.
In 1864 Mr. Brandegee was a member of the Connecticut delegation to the National Republican Convention held at Baltimore which renominated President Lincoln, and to that delegation it was largely due that Andrew Johnson was selected instead of Hannibal Hamlin for the vice-presidency, Connecticut being the first State to withdraw its support from the New England candidate.
In 1871, against his earnest protests, Mr. Brandegee was nominated for the office of mayor of the city of New London. He received very general support and was elected, but resigned after holding office for two years, being led to this by the exacting requirements of a large and growing legal prac- tice. In 1880 he was chairman of the Connecticut delegation to the National Republican Convention held in Chicago, and nominated Senator Washburn for the Presidency. His nominating speech attracted favorable notice in the convention as well as throughout the country, and won him wide reputation as an orator and party leader. In 1884 he was again chairman of the Con- necticut delegation to the National Republican Convention, also held in Chicago, and placed in nomination General Hawley as the candidate of his State for the Presidency.
During the last decade of life, Mr. Brandegee gradually retired from pub- lic affairs and devoted himself almost exclusively to the legal affairs of Brandegee, Noyes & Brandegee, a leading law firm of New London, of which he had been a member since 1892. He was urged by the leaders of his party to accept the nomination for governor, and was talked of as an available candidate for the United States Senatorship, but he steadfastly declined this and all other public offices and honors, preferring to devote his entire time and energies to professional work.
Mr. Brandegee married Christina Bosworth. Their daughter, wife of
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Major M. G. Zalinski, of the United States army, and their son, Frank B. Brandegee, survived their father. The son, then Congressman from the Third Connecticut District, once represented by his father, now United States Senator from Connecticut, an office to which he was elected a year after the death of his father.
As a lawyer, Augustus Brandegee ranked as one of the foremost in his profession ; as a politician, one of the highest ability and integrity ; and as a citizen, one of the most respected and honored.
The following memorial was the tribute paid by Judge Walter C. Noyes to his friend and contemporary, Augustus Brandegee, December 31, 1904, at a special meeting of the Superior Court, held to pay respect to the memory of Mr. Brandegee, Judge George D. Stanton and Colonel Allen Tenny, of Norwich. Judge Noyes said :
Augustus Brandegee, a leader of the New London county bar for half a century, is dead. During all that time he reflected honor upon this bar. He gave to its members an example for emulation. He has left us a memory which is a benediction. We strive through this memorial to show that we appreciate what he was and what he stood for.
He was a learned lawyer. Coming to the bar filled with the learning of the classics, he readily absorbed the law written in the books, and yet was always more than the book lawyer. He never failed to appreciate that the law is not an abstract science, but a rule of action for men. Mercy and charity ever came to him as the hand maidens of legal principle. He approached the trial of a cause with diffidence. He participated in the trial as a master.
He was a brilliant orator. Convention, legislature, congress and court thrilled with his eloquence. In manner unexcelled he clothed his thoughts in language chaste and beautiful, and drove his words deep into the hearts of his hearers. He stood for high ideals through all his public life. At a time when the Abolitionist met scorn and contumely, he labored zealously to free the slave. A member of Congress through the war, he became the trusted friend of Lincoln, and rendered signal service for the cause of the Union. And then and ever after he put aside official station for the simple life.
He was a knightly man-hypocrisy, shame, expedients, pretensions-the whole brood of lies and deceits-were his enemies. He fought them all his days and when the end came, passed over God's threshold with escutcheon unstained and with plume untarnished.
Eulogies were also delivered by Solomon Lucas, Frank T. Brown, Hadlai A. Hull, Edwin W. Higgins, and Judge Ralph Wheeler, of the Superior Court, the last named saying :
It was not my good fortune to become acquainted with Augustus Bran- degee prior to the year 1868, at which time his great intellectual and moral forces coupled with the training received in the schools and at his Alma Mater, Yale, had enabled him to attain a position of eminence in political life and in his chosen profession. He had already brought many honors home to his native city and state.
At the date mentioned there were many able men in the practice of our profession in New London county. Among them were Lippitt, Wait, Hovey, Foster and Halsey -- men learned in the law, and some of whom had devoted their lives almost exclusively to its practice.
Though younger than most of them, Mr. Brandegee had already easily
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taken rank among the first as a lawyer. He was a great lawyer, advocate and orator, a man of great resources, fidelity, diligence, force and efficiency in every situation, and under all circumstances. He loved the practice of his profession, and for that reason resolutely refused to accept nominations to high political offices after his service in Congress. He preserved his youthful enthusiasm late in life, was most hearty and vivacious and enter- taining among his associates, but would sometimes assume a brusqueness of manner which might lead to some misunderstanding of his real nature. His personality was most interesting. He had a great heart as well as a great intellect-was helpful, generous and magnanimous. He would give time and effort, and do much for others, and for any cause which interested him.
His was a great soul and through what experiences and by what strug- gles that soul reached hope, faith and rest, may not be known to us, but we may be sure they were attained.
JEREMIAH HALSEY-At a memorial meeting held to honor the memory of Jeremiah Halsey, one of the giants of the New London county bar, one of the speakers was Augustus Brandegee, another "giant" of that bar. His address follows :
The melancholy privilege of age assigns to me the duty of formally seconding these unanimous resolutions of the bar expressing the sentiments of the professional brethren at the loss of their great leader. The pro- prieties of the occasion do not permit any labored or extended review of his life, his character and abilities, but it is fitting that while still stand- ing in the shadow of our great loss, we place upon the imperishable records of the court this last feeble tribute of our respect, admiration and love for our departed brother.
Jeremiah Halsey was born at Preston, Connecticut, February 8, 1822. He was admitted to the bar in 1845. He practiced continuously in all the courts of this State for just half a century, and died at Washington, D. C., on the 9th of February, 1896, in the ripeness of his fame, and the full maturity of his powers.
He was a great lawyer; great in every department of that profession that calls for the exercise of the highest and most varied powers of human intellect. Whether he stood before the learned judge or a jury or an arbi- trator or a committee of the General Assembly, or other tribunal upon whose decision the lives, the property, and the rights of men depend, he was master of himself, his subject and his audience. In that wonderful system founded upon the principles of everlasting righteousness wrought out by the wisdom of ages and sanctioned by the experience of mankind, at once the handmaid and the sure defense of human society which men call law, he was easily "primis inter pares." The principles of this system he had explored to their deepest foundations. His comprehensive and philosophical mind had sought out their reasons, their applications and their limitations. He knew how and when to apply them in their rigor, and when to make them elastic enough to meet the requirements of an ever changing and ever advancing civilization.
He was no mere "case lawyer" such as the weaklings of our profession, whose sole requirements consists of a catalogue of authorities and whose ill digested citations only serve to "make confusion more confounded." He was not one of those who darken counsel with "profane and vain babblings," "striving," as saith an apostle, "about words to no profit but to the subverting of hearers." He rightly divined the word truth, seeming by an intuitive alchemy to know how to separate the dross from the pure gold, how to mar- shal, to reinforce, explain, apply, and if needs be to reconcile, the authorities. He loved the law-to him it was not a trade for hire, nor even a profession for furnishing one's daily bread, it was rather a sacred ministration. He looked
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upon it as that portion of the scheme of eternal justice committed to man by the Supreme Law Giver for the advancement of the human race; a rule of righteousness to be administered here, as at once a preparation and a foretaste of the more perfect law of the Grand Assize, when we shall no longer "see as through a glass darkly, but face to face." A judge was to him a representative of Him of whom it was written: "Justice and judgment are the habitation of His throne." A court room was a sacred temple, and while he ministered at the altar he had no part or lot with those who in the outer courts "were changers of money and sellers of doves."
And for this part in the noblest of all professions, Providence had en- dowed him with great and peculiar gifts of intellect, temperament and character. And these fitted into and worked in harmonious action with one another as in the most nicely adjusted piece of mechanism ever devised by the skill of man. His intellectual equipment was of the highest order. He possessed a mind strong, vigorous and acute, capable of close and continuous application, and of comprehending the most abstruse and complicated prob- lems. Nothing seemed too high, nothing too deep, nothing too hidden or involved as to baffle or obscure that penetrating vision. When once he had grasped the underlying principles of a case, he followed that clue through all the Daedalian windings and turnings of the labyrinth to its logical results as though guided by the fabled thread of Ariadne. He was not unmindful of the rule, "Stare decisis," but he looked beyond the decision to the reasons and the philosophy of it, and if it had not these credentials he boldly chal- lenged it as not having entered by authority through the lawful door of the fold, but as a thief and robber that had climbed up some other way.
To this clearness of vision there was added a lucidity of statement which has never been surpassed in our time by any member of the Connec- ticut bar. What he saw so clearly, he had the faculty of so expressing that his hearers saw it as clearly as he did himself. This is a rare gift and if it be not eloquence, it is akin to it. It was a delight in some tangled and com- plicated cause rendered still more tangled and complicated by the efforts of others who had struggled hopelessly in the Serbonian bog, to listen to the pure clean-cut Anglo-Saxon with which he extricated and unfolded the real issue and stripped it from all incumbrances. He rarely made excursions outside his argument by way of illustration into general literature, but at times there would come a flash of humor to irradiate and illumine, as light- ning sometimes comes from a clear sky as a warning of the approaching thunder.
It was to these two masterly qualities-perspicacity and perspicuity- clearness of vision and clearness of utterance-more than all others, I think, was due the great reputation which he achieved among his brethren all over the State. It was on account of these that he always received the undivided attention and confidence of the judges, who while not hankering after the dry husks of the law for their daily bread, still, it may be presumed, prefer argument to eloquence and demonstration to rhetoric.
In him was happily united to these qualities a temperament which acted in harmony and gave them full opportunity for exercise and development. He was calm, serene, self-poised and equable, no matter how important the issue, or how desperate the contest. Whether victory or defeat hung trembling in the balance-amid the smoke and confusion of the battle, "amid the thunder of the captains and the shoutings"-like the great Marlborough, he was imperturbable. He never lost his selfpossession. He never failed to employ all his resources. He never retreated till the last man was brought up, and the last gun was fired, nor until all was lost save honor. And his fight was always in the open-a fair fight and no favors. There were no mines or countermines, no breaches of armistice, no firing
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upon flags of truce-"Noblesse oblige." The law and the testimony, truth and honor, right and justice, these and nothing more and nothing less, were his watchwords.
It was these and such qualities as these that placed him in the front rank of our profession and caused his name to become a household word in our State from the river Bronx to the Providence Plantations. But he was more than these-he was a pure, spotless, honest, simple, unaffected, truth- ful, just, honorable, white-souled, gentleman. There was never one so con- spicuous who bore honors more unostentatiously. There was never one whose life had been spent in contest and in combat, more free from "envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness." He was "not slothful in business, but fervent in spirit, serving the Lord." "When the ear heard him it blessed him, and when the eye saw him it gave witness to him."
I may not on this public occasion draw aside the veil which covers our personal relations. But it may be permitted me to say that to me he was more than a Brother in Law. For forty years we have been associated in the battles of the bar, always together, except as I remember on only two or three occasions. He was my inspirer, my guide, my counsellor and my friend. "We took sweet counsel together and walked in the courts of law as friends.' We have been together in many a hard fought battle, have sympathized in many a defeat, and have rejoiced together in many a well earned victory. It was assigned to me as "junior" to lead the "light brigade and dash at the enemy with sound of battle and slashing broadsword"- but I knew full well, whether in attack or retreat that behind me was drawn up the heavy artillery and that my great commander stood there as fixed and immovable as "the Rock of Chickamauga."
His personal appearance harmonized with the disposition of his mind and character. He was tall and slim, with straight black hair, a pale intel- lectual countenance, the eye of an eagle, and that prominent nose which is the unfailing sign of indomitable will and forceful character. His manners though mild and affable, were decorous and dignified, inviting friendship while repelling undue familarity. There was an indescribable something about his fellow-citizens, as a man by all men with whom he came in contact. "His "that Goodness had come that way." One knew at his mere presence-here is a man to be trusted, and he was trusted-as a counsellor by his clients, as a lawyer by his brethren, as a legislator by his constituents, as a neighbor by his fellow-citizens, as a man by all men with whom he came in contact. "His life was gentle and the elements so mixed in him that Nature might stand up to all the world and say, This was a Man."
Alas, Alas! The inexorable law of human existence, which spares not rich or poor, young or old, great or humble! "He hath given his honors to the world again, his blessed part to heaven, and sleeps in peace." He has gone "to join the innumerable caravan which ever moves to that mysterious realm where each shall take his chamber in the silent halls of death." And so for a season we bid our brother "Farewell." He has fought a good fight. He has kept the faith. He has walked circumspectly amid the pitfalls of life. He has rejoiced not in iniquity, but has rejoiced in truth. He was first pure and then peaceable. He provided things honest in the sight of all men. He recompensed to no man evil for evil. He overcame evil with good, in all things showing himself a pattern of a perfect Christian gentleman.
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