USA > Connecticut > Tercentenary pamphlet series, v. 3 The Beginnings of Roman Catholicism in Connecticut > Part 15
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In the whole for myself this year of 1798
Doll Cents 71
63 Justice writs at 17 cents each IO
30 County Court do on this book and from dockett No. I, for Sept. CC. at 34 cents each is IO
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In the whole 20
91
The lawyer's patience rarely seems to have given way at the pettiness of the tasks for which he was engaged. Occasionally some laconic phrase crossing an entry shows what he thought of the case, or, more often, what he thought of the prospect for collecting his fee, and once
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when he entered a charge of three shillings in the day- book and specified "advice, plague, noise and trouble" one may fairly conclude that he was annoyed.
V
LAWYERS' fees at this time were oftener than not paid in produce. Nor did this always constitute a hardship; Slosson could hardly go wrong in accepting a half-dozen fleeces or a cartload of flax-straw, since all the processes of cloth-making-linen for sheeting and napery, woolen webs for blankets and heavy clothing-were still routine tasks in most Connecticut households. Wheat was as good as money, for gristmills stood on every stream near Kent. There was no risk in taking the pigs of iron with which the furnace-men paid for their legal incursions and excursions. The blacksmith would hammer some of it into horseshoes and make an honest penny by turning the surplus over to Phineas Smith, the nailor, who, having been worsted by the furnace-men in several lawsuits, thenceforth preferred to purchase his iron from the smiths. Not only were Slosson's fees and those of other professional men frequently paid in produce, but the exchange was effected at what now seems very dispropor- tionate rates. For example, he charged £2 2s., one of the largest fees recorded in the daybook, for "arguing cause for vexatious suit a day and a half"; and he had to pay exactly that amount to a shoemaker for making him a pair of boots. The term fee for two cases in County Court, brought against clients of his by the redoubtable Ephraim Kirby, amounted to the sum which he paid down for a portmanteau. His charge for "going to Wash- ington, Wheaton, &c, in search of evidence in Kent vs. Washington" was settled by a town order which eventu- ally he exchanged for five pounds of sugar to carry home
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with him. He drew up articles of partnership on a certain Monday morning, on Wednesday he was called upon to arrange the dissolution of the same, a process which required further documentation, and his fees for those writings several months later were traded out "in full" for a pocket handkerchief and two pounds of coffee. All the dickering which this system involved was a part of the economic pattern of the time-of "life in the small." If the lawyer lived by it, so, too, did the doctor, the schoolmaster, and the minister. A large part of Lyman Beecher's salary as minister of the Litchfield church, was paid to him in such exchanges; and when Ephraim Kirby's famous volume of law reports came from Collier's press in Litchfield it was advertised in the Weekly Monitor (April 13, 1789) as a work, "ready for Sub- scribers and Gentlemen disposed to purchase, for which most kinds of Country Produce will be received."
Accounts of collection occupy considerable space in the old daybook, and in this business Slosson was employed by many prominent men of his county. Some of these accounts throw light upon the confused state of the currency at this time, for payments were often specified in "New York money," and Slosson usually transcribed the amount into its equivalent of "lawful money" (the "Lmy" of the entries) when he credited them to his clients. The depreciation which the creditor of that day faced may be illustrated by a payment of £6 8s., "New York money," dated 1794, which Slosson received for Major Talman in 1796 and was obliged to cash for £5 4s., "lawful money." Money of any sort, lawful or otherwise, was not always forthcoming, however, and Slosson was frequently forced to accept commodities for his clients as well as for himself, a circumstance which led to some curious entries in the old book. Occasionally he
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notes the receipt of a payment in iron, brought direct to him from one or another of the many furnaces near Kent, and among his papers are records of promissory notes payable in iron. When he took "8 Cyder Barrels" in lieu of currency the transaction demonstrated Slosson's sound business judgment, and his predilection for Yankee dickering; for, after some bartering in which the "Cyder Barrels" changed hands several times, he finally had the satisfaction of crediting his client's account in the daybook with the entire sum due him-and annotated it, "Lmy."
Many officers of the Revolutionary army still lived in Litchfield County, and Slosson's relations with this group are indicative of his standing in a community in which they were arbiters. He lived in Major B's house; pastured his horse on Captain C's grassland; paid "Society Rates" when those became due, and collected money (New York money, regrettably, which was usually at a considerable discount) for absentee majors and colonels. Men with military titles seem to have sued and been sued less often than the rank and file, perhaps be- cause they were often justices themselves; but the legal vicissitudes of the time and place occasionally brought their names within the covers of Barzillai's book. The Revolution, moreover, was not the sole patent of gentility in Litchfield County, and the patronymics displayed on the fading pages of the old manuscript are in the line of good Connecticut tradition: they go back to men who followed Marsh and Buel through the wilderness and founded the Litchfield settlements on the borders of the Western Lands. The first names of Barzillai's clients fit equally with his own into the background of Puritan tradition : Aaron and Abraham and Adonijah, they read; Eliezer and Epaphroditus; Hezekiah and Habbakkuk; Jacob and Jedidiah and Jehoshaphat; and so on down
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the alphabet to Zechariah and Zephaniah and Zebedee.
During the time covered by the daybook, Slosson's criminal practice related chiefly to cases that involved petty crimes and misdemeanors. Assault and battery seems to have been common throughout the state; common enough, in fact, to prompt a facetious article in the Hartford newspaper, purporting to give a tariff of costs which would enable any suitor who was disap- pointed at law, to estimate the expense of private redress.7 Consultations over property disputes which Slosson notes in the daybook indicate that divorce was not quite so rare at that time as is sometimes supposed; but Slosson, so far as the daybook specifies, was directly engaged in a case of domestic trouble but once, and then, curiously enough, the case concerned a negro and his "pretended wife." The freedmen could-and usually did -refer such disputes to the "Governour of the Blacks" for settlement, but when Caleb Hill began to feel himself aggrieved at the desertion of his "pretended wife" he appealed to the white man's law and engaged Barzillai Slosson. Slosson followed the time-honored procedure, paying costs as they accumulated and charging the same to Caleb's account. In due time the advertisement that has immemorially proclaimed the defection of wives ap- peared in the newspapers accompanied by the usual woodcut, which had needed only the generous applica- tion of printer's ink to make it appropriate to Caleb's wife. Whether the case was ever brought into court is uncertain, but there was a long course of preliminary negotiations, and later the lawyer was obliged to sue for his fee and costs. He received judgment, execution was levied, and eventually he credited himself with three shillings, fourpence.
7 Quoted in the Litchfield Monitor, Feb. 27, 1793.
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VI
IF the constant round of petty litigation which fills the daybook brought its owner very little money, the fact that many of the cases were tried in justice's courts shows that it profited the principals scarcely more; for at that time only such civil cases as involved a sum not to exceed fifteen dollars and only criminal cases which carried a penalty of not more than seven dollars could be tried by a justice. Slosson's practice was not confined to justice's courts, however, and late in the second year covered by his accounts, he began to list separately in the daybook his cases in County Court. In Litchfield during these years the court usually met in March, September, and December. The hilly and boulder- strewn road that lay between Barzillai Slosson's home in Kent and the county seat was not likely to be at its best during those months. There was a bridge over the Housa- tonic-the covered bridge "over Bull's Falls" which had given Barzillai one of his first fees-but many streams between Kent and Litchfield must be forded if they were still open, or crossed on the ice if they were frozen over. Farmers went in oxcarts or sleds if, and as, the condition of the roads permitted; or they walked as the furnace workers did. Oliver Ellsworth, in his day, had walked, too-twenty miles to and from Hartford-when court met; but times had changed since then. Now gentlemen went on horseback, unless they were elderly and per- mitted themselves the doubtful luxury of a "pung." Barzillai always rode his own horse, carrying his briefs and a few law books in his saddlebags. Whitney's horse, or even Hopson's, either of which might be hired for six shillings a day, were all very well for riding about the countryside or even for the odd trip to the county seat
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between sessions. But at court time, when Governor Wolcott and Chief Justice Adams were to be met on South Street or at the Center, when Litchfield would be crowded with the county notables-all the majors and colonels, the judges, justices, lawyers, and smart young men of the Law School-it behooved a barrister and a Yale man to take some thought for the morrow, not only for himself, where he should eat and what he should drink and wherewithal be clothed; but even for his horse, how it should be accoutred. Wherefore, so the reader may infer, that silver-trimmed bridle, "single rein, washed tips," bought from John Wood, the saddler and book- binder, with a term fee. Wherefore the "trimmed, blew broadcloth coat and breeches," the brocaded waistcoat made by Whitney and settled for-indisputably-as an entry in the daybook attests:
To cash-paid at his garden East of his house by highway-Mr. Bordwell's land. Settled;
the "knapt hatt" he "bought at vendue," the white- topped boots, the portmanteau, the shaving-box, the knee-buckles exchanged at the sacrifice of six shillings "boot."
The December session of County Court was likely to last the greater part of the month, and here, as in all the county towns of the state when court was in session, lawyers, litigants, and witnesses came to stay. After the Catlin House was built, Slosson stayed there with his two friends, David Boardman, later judge of the County Court, and Samuel Southmayde; the three always occu- pying the same room, as the custom then was. But in the early days of his practice he boarded with Ebenezer Marsh when he attended court, paying a reckoning of twelve shillings a week. Slosson's choice of a residence
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showed a lively sense of what the lawyer owed to his professional standing, for the old colonial house where Marsh lived stood on South Street in the fashionable section of the town. Governor Oliver Wolcott lived on that street, his two sons-Frederick, clerk of the County Court, and Oliver, then secretary of the treasury in Washington's cabinet-Chief Justice Andrew Adams, Judge Reeve, Ephraim Kirby, Major Seymour, and other prominent citizens; and there, too, was the Law School where a full half of the Litchfield bar had studied with Judge Reeve. Across the curve of the Bantam River rose Chestnut Hill; and to the north, climbing the sloping hillsides above the town, streamed the long rows of trees in the apple orchards of the sheriff, Lynde Lord. At the center, rising against the blue of distant hills, the Litch- field County Court House stood near the Green; white- painted, reticent, with pillars and pediment and spire. Not greatly unlike many churches found on the greens of New England towns, it was a reminder of that not- distant past when the town meetinghouse had dispensed both the law and the gospel-and not infrequently "the Powder and Ball"-to Connecticut men.
Court was the one unfailing diversion of provincial life in the early days of the republic, as it had been in colonial times, and when it sat all classes of citizenry in Connecti- cut expected to attend. In that respect Litchfield was like all other county towns in the state. Farmers left the winter "chores" to the women and smaller boys, and took their older sons with them to town. Ironworkers banked the fires in their furnaces and gathered in from Ore Hill and Salisbury and Kent; teamsters, who should have been on their way south to New York with their loads of freight or outward bound to the Hudson River towns and Albany, stopped off at Litchfield and crowded
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the tavern stables with their teams. All this the builders had taken into account, and the Litchfield courthouse was the envy of the legal fraternity in other parts of the state. Large and beautifully proportioned, the courtroom rose to a beamed roof, and a double row of windows framed views of the Litchfield hills that were famous with the judges and lawyers of Connecticut long before land- scape artists took them for a theme. A wide gallery ran across one end of the courtroom, and at the other end a raised dais with a broad pulpit-like desk lifted the judges to an almost ecclesiastical height above the walnut tables where Barzillai Slosson sat with his colleagues, the famous "fighting bar" of Litchfield County.
Behind the tables of the barristers, in the space be- tween the fireplaces, were chairs for the gentry; and back of those the room was filled with quaint pine benches, made, like the chairs, by Oliver Clark and Ebenezer Plumb at their shop "in the main South Street, a few rods below Mr. Kirby's"-for Litchfield had its own chairmakers who were signing their names on "Heart- back Cherry Chairs, Windsors and Fiddle-backs" before Lambert Hitchcock was born. The carving which added no little distinction to the fine proportions of the court- room, was designed and executed by Litchfield men also. George Dewey and David Bulkeley had divided the labor between them and, if tradition speaks truly, it should not have been difficult to determine where the work of the one left off and that of the other began. The carved sconces for candles and the panels of doors lent themselves to a design lineally descended from carvings on the old Hartford chests that had come to Litchfield with the founders-tulips with stiffly rectilinear foliage and vines with stiffly triangular bunches of grapes-a design that had been preserved and in a way apotheo-
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sized, on the paneled pulpit of the church on the Green. But from the long roof beams, across the railings of the gallery, and before the judges' bench ran a grapevine carving of quite another sort-an errancy of tendrils that perhaps should have been put to shame by the well- pruned and prolific trinity of the state seal toward which they pursued their course. Of all the furnishings of the courtroom, the massive clock that ticked off the hours of the short New England winter's day, alone was not of Litchfield make. Daniel Burnap had fashioned that-one of the few wooden-wheeled thirty-hour clocks he made- had fetched it on an oxsled all the way from his shop in East Windsor to Litchfield, and had set it up beside the bench, with its stout wooden insides none the worse for the midwinter journey over the mountains.
Unlike the church, no regular seating list was publicly promulgated for the courtroom, but the relative dignity of seats that marked the rank of the spectators was tacitly accepted by the community. The chairs at the front of the room were occupied by gentlemen, who, like Barzillai and his colleagues of the bar, still wore the dress of the Revolution : small-clothes with buckles at the knee, wide-skirted coats, brocaded waistcoats, and powdered queues. Farmers in their homespun filed in to the benches behind the gentlefolk, not their inferiors in intelligence and scarcely so in literacy: in Connecticut the professions were still recruited largely from the ranks of farmers' sons. The young men of the Law School with their port- folios sat in the gallery. A Londoner would have missed apprentices in such a crowd. New England apprentices wasted little of their masters' time, but their place in the picture was taken by the furnace workers and the team- sters who congregated in groups to the right and the left, under the gallery. Free negroes and the colored body-
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servants of Southern students-at a later time "Old Grimes" was one of these-slipped into vacant spaces near the doors or crowded on the gallery stairs. Except for these blacks, so far as the floor space of the room was concerned, the judges looked down from the elevation of their desk upon a homogeneous assemblage: colonial and Connecticut stock, almost to a man-a little mellowed, perhaps, as Judge Church has said, by living for two generations or more, in a community where "neither Quakers, Prayer Books, nor Christmas were the object of penal legislation";8 but wholly Yankee, nevertheless, in physiognomy and speech. The homogeneity which pre- vailed on the floor of the courtroom stopped short of the gallery, however, for already the Litchfield Law School was attracting students from all the fifteen states, and in their speech, when court recessed, one might have heard all variations of accent and inflection in English that was no longer the King's.
In this courtroom Barzillai Slosson made his first ap- pearance in 1794. As an advocate, he had one handicap: his contemporaries record that he "rarely warmed into any high degree of animation." The spectators who followed his first case in County Court must have been fully aware of this defect-for undoubtedly it would have been considered a defect at that time, and especially in Litchfield, where there were many unusually eloquent pleaders, who were proud of their appellation of the "fighting bar." Every case-arguments of counsel, rulings from the bench, procedure, points of law-would have been reviewed in more popular tribunals when court adjourned : in taverns, in stores, in the Moot Court
8 Samuel Church, "Litchfield County Historical Address," in The Bench and Bar of Litchfield County, 1709-1909. Dwight C. Kilbourn (Litchfield, 1909), p. 9.
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t
of the Law School. There were ruder forums, too, lit only by stable-lantern or fire that still glimmered on the forge of some late-working smith, where apprentices who could manage to steal out, after their day's labor was done, gathered to hear the livelier accounts of the furnace-men and the teamsters who loved "lawing" quite as well as their betters, and understood, no whit less, the ins and outs of that ancient game. In these discussions, Slosson's conduct of his cases must have received popular ap- proval; for, while a list of ten entries sufficed to record his business in County Court the first time it was listed separately, with fees that came to less than fifteen pounds, the December term of the next year saw nearly double the number of entries in the daybook, and the total amount of fees more than twenty-five pounds-a very creditable increase of professional business in a year, for that time.
Slosson's business was expanding in other lines of legal practice also. His coolness and deliberation brought him into demand as an "arbitrator," and duties in connection with arbitrations often carried him outside Litchfield County and even across the state line into New York. His "dockett book"-described later-shows that he was practicing before the Superior Court in January, 1795; and two years afterward he began to enter his Superior Court cases in a separate list in the daybook. A comparison of these lists shows that his practice before the upper court ran much the same course as in the County Court. For example, the first list, that of Janu- ary, 1797, shows three term fees and an "arguing fee"; while the list for the August term of the next year shows eleven term fees-again, a very creditable increase.
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VII
ASIDE from the light which it throws upon the jural life of a Connecticut county at the end of the eighteenth cen- tury, the daybook is of more than passing interest in its contributions to the social history of the time. Certain of the entries have to do with other than professional matters; and this cursory record, scarcely less arid than the legal details which crowd the fading pages, supple- ments the expense accounts jotted down elsewhere in the book. Together they sum up many of the outward cir- cumstances of Slosson's everyday life: in whose house he lived and what rent he paid; where he put his cow to pasture and when he took her out; what taverns he stopped at when his clients' affairs took him abroad in the county; on which of those occasions he rode his own horse, on which of them the town of Kent furnished him a mount, and when and wherefore he hired Whitney's grey mare; how much he was charged for "dinner and horse-bait" by the different landlords on his itinerary, most of whom were, at one or another time, his clients; what was the manner of his apparel and its seasonal changes; how much he paid for the garments which he assembled from all points of the compass-material from one client, making from another. Everything is set down in meticulous detail. Barzillai knew his clients and in- tended to avoid-as much as was humanly possible in eighteenth-century Connecticut-appearing in court in any other than his professional rôle. None but the rash, one may suppose, disputed Barzillai's rock-ribbed "book accounts";
Paid Hopson 2/3 for dinner & horsebait &c in cash. A piece of 1/6d & a do o/9ª.
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Paid Whitney 9 shillings in full for making 2 pr. Nankeen Breeches. Paid him at Buell's store by Town Order traded out.
Equally explicit and equally modest are certain mani- festations of Slosson's tastes. He took the Litchfield paper, arranged with Buell for copies of the Herald, and with that useful functionary, the postrider, for the Courant, which no gentleman in Connecticut, then, could be without, and for additional journals from Boston and New York. His annual almanac he bespoke in good time each year, lest the demand for Nehemiah Strong's- which was "Calculated for the Meridien and Horizon of Lichfield [sic]," and hence a matter of pride to every loyal citizen-should exceed the supply from the Collier press, and he find himself obliged to use some alien version of that "supreme and only literary necessity." He sub- scribed for Swift's System of the Laws of Connecticut, and noted in the daybook the receipt of his copy and the price, four dollars. The postrider brought him Salmon's Gazetteer; he ordered the new edition of Morse's Geography as soon as it came from the press; and bought Jefferson's Notes on Virginia when Citizen Adet's letters began to make its author obnoxious to the Federalists. Slosson loaned books, at times; but not without his usual pre- cautions, as may be seen from the following entry, made after one of those "all day arbitrations," at which, evi- dently, some matters other than the one in dispute had been discussed:
Lent to Ezekiel Payne Junius's Letters-to be returned in a short time to John Hopson's house for me. Returned.
A reader of the manuscript will be convinced that Slosson documented his debts as well as his debtors. One entry, the only one of its kind in the daybook, must have been
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made when some sudden emergency called for "lawful money" at a time when he had none. The character of Barzillai Slosson to which, indeed, all his colleagues testify, needs no other memorial than this entry affords:
Took I Dol. of Johnson vs. David Bostwick out of paper & put in 1/6 & 4 12ª in a paper. And put it back the same day . . .
Barzillai, though he knew his Polonius, was both a borrower and a lender; but his careful account of such transactions shows that he lost neither loan nor friend, and the reader will be grateful for the lights and shadows which they add to this little vignette of a Connecticut lawyer's life:
Paid Dr. Berry 1/6 I borrowed of him at John Payne's this day. Paid at home-4 pieces of 4 12d each.
Amounts which changed hands in this way, usually only among friends, were small; so small as often to be counted in pence and pistarenes. Payment followed closely, and if delayed, the principal was not infrequently accompanied with interest:
Oct. 29. Lent Dr. Berry 22/2 lmy. 1/2/2. Nov. 2. Dr. Berry paid again 22/6 to me 1/2/6.
Not all of Barzillai's accounts were of petty and per- sonal interest, however. Some of his cases touched matters of controversy which were of public interest at the time: abuses of the old apprentice system, happily then draw- ing to its close; opposition to the new turnpikes, fought tooth and nail during those years that brought in the "stage coach era" and relegated the saddlebags, the pillion, and the ox bow to the cobwebbed shadows of old barns. Some of them foreshadowed the struggle beginning
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