USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Litchfield > The bi-centennial celebration of the settlement of Litchfield, Connecticut, August 1-4, 1920 > Part 5
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Colporters with packs of Methodist reading matter traveled over their circuits, (always entertained by its members) urg- ing the people to buy books. Rev. Charles Chittenden, in old age, took up this business and within my memory has spent nights at our house when on such tours.
"We have no time to mention several of the unique services of the early Methodists which were strongly instrumental in their rapid development-the quarterly meeting love feast, protracted meetings and revival services -- the week-long camp meetings-nor to note the great influence of the new singing the spirited tunes and theology freighted hymns which were taught the people by master hymn writers, Charles and John Wesley-all of which is of intense interest to students of early church life.
Week-long camp meetings started in Kentucky and Ten- nessee by two brothers-one a Presbyterian and the other a Methodist in 1799-spread like wildfire though the country
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and soon were specially claimed by the Methodists. They were a yearly festival, a harvest of souls. Many from this church attended these gatherings at Stepney, Burlington, Milford, etc. Perhaps more than any other of the "troopings" pecu- liar to early Methodism the camp meeting emphasized the brotherhood of this elannish sect. The last morning was al- ways a "processional" or "band meeting"-a most impressive service. The leader singing some trumpet call hymn would step down from the pulpit and begin a march around the encampment and another would follow till every man and woman present was in the march-like the Israelites round about Jericho. All the while singing hymn after hymn, "Am I a soldier of the cross", "Come ye that love the Lord," "Arise my soul, arise," "Blow ye the trumpet, blow," "Come let us anew our journey pursue", etc., etc. Then the leader would step to one side still singing, stand and grasp the hand of the next in line-and the next-till he had shaken hands with all the company. Back of him each other one would stand and do the same till all had grasped the hand of every one present, and the entire encampment was "standing at arms." Then followed an earnest prayer and the benediction and the meeting was closed.
"Hallelujah they cry, To the King of the sky To the great everlasting I am; To the Lamb that was slain, And that liveth again, Hallelujah to God and the Lamb".
Were the old brothers and sisters here who used to sing at those yearly processionals,
"Now here's my heart and here's my hand To meet you in that heavenly land,"
they might tell us that the branches of the treetops still whisper to them the words of the parting hymn of long ago :-
"My friends I bid you all adieu, I leave you in God's care; And if I here no more see-you, Go on, I'll meet you there.
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Millions of years around may roll, Our song will still go on, .
To praise the Father and the Son, And Spirit, Three in One. When we've been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun, We've no less days to sing God's praise, Than when we first began".
And now the old times with their many quaint religious customs have passed. One chapter of Litchfield Methodism is closed!
The antiquated Meadow Street Meeting House is to be abandoned-turned over to the world. A new, more commodi- ous, much needed church is being built. The younger members gladly anticipate its occupancy. There are now left but a very few aged members who might have answered the roll call at the dedication of the old church, 48 years before, and they well may sadly crone-
"My company before is gone And I am left here all alone".
The last sermon preached in the old church was delivered by a former pastor, Rev. James Taylor, Sunday evening, July 26th, 1885. Hlad we listened then methinks we might have heard this little remnant of a former, strange, heroic church, still shouting and singing in the quavering voices of age their belief in a sure, abiding home-their hope voiced in John Wesley's hymn which they had loved from youth :- "There is my house and portion fair; My treasure and my heart are there, And my abiding home; For me my elder brethren stay, And angels beckon me away And Jesus bids me come.
I come, thy servant, Lord, replies; I come, to meet thee in the skies, And claim my heavenly rest! Soon will the pilgrim's journey end; Then, O my Saviour, Brother, Friend Receive me to thy breast".
1
STATE DAY :
THE LITCHFIELD LAW SCHOOL.
Address by Former Governor Simeon E. Baldwin, LL.D. The Playhouse, August 1, 1920.
This day is given by an ancient town to the consideration of what she has done, during the past two centuries, for the advancement here of Religion and Education.
Religion has undoubtedly taken a forward step, in giving less weight than they formerly received to rules of doctrinal theology.
Public education has been extended, in unison with all the other towns of Connecticut; but it is in the foundation and support of Private Schools that Litchfield has won her great distinction. There she seized the position of a pioneer. To her ancient Law School, more than to any other single source, is due the form and symmetry and orderly develop- ment of American Law.
The Litchfield Law School was one of the first fruits of the American Revolution. That cut us clear of English law, except so far as we might voluntarily adopt it. But what authority was to say how far we had adopted or should adopt it? There had been, so long as we remained subject to King George, a large body of English law, of which we had both the benefit and the burden. Very little of it was in statutory form. It was mostly the result and expression of long estab- lished custom. It had never been put in the shape of an offi- cial code. What was its status in American courts?
Bear in mind that the United States until 1789 were very loosely bound together. Each was sovereign and independent .* Each had its own system of legal rights and legal procedure. Until the Revolution there had been a right in the Crown to set aside colonial statutes and the judgments of colonial courts. It was a prerogative of the "King in Council". In fact the Council, that is the Privy Council, at first exercised the power at meetings at which the King was seldom present, and later committed it to a standing committee of their number, styled the "Lords of Trade and Plantations". They had an official *Gen. Stat. of Conn-, Rev. of 1918, Sect. 2201.
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counsel of their own, and were also entitled to ask the advice of the Attorney General and Solicitor General.
This appellate power was very distasteful to the American colonists, but it tended strongly to give uniformity to their law, and to encourage a sentiment of common nationality. The Revolution withdrew this moderating and unifying force at the same time that it secured an independence of each col. ony or State in legislating on all subjects for itself.
Here were then thirteen governments, each making or recognizing certain rules of conduct, called law, and no two adopting rules that were identically the same.
All this brought confusion at the expense of order. Trade between the States was hindered. What was lawful in one inight be criminal in another. The English common law was nowhere recognized as a universal rule. Some of it was necessarily unfitted for the new conditions of American society .* None of it was officially recorded or published.
Here was a great opportunity for a great leader. Who should bring legal order to replace legal chaos? The hour had come. Where was the man to meet its call?
Legal history shows that codes are mainly the work of pri- vate individual writers. These writers begin what a legis- lature ultimately adopts.
In 1784, a year after the close of the Revolution and five years before the Constitution of the United States went into force, this work of private authorship, as a pre. liminary to public recognition, was begun on Litchfield ITill. It was then that Tapping Reeve, a graduate of Princeton of the Class of 1763, and afterwards tutor there for three years, took under his charge the first students who were to head the list of the graduates of the Litch. field Law School. He was then forty years old; an ardent and impetuous son of sturdy New England Stock. His father, ** a Congregational minister in Vermont, lived to be a hundred and four years old. The son, though not destined for such extreme longevity, had a strong constitution both of mind and body. He was of the kind who do their life's work
*A different view is presented in Fiske's Critical Period of American History, p. 69.
** Ret. Abner Reeve.
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with dash and feeling,-who wear out, but never rust out. After a quarter of a century of growing usefulness, his voice wore out, under the strain of daily lectures, but he was still able to give them in a shrill whisper until 1820, when he finally retired, at the age of seventy-nine, dying three years later.
Associated with him in the work of instruction after 1798 was James Gould, a man of even greater mark, who was graduated from Yale College in 1791, and conducted the School alone from 1820 to 1833, when it passed out of existence. It had always been conducted as a purely private enterprise. It had never had or wanted the legal status of a corporation.
When it was started in 1784 it was a pioneer in an untrod- den field.
William and Mary College, in Virginia, had indeed estab- lished a Professorship of Law during the Revolutionary War, in 1779. George Wythe was the first Professor, and John Marshall, the great Chief Justice, one of its first pupils. But here law was taught in a college, as one of the several branches of a liberal education; not as a profession to be studied as a preparation for the bar. Bushrod Washington, afterwards an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, took his bachelor's degree at William and Mary Col- lege in 1778, but far from deeming the general education received there as a sufficient legal education, went, to secure that, into the office of James Wilson, in Philadelphia.
Prior to the Revolutionary war Americans desiring to enter the bar seldom received what can fairly be called a thorough education for it. A very few went to England and studied in London at the Inns of Court ;* but even there they learned little except from listening to proceedings in court. Almost all our lawyers picked up such knowledge as they might have, in the offices of active practitioners, and in reading such legal treatises as they might recommend. A busy lawyer had little time to spare for questioning such pupils as he might receive into his office; and questioning by those who were not busy was generally of little worth.
There were always a few, however, who both were legal scholars, and took a fatherly interest in any young man so committed to their care. Indeed, the lawyer of those days *Not over 150 in all. Am. Hist. Review, Vol. XXV, p. 680.
سة
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had often read more of, Roman law, the so-called law of Nature, and international law, than is now commonly taught, either in or out of our Law Schools.
Mr. Justice Wilson was one of the more scholarly mem- bers of the American bar who, during the Revolutionary era, received law students into their offices, supervised their course of reading, and stood ready to explain to them, when time served, any difficulties encountered in the law books of the day. For such instruction a fee was charged, often amounting in the cities to as much as $100.
It was thus that the office of Judge Reeve had come to be frequented by young men reading for the bar, in the decade during which our independence was attained. He com- menced the practice of his profession here in 1772, and one of the first who studied under his eye was his brilliant brother- in-law, Aaron Burr, after whom he named his only son, born in 1790.
Whatever else Burr learned at Litchfield, it is safe to say that it did not include the cynical definition of law which he gave in later life-"Law is whatever is confidently asserted and plausibly maintained". The loose morality indicated by such an expression characterized far too many of the legal fraternity in the United States as the Revolution approached and in the years that immediately followed it.
A letter from Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts, after- wards United States Senator and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, to Aaron Burr, written a few weeks after the Declaration of Independence, described the state of society there, at that time thus:
"Amidst the confusion which was at once the cause and consequence of a demolition of Government, men's minds as well as actions became regardless of all legal restraint. All power reverted into the hands of the people, who were deter- mined that every one should be convinced that the People were the fountain of all honor. The first thing they did was to withdraw all confidence from every one who had ever had any connection with Government, the necessity of which was even called in question. Lawyers were universally almost represented as the pest of society." *
*Proceedings of the Am. Antiquarian Society, Vol. XXIX, N. S., p. 72.
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Anarchy was thus favored by some Americans, in the days of the Revolution, as a political principle.
Under such circumstances, the bar became an unpopular institution. In 1769, a New York law student, destined to rise to great prominence in the profession, wrote to a friend that there was "an almost universal clamor against the law and its practitioners" .*
Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England was then in course of publication, and soon attained a wide circu- lation in America. They tended to foster monarchical senti- ment, and to place law on the footing of an act of sovereign authority, rather than as expressive of general public consent. It was a block in the way of American independence.
Mr. Justice Wilson, in his law lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1790, cautioned the students there against being led astray by Blackstone's sophisms, ** and deplored the lack in this country of any opportunity for acquiring a com- plete legal education, both in generals and particulars.
"That a law education", he said, "is necessary for gentle- men intended for the profession of the law, it would be as ridiculous to prove as to deny. In all other countries, public institutions bear a standing testimony to this truth. Ought this to be the only country without them?" ***
His own lectures, at this period, were given as a proper part of a general liberal education. In the same spirit, President Stiles had introduced at Yale, in 1789, the study by the College Seniors of Montesquieu on the Spirit of the Laws; following in this the lead of Princeton; and adding in 1793, as a regular text book, Vattel on the Laws of Nature and Nations .****
The Litchfield Law School, from the first, gave prominence to the literary side of the legal profession, and its orderly development. Judges Reeve and Gould did not consider that those whom they helped to educate would lose, by entering it, their right to deem themselves citizens of the republic of letters.
*Life of Peter Van Schaick, p. 8.
** Wilson's Works, Vol. I, p. 170.
* Ibid., Vol. I, p. 13.
*Stiles' Literary Diary, Vol. III, pp. 346, 497.
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It is, indeed, a profession with a living and growing litera- ture of its own. This is officially expressed in the opinions of the highest courts, as found in our judicial reports, the first of which was published in Litchfield in 1789. Their study must be approached with the spirit of a scholar.
There is a constant tendency inherent in every body of national jurisprudence, towards irregularity of development. Its growth or its decay comes in spots. It is then for legal authorship to endeavor to restore its symmetry.
Judge Reeve accomplished much in this direction. One of his successors on the bench, Chief Justice Church, has thus characterized Reeve's view of his profession:
"He loved the law as a science, and studied it philosophic- ally. He considered it as the practical application of religi- ous principle to the business affairs of life. He wished to reduce it to a certain, symmetrical system of moral truth. He did not trust to the inspiration of genius for eminence, but to the results of profound and constant study".
Reeve addressed himself to the feelings of those to whom he spoke, more than his associate, Judge Gould, did or could. This characterized both his arguments at the bar and his lectures from the desk. Probably he never used this power more effectively than in the Elizabeth Freeman case, in Massa- chusetts, where he was associated with Theodore Sedgwick. She had been born a slave, and claimed her freedom from her former master under the declaration in the Constitution of the State, adopted in 1780, that "All men are born free and equal". In 1783 Sedgwick and Reeve obtained a favorable decision from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Such a question, the answer to which involved discussion of so vital a point in American constitutional law, gave Reeve a great opportunity to appeal both to the minds and hearts of those who heard him, and his arguments made a profound impression.
Gould, as a law lecturer, gave great care to orderly state- ment, and logical arrangement. His work on Pleading in Civil Actions proceeds, step by step, from one proposition to another, like a treatise on geometry. Chief Justice Church gives us this sketch of his mental traits and tastes:
L
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"Judge Gould was a critical scholar, and always read with his pen in his hand, whether Law books or books of fiction or fancy, for which he indulged a passion. In the more abstruse subjects of the law, he was more learned than Judge Reeve, and, as a lecturer, more lucid and methodical. The Comnion Law he had searched to the bottom, and he knew it all -its principles, and the reasons from which they were drawn. As an advocate, he was not a man of impassioned eloquence, but clear and logical, employing language eloquent and chaste. He indulged in no wit, and seldom excited a laugh, but was very sure to carry a listener along with him to his conclusions" .*
During the most flourishing years of the Litchfield Law School, Lyman Beecher, - a great preacher, and the father of a greater one,-was pastor of the Litchfield Congregational Church, and Judge Reeve was one of his chief counselors and supports. Dr. Beecher organized a special class of law students, meeting at his house, to which he lectured on theology one evening in the week .** This helped to fortify their grow- ing acquaintance with what in that day no one was afraid to name the Laws of Nature. This branch of law was taught at Litchfield with some care. The great aim of the School was to acquaint the student with legal principles in such an order of arrangement, and with such reference to their historical development, as would best impress them permanently upon his mind. Cases were used mainly to support or illustrate antecedent propositions. They were regarded less as sources of law than as channels of law.
The great thing in legal education is to put the student in possession of clear general notions as to the whole field of law and the manner in which any part of it is related to the rest. To give that the Litchfield Law School sought to set before each incoming class the outlines of law in general, sub- stantive and adjective, in orderly and scientific arrangement.
Law is both a science and an art, and it is no less science because it wears this double face. It was in the spirit of full recognition of its entire nature that it was taught here for forty years. As Chief Justice Church said of the point
*Bench and Bar of Litchfield County, p. 28.
** Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, 'Vol. I, pp. 225, 373.
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of view from which Reeve regarded it: to him Law was, in essence, a system of moral truth, involving the practical appli- cation of religious principle to the business affairs of life. Lord Erskine had voiced the same conception when he said that the principles of legal science were "founded in the charities of religion, in the philosophy of Nature, in the truths of history, and in the experience of common life". These two men were idealists, as every law teacher should be. An ideal, some one has said, is Truth at a distance. The truth is found if it is patiently sought for, though it may take one far a field. He attains the knowledge of it, as Sophocles declared, who sees things steadily and sees them whole.
Any enterprise, the success or maintenance of which depends on the personal qualities of a single man, must die with him, unless indeed it dies before him. The Litchfield Law School died in 1833, when Judge Gould's health became seriously impaired and he was no longer able to stand the strain of daily lectures.
Had it been thrown into the form of a corporation, the ultimate result must have been the same. A sparsely settled farming town could not expect to remain permanently the seat of a large professional school, which would attract students from a wide range of States. Such a School can only thrive as part of a University.
It had had a long and useful life. Among those (con- siderably over a thousand in number) who acquired their pro- fession there were one of the most distinguished Vice Presi- dents of the United States; three Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States (Henry Baldwin, Levi Woodbury and Ward E. Hunt) ; seventeen United States Senators; ten Governors of States; and seven foreign ministers.
The regular courses of instruction occupied a year and a half. There was a daily lecture of an hour and a half, and a weekly examination on them .* A Law School debating society met one evening a week, and there was also a weekly moot court, presided over by one of the Professors.
The exercises of the Law School were conducted first in a one-story building of the "old red school house" type, which
*Bench and Bar of Litchfield County, pp. 182, 187, 194, 214.
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is still standing, erected by Judge Reeve; and next in another of the same kind, put up by Judge Gould .*
In 1801, Yale had established a Professorship of Law, the incumbent of which gave a few lectures to the Senior Class, and in 1824, she set up a regular law department.
Some years earlier Harvard had taken similar steps, and in 1829 a successful law teacher, who, with one associate, had gathered about him, in Northampton, so considerable a class of law students as to give his office the name of the Northamp- ton Law School, ** accepted an invitation to one of the two chairs of Law then existing at Cambridge, Mr. Justice Story occupying the other. Some funds were created for the founda- tion of that institution, and the Litchfield Law School, even had Judge Gould's health been unimpaired, could not have long survived in the face of such accumulated competition.
It was a great service to the American people that this School rendered so early and so long. The welfare of a people depends on an intelligent, well educated and free-speaking bar. The American bar, in 1784, were re-constituting the law of the United States. They were creating one new kind of it-Con-
stitutional law. They were creating from day to day, by the decisions of the courts, a common law for the Union. Within the next five years the first volume of American law reports was published. There were no text-books in 1784, stating the law obtaining in the United States or any part of it. They were to be made. The Litchfield Law School made some of them out of the lectures delivered before it.
Because of its practical, as well as its theoretical side, law has a peculiar interest to thoughtful men. An applied science gives those who follow it the relief which always comes to a thinker when he is doing something, besides thinking. It brings him more satisfaction than most other studies can. One mode of exercising the mind supplements and illustrates another mode. Robert Louis Stevenson once said: "To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have suc- ceeded in life; and perhaps only in law and the higher mathe- matics may this devotion be maintained, suffice to itself with-
*Cuts of these buildings are contained in Bench and Bar, pp. 179, 192-195. -
** The College Book, p. 42.
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out re-action, and find continual reward, without excitement". This warm encomium of law holds up a high ideal. Part of a lawyer's life is to be given to gaining knowledge and intel- lectual strength, and part to the service of his fellow man. Both call for devotion. It was in full sympathy with that spirit, and all that it implies, that Reeve and Gould conducted the Litchfield Law School. Lord Morley has said that the true force of all oratory is the momentum of the orator's his- tory, personality, and purpose. The true force of the teaching given at that Law School was the momentum of the history, personality, and purpose of those two men.
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