USA > Delaware > History of the state of Delaware, Volume III > Part 13
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George Read, the Signer, was born September 17, 1733, on one of the family estates in Cecil County, Maryland. He re- ceived a classical education under Dr. Francis Alison, and then after studying law, was admitted to the bar at the age of nineteen in Philadelphia. Two years later, in 1754, he re- moved to New Castle, Delaware, in which province the family owned extensive estates, and resided till his death in the colonial family mansion in the town of New Castle on the west bank of the Delaware river, one of the handsomest homes in the South, surrounded by lovely gardens of trees and flowers, especially the tulip of which he was very fond. In his stately home he and his attractive wife dispensed for many years a hospitality as elegant as it was generous; and among his distinguished guests, who embraced the prominent warriors and statesmen of the day, were Washington and Lafayette, together with the foremost fashionable dames frou. all sections, notably from the South and from the cities of Philadelphia, Annapolis and New York.
January 11, 1763, he married Gertrude, daughter of the
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Rev. George Ross, for fifty years the rector of Immanuel church, one of the oldest Protestant Episcopal churches in America. Hon. George Ross, a brother of his wife, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Mr. Read was appointed Attorney-General for the Crown, and served in that capacity from 1762 to 1764 when he re- signed. While holding this office he candidly expressed to the government in England the opinion that it was perilous for England to tax the colonies without giving them parlia- mentary representation ; and eleven years before the Declara- tion of Independence, he made the remarkable prophecy, in his correspondence with Sir Richard Neave, afterwards Gov- ernor of the Bank of England, that a continuance of this mis- taken policy would lead to the independence of the colonies and finally to their wresting from the mother country her manufacturing supremacy. Finding his warnings ineffectual to stay the mad course of Great Britain towards his country, he threw up his office in 1774, and took a seat in the first Continental Congress which met in Philadelphia in that year. Although as loyal to the cause of his country as the most ardent patriot of them all, yet, like John Dickinson and others, he was more conservative in his views, and hoping the breach might yet be healed, voted against the motion of Richard Henry Lee for independence made in Congress June 7, 1776, as did also Livingston of New York and Wilson of Pennsyl- vania. But when Read found that there was no hope for justice at the hands of the foolish king and his blind ministers, he signed the immortal document, and became thenceforth the constant and zealous supporter of the cause of American liberty.
He was President of the Constitutional Convention of 1776. Congress in 1782 created him a judge in the national Court of Appeals in Admiralty, and in 1785 made him one of the commissioners of a court to settle an important controversy in reference to territory between Massachusetts and New York. He was a delegate to the convention which met in Annapolis
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in 1786, and took a leading part in the deliberations which resulted in the assembling in 1787 of the Federal Convention at Philadelphia which framed the Constitution of the United States.
Next to Pennsylvania, with her eight members, stood Dela- ware, with her delegation of five, at whose head was George Read. It is probable that but for the powerful opposition of this Delaware delegation, and Patterson and Brearley from New Jersey, to the proposed plan of a representation in Con- gress, both in the Senate and in the House, according to popu- lation, and but for Read's able advocacy of the rights of the smaller States to a fair representation, the after compromise upon the present method, which insured the success of the Constitution, would never have been made. The concession of an equal representation in the Senate won the enthusiastic support of Read for the new Constitution, and thanks to his hearty championship and the universal respect in which he was held, the high honor was secured for his State of being the first Commonwealth to ratify the Great Compact, which Gladstone declared to be "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man."
This State, as a fitting recognition of the eminent services of its illustrious citizen, forthwith chose him as her first Sen- ator, and on the expiry of the term re-elected him. He resigned, however, in 1793 to accept the office of Chief Justice of Delaware. He assumed this important public office amid the confusion and perplexities which followed the Revolution, having been induced to accept it because of the general con- viction of his pre-eminent fitness to discharge its laborious and difficult duties, and to bring again into an orderly system the necessarily greatly altered as well as deranged administration of justice.
His sound legal learning and his wide experience in public affairs enabled him to fulfil this trust in the same able man- ner that had marked the whole of his long official career, and his decisions were held in high esteem by the judges and
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lawyers of his time, and would doubtless command the respect of the modern bench and bar had they been reported. But strange to say none of the decisions of the early judges have been preserved, the body of adjudicated law in Delaware beginning with the first Harrington, 1832, when the Hon. Thomas Clayton was Chief Justice.
Mr. Read's fine sense of justice is shown by his refusal to accept the position of Chief Justice in 1793, upon the re- organization of the courts, unless the former Chief Justice, William Killen, was promoted to the Chancellorship, which by the new arrangement, was the official head of the judiciary. And what further accentuates the nobleness of the act, Judge Killen was a Democrat, and several members of the dominant Federal party were anxious to receive the appointment ! Mr. Read said Judge Killen had acceptably and courageously filled the office in the perilous days of the Revolution when the failure of the American cause might have cost him his life, and that, therefore, he should not now be laid aside. That Judge Killen was made Chancellor under those circumstances proves the overwhelming influence exercised by Mr. Read.
In the many offices with which the State and nation hon- ored him, he served every interest of his State and country most loyally, and alike by reason of this faithful discharge of these public duties, and by the rectitude of his private life, he ever commanded in his lifetime a universal esteem and re- spect, even those who differed from his views on matters of public concern, giving him their fullest confidence ; all men declaring " that there was not a dishonest fiber in his heart, nor an element of meanness in his soul."
In person, he was tall and slender, with a finely moulded head and features, which while refined, were yet expressive of strength, and eyes that were brown and lustrous. In man- ners he was dignified, and though very reserved, courteous and agreeable. In dress he observed the nicest punctilio of a day nicer than our own in matters of attire.
Judge Read was one of the two statesmen who signed all
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three of the great Revolutionary State papers, viz., the first petition of the Congress of 1774 to the King ; the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States.
This noble character and patriot closed his long life of pub- lic and private usefulness September 21, 1798, after a sudden and short illness at his home in New Castle, where he was buried near the eastern wall of the Immanuel Episcopal Church in that town.
JAMES BOOTH, SR.
James Booth, Sr., the successor of Richard Bassett as Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, was born at New Castle, February 6, 1753. Though not bred to the law he showed a great aptitude for the science and helped by a strong native wit and good judgment together with the results of diligent study and a long experience in courts and public life, he discharged the duties of judge in so acceptable a manner to to both the bar and the people that he remained on the bench for the long period of thirty years.
But before being honored with the appointment of Chief Justice he had filled a number of positions of trust and re- sponsibility in private and public stations, being clerk of the Delaware constitutional conventions of 1776 and 1792; an officer of the United States navy in the year 1777; United States Marshal in 1778 ; Secretary of State from 1778 to 1797 under Governors Caesar Rodney, John Dickenson, Joshua Clayton and Gunning Bedford. In figure, stature and features he was unusually prepossessing, his dress and manners those of a gentleman of the olden time. His long and useful public career was closed by his death, at New Castle, February 3, 1828. He had been a life-long resident of New Castle.
JAMES BOOTH, JR.
James Booth, Jr., the son of James Booth, Sr., was born at New Castle, November 21, 1789. After graduating from Princeton college he studied law at Litchfield, Conn., and was
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admitted to the bar of Delaware in 1812, from which, after a long and successful practice, he was summoned to assume the responsible office of Chief Justice, made vacant by the resig- nation, March 12, 1841, of Richard H. Bayard, and admin- istered its functions with ability and integrity to the satisfac- tion of the bar and the public, and to his own lasting honor, until his death, March 23, 1855. The Chief Justice married the sister of Hon. James Rogers, Attorney-General of Delaware.
JOHN M. CLAYTON.
That inerrant judgment of history, which, after the perspec- tive of the years has furnished the true rule of measurement fixes the proper places of the principal actors in the world's great drama, has set the name of John Middleton Clayton in the highest niche of honor in Delaware's pantheon of her great. His primacy as her foremost citizen is indisputable whether we compare his achievements and fame with those of the great of old, or with those later worthies. No fuller-orbed name ap- pears in all her history. He did many things eminently well ; won the highest distinction in many diverse fields of thought and action. As an advocate he shone pre-eminently in the forum ; as a judge, in profundity of legal and other learning and in wisdom of decree, he fully sustained the best traditions of the Bench ; while as a youthful Senator at thirty-three he signalized in the United States Senate the rising of a new star of the first magnitude among that splendid galaxy of orators and statesmen who composed the senatorial zodiac of 1829. But it was as Secretary of State in President Taylor's adminis- tration in 1849 that his brilliant qualities of constructive statesmanship found for a brief period that fuller exercise for his genius which no previous field had afforded.
A sketch of his life has already been given, and it remains only to recount his career as Judge of the Supreme Court of Delaware, and briefly to notice more at length one or two of his notable acts as Senator ; and more especially to allude to the famous episode in American history with which his name
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. PROFILE SILHOUETTE OF JOHN M. CLAYTON.
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JOHN M. CLAYTON. 1796-1856.
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is linked, the Clayton and Bulwer Treaty with Great Britain. The gravest injustice has been done his memory in reference to that treaty, consequent upon the cruel calumnies which most unjustly assailed him living, and which indeed hastened his untimely death. No history of Delaware should fail to do justice herein to this illustrious son of hers, as a duty due alike to him and his State, and the cause of historic truth as well. As Chief Justice John M. Clayton added to the high fame he had already won as a lawyer, and an advocate, although the brief period, less than three years, in which he exercised his judicial functions, and the restricted arena of his own little State, together with the smallness and paucity of the issues involved, gave him but slight opportunity to make any adequate display of his extensive erudition and skill and ex- perience as a jurist.
Had it been his good fortune, like another Hardwicke or Marshall, to have urged his judicial career in some formative period of the law, and in a forum fitted to evoke his best pow- ers, he would have won a high position among the world's great creative jurists. The late Chief Justice Comegys, who, as a youth, read law in his office, and knew him well, pays him the following tribute : " As a judge he could not have had a superior in any respect. He had legal learning ; quickness and acuteness of perception ; great patience to hear ; an entire freedom from prejudice or passion, and an impartiality remark- able in one so fresh from bitter political contests. He resigned after he had held the place for nearly three years, and no writ of error was ever taken from any of the court's decisions dur- ing his time."
His longest opinion, and if not the most important one he ever wrote, certainly the one best calculated to exhibit his great and versatile erudition, was in the case of State v8. Thomas Jefferson Chandler, 2 Harrington, 553, in which the defendant was charged with having publicly spoken a vulgar blasphemy upon our Savior. As a desperate makeshift, his counsel sought, upon the sole authority of Thomas Jefferson,
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whose infidel bias is well known, to impugn the historical and legal accuracy of the maxim of English and American law, which declares Christianity to be a part of the common law, a doctrine even then long settled by the adjudication of the courts of both countries. Mr. Jefferson attempted to buttress his erroneous opinion by a display of mistaken learning, wherein he alleged a mistranslation of an early Norman-French decision by Prisot, C. J., in the Year Books, upon which he mistakenly claimed the doctrine in question was founded, and had, more- over the temerity to charge the great and good Mansfield with judicial forgery. Judge Clayton, in a learned excursus into those rarely visited regions of the ancient Year Books, and far more at home among their musty lore, legal and linguistical, than Jefferson himself, and vastly his superior as a lawyer, totally confutes these assertions, and while vindicating the memory of Mansfield, impales Mr. Jefferson upon one of the horns of the dilemma of being ignorant of the well-settled fact that this maxim was much older than the decisions of Mansfield or Hale, of wilfully perverting this historical fact to have a thrust at the Christian religion !
In Tindal vs. Hudson, 2 Harr., wherein a free negro sought to hold his own child as a slave, the Chief Justice showed his hatred of slavery as an institution by refusing to permit negroes themselves to become slaveholders. The doctrine of the law relating to cattle, " partus ventrem sequitur," was brutally applied to a slave mother and this child, till bought by its own father. The opinion not only does credit to the judge's humane sentiments, but is also worth citing as a fine bit of reasoning in a case of first instance. "Humanity for- bids a father to own his own child in slavery. The natural rights and obligations of the father are paramount to the ac- quired rights of the master ; and the moment the father pur- chased the child these obligations and rights blended in the same person, and the child is free. It is no more master and slave, but parent and child. Humanity revolts at the idea of a parent selling his own child into slavery. We think the
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petitioner is entitled to his freedom." As a specimen of log- ical reasoning at once concise and clear, this opinion shows the hands of the master. The simplicity and brevity of his style is one of the car marks of all great literary performances, whether it be the Bible or Blackstone, Bunyan or Defoe. One notes in all his opinions the absence of that involved verbosity and technical jargon which makes much of the res judicatæ difficult for the profession and impossible for the laity. Observe the above brief excerpt and see if one super- fluous word can be found in it !
Even this short sketch should mention one extraordinary service he rendered his country while a Senator from this State, a service whose perennial benefits will prove co-equal with the life of the nation itself. Like another Hercules, single-handed and alone, and despite the vicious antagonism of President Jackson, his party and his press, he turned a river of investigation through the Augean stables of the postoffice department in 1831 and cleansed it of the gross corruption that had for years accumulated there. The credit for this great reform is his alone; for nearly all his associates either stood neutral, or endeavored, at the dictation of Jackson, to hamper or defeat his plans. In the course of his exposé he showed thirty-six forgeries in a single document, and demon- strated to the Senate the amazing fact that the postoffice de- partment from its institution at the founding of the govern- ment, until that time, December, 1831, had been administered in an unconstitutional manner, wholly at variance with the plan upon which, in the Constitution, it had been originally established. That for a period of over forty years Congress, unmindful of its rights and duties under the great charter, had allowed the Postmaster-General annually to expend mil- lions of public moneys without warrant of law, and with no other check than his own pleasure or caprice ! But he not only discovered and diagnosed this serious disease in the body politic, but like a skilful physician prescribed a remedy for its permanent cure, viz., bringing the postoffice department
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under the control of Congress, and making its expenditures dependent upon annual appropriations by Congress, as the Constitution intended and provided. This total revolutioniz- ing of this department of the government was adopted by Congress, precisely as Senator Clayton proposed, and is to-day its method of administration. He disclosed in this affair those great qualities of constructive statesmanship which he afterwards so notably employed as President Taylor's Secre- tary of State. But had Senator Clayton done nothing further in his public career, this single act of wise and courageous statesmanship would entitle him to be enrolled among the few great names that have signally benefited the republic.
Yet this piece of far-reaching statecraft was but a large copy of what he had done for his own State many years before when as Auditor of Public Accounts, he brought order and system out of the chaos that had previously reigned in the conduct of that office, and established therein the orderly accurate busi- ness methods which to this day prevail. Space is wanting to tell how in 1832, Senator Clayton repeatedly warned the Senate and the Jackson administration of the deadly conse- quences which their monetary policies would entail, picturing in his earnest words on the floor of the Senate, with startling prevision the awful calamities which afterwards befell in the panic of 1837. During his entire service in the Senate, he had been honored with the first gift in the power of that body, the chairmanship of its Judiciary Committee. His valuable services in that capacity have already been recounted ; and it remains only to narrate at best an outline of the most import- ant act in President Taylor's administration, wherein as Secre- tary of State he drew up and negotiated the famous Clayton and Bulwer Treaty, one of the half-dozen great compacts rati- fied by the United States since that of John Jay, its first.
In 1786 a few English traders got from Spain, then sover- eign of nearly all of South America, permission to cut ma- hogany and logwood on the coast of Honduras, but upon the express condition that no settlements should be made, nor any
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claims of title asserted. But with characteristic British greed, and in shameful and repeated violations of her solemn treaties, England kept the foothold thus gained, and in a half-century thriftily managed to juggle this wood-chopping license, and her subsequent wanton trespass, into a right in fee, and called the region British Honduras. Again, for over fifty years before the making of the Clayton and Bulwer Treaty, this same land- grabbing England had been engaged in seeking, under the thin pretence of a "protectorate " of the " Mosquito Coast," yet further to extend these usurped possessions of hers in Central America, and more especially to get control of the then mooted Nicaragua Canal. Mosquitia, or Mosquito Coast, was a narrow strip of land along the northeast coast of Nica- ragua, and occupied by a handful of brutalized, mongrel savages of the lowest type, called Zamboes. The territory belonged rightfully to Nicaragua. The project of a canal throughout the narrow isthmus that unites North and South America, though not like that of the Suez, dating back to the Pharoahs, was as old as the time of Philip II of Spain to whom it was suggested by Galvas, a Portuguese.
California was then approaching the meridian splendor of her marvelous development ; thousands were pouring into her territory which then occupied the entire Pacific coast clean to British America, truly in size and resources a new Western empire. But her isolation was as complete as that of the Philippines to-day, aye more so, for a vast, unexplored, im- passable wilderness lay between her and the East. Railroads west of the Mississippi, there were none, and even the hardy pioneer Fremont had not yet pierced the terra incognita of the "Great West;" while the wildest enthusiast had not dreamed of a transcontinental railway. The interoceanic canal at Nicaragua was then deemed the quickest and the best means of reaching California and the whole Pacific coast, and had at that time an importance purely local to the United States that far transcends its international importance now. Instigated by England, this savage puppet "King " of Mos-
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quitia, whose " crowning " at Jamaica, West Indies, in 1815, under English auspices, was more grotesque than any opera bouffe ever was, had fraudulently stretched his "Kingdom " some hundred or more miles down the Costa-Rican coast until his usurpation included the banks of the San Juan river where the canal must pass. Next the English government benevo- lently seized the town and renamed it Greytown. These acts of open, audacious spoilation of a helpless state in our own hemisphere and a territory too, of such strategic importance, were justly deemed a menace to the United States, and a direct blow at the Monroe Doctrine ; and aroused deep resent- ment throughout the land. President Polk's administration had just closed, and the Van Hise imbroglio, adding fuel to the flames, had brought the country to the very verge of war with England. This was the situation when Secretary Clay- ton, as President Taylor's "Premier" took the portfolio of State. War was imminent, and this deep feeling of anger at the atrocious course of England was hourly augmenting and might any moment burst all bounds, and coerce a bloody arbitrament of the question.
Secretary Clayton's first act was to undo the folly of Van Hise, as promptly as Lincoln receded from the untenable position of the seizure of Mason and Slidell by Commander Wilkes. Next he invited to a conference Sir Henry Bulwer, England's most experienced and renowned diplomat, who had been sent to this country to settle, if possible, the grave ques- tions between our land and his own. But at the very moment when Secretary Clayton was honorably seeking a peaceful ad- justment of the difficulty, the English government with its customary punic faith, was engaged in making further seizures of territory adjacent to the projected water-way, viz., an island in the gulf of Fonseca dominating the Pacific entrance, and when the United States in justifiable self-defence retaliated by taking possession of Tigre island, an armed expedition, com- manded by English officers, seized the island under a pre- tended claim of debt. The situation had grown yet more crit-
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ical; the sword of war was hanging by but a single Damocles' thread, and Secretary Clayton must act quickly. He framed a short treaty of nine articles not less comprehensive than clear in its provisions, in which each nation disclaimed all rights of exclusive control of the canal and guaranteed its neutrality, etc., etc. After a careful consideration of the treaty in every particular by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, of which Senator William R. King was chairman and Webster and several other leading Senators, members; and after a full explanation in open Senate of it and every circumstance connected with its negotiation by the Secretary, it was ratified by the Senate by a vote of 42 to 12.
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