USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880, Vol. IV > Part 75
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estimate of him as a lawyer, and of the condition of practice in his day .- ED.]
1 [See Amory's Life of James Sullivan, ii. 133; Austin's Life of Gerry. - ED.]
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ridge case was the most famous which it fell to him to conduct during his long term of office; but only second to it was the still-remembered trial of Jason Fairbanks for the murder of Miss Fales. She was the village belle at Dedham, and perhaps a trifle prone to flirtation. Fairbanks was a sickly and unattractive youth, one of her admirers, to whom she seemed rather unaccountably kind. One day he met her in a meadow, and, having in vain attempted to dishonor her, he stabbed or rather hacked her to death with a knife, with circumstances of extreme barbarity. Intense excitement prevailed. The trial took place in the Dedham church, Chief-Justice Dana presiding in the pulpit, associates Paine, Strong, and Davis sitting in the desk below him, and the jury occupying the neighboring pews. John Lowell and Harrison Gray Otis appeared for Fairbanks, and surprised every one by the force and ingenuity of their defence. It is said that Lowell was then, and ever after remained, convinced of his client's inno- cence. Sullivan however, in closing, made a superb address, and won a well-merited verdict of "guilty."1 Strange to say, the wretched prisoner found sympathizers sufficiently enterprising to rescue him from his con- finement and run him off towards Canada. By good fortune, however, he was recaptured when almost upon the very border, was brought back, and -since fortunately the days of sentimentality for brutal criminals had not yet arrived - he met his just deserts upon the gallows.
In the Selfridge trial Sullivan labored under severe disadvantages. He had been hard pushed with other causes during the term; he was in ill- health, and within a few days he had lost, by sudden death in his own house, one of his sons. Gore wrote out his argument carefully for the re- port of the case ; but Sullivan trusted to the ordinary reporter's notes. Yet even under all these disadvantages the speech appears to have been a fine one, though it was not generally considered that he was at his best in it. He was always a very fluent and ready speaker, quick in expedient and never disconcerted, with a surprising ability for carrying on other business, even to the writing of his law books and political tracts during the conduct of a cause, without ever losing the thread of his opponent's case. In spite of his lameness he is said to have had an excellent personal presence.2
Sullivan was one of the few gentlemen of position and prominence in Massachusetts who belonged to the Republican party. Such, however, was the respect felt for his character that he was well liked even by Federalists. Most of his personal friends were almost inevitably, as Boston society was then constituted, of the Federal persuasion, and it is much to his and to their credit that, at a time when personal animosity was freely imported into political life, such friendships were warmly maintained. But it must be said that he was a very high-spirited and independent man in political as well as in all other matters, and more than once gave offence to his party.
1 [This address is given in part in Amory's in Amory's Life of him, and in Massachusetts Sullivan. - ED.]
2 [This is apparent from his portrait given
Historical Society Proceedings, i. The original is by Gilbert Stuart. - ED.]
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They could not, however, get along without him in Massachusetts, and for- gave perforce his occasional derelictions. He was several times their can- didate for Governor, narrowly missing success, until in 1807 he was elected, and again in 1808 was re-elected, dying in that year before his term of office had expired. Democrat though he was, he had lived handsomely, and was opposed in the gubernatorial campaign, as Gore was soon afterward, on the ground that. he was too much of an aristocrat. The personal charges brought against him in the canvass were very discreditable to his opponents, but are now in a certain sense agreeable reading, as showing that falsehood and calumny were at least as freely used in political warfare in those days as in our own. Few men, near the close of so long and active a life, could have been found so invulnerable to just reproach as was Governor Sullivan.
Theophilus Parsons was a student in the office of Judge Trowbridge. When admitted to practice at the bar he opened his office in Newburyport, and there did a thriving business for the merchants and ship-captains who then gave an air of liveliness and enterprise Theoparsons to the streets of that now tranquil and sleepy. old town. He became a master of prize and admiralty law, then a lucrative branch of practice, and divided the business in these departments with John Lowell and Governor Sullivan. Clients who are making money fast are usually welcome to the lawyer's of- fice, and such were the kind who came to Parsons. One of them, a master of a privateer, one day threw into the lap of Mrs. Parsons -as she sat, after the simple, pleasant fashion of the day, in her husband's office - a dozen heavy silver-gilt spoons, with the remark that " the squire had not charged him half enough." `Another, one day, said that in praying the Lord to make him rich he believed he must have prayed too hard, for it seemed that now the Almighty " meant to drown him out." Parsons came to Boston in 1806 with a high reputation. It was remarked that he never used a brief, trusting with perfect confidence to a memory of extraordinary tenacity. He addressed jurors and judges alike with brevity, simplicity, and force, and achieved brilliant successes. Chief-Justice Parker has left a de- scription of him in argument: . "He put one foot on his chair, and, with an elbow on his knee, leaned over and began to talk about the case as a man might talk to a neighbor at his fireside." A juror once said of him : " He is not much of a lawyer, and he don't talk or look as if he would ever be one; but he seems a real good sort of a man." He had an eccentric habit of declining ever to take a fee from a widow or a clergyman.
Parsons was appointed by Governor Strong to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Chief-Justice Dana. The promotion was made over the head, as it were, of the senior Associate Justice, Theodore Sedgwick, at the private intercession of Judges Isaac Parker and Samuel E. Sewall. The truth was, that Sedgwick was a courteous and amiable gentleman, who could not be expected to make any reform in the extreme and mischievous laxity which then disfigured the administration of justice; but Parsons was a man of VOL. IV. -- 75.
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different temper. No sooner had he taken his seat upon the bench than the whole air of the court-room seemed charged with a terrible energy. No excuse was listened to, no delay was admitted. Counsel might try in their turn, or they must submit to the inexorable non-suit or default. The drop- sical dockets rapidly shrunk when gashed by the unsparing lancet of the new Chief. The lawyers at first grumbled much; but suitors were better pleased, and the great improvement effected soon reconciled all persons to the new system. Yet it cannot be denied that Parsons often carried his autocratic spirit too far. It was not only that his manners were rough; but he was too apt to take the case into his own hands, to lead or drive the jury according to his own notions, and not unfrequently even to refuse to hear the arguments of counsel. In spite of his perfect honesty and his, shrewd intelligence, this was over-doing the judicial authority. Samuel Dexter, once smarting beneath one of these arbitrary interruptions, said with some temper, " Your honor did not argue your own cases in the way you require of us." "Certainly not," replied Parsons; "but that was the judge's fault, not mine." He had a quick and trenchant tongue, and was almost as proud of his reputation for wit as of his standing as a lawyer; so that it was dangerous for counsel to tilt with him, especially when he had the authority of office at his back. Yet sometimes he got as good as he gave. For example, once, when he was in Hampshire on circuit, Elijah H. Mills, afterward a distinguished lawyer and politician of Northampton, then very young at the bar, was compelled to take charge of the cases of an old lawyer who had been taken suddenly ill. Mills called upon the chief-justice . with a letter of introduction, stated the embarrassing position in which he found himself, and asked for advice as to whom he should employ as senior counsel in the emergency. "I think on the whole," said Parsons, " that you had better employ nobody ; you and I can do the business about as well as any one." It was hardly to be wondered at that these allies made a brilliant campaign through the session. At its close, one of the old coun- try lawyers visited the chief-justice, and, as he rose to take leave, Parsons said to him, "Well, Mr .- , I shall expect to see you at the next term." " I'm not so sure of that, judge," retorted the other ; " I think some of send- ing my office-boy with my papers; you and he together will do the busi- ness full as well as I can."
Parsons was a sound Federalist; but unlike his rivals of that political creed, he was far from being an aristocrat in manners or appearance. He was slouching in figure, and careless to the point of being actually slatternly and unclean in his dress and person. Once when he was going on circuit, his wife put six clean shirts in his valise, with strict injunctions that he should be sure to put on a fresh shirt every day. On his return at the end of the week, no shirt was to be found in his valise; he vowed solemnly that he could not account for it, that he had put on a fresh shirt every morning. It turned out that he had indeed done so; but he had never taken off a shirt during the time : he had put one on over another to the end of the supply !
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He died in 1813, at the age of sixty-three, of some trouble in the head. As his mind wandered towards the end, his last words were: " Gentlemen of the . jury, the case is closed, and in your hands; you will please retire, and agree upon your verdict." 1
In casting about to determine which law office in Boston he should enter, Daniel Webster found none so well suited to his taste as that of Governor Gore. It was with no small diffidence that the lad from the country, un- known and unfriended, ventured to approach the famous and aristocratic lawyer whose office then was in " Scollay's Building," where now stands the statue of Winthrop. But Mr. Gore received him with great kindliness, and readily gave him all the opportunities which he wished. A warm friend- ship grew up and endured between them during the remaining years of the ex-governor's life, and Webster always held his memory, both as a man and as a lawyer, in great veneration. It was while in Mr. Gore's office that Mr. Webster had the offer of the clerkship of a court of common pleas in New Hampshire, with a. salary of one thousand five hundred dollars per annum. It seems astonishing now to think that his first impulse was to ac- cept this position, and it is curious to speculate upon what would have been his career had he done so. Fortunately, however, Mr. Gore threw his influ- ence so vigorously and authoritatively into the opposite scale that Webster changed his mind, refused the office, - to the extreme disappointment of his aged father, - and was saved to his country and his profession. Soon after- ward, in 1805, in the Court of Common Pleas in Boston, Mr. Gore moved the admission of Mr. Webster to the Bar, and according to the custom of the day he made a short speech concerning his pupil. " It is a well-known tradition," says Mr. George Ticknor Curtis, "that on this occasion Mr. Gore predicted the future eminence of his young friend. What he said has not been preserved; but that he said what Mr. Webster never forgot, that it was distinctly a prediction, and that it excited in him a resolve that it should not go unfulfilled, we have upon his own authority, although he appears to have been unwilling to repeat the words of Mr. Gore's address." After this ceremony Mr. Webster returned to New Hampshire; but a principle of gravitation too strong to be resisted drew him back towards Boston, of which place he became permanently a citizen in August, 1816. There he not only found congenial friends and devoted admirers, but was often able to make more money in a single case than he had been able to gather in twelve
1 [We fortunately have a filial record of Judge Parsons's life in a Memoir of Theophilus Parsons, by his son of the same name, written over fifty years after the judge's death, and when but a small portion of his manuscripts remained in the family hands. An unfinished portrait by Stuart, painted after Judge Parsons's death, but regarded " as an admirable likeness," is prefixed to the volume. It is said in Mason's Stuart, p. 236, that the artist Alexander painted in the eyes in the unfinished picture, before it was engraved.
After coming to Boston, he lived for a year on the southerly side of Bromfield Street, but in 1801 he bought a house with a large garden on the eastern side of Pearl Street, and there died. Judge Parsons's library was for his day a very large one, - between five and six thousand vol- umes. After his death in 1813, it was sold for more than its original cost with interest. "Such a sale was then without precedent, and has not occurred since, that I know of," says his son. Memoir of Theophilus Parsons, p. 263. - ED.]
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months in New Hampshire, where his practice, we are told, had never been worth more than two thousand dollars a year, and was scarcely susceptible
ZEVEN
DANIEL WEBSTER.1
of possible increase beyond that paltry sum. Mr. Webster's fame as a states- man far overshadows his reputation as a lawyer; yet in the argument of a
1 [This cut follows an unfinished picture by it. - Works, iv. 146, 186. An excellent engraving Stuart, who only completed the head. It was of Powers's bust, which was made from life before Webster was fifty, adorns the second volume of Webster's Works as edited by Mr. Everett. A re- port of the reasons urged by Mr. George T. Cur- tis and Mr. J. T. Stevenson, against accepting the statue as an adequate representation of Mr. Webster, will be found in full in the Boston Courier, July 8, 1859. The model which was painted at the time when Webster first moved to Boston from Portsmouth. It is owned by Mr. Henry Parkman, of Boston. On the terrace in front of the State House stands a statue of him by Powers, which met with such adverse criticism that Mr. Everett, who delivered in 1859 an ora- tion at its dedication, felt called upon to defend
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constitutional question he has never had a superior. He can hardly, how- ever, be regarded as peculiarly associated with Boston in his professional career; for though he often practised in the State courts, and had many steady clients in this city, his chief business was in the Supreme Court at Washington, and it was before that tribunal that all his greatest efforts were made. Among his professional achievements, by far the most popularly known are his great speeches in the Knapp cases at Salem. It may be doubted whether a more effective harangue was ever uttered in a court-room, than that famous and familiar speech which contains the now proverbial words: " There was no escape from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession." In the earlier trial Franklin Dexter, who had the arduous task of defending the accused not only against a terrible weight of adverse testimony, but also against the superb eloquence of Webster, complained to
preferred by many was that made by Thomas Ball, upon which, with some changes, that artist moulded the statue which in 1876 was erected in Central Park, New York, when the Hon. Robert C. Winthrop and others delivered addresses. The proceedings of the occasion were issued in a sumptuous quarto, with a large engraving of the statue, and another is given in Harvey's Reminiscences of Webster.
The engraved portraits of Mr. Webster are numerous ; but the following will show the grad- ual change in his appearance, of which Mr. Ev- erett speaks in his defence of Powers's statue : a miniature, painted at twenty-two, and engraved on the title of Harvey's Reminiscences ; by Miss Goodrich, a miniature, painted in 1820, in the Private Correspondence, i .; by Healy, in 1843, in Curtis's Life of Webster, i .; by Chester Hard- ing, engraved by Schoff, in Works, i., and in the Boston Memorial; and another, in 1849, in Curtis's Life, ii., engraved by Jackman after Whipple's daguerreotype ; by J. Ames in 1852, with slouched hat and fishing costume, a full length in Harvey's Reminiscences ; and a similar head by Ames, in Private Correspondence, ii. .
Mr. Webster's fame is so closely connected with the Federalist town and the Whig city, that it may be well to indicate the chief contributions to an understanding of his character and career. The two most authentic accounts of him are the Memoir which Mr. Everett prefixed to Webster's Works, in their author's lifetime, and the ex- tended Life prepared by his executor, George Ticknor Curtis, published in 1869; many of the papers on which it was based are now in the collection of Charles P. Greenough, Esq. Mr. Curtis subsequently, in 1878, issued in expla- nation of Webster's later political views a little monograph on The Last Years of Webster. Webster's son, Fletcher, published the Private Correspondence in two volumes in 1857, with which was an autobiographical fragment ending with 1817, and some recollections of his school-
days by his mates. Charles Hale gave a paper on his literary work in college in Old and New, July, 1873. It is noteworthy that Webster's first Latin lesson at Exeter was recited to Joseph Stevens Buckminster, the subsequent Boston pulpit orator. Books dealing more or less with his personal character are Charles Lanman's Private Life of Daniel Webster, 1856, and Peter Harvey's Reminiscences and Anecdotes of Webster, 1877. March's Reminiscences of Congress deal largely with Webster up to 1835; and the lives of his political contemporaries all throw side- lights. Joel Parker delivered an address treat- ing him as a jurist. Edwin P. Whipple has measured him in his Essays, i. 172, and lately in an Essay presenting Webster as a master of English style in Webster's Great Speeches, 1879. At his death in 1852, the Eulogies in Congress were printed in a volume; George S. Hillard delivered an oration before the Government of Boston, which, with other memorials, made up a commemorative volume issued by the city. Other addresses of a like character were delivered by Mr. Everett (in his Works) ; and another, by Rufus Choate, was spoken at Dartmouth, the alma mater of both, and the manuscript of this is now in the Public Library, as well as other interesting memorials, - namely, the short-hand report made by Joseph Gales of Webster's re- ply to Hayne, Jan. 26, 1830, and the copy which the author prepared from it for the press, and the silver vase given to him in 1835 by various Boston gentlemen. It should be remembered that the city also owns Healy's large picture of Webster replying to Hayne, which hangs in Faneuil Hall. Party feeling, or that judgment which came from such as kept aloof from his admirers, sometimes took issue with the esti- mates commonly made of him; and some of these antagonistic views can be found in Theo- dore Parker's Historic Americans, James Parton's Famous Americans, and in Wendell Phillips's Speeches. - ED.}
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the panel that this gentleman had been brought into the case "to hurry the jury against the law, and beyond the evidence." In the succeeding trial opposition was made, under a statute, to Mr. Webster's taking part at all. The objection was, however, overruled; unfortunately perhaps for the pris- oner, but very fortunately for all lovers of noble specimens of professional oratory. Only less interesting was the Kenniston case. But far in advance of these Nisi Prius causes looms the great Dartmouth College case, which may perhaps be justly esteemed the most important cause ever tried in this country. Mr. Webster appeared for the college, and had the pleasure and glory of triumph. Whether his eloquence warped the court from a sound decision is a problem which the profession have not yet succeeded in solv- ing beyond dispute; and the two factions still divide the Bar of the country, remaining, like two political parties, forever incapable of agreement.
Older than Daniel Webster, but in the memory of New England lawyers inseparably associated with him, was Jeremiah Mason. He also was born in New Hampshire, but as early as 1768, so that he was fourteen years Mr. Webster's senior. He did not, however, remove to Boston until 1832,' so that when Mr. Webster came to the New Hampshire Bar, he found 'Mr. Mason reigning there almost supreme. It was not long ere the two were regarded as not unequal opponents, and were constantly pitted against each other ; but they were, and ever continued to be, the best of friends. Mr. Mason was a man of strongly marked individuality, with great independence and courage, a clear, strong, and keen mind, a trenchant wit, and a brusque, not to say a rough, manner. Long before he came to Boston he had served with distinction in the Senate of the United States from New Hampshire, and his practice had carried him not only all over New England, but often also to Washington. He was the intimate friend of Rufus King and Chris- topher Gore, and a valuable correspondence between him and them has fortunately been preserved. He shared with Mr. Webster the honor of winning the Dartmouth College case. He had some claim to be what is called a " character ; " and his shrewd, witty, often sarcastic, and sometimes rough retorts were, to judge from tradition, the frequent provocation to merriment in his lifetime. It is sad, however, to find how singularly few
1 [William Prescott had retired from the bar four years before this, when, as Mr. Webster later said, he "stood at the head of the Bar of
which is here copied (1831), he marks as a de- parture from the old ways that he had laid aside the quill, temporarily at least. An account of him will be found in the appendix to Mr. Ticknor's Life of William H. Pres- 3 wurden with an eron fen , cott, his son. A portrait of him, by Stuart, is owned by his daughter, the Im Pr Escola widow of Franklin Dexter, a son of Samuel Dexter ; and another by the estate of the late James Lawrence, who married a daughter of the historian. Judge Story, in his autobiography, pays Judge Prescott a high tribute. Life and Letters of Joseph Story, i. 97. - ED.]
Massachusetts for legal learning and attain- ments." Judge Prescott did not die till No- vember, 1843. It is significant of his linking a new era with the old that, in the autograph
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of the "good stories" to which his sharp-edged tongue gave rise have been preserved. Perhaps the best and most familiar is this : A judge be- fore whom he was conducting a case put a question to an-important wit- ness. In an instant Mr. Mason was on his feet, and checked the witness's reply. "May it please your Honor," he said, " I should like to inquire on whose side you asked that question? If it is on our side, we do not want it put; and if it is on the other side, the answer would not be legal evidence." As may be supposed, his forte lay in cross-examination, which, as he man- aged it, was a species of vivisection beneath which many a dishonest wit- ness, and perchance occasionally also an honest one, writhed in pitiable suffering. One of his clients one day said to him, just before going in to trial, "We shall win the case; I am sure of it, for in a dream last night I had information from the Angel Gabriel." "Aha !" cried Mr. Mason, " we must subpoena him at once." Mr. Webster says that when he came to the Bar he observed that Mr. Mason was a "cause-getting" man. "He had a habit of standing quite near to the jury, so that he might have laid his finger on the foreman's nose; and then he talked to them in a plain con- versational way, in short sentences, and using no word that was not level to the comprehension of the least educated man on the panel. This led me to examine my own style; and I set about reforming it altogether." There certainly was not much artificiality or polish about Mr. Mason's rhetoric; but it was full of a rugged vigor, which prevailed mightily with a jury, and of a logical clearness not less formidable before the judges in banc.1
An intimate friend of Mr. Mason was Mr. Justice Story, of the Supreme Court of the United States. This gentleman was born at Marblehead, Sept. 18, 1779. He became one of the greatest jurists whom this country has ever produced. Appointed to the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States by Mr. Madison, in 1810, he imbibed the spirit of Chief- Justice Marshall, for whom he had a warm affection, as well as a high esteem. His long services and eminent ability pointed him out as the natural successor to the distinguished position which Marshall left vacant in 1835; and he would undoubtedly have enjoyed the well-merited honor had it not been for the narrow prejudices and rancorous hostility of Presi- dent Jackson, who openly avowed his antipathy to the "school of Kent and Story," and passed by this latter gentleman to appoint Roger B. Taney, -a sufficiently good lawyer, but who really owed his office to an act of political servility. This unjust treatment, however, cannot dim the lustre of Story's fame. He played a great part in framing both the constitutional and the commercial law of this country, at a period when both these depart-
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