USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester county; a narrative history, Volume II > Part 19
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Abel Willard, of Lancaster, admitted to the Worcester bar, in 1755, was a member of the first law partnership in the county, Willard and Sprague. John Sprague of Lancaster, the other partner was the first attorney to be appointed a judge of the Court of Common Pleas, after the Revolution. Other justices had been so elevated, but it was then still exceptional for a lawyer to be elevated to the bench. "During the forty years of Colonial court history, only three lawyers were appointed to the judiciary of Worces- ter County." Of the partners, Willard remained loyal to his oath to the Crown, while Sprague cast his lot with the revolutionists. Ezra Taylor practiced law in Southborough from 1751 to 1774, but later went to Maine. Joshua Atherton learned his law from James Putnam, and practiced for a short time in Petersham. He became the Attorney-General of Massachu- setts in later years. Daniel Bliss was a lawyer of Rutland until he fled the Colonies at the outbreak of the Revolution. Joshua Upham, of Brookfield, another Loyalist, practiced in Brookfield. Rufus and Nathaniel Chandler, of the anti-Revolutionary legal practitioners in Worcester County, were the sons of John Chandler, Jr., and the grandsons of John Chandler, of Woodstock, Chief Justice of the first courts in Worcester. John Chandler also was elevated to the bench, but only Rufus and Nathaniel were lawyers. Nathaniel was an exile of the Revolution who never returned, but Rufus, after service with the British, in 1784 came back to Petersham.
Judge Joseph Wilder, of Lancaster, who was one of the four Common Pleas justices at the first Worcester County court session in 1731, succeeded Judge Chandler as Chief Justice in 1740. William Ward, of Southborough, was Common Pleas Justice from 1731 until 1745, and the other original justice, William Jennison, of Worcester, served until his death in 1741. Samuel Willard, grandson of the famous Major Simon Willard, took his place. Judge Willard also gained distinguished military record; he died in 1752, and Major Jonas Rice, who in 1714 was the sole inhabitant of Worces- ter, took his seat as Justice of Common Pleas, dying three years later. Cap- tain Edward Hartwell, a brave and capable military officer, of Lancaster and Lunenburg, succeeded Judge Dwight in 1750, and Thomas Steele, of Leicester,
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was appointed in 1755 to the place of Judge Rice. John Chandler, Jr., was Chief Justice in 1757, when Esquire Ruggles was the junior member of the court ; five years later, Judge Ruggles became Chief Justice, Thomas Steele of Leicester, Joseph Wilder, Jr., of Lancaster, and Artemas Ward of Shrews- bury, being his associate justices. Judge Wilder died in 1773, but there was no other change in the Bench until 1774, when all the courts were closed, most of the judiciary going into exile. No doubt the courts leaned upon the opinions of the only two Worcester County lawyers available in 1775, Joshua Upham of Brookfield, and John Sprague of Lancaster. Still, the court was able and discerning ; Judge Foster manifested fine judgment, and soon gained an estimable reputation for probity, wisdom, and impartiality. He was advanced to the Superior Court of Judicature in 1776, being in fact the first Worcester County man to reach that high dignity in the judiciary. Judge Gill eventually became Lieutenant-Governor. Joseph Dorr of Mendon, who succeeded Judge Foster on the Common Pleas bench, was a man of pains- taking thoroughness, loyal, conscientious and self-sacrificing in his public service ; he continued as justice for twenty-five years. Eventually, he lived, at Brookfield, where he died in 1808.
Attorney Dwight Foster, son of Judge Foster, was offered the vacant seat on the Common Pleas bench when Judge Gill became Lieutenant-Governor, but he declined the honor, and Michael Gill, nephew of Moses, was appointed. Judge Baker served for twenty years, Elijah Brigham of Westborough being appointed after the death of the former in 1795. Judge Brigham had had a notable career, but was not a lawyer; he had studied divinity, had been a merchant, and in public service had successfully and successively been Sena- tor, Councillor, and Member of Congress. He showed good qualities as a jurist, going out of office in 1811. Dwight Foster was the second lawyer appointed to the Common Pleas Bench after the Revolution ; he was appointed in 1801, a year after John Sprague, the only other lawyer on the bench, had taken his seat. He succeeded Sprague as Chief Justice in 1813, and presided over that court until his death, ten years later. Judge Foster's public record is one term as High Sheriff, three terms as Congressman, and a term as United States Senator. Judge Benjamin Heywood, who ably served as a Common Pleas Justice from 1891 until the court was abolished in 1811, was "the last judge of any of the higher courts of this county who was not educated for the legal profession." Heywood was a carpenter by trade, though he might have become a lawyer, had not the Harvard court he had begun been interrupted by the outbreaking of war. For some years he was town treasurer of Worcester.
Of the nine new attorneys of the Revolution, as named by Benjamin Thomas Hill, among leaders in later years was Levi Lincoln, of whom Judge
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Willard wrote: "He was without question at the head of the bar from the close of the Revolution until he left our courts at the commencement of the present century." Lincoln was variously clerk of the courts, Judge of Pro- bate, Attorney-General of the United States under Jefferson. Other nota- bles of the last quarter of the eighteenth century were: Judge of Probate, Nathaniel Paine, who once had more professional business than any other member of the bar ; Chief Justice of the Court of Sessions, Seth Hastings of Mendon; William Stedman of Lancaster, United States Senator ; Pliny Mer- rick of Brookfield, and his son, Judge Pliny Merrick, Justices of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts; Benjamin Adams of Mendon, Congressman ; Fran- cis Blake, born in Rutland; Solomon Strong, who succeeded Judge Edward Bangs as Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, and practiced law in four Worcester County towns. Levi Lincoln, son of the Lincoln whose name heads this paragraph, was a worthy scion of a great family. "He had acquired a position at the bar second to none in the Commonwealth," prior to his elevation to the bench of the Supreme Court. He was Governor of the State for nine years, declining reëlection to enter Congress. Much could be written of this remarkable native of Worcester. John Davis of North- borough and Worcester was a contemporary of the second Levi Lincoln, and according to Judge Paine "he had more common sense than any three lawyers of his acquaintance." He was also Governor of Massachusetts, and United States Senator.
This roster has carried us well on into the early quarter of 1800, and names become more numerous. Nutt reviews the lives of Joseph Thayer, prominent in all phases of Uxbridge and Worcester life for a half-century ; Judge Ira M. Barton of Oxford, Isaac Davis, politically prominent, and Mayor of Worcester; Judge Willard of Lancaster, one of the best of the older historians of the bench and bar of Worcester County ; the much quoted Judge Emory Washburn of Leicester carried on this work ably, and was once Governor of the Commonwealth and won fame as Bussey professor of law in Cambridge. The writer of the chapter on courts and history in Crane's History of Worcester (1924) selects for special mention from among the lawyers of the last century : Benjamin Franklin Thomas of Worcester, Judge of Probate, Congressman and a Justice of the Supreme Court at the age of forty ; Edward Mellen, Judge and Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas ; Attorney William Nelson Green, judge of the Worcester Police Court for the twenty years it existed ; Peter Child Bacon of Dudley, a prominent figure in the courts for half a century ; Judge of Probate, Henry Chapin, native of Upton, and later mayor of Worcester ; Alexander Hamilton Bullock of Roy- alston, thrice Governor ; Francis H. Dewey was third of his name to hold a judgeship, both his father and grandfather being justices of the Supreme
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Judicial Court ; Hartley Williams, judge of the Worcester Municipal Court and its successor; Dwight Foster of Worcester, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and Attorney-General of the State; George F. Verry, mayor of Worcester and able criminal lawyer; Judge of Probate, Adin Thayer of Mendon.
No adequate recognition has yet been given to such men as General Charles Devens, notable in the Civil War, a justice of the Superior Court, Supreme Court, and United States Attorney-General to President Hayes; Judge P. Emory Aldrich, lawyer, educator, editor, and his son, Charles Fran- cis Aldrich, both of Worcester-to the latter, the present and all interested in the history of the judiciary and bar are indebted for his splendid chapter in Hurd's history of 1889. Then there is John D. Washburn, relative of Gov- ernor Emory Washburn, already mentioned; Justice of the Superior Court, Francis Almon Gaskill, native of Blackstone; Harry Cowdray Hartwell, of Fitchburg; William S. B. Hopkins, and his partners, Peter C., and Henry Bacon, and Frank B. Smith; Edward Conant of Worcester, Henry Langdon, another outstanding Worcester lawyer ; United States Judge Thomas Nelson, Judge W. R. R. Rice, and Senator Hoar, were sometime associates-Judge Nelson is responsible for the splendid Worcester County Law Library. George Frisbie Hoar began his law career in Worcester in 1849, but became a national figure during his thirty-five years in Washington, twenty-seven of which he was a leader in the United States Senate. Of the present century are: Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth, Arthur Prentice Rugg, so elevated in 1911; former mayor of Worcester, Philip J. O'Connell; Webster Thayer, native of Blackstone; Winfred Holt Whiting, born in West Boylston, all on the bench of the Superior Court; Judge Samuel Utley, Judge William T. Forbes, Judge Frederick H. Cham- berlain, Colonel Theodore Johnson, from 1871 to 1922, clerk of the courts of Worcester County ; Chief Justice of the Superior Court, Walter Perley Hall, of Fitchburg; District Attorney Emerson W. Baker ; and literally hundreds of others who have contributed importantly to the bench and bar of their generation. No roster can do justice to the personnel of our courts, upon the bench or appearing before it. Fortunately, in the biographical volumes of this work there are ample authentic reviews of the lives of a great number of the living members of the legal profession, and to a great extent of the outstanding personages of former generations.
Much history on which there is no new angle of view has been omitted from this chapter because of its narrative purpose-courthouses and jails, bar associations and fraternal relations, race elements in the bar and standards of admission to the bar, trends towards the organization of large firms, the evolution of methods of practice, changing tendencies in litigation and the
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prosecution of criminals. We use the ending of Frank W. Grinnell, who, in Hart's Commonwealth History of Massachusetts relates a story which, summarized, is that Charles Allen of Worcester, first Chief Justice of the Superior Court (1859-67) was noted for an impartiality equal to that of Lord Lyndhurst, famous English justice. Upon an occasion Lord Lynd- hurst started muttering to himself as a counsel began his argument before him, "What a fool the man is." As the argument proceeded further, he grumbled, "Not such a fool as I thought." When the argument was closed, he exclaimed, "Egad, I was the fool myself." As the story goes, William Crapo, as a young man, was trying a case before Chief Justice Allen and a jury, and the verdict was against him. Mr. Crapo moved for a new trial on the ground "that the presiding judge was physically and mentally incompetent to hear the case at the time of the trial." In the words of Grinnell : "Chief Justice Allen listened attentively to the argument for a new trial and, after considering the matter for a few days, granted the motion on the grounds stated! Shortly after he resigned from the bench. The explanation of the story is that he was not well; and he knew it and was fair enough to admit it." This is an account of a standard of judicial impartiality of which Massa- chusetts and Worcester County may be justly proud.
Wor .- 37
CHAPTER XLIII.
Newspapers
The annals of the secular press in Worcester cover a period of one hun- dred and fifty-nine years. They record such interesting facts as the first printing done in an inland town of Massachusetts, the survival of the city's first newspaper from 1775 to 1904, the rise of the present leading journal of Worcester whose ancestors can be traced back to the first year of the nine- teenth century, and incidents in the lives of a notable line of proprietors, pub- lishers and editors, not the least among whom was the earliest and versatile Isaiah Thomas. In general, however, the history of the press during the first century and more, is more or less a story of the coming and going of a wide number and variety of newspapers, editors and publishers. Papers were born and interred, often before they had an opportunity to play much of a part in public affairs. An enterprising editor or printer attracted to this thriving section of the State, set up his printing press, or took over the burdens another had laid down, and struggling against increasing odds would finally succumb to financial embarrassment. Journalism was a speculation dependent for success upon public support. The circulation of a paper was mainly local as was also its minute quantity of news; the readers were few and usually more interested in their own picturesque verbal gossip than in the material ladled out in print. Worcester was a graveyard of newspapers.
It is well to remember that the making of newspapers has advanced fully as greatly as any other industry. Whereas the present city daily is a huge department store of news and other features, supplied by men from all over the world through a network of telegraph and telephone wires, not to men- tion cable and radio facilities, the early Worcester sheets were usually four- page quartos, sometimes enlarged to four-page folios, containing a few belated news items, brief local personals and some labored editorials, "poems," and literary effusions. The old-time newspaper had no illustrations, now so prominently featured ; there were no news services or syndicates, general
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news being taken from coastal journals whose receipt was often long delayed. Our early newspapers were principally exponents of the personal brand of journalism, and politics was the main subject of editorial treatment. No apologies need be made for the "Fourth Estate" of any period. The activi- ties of the press went hand in hand with the development which it chronicled. The efforts of earnest patriotic journalists have done a great deal to advance the interests of the city and county. The story of the press furnishes another proof that it, alongside the pulpit and the schoolroom, has battled for free- dom and right, furnishing increasing intelligence to the masses and thus marking the constant and continuous growth in ideals and principles, without which no community could survive. Further, because the press chronicles contemporary history, current information, local comment and opinions, it is one of the most interesting and important sources of history. The past tense has been used deliberately in these introductory paragraphs, because what follows deals chiefly with the past, with the foundations upon which the highly specialized press of the present century has been builded. The veteran editor of the Worcester Telegram and The Evening Gazette, George F. Booth, a dozen years ago remarked :
"Times have changed now with the starting and publishing of news- papers. It is not today a matter of ardent spirit and small capital carrying the torch of journalistic light ; but of a large financial resource. The capital employed in a successful newspaper in a city like Worcester today runs into hundreds of thousands and beyond. A successful newspaper in a city of 200,000 is now a million-dollar, and better, enterprise."
The American Antiquarian Society over a period of a century and more has accumulated one of the complete collections of files of early American newspapers in the United States. The society, although national in scope and membership, is peculiarly a Worcester organization, founded and endowed there, and the city remains its true home and physical headquarters. The man who suggested the formation of this society, and the first to give it practical entity, was one Isaiah Thomas, the founder of the city's first news- paper, The Spy. Thomas was of Boston birth, who was apprenticed to a printer at the age of six, and was a journeyman printer from Halifax. Canada, to Charleston, South Carolina. He returned to his native town. where on July 17, 1770, he printed the first copy of The Massachusetts Spy. The policy of the paper was neutrality, as regards the Royalists and Whigs. the conflicting interests of the Colonies and England. Within a year he had fallen from his lofty perch, and the Royalists were calling his printing office a "sedition foundry." Three years before the Revolution he ended an article with the words :
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"Should the liberty of the press be once destroyed, farewell the remainder of our invaluable rights and privileges! We may next expect padlocks on our lips, fetters on our legs, and only our hands left at liberty to slave for our worse than Egyptian taskmasters, or-or-FIGHT OUR WAY TO CON- STITUTIONAL FREEDOM !"
Isaiah Thomas and The Spy became increasingly unpopular with the Royalists, then in the majority in Boston. This condition was not eased when in 1774 he changed the title of his paper to The Massachusetts Spy and Oracle of American Liberty, and used as the caption of his sheet, the snake and dragon device, taken from what probably was the first American cartoon, that published by Benjamin Franklin in The Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754. The snake was divided into ten parts above which were the words, "Join or Die," while the dragon stood by ready to attack. The snake stood for the Colonies, of course, and the dragon for England.
In 1774 Isaiah Thomas had been urged by Worcester Whigs to start a newspaper in their town, and had consented to do so a year later. He was delayed in keeping this promise by his endeavors to keep one step ahead of his numerous enemies and his underground activities in the cause of revolution. Thomas Hancock addressed him: "Isaiah Thomas, Supporter of the Rights and Liberties of Mankind," but a British regiment paraded before the print- ing plant, and Loyalists in the South burned his paper and his effigy. It was on the advice of Hancock that he finally decided that it was wise to move his press and his crusade to Worcester. On April 16, 1775, Thomas packed his printing press and equipment, assisted by General Joseph Warren and Colonel Timothy Bigelow, and "stole them out of town in the dead of night." He remained behind in Boston, where he was active in sending out news of the intended march of the British, and took part in the fighting that caused the retreat from Concord.
On April 20 Isaiah Thomas arrived in Worcester, and set up his press in the cellar of Colonel Bigelow's house. Here he did the first printing done in any inland town in New England. The first Worcester issue of the Spy, bears the date May 3, 1775. Its title was The Massachusetts Spy, American Oracle of Liberty. Had the British delayed their offensive on Lexington a few weeks and the Spy had printed its "scoop" in modern style, what head- lines might have ornamented its front page! Imagine the sales appeal of newsboys crying: "All about the great victory! British in full retreat ! Worcester Minutemen leave for the front!" The Spy would have been made with its initial copy. The name of Worcester's first paper was changed to Thomas's Massachusetts Spy and American Oracle of Liberty, with the issue of August 16, 1775. Thomas stopped publishing his sheet with the
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May 3, 1776, number, but after an interval of two weeks it was continued by William Stearns and Daniel Bigelow under the title The Massachusetts Spy and American Oracle of Liberty. From August 14, 1777, it was printed by Anthony Haswell, as Haswell's Massachusetts Spy and American Oracle of Freedom. No publisher believed in anonymity. Thomas again took over the newspaper with the copy of May 24, 1781, and changed its name to Thomas' Massachusetts Spy, or The Worcester Gazette. With the issue of March 30, 1786, Isaiah Thomas discontinued printing his paper because the State had imposed a tax on advertising. Such a tax was a strange way in which to raise governmental expenses, and one thoroughly displeasing to the newspaper fraternity, who already knew that the profit, if any, in the game was that derived from advertisements. The proprietor of the Spy-Gazette, in April, 1786, started what he called the Worcester Magazine but when the tax mentioned was removed in March, 1788, he brought out promptly the Massachusetts Spy and Worcester Gazette, and so continued until 1820. For fifty years the prolific and versatile Isaiah Thomas had a finger in every local pie, and also found the time to compile and publish his celebrated work on the History of Printing in America. This was printed in 1810; its author died in Worcester in 1831, at the age of eighty-two years.
This chronological account of the early history of the Spy, and the rôle played by Isaiah Thomas has been given because of its priority in Worcester and for the reason that when it suspended publication, on May 31, 1904, it ranked among the three or four oldest newspapers in the United States. If any publication died of the infirmities of old age, the Spy was it, for "It lived too much in the past, never quite forgetting its ancestry. It had a dis- tinguished list of editors, but it did not recognize changing conditions of business, changing conditions of publishing newspapers, changes which were going on in the retail establishments, nor the quickening of trade, nor the changing populations of American cities, of which Worcester was no excep- tion." This indictment might be amplified by pointing out that the immediate cause of its decease was its inability to retain its place as a morning news- paper in a city which in the late 1880's was not inclined to support two dailies. In the battle waged for supremacy between the Spy and the Telegram, the less fitted for up-to-date conditions failed to survive. The Spy was by a month, the second daily in Worcester, the Daily Transcript (first of the name) getting out its first issue on June 23, 1845. A few years later the Daily Transcript was taken over by the Spy, leaving the latter named the oldest, and only, daily in the city. It soon had competition, however, for the decade 1845-55 was one in which daily newspapers sprang up in all the larger cities of the East.
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The Spy weathered a long series of vicissitudes, despite substantial owners and a line of brilliant editors. The Baldwin family, John D. Baldwin, nation- ally known political power, and his sons, John S., and Charles C. Baldwin, owned the journal from 1859 to 1898. Among its editors were John Davis, John Milton Earl, Anthony Chase, Delano Goddard, J. Evarts Greene, John Perley Monroe, and Charles Nutt. The Spy was sold by the Baldwins in 1898 to William S. Walker, who shortly later resold it to Mr. Nutt. Charles Nutt was a Harvard graduate, a classmate of Robert Lincoln O'Brien, note- worthy as editor of the Boston Herald, and was intellectually capable of carrying on the traditions of the ancient Worcester newspaper. It may be that he paid too much attention to traditions and less to the business of journalism. At any rate, the truly remarkable career of Worcester's first newspaper came to an end on May 31, 1904, at the ripe old age of one hun- dred and twenty-nine years.
The Worcester newspaper with the longest history is the present leading journal of the city, the Gazette, which was, as such things are considered, founded in 1801. Accuracy requires the statement that the Gazette is a descendant of a weekly, known as the National Aegis, founded on December 2, 1801, to support Jefferson as President. In passing it should be noted that there were two newspapers, each of which lasted for more than a year, started between the founding of the Massachusetts Spy, of Thomas, and the National Aegis. One of these, the American Herald and Worcester Recorder was a migrant from Boston in 1788, and was published in its new home for two years and two months. The other was the Independent Gazeteer, founded on January 7, 1800, but which gave up the ghost in December, 1801. Whether there was any connection with the demise of this journal and the birth of the National Aegis in the same month and year, the writer does not know.
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