History of Oneida County, New York : with illustrations and biographical sketches of some of its prominent men and pioneers, Part 56

Author: Durant, Samuel W
Publication date: 1878
Publisher: Philadelphia : Everts & Fariss
Number of Pages: 920

USA > New York > Oneida County > History of Oneida County, New York : with illustrations and biographical sketches of some of its prominent men and pioneers > Part 56

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But, as a lawyer, Mr. Storrs had transcendent merits. He was largely gifted with many of the choicest elements that enter into the composition of the accomplished lawyer. In person he was large, and perhaps a little unwieldy, but his presence nevertheless was commanding. His voice pos- sessed wonderful power not only, but unusual sweetness. It was literally like listening to a strain of noble and subduing

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melody. as lie poured forth from the resources of a full mind, a retentive memory, and a faultless diction a stream of eloquence that captivated the fancy, while it swayed the intellect and convinced the judgment. He was skillful in the examination of witnesses, and in bringing out the strong points of a case and leaving them to make their own im- pression, instead of, like many keen but over-zealous law- yers whom I have known, in their extreme anxiety and nervousness, to overdo and attenuate a cause, until by tedi- ous and tiresome manipulation they have disgusted the jury and weakened and lost many a case, which but for their injudicious nursing would have succeeded by its own intrin- sic strength.

Mr. Storrs presided in the old court of Common Pleas as chief judge with distinguished ability for one year (1825), and after leaving the bench returned for a short time to the practice of his profession in this county, and then re- moved to the city of New York, where he was just enter- ing upon a wide field of practice in all the courts of the city and the State, when he suddenly closed his career in the very meridian of his days, in the fullness of all his power, and with the capacity to have achieved greater suc- cess and far higher renown than ever he attained. The public life of Henry R. Storrs affords a striking illustration of the truth that the loftiest intellect and the broadest cul- ture are often powerless to produce those great results which are frequently achieved by men of far meaner gifts and lower acquisitions, who are nevertheless inspired by intense earnestness, strong principle, and steady purpose. Upon his monument might fitly be engraved the words in which the historian Tacitus characterized the career of a Roman Emperor: "Consensu omnium, capax imperii nisi imperas- set."

Somewhere between the years 1810 and 1812, two other men came into the county of Oneida, who acquired high reputation at the bar, and have left their impress not only on its jurisprudence, but upon its history. They were William H. Maynard and Samuel Beardsley. They were rivals at the bar, and rivals to some extent in the political arena, and both in their several spheres were highly influ- ential and successful men.

William H. Maynard was born in Massachusetts, of humble but very respectable parentage, and at an early day poverty had apparently placed across his pathway her " un- conquerable bar." But he felt, like Sheridan, that there was something in him, which by the help of Providence and his own strong will and brave heart should come out of him. He began his career by teaching a country school, and in the intervals of imparting to his scholars what he had mastered, he diligently stored his own mind with all the knowledge and information he could derive from the books he was able to borrow, and the men with whom he came in contact. Among his early pupils was the cele- brated Dr. Jonas King, the American missionary to Greece, a very remarkable man with a remarkable history, who passed through some trying exigencies with high courage and singular fortitude, a part of the credit of which may fairly be reflected back upon his first instructor. He con- tinued this employment of teaching, to some extent, after he came to the county of Oneida, and laboriously and dili-

gently studied his profession, upon the practice of which he entered comparatively late in life. But he rose rapidly after he had made his first mark, and was soon employed, on one side or the other, in most of the heavy litigations that engaged the attention of the courts of the county. He was not graceful in manner nor eloquent in utterance, but he strongly grasped a case, and had a large fund of general knowledge, and one gift of incalculable value to him,-a memory more retentive, and with its stores at more ready command, thao any man I ever knew. He seemed never to have forgotten what he once had laid away in his mind: It was not the torture of memory under which poor Eugene Aram cried out in agony, --

"Oh God, could I so close my mind, And clasp it with a clasp!"

Maynard could close his mind upon any subject which he desired to hold, and shut it in with the clasp of a most tenacious memory, ready to yield all its treasures at the very moment they were needed. Many striking examples of his wonderful power of memory will be readily recalled by the elder members of our profession, and need not be re- hearsed.

Later in life he entered the political field, and was elected to the State Senate, where he took high rank both as a de- bater and a legislator, and was especially distinguished as a member of the court for the correction of errors, then the highest court of judicature in the State. While a member of the Senate, and during a session of the court in the city of New York, in 1832, he was attacked with the cholera, and died in that city after a few days' illness. By indus- try and economy he had accumulated what in that day was decmed quite a fortune for a professional man, the bulk of which, some $20,000 as he estimated it, he bequeathed to Hamilton College to found the professorship of law, civil polity, and political ceonomy which now bears his name, and will perpetuate it as that of a wise, thoughtful, and pa- triotic man as long as that institution shall endure.

Of the early history of Samuel Beardsley I know but little. I know this, however, that he was, from the very beginning, a most indefatigable student, and his early habits of study he continued throughout his life most diligently and conscientiously ; so that I think it could be safely said there was not at the close of his life in this State a more thoroughly well-read and firmly-grounded lawyer, nor one whose opinions carried greater weight with the courts, or received higher consideration. He was deficient, indeed, in many of the qualities which conduce to great success as an advocate. His manner was a little constrained, his form unbending, his voice unmusical, and his diction, although always clear and forcible, was not flowing or graceful. In all these respects he was outshone by his great and frequent antagonist, Spencer. But when he came to deal with the weightier matters of the law-to defend a principle or to discuss a question as to the admissibility of evidence, or the pertinency and bearing of a particular line of testimony- his vast superiority came out conspicuously, for he was far the better lawyer, as Spencer was far the most successful advocate. It was the favorite role of Spencer to take what he was accustomed to call "the town-mecting view of the

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case,"-u position which the keen logic, the clear percep- tion, and the stern loyalty to the law which Beardsley never would compromise would not permit him to occupy. He was a man of marked individuality and independence of character, and his opinions on all subjects, political, social, moral, and religious, were clear and decided, and when once formed and expressed, the everlasting hills stand not more firmly upon their base than he upon the conclusion he had reached and the faith he had adopted: He was a lawyer somewhat after the old school, and inclined to be conserva- tive of established landmarks, and I doubt not he shared keenly the feeling of Chancellor Kent when contemplating the piles of learning swept away by the revised statutes, and when, like him, he saw them " devoted to destruction by an edict as sweeping and unrelenting as the torch of Omar." Mr. Beardsley was for many years a judge of the Supreme Court, and rendered some of the most learned and able judgments that are to be found in our books. As a politician he was both influential and successful. He rep- resented the county of Oneida with great ability in the Congress of the United States, and, although he passed through some stormy scenes, was engaged in some contro- versies that provoked sharp criticism and called out at times excited if not angry feelings, no man ever doubted the absolute sincerity of his convictions and the thorough and uncompromising integrity of both his public and his private life.

Contemporaneons with both these men, often associated with and often opposed to them in the struggles of the bar, was Greene C. Bronson, nearly if not quite their equal in learning, and more effective in the presentation of a case to a jury. He began his professional life, I think, in Ver- non, but subsequently removed to Utica, and was associated in business with Judge Beardsley. Like him, he rose to the position of attorney-general of the State, and subse- quently to the bench of the Supreme Court, in which court and the Court of Appeals he served continuously for filtcen years. He won in these tribunals his greatest fame, and voluntarily retired from the bench with the established and conceded reputation of a learned, independent, and incor- ruptible judge, than which no eulogy can well be higher. He did not subscquently return to the county of Oneida, but took up his residence in the city of New York, where he well maintained the reputation he had established, and reflected back upon his native county the lustre of a char- acter and the purity of a name she contributed to form, and will be proud to perpetuate.

There are many other names belonging to the early bar of Oneida that often occur in connection with these I have selected for special commemoration, and of whom honorable mention might be made did the time I have had at my command and your patience permit. I should like to speak of John H. Lothrop, who too early withdrew himself from the practice of the profession to leave the mark which, had he remained in it, I am persuaded he would have made. He was one of the most delightful companions that ever moved in any society, of high culture, of keen and polished wit, and of a most magnetic humor, that at any time would have set not the table only, but the largest masses, in a roar of uncontrollable merriment. These fine powers and

capacities, it has always seemed to me, would have given him high reputation as a jury lawyer. But he was early diverted to other pursuits, which afterwards became a necessity, and in the monotonous toil of a banker's life passed his days, little appreciated except by that inner circle of which he was the central figure, and constituted its life and its charm. When Lord Mansfield turned away from his early dalliance with the muses, to tread the toilsome pathway that ulti- mately led him to high renown, Pope exclaimed,-

" How sweet an Ovid was in Murray lost,"

and I have never been able to think of the changed career of Lothrop without fancying how great a lawyer and how distinguished an advocate was lost to the world when he left the temple of justice to serve in the temple of mammon. " Tread lightly on his grave, ye men of genius, for he was your kinsman ; weed clean his grave, ye men of goodness, for he was your brother."

I would like to utter the pleasant thoughts that rise to my memory as I recall the name of Morris S. Miller, that most finished and accomplished gentleman, the life of every social circle that he entered, and the dispenser of a graceful and bountiful hospitality at his residence on Main street, in what was then the court end of the town, a place of which I have a most distinct and vivid recollection, and where, although then quite a youth comparatively, I was not an unfrequent visitor. He represented the county of Oneida in the Congress of 1812, and attracted considerable notice, as well as gained some reputation, by several speeches he made against certain war measures of the administration, to which he was strongly, and, without doubt, conscientiously opposed ; and he presided over the Common Pleas of Oneida for thirteen years, in those palmy days when it was fre- quented by our best lawyers, and when its jurisdiction was much larger than it has been since the constitution of 1846, and in that position he earned the reputation of a just, discriminating, and impartial judge. He fell a victim, at the early age of forty-four, to a painful disease, which he bore with wonderful patience and Christian fortitude, sus- tained by that faith which he had for many years professed, and in which he was a devout believer.

But I must pass by these and many more honorable and worthy names, to give a closing and hurried sketch of one for whom, when living, I entertained a strong personal attachment, and whose memory I shall never cease to cherish. I need hardly say that I allude to Joshua A. Spencer. He originated in Berkshire County, Mass., the home in the past of many an honored name; and certainly an excellent place to originate from. He, too, had his early struggles with narrow means and a very limited educa- tion, as compared with many of his compeers and rivals, who had all the advantages that the best scholastic and col- legiate instruction of the day could impart. But nature had gifted him with a clear intellect, with indomitable courage, and with the industry to acquire and the ambition to use to the best advantage everything that he could master; and well did he improve all his opportunities, and manfully struggle with and overcome every obstacle in the way of his professional advancement. He had obtained some reputa- tion io the trial of causes in the neighboring county of

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Madison before he came to Oncida, but all his great fame was achieved, and his largest successes were gained, after he became a resident of the city of Utica.

He was not, as I have already intimated, a deeply-read lawyer, for his acquaintance with books of any kind was limited ; but he knew ruen, and he had a large acquaintance with all the common avocations and employments of life. He did not often attempt to enlighten eourts in those more recondite and abstruse principles which nothing but elose and diligent study ever enables any man to master; but give him a case, I eare not how ingeniously complicated by cunning or by fraud, where facts were to be sifted and testi- mony weighed before a jury, and he had few peers .. He had a special gift as the cross-examiner of an equivocating, a cunning, or a corrupt witness, and he would follow such a man with a step steady as time and a tenacity as inexorable as death, until he stood exposed in all his deformity. And when he arose to address the jury, like Rob Roy's feet, his were on his native heather, and he would go crashing through an adversary's case with a tread like that of an elephant tramping and tearing through an Indian jungle. It did not require a cause of the greatest magnitude, either in the pecuniary or personal interests at stake, to call forth his highest powers. Nay, in some of this character he not unfrequently failed, as was notably the case in a trial which excited great interest at the time, and was supposed to in- volve some very momentous public issues. I allude to the case of Alexander McLeod. The truth was that the case was too plain and the proof on the part of the defense too overwhelming to require the outlay of any great ingenuity in the examination of the witnesses, or in the summing up to the jury, and while Spencer felt this, he was oppressed with the idea that some great effort of eloquence was ex- peeted from him; and the consequence was, that instead of being impressive, he was, what was very unusual with him, only tumid and verbose. The only remarkable thing about the trial was the great ability with which Judge Gridley presided, and rehuked the supposed impertinence of one of the counsel as only he could, and gave such a charge as few judges in any land could have equaled, and none sur- passed. I have seen and heard Spencer, however, in cases where no vast interests were at stake, but where perchance some poor and honest man was sought to be victimized by an artful scoundrel, or an ingenious net-work of fraud had been woven, and which had to be carefully and industriously unraveled, where he shone out with wonderful power; and his addresses to the jury in such cases were not merely convincing, they were absolutely overwhelming. On such occasions, to use a western phrase, he was " simply omnipo- tent." Alas, that the fame of a distinguished lawyer should be so evanescent and so traditionary ! Spencer, great as he was in his peculiar sphere, has left nothing on record by which even the present generation can properly estimate him, and in the next he will be among the men but faintly remembered, and in the next perhaps utterly forgotten.

I need not speak of his public life, which was short, embracing one term of two years in the Senate of the State and member of the Court of Errors. It was respeet- able, but in no degree remarkable, for his mission was to be an advocate, and his throne of power was before twelve

men in the jury box. As a man, he was most kind and unselfish. No student ever left his office without a high respect for his capacity, and an affectionate attachment. to his person. He was ever doing considerate and helpful acts to the younger members of the profession, and I well remember a kind interposition in my behalf in a professional matter where he relieved me of a erushing weight of re- sponsibility, and made me deeply his debtor.

He was impulsively benevolent, and cared little for money except so far as it supplied his own wants and that of his family, or ministered to the necessities of others. He per- formed labor enough, at a moderate rate of compensation, to have secured an ample fortune, and yet so indifferent, and at the same time so indulgent, was he, that he left to his children little more than the house he lived in, and the priceless legaey of a name unstained by any vice, and full of kind deeds and gentle ministries. He well understood, however, and knew how to appreciate a mean and sordid aet, as was illustrated in the well-authenticated ease of the man who, having sought and received his advice in an im- portant matter, drew painfully from his pocket and presented him with a coin of the value of five cents. Holding the counsel fee in his hand, Spencer turned to his partner and said, " Mr. Kernan, you are the junior member of our firm ; enter this in our accounts as the smallest fee ever received by us, in the smallest coin known to the govern- ment, from the smallest man that ever darkened our doors."

Such, very imperfectly sketched, was Joshua A. Spencer, a man of some striking weaknesses which his best friends were conscious of, for his character was transparent as the day, but with a nature noble enough and with a heart large enough to atone for them all ; and, upon the whole, we may safely say we shall not soon, if ever, see his equal before that tribunal which, somewhat hyperbolically perhaps, it is said it is the object of all government to secure, " twelve honest men in the jury box."

In closing these hasty sketches, I may very naturally be asked if, in my judgment, the bar of Oneida County has suffered an eclipse of its original fame, or degenerated from its former high standard of intellect, learning, and integ- rity ; and I unhesitatingly answer, that taking those who have been and are its acknowledged standard-bearers, and making no account of those members of the bar who are not concerned enough for the honor of their profession to learn its history, or remember the names of those who have illustrated and adorned it, it has not essentially declined from its pristine estate. I could easily demonstrate this by pursuing its history from the days of the men I have com- memorated, and running my eye along the line of their sue- cessors who have passed away, graced and illustrated as it is by the names, among many others, of James Lynch, of Rome, a man of prineely bearing and commanding presence, and capable, when roused, of efforts but little inferior to those of Storrs or Taleott; of Timothy Jenkins, the unri- valed public prosecutor, from whose iron grasp no felon ever escaped that was destined for the State's prison, or deserved the halter ; of Charles A. Mann, the wise counselor, the accomplished man of business, the aider of every enterprise that promised benefit to his fellow-men, who from a very humble beginning rose, by energy, by diligence, by unsullied

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integrity, to a most respectable rank in his profession, and to public honors fairly won and worthily worn ; of Alvan Stewart, a remarkable man, somewhat coarse in texture, but who had a larger fund of quaint and apposite stories than any man I ever knew, and who, though a little ponderous at times, carried tremendous power with a jury ; of William C. Noyes, who gained indeed his highest reputation in the city of New York, where he stood side by side with those who were in the front rank of the profession, but who, by the generous benefaction of his large and valuable library to Hamilton College, has shown how kindly and tenderly he turned in grateful recollection of the mother that bore and nourished him in the early days of his professional life ; and, passing many others, of Hiram Denio, whose grave is yet green, of whom it is no disparagement of others to say there is no higher or worthier name in the annals of our American jurisprudence-a striking example of the fostering and beneficent influence of our institutions which made him, through toil and effort commensurate with the end he reached, a jurist whose decisions are received as law throughout the continent of America, and quoted with re- spect in Westminster Hall; and of Charles H. Doolittle, the most recently departed, whose indomitable industry, painstaking research, and keenly analytic intellect made him the dread of his opponents at the bar, and would doubtless have continued to illustrate the bench, and the sad tragedy of whose death cannot even now be alluded to without emotion .*

And here it is but fair to remark that in looking at either men or things from a remote standpoint we are very apt to exaggerate both their merits and their dimensions. Our gaze backward is through the vista of years and the haze which distance casts over every object. It is with men oft- times as it is with nature, true, that " distance lends en- chantment to the view." The men of our own days stand too neur us to be weighed at their true value and appre- ciated at their intrinsic worth. Let time and remoteness do their appropriate work, as in nature they smooth the ruggedness, soften the asperities, and intensify the beauty of every scene they touch, and our contemporaries, it may be, will appear to posterity as the fathers do to us, covered with laurels which we perhaps too grudgingly bestow. It may be accepted as a striking testimony to the high position held by our professional brethren in the public esteem, that at this moment the bar of Oneida is represented in the Senate of the United States in the persons of both Sena- tors from the State of New York, in the House of Repre- sentatives by the member from the 21st Congressional Dis- trict, and in the national judiciary by an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and by the judge of the circuit composed of New York, Connecticut, and Vermont .; It is almost superfluous to add that the bar of no county in the State, and without doubt none in the Union, can present a parallel to this.

It does not fall within the scope of my present design, and it might be deemed indelicate if not invidious, to speak of the living, some of whom have floated away upon the

tide that has borne so much of enterprise and of talent to our metropolis, and are there carving out fortunes and mak- ing a large reputation among the ablest of the profession ; and others of whom are among and around you, and I can safely leave their record to your candid judgment. Neither in learning nor in power to move men's minds by eloquent discourse has our bar declined essentially from its original standard. I can truly say that from men whom I have en- countered at the bar and heard from the bench, from men whom we have been accustomed to meet as our daily com- panions and associates, I have heard as learned and elabo- rate legal arguments, and listened to as soul-stirring, elo- quent, and impassioned appeals as any that I find recorded in the books ar that popular tradition assures us controlled the judgments or led captive the passions of the men who listened to the glowing periods of Storrs, or Talcott, or Spencer, in their palmiest days.

If I were to indulge in criticism of the recent bar of Oneida as compared with its predecessors,-and temperate criticism, I would fain hope, may be permitted to one who has retired from active participation in the labors of his profession, but who nevertheless feels deeply all that may tend to its discredit, or redound to its honor,-I should be disposed to say that it may perhaps be feared that it has a little declined from that elevated standard of personal char- acter which feels the slightest imputation upon its perfect trustworthiness, like the pain inflicted by a wound upon a sensitive nature, as well as something of the high-toned courtesy with which the members of the ancient bar never failed to treat each other, even in the warmest and most excited professional encounters. A lawyer, in the days of which I have been speaking, who justly incurred the sus- picion of a trickish man, who used the forms of the law and employed its machinery to entrap his adversaries, to extort exorbitant fees, or roh the unskilled and unsuspect- ing, unfailingly earned the odium of the community and awakened the watchful scrutiny of both bench and bar ; and if his offenses were not so patent or so capable of proof as to lead to official degradation, the suspicion of them was enough to subject him to an ostracism that, to a sensitive mind, would impose as severe a penalty as the blotting out of his name from the roll of honorable men. In my earliest recollections of the bar of Oneida I can recall but a single instance of a man thus suspected and thus odious, and he was put so effectually under the social and professional ban that he was ultimately compelled to remove to a distant city, where, either through expediency or from higher motives, he established a fairer reputation, and lived and died, I trust, a wiser and a better man.

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History of Oneida County, New York : with illustrations and biographical sketches of some of its prominent men and pioneers, Part 56

Author: Durant, Samuel W Publication date: 1878 Publisher: Philadelphia : Everts & Fariss Number of Pages: 920

Author: Durant, Samuel W
Publication date: 1878
Publisher: Philadelphia : Everts & Fariss
Number of Pages: 920