USA > Ohio > Bench and bar of Ohio; a compendium of history and biography, Vol. I > Part 19
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his close application to business, and business-like methods, his strict integrity, his quickness of perception and clearness of thought, accompanied as they are with great facility of speech and perspicuity of expression, have given him a very high rank in his profession and the fullest confidence of his clients. Major Lloyd's powers of speech, already alluded to, his creative imagination and literary education make him a successful lecturer and public speaker. He delivered the baccalaureate address before the University of Cincinnati in 1882. Frequent calls have been made on him for lectures on historical subjects, the delivery of which gave the greatest satisfaction to his audiences. As a Repub- lican he has gone on the stump and lifted his voice with no uncertain sound in favor of his political principles. He has never held a political office, nor been a candidate for one. A large number of lawyers throughout the district recommended him for appointment as judge of the United States District Court, after Judge Swing's death. After some consideration he declined to be a candidate, preferring to remain in the practice. The weight of Major Lloyd's influence has always been on the side of Christianity, and therefore he has always been actively interested in the Sabbath-schools in Cincinnati, in the Young Men's Bible Society, and in the Young Men's Christian Association, of which at one time he was president. He was also president of the State Con- vention of the Young Men's Christian Association at Toledo, in 1874. He is deeply interested in the Grand Army of the Republic, and has devoted much of his time to the interests of that order. In 1884 he was elected commander of the Department of Ohio, and served with great ability. The membership rapidly increased under his leadership, and the usefulness of the organization was greatly enlarged. He is a prominent member of the military order of the Loyal Legion, and has frequently delivered addresses before its members. Major Lloyd is also a member of various clubs, literary, social and political, and was elected president of the Cincinnati Literary Club in 1892. In 1877 he went to Europe, spending several months in travel and study, visiting England, Scotland, Belgium, France, Germany and Switzerland. He went again in 1883, spending much time in Bavaria and Austria, and later has made two other European trips. A few years after he commenced practice in Cincin- nati he was unanimously elected as professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres in Hamilton College, to succeed that eminent scholar Dr. A. J. Upson. Still later he was asked by many friends to take the presidency of the University of Cincinnati. Both these positions were declined. He has also been invited to deliver courses of lectures on constitutional and municipal law at several of the colleges. He was appointed by the governor as trustee of the Ohio Soldiers' and Sailors' Orphans Home, and served in that capacity for a long time. While there he did much to reorganize the graded school system and to increase the efficiency of this branch of the institution. In June, 1869, Major Lloyd was married at Poughkeepsie, New York, to Miss Harriet G. Raymond, daughter of President John H. Raymond, of Vassar College. Two children were born of this union, Raymond and Marguerite. Mrs. Lloyd died in April, 1890. In July, 1893, Major Lloyd was married to Miss Anna O. von Kienbusch, of New York.
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WILLIAM MARTIN DICKSON, Cincinnati. William M. Dickson, lawyer and jurist, was born in Scott County, Indiana, September 19, 1827, of Scotch- Irish Presbyterian stock. His grandfather presided over one parish near Dumfries, Scotland, for over fifty years. He was united on his mother's side with the oldest families of Virginia, descendants of the North of Ire- land, among them the Campbells, Ochiltrees and Lowrys. He was a lineal descendant of Sir Charles Richardson, the African explorer. His father, a sec- ond son, having visited the English Colonies in an official position, drifted to America, met and married Rachel Lowry, near Madison, Indiana, and settled in Scott county. Two boys were the issue of this union. In 1837 his father died, leaving a widow and John J., aged thirteen years, and William M., aged eleven, who moved to Hanover, Indiana, where there was at that time a good school. The death of the father and the panic at that time had reduced the family to want. The elder brother volunteered to learn a trade, so that his brother William, the weaker and younger, could attend school. William first attended college at Hanover, which college being moved to Madison com- pelled him to leave home. For the first two years he walked to Madison each Monday morning, carrying on his back the food for the week. By working during vacation, and tutoring, he managed to get enough money to attend col- lege at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Here, by also tutoring and teaching in the summer time, he managed to make enough money to graduate from Old Miami in 1846. While teaching school in vacation in Kentucky he studied law and was admitted to practice at Lexington. In 1848 he attended law school at Harvard University. While there, Chief Justice Parker, of New Hampshire, at that time one of the instructors at Harvard, was his pre- ceptor. Justice Parker selected him from a large number of students as an unusually bright, honest young man, and made him one of his own household, treated him as one of his own children. Afterward, without money, without a friend, alone, with only a letter of introduction from Justice Parker to the late Nathaniel Wright, Dickson came to Cineinnati. Judge Dickson presented this letter to Mrs. Wright, who immediately invited him, on account of his past friendship to Judge D. Thew Wright, at Cam- bridge, to come and live at her house. By tutoring in Judge Wright's family, teaching elsewhere, and by reporting as a space reporter on the old Cincinnati Times, he made a living. While teaching in Kentucky he had met Anna Maria Parker, and had fallen in love with her, but poverty and the struggle for life had prevented him from asking her to marry him. About this time Dr. Parker, with this daughter, Annie Maria, visited Cincinnati to hear Jenny Lind. Mr. Dickson had bought five tickets on speculation, had sold two for enough to pay for the five, and invited Dr. Parker with his daughter to join him. Annie was a great-granddaughter of General Benjamin Logan, of pio- neer memory; granddaughter of Colonel John Allen, who fell in command of the Kentuckians at River Raisin in 1812; was the own cousin of Mary Todd, the wife of Abraham Lincoln, and cousin of Governor Porter, of Pennsylvania, Justice Marshall, of Pennsylvania, Governor Crittenden, of
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Missouri, Governor Murray, of Utah, and Logan Murray, of New York. In 1852 Judge Dickson was married to Annie Maria Parker, and they immedi- ately came to Cincinnati, both almost strangers at this time. He ran on the Independent ticket for prosecuting attorney of the police court. To the sur- prise of all, he was elected. He was the first prosecuting attorney of the court, which during its infancy had many struggles to maintain its jurisdiction. It was Dickson who made this court the success it is to-day. During his term of office occurred the famous Bedini riots, and the cry of "Down with the Dutch!" Snelbaker was mayor. Dickson, with Frederick Hassaurek and Judge Stallo as advisers, brought about harmony, and by his uniform, just con- duct toward the unfortunate Germans endeared himself to them. After leav- ing the police court he rapidly rose to the foremost rank among our lawyers. His arguments under the Fugitive Slave Law and in the celebrated Blind Tom case are well known. In 1859 he was appointed by Governor Salmon P. Chase as judge of the Common Pleas Court of Hamilton county. On February 12 he was sworn into office, succeeding Judge Oliver, who had resigned. Hc was judge of this court until November 7, 1859, being succeeded by Judge Collins. On account of his extreme youth and younger looks his appointment as judge was objected to by the older lawyers ; but by hard work, uniform and impar- tial treatment to all, just and fearless decisions, he left the Bench to renew the practice, beloved and respected by all who had come in contact with him. During the war, his sympathetic nature made him espouse the cause of the colored man. He took the stump for universal amnesty, liberty and the Union. He partook in his love for the Union of the spirit of Webster; in his love for abolition, the uncompromising spirit of Sumner. In 1860 he was elected Presidential elector for Abraham Lincoln. He refused the position of assistant judge advocate general, with the rank of lieutenant colonel on the staff of General George B. McClellan. He organized the first colored regiment during the war, holding that the colored man was a fit subject to fight for the Union and his own liberty. During the war he was the confidential friend of Lincoln, Stanton and Chase; spent much of his time at Washington and had much to do in framing the Amnesty Proclamation at the close of the war. His ready pen and active brain were ever employed in the service of his coun- try and his party. His contributions to the press, and his pamphlets at this time, attracted universal attention. He first secured by law, to the negro, the right to ride in the Cincinnati street cars. In 1866, at the early age of thirty- nine, his health failed. Travel abroad brought no relief. Notwithstanding his physical suffering, the last twenty-five years of his life were spent in study and writing on public topics. He was a hard student, and particularly loved biogra- phy and history. He was a constant writer during these twenty-five years for the magazines of the country, for the daily press of this and other States, always upon political and social subjects and always under the initials "W. M. D." His style of writing was peculiarly concise, terse and perspicuous. In all his writings, that which most impresscs one is that he could say more in a few words than almost any other writer. In his attacks on monopolies, jobbery
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and public trickery, public dishonesty, office seeking for the mere office, he was never misunderstood. Public dishonesty he could not brook, but for private misfortunes or private wrong he always had the kindly word "forgive." Among his correspondents were John and George Carlisle, of Scotland, John Bright, Max Muller, Gladstone, John Stuart Mill, Disraeli, George William Curtis, Seth Lowe, etc. He was for some years before his death president of the board of trustees of the Ohio Medical College. His greatest public love was the formation and success of the Republican party. George William Curtis, in Harper's Weekly of November 2, 1889, among other things, says this of Judge Dickson : "Judge Dickson was a man of that union of deep convictions, cultivated intelligence and intellectual ability, upright character, political courage and independence which is peculiarly American. His sudden and lamentable death is a distinct loss to the force of the best American citi- zenship. His name will not pass into our history, but it is such qualities as his that make it." Mrs. Dickson died March 6, 1885. Judge Dickson was killed October 15, 1889, by an accident on the Mount Auburn Inclined Plane Railway, leaving surviving him three children: Parker, William L. (both lawyers of Cincinnati), and one daughter, Jennie, now Mrs. Jennie Dickson Buck, of Syracuse, New York.
BENJAMIN F. WADE, deceased. History has already assigned Benjamin Franklin Wade to the immortality of fame. As a man, a jurist and a states- man his life and deeds merit commemoration. His birth was almost contem- poraneous with the opening of the nineteenth century, at least during the first year in the State of Massachusetts. He was tenth in a family of eleven chil- dren and his mother was a woman of culture and morality. The Wades, who were of English descent, took root in America from Major Jonathan Wade, who planted himself at Medford, Massachusetts, in 1634, after emigrating from Norfolk, England, and married a daughter of Governor Bradstreet. In youth Benjamin Wade struggled with poverty, and in gaining the victory over it he gained the independence and self-reliance which characterized his subse- quent life. He was mainly self-educated and his early acquirements embraced a broad knowledge of history and general literature, as well as science and mathematics. He taught school for a time and settled in the Western Reserve, Ashtabula county, a few days before attaining his majority. He was favored with a rugged constitution and well fitted for the life of a backwoodsman, as a stepping stone to something better. He had the physical strength to clear the forest and the intellectual strength to qualify himself for great success in a profession and the foremost rank of statesmanship. He drove cattle across the Alleghenies to Philadelphia as a hired man and worked with pick and shovel on the New York & Erie Canal. He had the disposition to work hard at any employment to which he devoted himself, whilst he fostered an ambition to enter a profession in which brains count for more than muscle and
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sinew. He studied law with Joshua Whittlesey and was admitted to the Bar, beginning his practice at Jefferson. He was the partner of Joshua R. Gid- dings for the first ten years of his practice, and at the very threshold of his career in the law served as prosecuting attorney of Ashtabula county. While engaged in practice with Mr. Giddings, the late Judge Rufus P. Ranney was a student of law in their office, and upon the dissolution of the firm of Giddings & Wade, that of Wade & Ranney was organized. This was in 1839. Mr. Wade had then overcome the diffidence which served as an impediment in his early practice. To the student of his public life only, the statement that he was bashful, timid and hesitating, and made frequent failures in essaying pub- lic addresses, is quite incredible; for at the meridian of life he was a most effective speaker - clear, earnest, intelligent and powerful. He was able to influence the verdict of a jury, move a popular assembly, or carry a measure through the United States Senate, by the eloquence of his oratory and the logic of his argument. As a lawyer he was not the equal of Judge Ranney, but very few of his contemporaries surpassed him in the management of liti- gation or in effective ability as an advocate. He was a match for the learned, eloquent and very elegant Millard Fillmore, of New York, who was pitted against him in the Ashtabula courts in a very important admiralty case. In the days of his prime at the Bar he asked no favor and was able to take care of himself in a contention with its ablest members. Mr. A. G. Riddle, of Washington, has contributed to the Western Reserve Law Journal some anec- dotes of Mr. Wade as a practicing lawyer and a judge, which are not without interest in this connection. One of the pioneer churches in the Reserve called a pastor to care for the spiritual wants of the flock and agreed to pay him a stipulated salary. This sum was to be paid by the voluntary subscriptions of individual members, each of whom signed a paper promising to pay "the sum set opposite his name," in the products of the farm or work-shop, all of which were practically legal tender for such debts at that time. After some years a large percentage of the membership became indifferent to their obliga- tions or unable to pay, the pastor's salary was largely in arrears, and his family was in want. He hesitated to sue the church, and the delinquent members sought to enforce his resignation by an accusation of immorality and arraignment before the church authority. In his extremity the man of God applied to Wade & Ranney, who appeared for him, prepared his defense and won a victory. The same attorneys then brought suit to recover his salary, and in the trial Mr. Wade had the closing argument. He arraigned the defaulting members with caustic severity, and pictured in dark colors the meanness of the church, exhib- ited in the treatment of its pastor. He declared he would submit the case on two fundamental laws regulating human conduct : 1. " The laborer is worthy of his hire." With effective pathos he portrayed the great service of the pas- tor, and his devotion to the church in nourishing its weak oncs and caring for all its interests. He asserted the church, as an organized body, had hired him and was bound to pay him. 2. "Hc who danceth must pay the fiddler." This recognized rule of human conduct he declared was equally binding. It
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was deduced from the mass of unwritten law which governs the social rela- tions of men. It was the consensus of universal judgment pithily expressed as a maxim. "The church had danced all these years and had not paid the fid- dler as the law required," and without further argument or asking any instructions from the court he submitted the case and the jury found for the plaintiff, assessing his damages at the full amount claimed. The case was appealed, but the verdict stood. Two farmers, well off for the times, became involved in a dispute over a matter of considerable importance, and their con- tention was carried into court. Mr. Wade was employed by the defendant, and his client was stubborn. The plaintiff was endowed with equal grit and pertinacity. Mr. Wade soon became convinced that the litigation persisted in would involve both the parties in financial ruin, and he resolved to save them. Seeking out the plaintiff's counsel, he proposed a compromise, and after the case was considered carefully, terms of adjustment were agreed upon by the opposing counsel. The defendant was greatly enraged. He was combative, and this settlement deprived him of the chance to ruin his neighbor. He fol- lowed Mr. Wade into court and openly protested against a settlement without trial. After a few words of explanation by counsel the case was finally dis- posed of by entering in the clerk's minutes the terms as agreed upon. After- wards, as related by Judge Ranney, when the belligerent parties to the suit had time to cool, both the plaintiff and the defendant personally thanked Mr. Wade for the satisfactory adjustment of what promised to be an endless as well as a ruinous feud. Another time he appeared for the defendant in a slander case, opposed to his former partner, Joshua Giddings, attorney for the plaintiff. Mr. Giddings, who had high standing as an advocate, was closing his argu- ment with wonderful effect by reciting Iago's eulogy on a good name. He had reached the familiar quotation :
"But he who filches from me my good name Robs me of that-"
At this point his memory failed him and he sought to recover it by repeat- ing-" robs me of that-robs me of that-" Whilst the jury and the audience, wrought to an extreme nervous tension by the eloquence and pathos of the advocate, listened with eager intensity for the climax, and he again repeated, " robs me of that"-" which I never had," suggested Ben Wade, in tones gen- tle and insinuating. The effect was electric. The tension relaxed and the anticlimax was greeted with laughter which the court was unable to repress, even if so inclined. No human power could resist the humorous outburst responsive to so ridiculous an incident. Of course the argument could not be resumed, and the verdict was for the defendant. Mr. Wade was elected presid- ing judge of the Court of Common Pleas for the third circuit, by the legisla- ture, in 1847. Thoroughly equipped by natural ability, learning and temper, and by twenty years of successful practice, he assumed judicial duties. His service was in the highest degree honorable and in all respects able. It is only because of the overshadowing greatness of his subsequent career in politics and statesmanship, and because of the more conspicuously public character of
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his record in the Senate of the United States during the period of greatest peril to the Nation-the time of rebellion and reconstruction-that the history of his four years on the Bench is so little known. It is sufficient to state here that he judged in righteousness and followed his convictions with a firmness that could not be shaken, even by an overruling decision of the Supreme Court. This was fairly tested in one case, at least, which was tried before him. An appeal was taken from his decision in a case involving nice distinctions and technical construction of the law, and the Supreme Court reversed him. The case was remanded, and on the second trial Judge Wade adhered to his former ruling. On being reminded by counsel that the Supreme Court had held the opposite, he replied gravely : "I am aware of that, and I will give that court a chance to set itself right." His views were sent up at length in the record and the Supreme Court did set itself right by reversing its former judg- ment. Whilst yet serving on the Bench, in 1851, he was elected United States senator by the legislature, although he was not a candidate and had no information that his name was used in that connection until the tele- gram announcing his election was received. He was not without experi- ence in political strife and training in the work of a legislative body. In 1837 he had been elected to the Ohio Senate as a Whig and had been the leader of the forlorn hope in the Senate against the odious " black laws " en- acted by a majority during the first session which he attended as a member. The anti-slavery spirit was born and bred in him and the cruel legislation offended his sense of justice. He held firmly to a political creed promulgated in the Declaration of Independence, and among his profoundest convictions was the belief that the maintenance of human slavery in the United States was repugnant to that Declaration. He believed that the inalienable rights with which men are endowed by the Creator should not be contravened by restrictive legislation ; that the right to liberty was not less a birth-right than the right to life. Ohio was in 1838 strongly pervaded by a Kentucky senti- ment on the question of slavery, so that defeat awaited Mr. Wade in 1839. A year later, however, the leaven of his speeches and those of his coadjutors had so permeated the masses that he was again elected in 1841 by the largest majority ever accorded a candidate in that district. He was a leader of the Harrison campaign in the Western Reserve, and before it closed his reputation was national. In all of the succeeding Presidential campaigns, to the end of his life, he was a conspicuous advocate and champion of the Whig and Repub- lican parties. Upon entering the United States Senate, as the colleague of Salmon P. Chase, he naturally took his place among the great leaders. He was in the forefront of the battle to resist the aggressions of the slave power just before the war, and exhibited a courage which was a revelation to the Toombses and Wigfalls and Davises of the Cotton States. Accustomed as a backwoodsman to the use of his rifle, he carried that weapon with hini to Washington ; but fortunately for his adversary, none challenged him to mortal combat. His bluff manner contained no element of bravado, but the genuine- ness of his courage won the admiration of his bitterest antagonist. The evi-
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dent sincerity with which his convictions were formed and the unfaltering frankness with which they were uttered made him one of the most formidable debaters of that fearless body of statesmen to whom the issue of life or death for the Nation was committed. From 1861 to the close of the Rebellion he was chairman of the joint committee for the conduct of the war, and one of his bravest colleagues on that committee was Senator Zach Chandler, of Mich- igan. Mr. Wade was very near the Presidency of the United States in 1867. As president of the Senate he would have succeeded Andrew Johnson if the articles of impeachment had received the votes of only two more senators. During the proceedings of that high court he bore himself with the utmost dig- nity and decorum. At the close of his third term in the Senate, March 4, 1869, Mr. Wade resumed the practice of his profession and accepted the posi- tion of general counsel for the Northern Pacific Railroad. His wife was Car- oline Rosecranz, of Middletown, Connecticut, a relative of the distinguished general. His sons, James Franklin and Henry Parsons, both received com- missions in the regular army.
WILLIAM H. WEST, Bellefontaine. Honorable William H. West, formerly judge of the Supreme Court of Ohio, is of English-Irish extraction. His father's ancestors were of William Penn's Colony of Quakers who settled on the Delaware, near Philadelphia, in 1682. His grandfather removed to the west shore of the Monongahela near Brownsville, prior to the Revolution, and there his father, Samuel West, was born in 1785. Concerning his mother's ancestors he has little information, except that they emigrated from the north of Ireland soon after the close of the Revolutionary War and settled near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, where his mother was born. Both his pater- nal and maternal grandparents, with their families, settled in the territory of Ohio near Steubenville before the close of the last century, and they have long slept in the old churchyard of Island Creek above that city. In a few years his father returned to Pennsylvania, and upon attaining his majority, estab- lished himself in business at Millsborough, Washington county. Here William H. West was born on the 9th day of February, 1824. When he was six years old he came with his father's family to Ohio and settled on a small farm in Knox county, in a locality where the area of forest largely exceeded the cleared lands. In childhood, therefore, he experienced the joys and privations of pioneer life in the log cabin home. His first inspiration to learning was received in the primitive school-house of the clearing, illumined by the solar light admitted through oiled paper and the frontier schoolmaster's genius transmitted through the beech cudgel or the ferule. Young West was favored with superior advantages, because his father's small collection of books was the largest library in the neighborhood, and he read all of them before reaching the age of fifteen. History, poetry, fiction and allegory were all treated copiously in the quaint collection. He read with more or less eager- ness and enjoyment the History of the United States by Woodbridge, and
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