USA > Vermont > Men of Vermont : an illustrated biographical history of Vermonters and sons of Vermont > Part 20
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He was an ardent friend of the University of Vermont in its younger days, and served on its board of trustees for several years, re- signing in 1812. He naturally, with his adroitness and resourcefulness, became the leader of the Jeffersonians, being placed in the front in most of the contests with the Federalists, and especially where they wanted to match Governor Tichenor, who was in- dubitably one of the shrewdest politicians of his time. He was chairman of the com- mittee in 1805 to draft an address in reply to the Governor's speech, and framed the answer to the proposal of the Massachusetts Legislature for constitutional amendments to exclude slaves from representation in any measure in Congress. He regretted the ex- istence of slavery, and its influence in the making of laws to bind the freemen of our free state, but could see no remedy that "would not subvert the first and most opera- tive principles of our federal compact." The skill with which these replies managed to take issue with the Governor, while couched in the most commendatory phrase, were too
much for even "Jersey Slick" himself, and they may be instructively studied as models of this sort of sheathed stabbing in political warfare.
Mr. Fisk was also the chairman of the same committee when the Democracy came into power in 1809 and it was the address of Governor Galnsha, with whom he was in full political sympathy, that was to be answered.
He was a judge of the Orange county court in 1802 and 1869, and in 1816 the Legisla- ture chose him one of the three judges of the Supreme Court of the state. The next year he was re-elected, becoming the first assistant, and with his undoubted talent as a lawyer was on his way to the chief justiceship when he resigned to accept an election to the Senate.
He was elected a representative in Con- gress in 1804, serving two terms, and again two terms from 1811 to 1815, and then after his two years service on the Supreme Court, was chosen by the Legislature United States senator in 1817 to succeed Dudley Chase, but resigned after less than two years service and William A. Palmer was elected to suc- ceed him.
He was a close friend and confidential ad- viser of President Madison and the adminis- tration through the war of 1812 ; he voted for the declaration of that war and his counsel was constantly sought, with reference to war measures.
He took a vigorous part in the "John Henry" debate of 1812, over the papers secured from that reprobate, who after five years life as a farmer, lawyer and editor in Vermont, was in 1809 employed by the Governor of Canada to get into communica- tion with the most violent Federalists in New England and ascertain how far they could be brought to turn against their own country and in favor of England in case the embargo and other resistance to British aggressions should result in war. These papers opened the lid only a bit upon one of the most shameful chapters of our history, a chapter over which, fragmentary and un- satisfactory as is our knowledge of it, the blood of right feeling men cannot fail to boil to-day, a chapter that tells of sordid men and money making interests in New England that conspired in treason against the govern- ment that was fighting their battle and seek- ing to protect them from British spoliation, because they believed that the government ought to crawl at Britain's feet and do Britain's bidding against France, in order to help them to continue their money making. Mr. Fisk treated the subject vigorously in this view, and collected and presented a large mass of evidence showing how plottings for the dissolution of the Union had been going on. He quoted letters from Mr.
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Erskine, the British minister, in support of this view. His arraignment was one that must have done an important part in cover- ing the once glorious Federalist party with the disgrace that brought it into speedy decay and ruin.
But Mr. Fisk's moderation at another time served the state a good turn. The country's indignation at the selfish and base deeds of Federalists, focussed in the introduction, Jan. 6, 1814, of resolutions in the House in- structing the attorney-general to institute a prosecution against Gov. Martin Chittenden for his proclamation of the year before ordering the Vermont militia home from New York, where they had been assigned to military duty at a critical time and point un- der the orders of federal commanders. The Governors of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island had pursued a similar policy, refusing or threatening to refuse, on state rights grounds, requisitions on their militia for the common defense. Unscrupulous parti- sanship had reached about its worst abase- ment when Federalist executives could take this ground, and so far as they were concerned personally, prosecution might have been healthy. But Fisk deprecated the resolu- tions. He admitted that the proclamation was unjustifiable, thought few people in Ver- mont approved of it, knew the delegation in Congress did not, but he did not think it advisable to thus force the issue between state and nation. If the Governor had com- mitted an offense against the laws let him be prosecuted, but let not Congress turn in- former, which was all the resolutions meant ; their effect would be only to give undue weight to successful prosecution and make Congress ridiculous if unsuccessful ; they neither made nor strengthened law, and so were of no use. The argument was so well made that the resolutions were put to final sleep on the table.
.Mr. Fisk was nominated and confirmed judge of the territory of Indiana in 1812, but declined the office after the Federalist presses in Vermont had wasted considerable energy in ridiculing the appointment. He did not cut much of a figure in his senatorial service because it was too brief to permit him, even under the rules then, to get to the front. He resigned in 1819 to accept the post of collector of customs for the district of Vermont, which he held for eight years, and during that time moved to Swanton, where he made his home until his death, which occurred Dec. 1, 1844.
In his later years he was a Whig as ardent as he had formerly been a Democrat. He was by temperament and logic a follower of Henry Clay, and the development of issues after the death of the Federalist party, that made the great Kentuckian the leader of the
new party, naturally brought Fisk with them.
Mr. Fisk, soon after he came out of the Revolution, wedded Miss Priscilla West, of Greenwich, who died August 19, 1840, at the age of seventy-seven. They had six children-three sons and three daughters.
SEYMOUR, HORATIO .- Judge, coun- cilor and senator, was born in Litchfield, Conn., May 31, 1778, the son of Major Moses and Mary ( Marsh) Seymour. His father was a man of importance in Connecticut, a Rev- olutionary officer, state legislator for seventeen years and town clerk forty years, and among his descendants was Horatio Seymour, the New York statesman, Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1868, and a nephew of the Horatio Seymour who became the Ver- mont senator and for a number of years the acknowledged leader of the Whigs in this state.
The subject of this sketch fitted for college under the tuition of his brother-in-law, Rev. Truman Marsh, graduated from Yale in 1797, taught an academy for a year at Cheshire, Conn., then attended Judge Reeve's famous law school at Litchfield for a year, and in October, 1799, came to Middlebury to con- tinue his studies in the office of Daniel Chip- man, and in 1800 was admitted to the bar. He was soon after appointed postmaster at Middlebury, and continued in the office nine years, until the growth of his law practice pre- vented his longer holding it. His reputa- tion professionally was confined mainly to his own county, but he was probably engaged in more cases than any lawyer before or after him. His great defect was over modesty and lack of confidence in himself, so that he never pushed himself in law practice or poli- tics as he might.
He had to get absorbed in the cause of his client, and the feelings and interests in- volved, before he could do himself justice. But he was very shrewd and tactful in the management of cases, and as a speaker, while making no pretensions to oratory, clear, logical and persuasive. In manners he was not only unassuming, but most ur- bane and courteous, and careful not to offend. His make up, in fine, was such as was sure in the course of years to command a great popularity, and he held it almost against his will, while shrinking from lead- ership, as few Vermonters have done. He was state's attorney for Addison county 1810 to 1813 and again 1815 to 1819, and coun- cilor 1809 to 1814. When the Vermont state bank was established in 1806 he was chosen one of the first directors, and re- mained such until the branch at Middlebury was closed. In 1820 he was elected United States senator, and re-elected in 1826 after a vigorous contest with Governor Van Ness.
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Ile was in early life a supporter of the ad- ministration and measures of Jefferson and Madison, but after the breakup following the Monroe administration he went with the Adams, on National Republican or what was afterwards the Whig clement, and was influential in the party councils until his terin in the Senate closed. Ile was also on terms of intimate personal friendship with Adams, Clay, Webster, King and Marcy, and men of such caliber, who all relied much on his judgment in matters of legislation, though it was rarely they could ever get him to speak in the Senate. He was chair- man of the committee on agriculture.
At the close of his second term he re- turned to his law practice, and to party leadership in the state. It was due to his shrewd management very largely, that after the Anti-Masonic wave had swept over the state and controlled it for several years, the whigs were able to get the chief advantage of its breakup. Mr. Seymour was their can- didate for Governor in 1833 and 1834, in the former of which years the whig vote fell to less than two thousand. In 1834, when the election was thrown into the Legislature, Seymour wrote a letter before the assemb- ling, announcing that he would not be a candidate. This was to allow Governor Palmer an unobstructed re-election, which it was calculated would count when the collapse of Anti-Masonry came. Bradley, the Democratic candidate, who had about the same vote as Seymour, each a little over ten thousand, pursued the same wary course, but by individual instruction rather than a public letter, and with much less effect on the rank and file of the voters.
Mr. Seymour's later years were passed in the practice of his profession and in the duties of judge of probate, which he per- formed from 1847 to 1856. Middlebury conferred the degree of LL. D. on him in 1847.
He died Nov. 21, 1857, after several years of infirmity, at the age of eighty. He married in 1800 Lucy, daughter of Jonah Case, of Addison. She died in October, 1838, leaving three sons and one daughter. One of the sons, Moses Seymour, settled at Geneva, Wis. ; another, Horatio, was a law- yer at Buffalo, N. Y., and another, Ozias, an attorney at Middlebury.
PRENTISS, SAMUEL, twice United States Senator, one of the great Whig leaders of his day, ranking with the six of highest fame whom Vermont has had among "the Elders of the land," the peer of the intellectual giants with whom he sat, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and Benton, and perhaps even greater yet on the bench of the state Supreme Court and the United States district court, was a
native of Stonington, Conn., where he was born March 31, 1782, the son of Dr. Samuel Prentiss. The family had been one of note for centuries, tracing back to 1318 in Eng- lish official records, and inchiding Capt. Thomas Prentiss, the noted cavalry officer in the King Phillip war, and Col. Sanmel Prentiss, of the Revolutionary army, the great - grandfather of Judge and Senator Samuel.
Young Pren- tiss' boyhood was chiefly passed at Northfield, Mass., where Dr. Pren- tiss moved after a short stay at Worcester, when the future states- man was only four years old. With only a com- mon school edu- cation, supple- mented by a study of the classics under Rev. S. C. Allen, the minister of the town, young Prentiss studied law, first with Samuel Vose, of Northfield, then with John W. Blakc, at Brattleboro, was admitted to the Windham county bar in December, 1802, and located at Montpelier a few months later. He de- voted himself for full twenty years to his profession, and to extensive study and read- ing in cognate lines until his equipment was such as few men have.
The Legislature offered him almost unani- mously in 1822, a position as associate jus- tice of the Supreme Court, but he declined it. But in 1824 he did accept an election as Montpelier's representative in the Gen- eral Assembly and from this time his rise in politics was rapid. It was at a time when the era of great Democratic leadership, the era of Galusha, Niles, Butler, Fisk, Bradley, and Van Ness, was drawing to a close, and a man of Prentiss' intellectual sweep found but little to obstruct his progress. He was re- elected to the General Assembly in 1825, and during the session was chosen to the Supreme Court, where four years' service won him an election by common consent to the chief justiceship, and one year more brought a summons to go to Washington as senator to succeed Dudley Chase. He was re-elected for a second term in 1836, but before it expired he resigned to accept an appointment as judge of the United States district court for the district of Vermont to succeed Elijah Paine, deceased. The nom- ination was confirmed by unanimous con- sent without the usual reference to a com- mittee. He continued in this position for
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fourteen years until his death, Jan. 15, 1857, completing an official career of thirty-four years which was not begun until he was forty- two. There is reason for believing that he could have had a seat on the Federal su- preme bench, but preferred this because the duties were so near home.
As a lawyer he was profoundly learned with a learning that reached to the sources of the Roman as well as the common law, with a comprehension that embraced it as a great system of principles rather than tech- nicalities and with a thorough belief that no less could be said of the law, in the words of Bishop Hooker, "than that its seat is the bosom of God." As a judge no less an authority than Chancellor Kent said: "I cannot help regarding Judge Prentiss as the best jurist in New England." His penetrat- ing judgment, his power of analysis, like that of chemical forces in the certainty with which it could resolve every problem into its elements, his habit of sifting and of classifi- cation, together with his faculty of luminous statement, and his resolute uprightness, com- bined to render him well nigh a model for a judge.
It is said that not one of his decisions while on the Supreme Court was afterwards over- ruled. In the Senate his rank was easily among the first. John C. Calhoun said of him and his speech against the bankruptcy law of 1840, that it was the clearest and most un- answerable argument on a debatable ques- tion which he had heard for years. Mr. Pren- tiss' independence in following where his con- victions led was illustrated by his stand on his questions, for he was the only Whig, with one exception, that fought the bill. But he was generally in close and confidential rela- tions with Clay and Webster, sharing with them as third in command, the party leader- ship in the Senate. They both regarded him as the best lawyer in the Senate.
He was the originator and successful ad- vocate of the law to suppress dueling in the District of Columbia. He was in at the opening of the great and protracted battle with the slavocracy, presenting in 1838, the resolutions of the state Legislature for the abolition of slavery in the District of Colum- bia and also against the annexation of Texas. Several of his speeches on different subjects have gone into the reading books as among the American classics, and they are fine examples of the eloquence of straightfor- ward logic. In his younger days he wrote considerable on literary and moral topics, which was published in the newspapers, and all through his life he constantly sought re- freshment and invigoration of the mind by communion with the great masters of Eng- lish literature. In his personal habits and his domestic life, he was a severe economist, a
habit to which early necessity trained him ; but he was still a liberal giver where the object commanded his approval. It is related of him that when the minister lost his own cow, the judge sent his man to the parson- age stable with one of his own two cows, and when as luck would have it that cow died the first night, he forwarded to the minister the money required to buy still another.
He married, in 1804, Lucretia, daughter of Edward Houghton of Northfield, a woman of unusual powers of mind and strength of character, who bore most of the family cares during Judge Prentiss' busy life. She died at Montpelier, June 15, 1855, aged sixty- nine. She had twelve children of whom ten were boys, and all of them who lived to reach manhood became lawyers.
SWIFT, BENJAMIN .- Representative in Congress in 1827,-1831, and senator from 1833 to 1839, came of a family of distinction in Connecticut, where his uncle, a Revolu- tionary colonel, was a judge and member of the council for twelve years. His father, Rev. Job Swift, was a well-known divine at Ben- nington and Addison. A brother, the sev- enth son of Rev. Job, was Samuel Swift, lawyer, editor, historian of Addison county, a judge of probate and assistant judge there, and secretary of the Governor and council in 1813 and 1814.
Benjamin Swift, the sixth child of Rev. Job, was born at Amenia, N. Y., April 8, 1780, before his father's coming to Vermont. He was well educated for those days, took a course in the law school of Reeves & Gould at Litchfield, Conn., and first put out his shingle for practice in Bennington county, but moved to St. Albans in 1809. Like most young lawyers he soon plunged into politics, taking the side of the then declining Federalists, so as to be effectually estopped from office-holding for a while and leaving a good share of his time and energy for im- provement in his profession. He thus at- tained a leading place at the bar, though his equipment was not by nature that of a lawyer. He was repeatedly a candidate on local and county tickets and was two or three times elected representative from St. Albans, but it was eighteen years after his settlement in St. Albans before he reached any other office. He had come out of the war of 1812 a good deal better than most Federalists, for he did not allow his feeling against the Madison ad- ministration and his criticism of the war to carry him to any such foolish or traitorous lengths as it did many of his party. In fact, when the report came of a probable engage- ment with the British at Plattsburgh he was one of the first to shoulder his musket and proceed to the scene, and though he arrived
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too late for the battle he showed a disposi- tion which counted in his favor in after years.
As party lines were reformed after the "era of good feeling" under the Monroe administration, he naturally took the side of the national Republicans, and afterwards the Whigs, and as such was elected representa- tive to Congress in 1827. He was re-elected in 1829, but before his teri had expired the opposition party had become so strong, that though he was earnestly supported by his followers for a third election, he withdrew in favor of Heman Allen of Milton, who was elected. The next year, however, while the politics of the state were shaken all to pieces as regards the old parties, by the Anti- Masonic movement, he was brought forward as a candidate for the United States Senate, as a man whose moderation of views could command votes from all factions. He was elected and served a full term till 1839, re- tiring with a fair degree of credit. On one point especially he took an emphatic posi- tion in line with Vermont's views from the beginning. He refused to vote for the ad- mission of Arkansas in 1836, because the new constitution of the state sanctioned per- petual slavery. He was a warm admirer and follower of Clay, and an enthusiastic advocate of his policies.
After his retirement from the Senate he devoted himself mainly to agricultural pur- suits and scholarly leisure, except when he buckled on the armor for the management of campaign work for the Whig party, and it was while he was at work in the fields with his laborers that death overtook him. While in Congress he engaged earnestly in temper- ance work and was among the pioneer movers in the great Washingtonian temperance re- form.
While in the Legislature he obtained the charter for the Bank of St. Albans, and was its first president.
He was a man of simple tastes and habits of life, of clear and penetrating judgment, severe in his notions, even while of a natur- ally impulsive temperament, and inclined to pursue with an absorbing energy any object for which he had started. In theology he was a Calvinist of the most rigid type in the regu- lation of his own conduct, but inclined to gentleness in abstract views. There was a rugged kindly courtesy about him, a freedom from malice or personal bitterness in contro- versy, political or religious, which in spite of his uncompromising argument, could not fail to command respect and even attachment. " Physically, mentally and morally," says E. P. Walton, " he was a large man."
PHELPS, SAMUEL S .- Senator for thir- teen years, councilor, Supreme Court judge,
and one of the ablest and most accomplish- ed men the state has ever had in public life, was born at Litchfield, Conn , in May, 1793, and of a family that had for generations been one of intelligent well-to-do farmers. Litchfield was in those days a breeding ground for able and influential men, and has probably turned out more than any town of its size in the country. It then contained the very best law school in the country. The intellectual friction of such associations was of incalculable benefit for such a bright youth as Phelps, and here may be found the foundation of his great- ness and that of his son. He entered Yale at the age of fourteen, graduating in 1811, in the class with John M. Clayton of Dela- ware and Roger S. Baldwin of Connecticut. He pursued his legal studies for a few months in the law school until in 1812 he came to Middlebury and entered the office of Horatio Seymour who had himself come from Litchfield. He served in the war of 1812, in the ranks at Burlington and Platts- burg and afterwards as paymaster. In those days he was an enthusiatic young Democrat and supporter of the administration and the war; but when the Whig party was formed he went with that, though all through his political life he exhibited an indepen- dence of judgment and action that was un- usual in those times, and several times he stood up for his views against the majority of his party when it cost something of peril and sacrifice to do so.
He was admitted to the Addison county bar in 1815, and made rapid progress to professional eminence, even with such lawyers as Seymour, Dan Chipman and Robert B. Bates as competitors. He was a member of the council of censors of 1827, and wrote the address of that body to the people of the state, chiefly notable for its argument for the abolition of the Governor's council, and the establishment of a Senate as a co-ordinate branch of the Legislature-an argument which bore fruit seven years later, though it then failed. In 1831 he was elected a mem- ber of the Governor's council, and at that fall's session was chosen a judge of the Supreme Court, and was annually re-elected seven times until 1838, when he was chosen a senator in Congress to succeed Benjamin Swift. He was again elected in 1844, though he had one of the most disagreeable fights that the state has ever seen ; an ac- count of it is given in the sketch of Gov- ernor Slade.
In January, 1853, on the death of Senator Upham he was appointed to the vacancy on the recommendation of the Vermont delega- tion in Congress, though he lived on the west side of the state, because he was in Washington at the time ; the nomination of a
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judge of the Supreme Court was pending in the Senate and it was doubtful if any one else if appointed, could reach the Capital from Vermont, in season to help the Whigs on the vote. Judge Phelps remained in the dis- charge of his duties through that session, and returned to Washington the next winter to claim his seat, but as the Legislature had met in the meantime and failed to elect him or anybody else, the Senate refused to admit him on the ground that an executive appointee could not continue after the Legislature had had an opportunity to fill the vacancy.
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