The Circuit Court for New Hampshire. Upon the equity docket of the term was a suit brought by Perez Morton, of Boston, against Woodbury Langdon, a prominent merchant and brother of Gov. John Lang don. Woodbury Langdon built an elegant house on the site of the present Rocking ham House, upon the facade of which is his medallion. He was a delegate to Congress, and became a judge of one of the courts, without any law education. He was disin clined to hold courts, and resigned his judge ship when about to be impeached for neglect of judicial duties. During the Revolution ary War he visited England, where his im posing address and great beauty caused him to receive marked attention from many of the nobility. Such was the respectable de fendant of whom the Boston merchant com plained, in due form of law, that in September, 1778, in a time of war between the United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain, he, Morton, with John Carter, John Lang don, Phillips Moore, Archibald Mercer, John R. Livingston, Adam Babcock, James McCarty, and Woodbury Langdon, purchased together a ship called the " Hampden," for the purpose of fitting the same as a privateer to cruise on the high-seas to annoy the ene mies of the United States and to capture their property, by virtue and under the sanc tion of certain acts, resolves, and ordinances of the Congress of the United States and the Laws of Nations. That Woodbury Langdon was appointed agent to fit out, man, and provide the ship, which Langdon did, and charged the owners with their respec tive proportions of the cost. Morton owned a sixteenth of the ship, and paid his share of the outfit; and Langdon was made agent to receive all the prize vessels and captured goods and to divide the avails, etc. The "Hampden," it was alleged, in 1778 captured from the British a large and valuable French ship called " La Constance," which our Brit ish friends, the then enemy, had twentyfour hours before taken from the French. After condemnation in the port of Brest, France, the sale of the ship and cargo
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amounted to 200,000 French livres Tournois, equal to $37,142, half of which went to the master, officers, and crew of the " Hampden," which Morton asserted Mr. Agent Langdon directed to be remitted to Portsmouth and did receive, or a sum of $1,142,850, coming in the shape of merchandise in 1782, at a time when foreign goods were sold at three times their sterling or original cost in Europe. Morton also bought the interest in the "Hampden " of one of his co-owners, and called upon Langdon for an account. He persevered and applied in a friendly manner every year from 1782 to 1789 inclusive, for a payment of the sums due him; but Langdon refused to pay, and declined to adjust other than to offer a hundred pounds for Mr. Morton's shares of three sixteenths of the proceeds of the venture. Morton sought an accounting and an answer to certain specific inquiries as to the proceeds of the cruise of the " Hampden." The complainant appears to have acted as his own lawyer. Langdon appeared at the November term by such illustrious counsel as Theophilus Bradbury, and Theophilus Parsons of Newburyport, who filed a demurrer to Morton's Bill in equity, which, denying the allegations in the bill, maintained that Morton by his own showing had a plain, adequate, and complete remedy at law for all his injuries and damages sup posed in his bill to have been by him sus tained, and they asked to have the bill dismissed with costs. Morton joined issue on this demurrer and upon the law question raised therein. The court sustained the demurrer of Lang don, reserving the question of his costs until a succeeding term, when the prevailing de fendant came into court and magnanimously relinquished his claim to costs, which at the most would be but for a nominal amount. The courts in those days were held in the court-houses belonging to the county, as the Federal government had not then begun to build buildings for these purposes. In the court-house in Portsmouth the State legisla ture met until 1796. In the second story
