Thaddens Stevens. fore judge or jury, or in conducting a case. His oratory was of a caustic and trenchant style, abounding in keen thrusts and parries and sharp wit. He seized the salient points in a case, and hammered them in. He had a profound contempt for loquacious and or namental declamation, which he made no effort to conceal. He was fond of telling the following incident as illustrating the ver bosity of one of his associates at the Lan caster Bar. The case for argument involved the question as to whether #87.50 should be paid to his client personally or to his assignee. Stevens opened the argument with a fifteenminute speech. "Then," he would say, "Mr. began. I went up to Harrisburg and tried the McCook bribery case [a fa mous case of that day], and got back in time to hear him sum up the case to the judge." In jury trials he was armed at all points. His quick perception and analysis gave him the faculty of darting in a moment upon a latent truth or falsehood, often fright ening carefully concealed evidence from unwilling witnesses by the rapidity and viru lence of his searching cross-examinations. He took few notes, often none at all, some times having in his hand a small oblong piece of paper about six by three inches on which he scrawled « few leading points, — for he was a wonderfully bad though rapid penman, and his writing was an unsolvable enigma to his clients, who were often forced to return his letters unread, and Stevens himself was often compelled to inquire the nature of the transaction before he could decipher his own handwriting. His readiness to seize upon an unexpected event and use it in the "furtherance of his own ends is aptly shown in the following an ecdote locally known as the " firebrand in the convention." Early in the thirties a conven tion was called at Harrisburg by the antiabolitionist element of Pennsylvania " to preserve the integrity of the Union." Ste vens, whose antislavery ideas were already deeply rooted, procured his election as dele gate from Adams County by some half-dozen
men about the hotel at which he boarded, and went to Harrisburg with the secret in tention of breaking up the convention if possible. * Organization was scarcely effected when he arose and moved to adjourn. The Speaker, a prominent delegate from Pitts burg, said, " Mr. Stevens, I hope you will nof attempt to- introduce a firebrand into this convention." It happened that the delegate next to Stevens was a lawyer from Franklin County, with fiery red hair and irascible tem per. Stevens saw his chance. He said he hoped the chairman did not intend any personal insult to his friend from Franklin County, that he certainly was not to be blamed for his personal appearance. The lawyer was on his feet in an instant, and began an abusive attack upon the Speaker. The misunderstanding was complete. A general uproar followed, the Speaker lost his head and his temper, and the delegates, leav ing the convention in disgust, could not be reassembled. In his dealings with his clients Stevens was brusque and inclined to be impatient. The evolutions of his mind were too rapid for them to follow; grasping conclusions before their cases were fairly stated, and in terjecting opinions which they did not com prehend and which he did not see fit to explain. But he was none the less popular on that account. He enjoyed the respect and entire confidence of his clients, and he was deserving of it. His integrity cannot be questioned, although more or less openly assailed during his life by political enemies animated by party prejudice and passion. Moreover he possessed a nice sense of exact justice which would not allow him to take ad vantage of a merely legal excuse for the non payment of just debts. For some of the in dorsements which brought about his financial embarrassment in 1842 he had a perfect de fence in the bar of the Statute of Limitations, which he refused to plead, but turned over his estate to his creditors, and as we have seen left the more fascinating and congenial field of politics, and by hard work and continued
