548
NATHAN
DANE.
Bv Henry A. ( haney. [The eminent Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet, of New York, himself the grandson of a distinguished lawyer, is known to have interested himself for years in collecting the portraits of early American statesmen, and in perpetuating them, where there was a risk of their ultimate loss, by causing them to be reproduced. The accompanying portraits of Dane, Kean, and Carrington .ire from etchings made by his order; and it is to his generosity that the • Green Bag" is indebted for their use. A large oil painting of Dane hangs in the Law School at Cambridge. The likeness of Melancton Smith, which is kindly furnished by his granddaugh ter, Mrs. Elizabeth S. Martin, of Green Bay, Wis., is from a rude drawing which was found in 1839, and which her husband, the late Morgan L. Martin, Esq., caused at that time to be engraved by Rawson, Hatch & Co. The picture of Governor Foote is from an oil painting owned by his son, Mr. John A. Foote, of Cleveland, who most obligingly caused it to be photographed for the use of the writer of this article. — Ed.] THERE was living in the Massachusetts town of Beverly, within the memory of men still active, a deaf old lawyer who wore to the end of his long life the costume of the last century, and whose name was Nathan Dane. This man was in some sense the Father of American Jurisprudence; the three conspicuous acts of his career, though distinct in themselves, all went to the foun dation of such a system of American law as would help to make the young Republic a leader among the nations In his youth he had drafted the most famous statute in American history; in his later years he pre pared the first great compend of American law; and the crowning act of his last days was the endowment of a Harvard professor ship from which have proceeded most of the leading treatises in American jurisprudence. Judge Story has said that the doing of these things was " glory enough for one man in one age; " John Quincy Adams declared that Lib erty and Law were "associated till the judg ment day with the name of Nathan Dane;" and it was one of Webster's periods that the authorship of the great Northwestern Ordi nance would make that name "as immortal as if it were written on yonder firmament, blaz ing forever between Orion and the Pleiades." Where now are these splendid prophecies? It came to pass, instead, that within fifty years from his death, though the influence
of his college chair was unabated, scarce one collegian in fifty so much as knew his name; his ponderous digest had long since been displaced by its successors; and the honors that belonged to him for his famous statute had been torn from him and given to another. His fate was like that of the new-slain knight in the border ballad : — "His hound is to the hunting gone, His hawk to fetch the wild fowl home, His lady s away with another mate. O'er his white bones the birds shall fly, The wild deer bound, andfoxes cry." Dane was born on the 29th of December, 1752, in the village of Ipswich, Mass., where the first of his family in this country had set tled as early as 1638. He worked as a farm hand for his father until he was twenty, and then in eight months and with but little aid fitted for Harvard College, where he was graduated in 1778, with a record of superior scholarship, in the same class with the father of George Bancroft. Then he taught school, and meantime studied law with William Wet more, Judge Story's father-in-law. As a stu dent, he was one of the first subscribers to a Philosophical Library, started at Salem by Dr. Manasseh Cutler and others. He is said to have come quickly into a profitable prac tice, but he kept his cases out of court as far as possible; and his course in this respect
