Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 03.pdf/597

besides being president, of the Massachusetts academies of higher education were virtually Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, established as a part of the public school sys and he contributed to its support. That was tem. In 1802 he was a corporator in a turn the first association of its kind that ever was pike company. During the embargo times he gave effective support to a society that he had organized. He was a patron of the Massachu setts Agricultural Society, and a member of established for furnishing employment to men the Massachusetts Historical Society, the and families that had depended on the ship Essex Historical Institute, and the American ping interests. In 1811 he was on a com Antiquarian Society. In the winter of 1787 mission to revise and publish the charters

theretofore granted. he acted as moderator The next year he had of the Beverly townmeeting that voted the to republish the gen eral statutes, and he Essex bridge, the first was also a presidential great engineering tri elector, in which ca umph of its kind in this country. In 1789 pacity he voted, though he was one of the pas a Federalist himself, sengers in the first for DeWitt Clinton. paddle-wheel steamer The main question in in American waters, New England at that when it made its trial campaign was whether trip from Danvers Iron there should be an Works to Beverly. Be other war with the tween 1790 and 1798 mother-country; and he was in the Massa when Madison, who chusetts Senate at was elected, forced on various times for five the disastrous and un sessions. In 1794 he necessary contest now was made justice of known as the War the Court of Common of 1812, the feeling Pleas, but he resigned against the Govern without taking his ment was so strong as to lead to that seat, although he had SAMUEL AUGUSTUS FOOTE. famous Hartford Con qualified. He may have preferred the task vention which later malcontents affected to regard as setting the that was given him in 1795, as a commis example of disunion. It is altogether likely sioner to revise the laws of the Common wealth. In 1797 he drew, it is supposed, the that if some of the younger men had got con important report which is printed with the trol of it, there might have been some colo: Massachusetts statutes of that year, whereby for this slur; for Dane himself went to it, as Samuel Augustus Foote has no proper connection with this sketch beyond this, that the controversy over the authorship of the Ordinance of 1787 was first provoked by the debate on that harmless-looking resolution of his, that the sale of the public lands should be suspended. But as this debate was on the whole the most famous that has ever been held in Congress, and as it called forth Webster's masterpiece, it is interesting to see the face of the man who set such forces in motion. He was himself a youngster of but seven when the great Ordinance was adopted, and he was graduated at seventeen from Yale. He was in one house or the other of Congress most of the time from 1819 to 1834, and he then became governor of Connecticut. He was a merchant by occupation, and not a lawyer, and one of his sons was that great admiral whose cannon opened the Tennessee for Grant. This excellent portrait of Senator Foote is photographed from a painting now owned by his son, John A. Foote, of Cleveland, Ohio.