The Ghost of Nisi Prius. and the second Samuel Jones, and Marshall Bidwell, and James W. Gerard the first, and George Wood but Thomas J. Oakley and John Duer were yet survivors from the last epoch; then the new and very radical epoch, at which judges became elected, and codifica tion put snaffle-bits into the jaws of common law in New York City, restricting its elastic ity much as the snaffle-bit curbs alike the horse marked aged in turf annals and the two-year-olds, — such a radical epoch brought forward, necessarily, younger law yers, who had no old traditions to bury, nor old forms to remember. Now to the front stepped Charles P. Daly, John E. Burrill, Lorenzo B. Shepard, C. Bainbridge Smith and Stephen J. Field. They who now see the last named on the Federal Bench can hardly believe he was the almost boyish-faced, alert, active young lawyer, whom, prior to his hegira to California, I heard in 1848 in the Court of Common Pleas during a patent medicine controversy, when basting such an old forensic hand as Charles W. Sandford, a veteran of the Chan cery Bar. There were also at that era such young nisi prius advocates as William M. Evarts, Frank Marbury, Daniel E. Sickles, then the dandy of the Bar, Richard Busteed, who became during the Civil War in Ala bama what the Southerners called a carpet bag Federal judge; and Ammiel J. Willard, who about that time of war became a South Carolina judge; and his partners, Peter B. Sweeney, now, wearied of political general ship, a veteran municipal lawyer of the existing Bar; and another young lawyer, Henry H. Anderson, who soon forged to the front of the Bar, and, now a veteran, is the referee, whom, according to newspaper reports, Hetty Howland Green is daily com batting in a modern Jarndyce litigation. Then, also, came forward, as young rising lawyers, Abraham R. Lawrence, Luther R. Marsh, John Cochrane and Chauncy Shaf fer, each of whom was an impassioned jury orator. Also James T. and John R. Brady,
345
John Mason Knox, Waldo Hutchins, Henry E. Davies, who died Chief Justice of the Court of Appeals, Edwards Pierrepont, who became Federal Attorney-General, N. Bowditch Blunt, who afterwards died while dis trict attorney, and Aaron J. Vanderpoel and J. Smith Bryce, father of the present proprietor of the " North American Review," and Alexander Hamilton, grandson of Alex ander the great among royal jurists, and Albert Mathews, now a septuagenarian author of great repute; and Richard B. Kimball, who finally rejected jurisprudence for the fame of a novelist, and William Allan But ler, (a modern Sir William Jones), and Edward Sandford, who was shipwrecked on the ill-fated Arctic; and Andrew Boardman, the chosen junior of Charles O'Conor, and Edwin W. Stoughton, who died minister to Russia. Indeed the decades following 1846 knew a more promising and distinguished Junior Bar than New York City ever after wards knew. "Among that galaxy I, of course, had my favorites. John E. Burrill — founder of a great law-firm which graduated the present fearless and popular Judge Ingraham — stood at the head of my favorites then. He was so courteously aggressive and tactfully fearless. He was a very legal David amid Goliaths of the Bar. A scientific cross-ex aminer and a born persuader of men. In later life he seemed to have lost his early zeal and ambition, and he died a discrimi nating jurisconsult, after leaving the brunt of court battles to an able younger brother and junior partners, ' chicks whom I gather under my wing,' as I once heard him re mark of them. Ned Stoughton, as he was lovingly called, was even in youth distin guished for imposing personal appearance, with a Romanesque countenance, and pic turesquely clustering heavy locks of hair, and magnetic eyes formed to command. He was one of the group of lawyers who were of counsel to Rutherford B. Hayes in the legal scuffle of 1877 for the Presidency.
