The Green Ba Vol. VIII.
No. 9.
BOSTON.
September, 1896.
SERGEANT SMITH PRENTISS. By A. Oakey Hall. Thence to the famous orators repair, Those ancients whose resistless eloquence Wielded at will that fierce democratic — Milton, Paradise regained, Hook 4, line 267.
"T} ESISTLESS eloquence " is an apt -IV phrase to apply to Sergeant S. Pren tiss; who, born in Maine, of noted Puritan ancestry, eighty-eight years ago — and now forty-six years dead — educated at Bowdoin college; a law student with the late Judge Josiah Pierce of Gorham; emigrated to the South, and during two decades stood therein primus inter pares at the bar of Missis sippi and Louisiana; and who at the age of twenty-five fairly electrified the Supreme Court at Washington, in an argument by which he won the attention of Chief-Justice Marshall, who disdained oratory in his court. I was an academy boy, preparing for college in Newark, New Jersey, when the preceptor — it was during the heated presidential campaign of 1840, between President Van Buren and Tippecanoe and Tyler too — said to the class : " You may have holiday this afternoon, and with mc attend a Whig mass meeting in the Park, where a Southern Con gressman named Prentiss, whom Daniel Web ster has pronounced to be the greatest orator of the era, is to make a speech. And if he sustains his reputation, and the Websterian encomium, the event will become one for you to always remember. We have lately been reading about ancient Demosthenes, but let us go and hear a modern Demosthenes." The event proved to be one for me to always remember; and six years later, while a student of civil law at New Orleans, in the office of John and Thomas Slidell, I again
heard the" resistless eloquence "of him whose voice and impassioned delivery had in the Newark Park captivated my youthful imagi nation. I beg to pronounce him the greatest of legal orators, next to Rufus Choate, to whom I often listened when at Harvard Law School, where I had matriculated under Joseph Story and Simon Greenleaf as professors; and with after-President Rutherford B. Hayes in my class and at my boarding mess. In infancy, Prentiss, like Byron, suffered from a deformed foot, but, like Byron, he possessed in manhood a remarkable head, and even a teeming brain. I recall him, on all public occasions, either leaning upon a cane, or grasping a chair for support with one hand, while he gracefully gestured with the other. After admission to the Bar of his native Pine-tree State, and desirous of aiding the res angusta domi of his family — its head, his father, having deceased while the son was col legian — he restlessly longed, like many a New England youth, for early participation in the battle of life. Wherefore he emigrated to Natchez, in Mississippi, to become tutor in a planter's family, for sustenance while preparing to join its local Bar. He was soon re-admitted; and having been almost im mediately assigned to defend in forma pau peris an accused, he displayed, in procuring from a rural jury an acquittal, such surprising eloquence that, like Henry Erskine, he at 353
