Sergeant Smith Prentiss. made several appearances before the Wash ington Supreme Court, on briefs and retain ers impelled towards him by the prestige of his oratory from many attorneys of record. His high sense of personal honor and rectitude of purpose can be gauged by the fact that he refused to accept the per diem pay and mileage which had been voted to him when he first lost his seat; saying, "You shall not pay me for what you have denied me, and prevented me from earn ing." While still in Congress, he defended in Kentucky his friend, Ex-Judge Wilkinson, who had been indicted for murder during an altercation forced upon him at a hotel. Public feeling was strong against him, and the evidence really placed him in a perilous position. Everyone present at the trial thought that he would be at least convicted of manslaughter in a low degree; but per sonal magnetism and remarkable oratory procured an entire acquittal. In 1842, always theretofore shy in the society of ladies, and sensitive in society as to his lameness, he matrimonially succumbed to the charms of a beautiful Natchez belle, who as his wife rescued him from a growing tendency to occasional morbidness, and brightened his arduous life. She finally survived him. During the two years succeeding his marriage, he devoted himself entirely to his profession, neglecting for the time political calls; and received retainers that summoned him to many adjoining States out of his own. His fame became essentially a South western one. Any client, having a reason ably doubtful litigation, or any friends of an accused in desperate straits, who retained Prentiss, felt that the matter was already settled in the direction that he carried it. But the Presidential election of 1844 brought him again into the political arena. While in Congress he had become a very idolator of Henry Clay, who in the last named year had become the Presidential
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candidate of the Whig party, while the opposing one was Mr. Polk — that Speaker whose casting vote had denied Mr. Prentiss his first Congressional seat; and it may well be believed that in that behalf Prentiss's de sires to see vanquished the man who had done him a political wrong doubled his desire to have Mr. Polk defeated. He actively participated in the campaign for Clay, and, when the latter was beaten at the polls — as all his party friends believed by electoral frauds in the City of New York and in the Plaquemine parish of Louisiana — felt sorely disappointed; the which his letter to his relatives in Maine despairingly showed. By the decision of the United States Supreme Court, Prentiss became ejected from the valuable real estate in Vicksburg into which all his savings had gone; and in a financial sense he was ruined. But his oratorical power, his experience in his pro fession, and his Yankee pluck and per sistence remained as capital. Coupled with his disappointment over the defeat of Henry Clay, and the loss of his estate, there ensued disgust at the repudiation by Mississippi of its bonded debt, the initiation of which certainly infamous idea — and which for many years excited abroad intense injury to American credit — he had, when in the legislature and in public addresses, strongly in turn repudiated and combatted. All these incidents combined to influence him to leave Mississippi and join the New Orleans Bar, where he had already argued cases before its Federal District Court. He arrived in the Crescent City during No vember, 1845, one year before I reached it. His eclectic mind soon grasped the intrica cies of the civil, the practice, and the criminal codes of Louisiana that were patterned after the code Napoleon and the institutes and pandects of Roman law; but with the Lex Mereatoria that chiefly concerned litigation in New Orleans he was already thoroughly familiar. Almost immediately, retainers
