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"Reminiscences After Sixty-Four Years at the Bar" |
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"Among my earliest recollections is that of the soldiers going off to the Civil War. One day I asked my oldest sister whether there was going to be a war and I recall her telling me that they were already fighting. Yes, I remember the Battle of Gettysburg because I was about nine then. I remember General Lee's surrendering to General Grant. Grant impressed me as being generous. At Appomattox, when the Confederate officers delivered up there swords, the southern cavalrymen brought in their horses. General Grant told the men to keep their horses because they would need them on their farms when they got home. That was a generous thing to do, wasn't it? "Yes, I remember hearing about Abraham Lincoln, too, but I never actually saw him when I was a boy. He was assassinated in '65 when I was eleven. That was a gloomy time, when Lincoln died. The Gettysburg Address didn't make any stir, as I recall. But when the Civil War ended, people went wild-just the way they did recently on V-J day. I remember they shot off cannons down on the Court House square. In those days cannons were muzzle-loaders, you know. While one of the local town boys was tamping the wadding into one of the cannons during the celebration, the cannon fired. The blast blew both his hands off. Late he married and was able to do enough gardening to make his own living. He wouldn't quit. "In those days the schools didn't have separate classes. The students used to read from different readers, like the Fourth Reader and the Fifth Reader, and so forth. We managed somehow to get an education. As a boy, I used to walk four miles to a high school where we only had one classroom. The school used to be located down by the Court House on the plot where the City Hall now stands. I'm the only one that's still living of our high school class and still get a kick out of recalling that I was its valedictorian. "About 1871 I went off to normal school for a semester and then because my money gave out, I started teaching near here in a small town. I taught the whole year of 1872. Later, when I was graduated from normal school, I look a job teaching at a one-room schoolhouse out in the country. There were seventy-five pupils in that school and some of them were older than I was. We were all in the one room and I was the only teacher. When it came to Algebra, some of the pupils had gone father in Algebra than I had. I'd only had a year, and some of them had had two years. So I suggested that we have a review class in Algebra which gave me a chance to keep ahead of the class. "In 1879 I was graduated from Amherst College and our class has dwindled to three. I keep in touch with the other two alumni of '79 because I'm the class secretary. This year we had a class reunion and two-thirds of us were there. At Amherst I was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. "After I got out of college, I again taught school to earn my living. At night I used to study law in the offices of some of my family's friends who were lawyers. In those days most young men didn't go to law school but just studied law in a lawyer's office. After he had studied for two years, his lawyer preceptor would file a certificate with the court that the young man had been registered with him for the required period and the court would admit him to practice on motion. That is all there was to it. Sometimes the judge himself would examine us on our knowledge of the law. "In those days we young men weren't paid anything while we were studying law. We were like apprentices and were glad to get our education in return for running errands and serving papers for the lawyers. In those days the bulk of law practice consisted mostly of real estate cases, wills, making title searches, and handling the business affairs of our clients. Of course, in the 1880's there weren't any automobiles, so there weren't the negligence cases there are today. "After I was admitted, I went into partnership with one of the older lawyers with whom I had studied. We each had a desk in the office which was diagonally across the street from the county court house. In those days there wasn't a lawyer in the city who had a full-time secretary. There were only two legal stenographers in the town at that time and they were both me. One of them, a man named Briggs, used to have a desk in our office. Whenever anybody needed any typing done, they would call in one of these court stenographers to do the work. Most of our pleadings were written our in longhand. When I started in to practice in 1883, the typewriter had just come into vogue. You remember the story in Bellamy Partridge's Country Lawyer[3] about the problem they had with the first typewriter in their office. When I started out, typewriters were just a little better known. We didn't have any office help at all at first.
Footnotes
Footnote 3:New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1939. The incident referred to appears in Chapter 11, pages 124, seq. |
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 The Historical Society of the Courts of the State of New York |