LEMUEL SHAW - Kouroo · unable to preside at the trial of the British soldiers accused in the...

“perhaps the most influential state justice — ever”

CHIEF JUSTICES

OF THE

MASSACHUSETTS SUPREME JUDICIAL COURT

William Stoughton, Chief Justice 1692-1701

Waitstill Winthrop, Chief Justice 1701 and 1708-1717

Isaac Addington, Chief Justice 1702-1703

Samuel Sewall, Chief Justice 1718-1728

Benjamin Lynde, Sr., Chief Justice 1729-1745

Paul Dudley, Chief Justice 1745-1751

Stephen Sewall, Chief Justice 1752-1760

Thomas Hutchinson, Chief Justice 1761-1769

Benjamin Lynde, Jr., Chief Justice 1769-1771

Peter Oliver, Chief Justice 1772-1775

John Adams, Chief Justice 1775-1777

William Cushing, Chief Justice 1777-1789

Nathaniel Peaslee Sargeant, Chief Justice 1790-1791

Francis Dana, Chief Justice 1791-1806

Theophilus Parsons, Chief Justice 1806-1813

Samuel Sewall, Chief Justice 1813-1814

Isaac Parker, Chief Justice 1814-1830

Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice 1830-1860

LEMUEL SHAW

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/ActiveIndex.pdf

2 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith

JUDGE LEMUEL SHAW JUDGE LEMUEL SHAW

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William Stoughton (1631-1701) Chief Justice 1692-1701William Stoughton is perhaps most famous for his role in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. While Chief Justice of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, the court established expressly to deal with the accused, Stoughton insisted on the admission of spectral evidence. This insistence, along with Stoughton’s overbearing attitude toward the accused, the witnesses, and the jury has left him credited in some circles as being largely responsible for the tragic consequences of those trials. Although he never repented for his part in the witchcraft delusion as others did, he remained respected by his contemporaries and was still regarded as one of the most eminent citizens of the Colony when he died in 1701.

Waitstill Winthrop (1643-1717) Chief Justice 1701 and 1708-1717The only man ever appointed Chief Justice twice, Winthrop first assumed the office in 1701 when Chief Justice Stoughton died. Winthrop, however, held aspirations of becoming governor, and to further his cause, resigned his place on the bench to accept an appointment as agent of the Province. When Joseph Dudley was appointed governor instead, Winthrop’s agency was rescinded and he returned home. In 1708, he was appointed Chief Justice again and served in that capacity until his death in 1717.

Isaac Addington (1645-1715) Chief Justice 1702-1703Noted for his integrity, wisdom, and modesty, Addington was trained as a physician but assumed the role of Chief Justice upon the death of William Stoughton. He dedicated the majority of his career to the office of Secretary of the Colony and spent little time serving on the bench, a position far less prestigious. Being a physician first, he was not inclined to expound on the law and soon resigned.

Samuel Sewall (1652-1730) Chief Justice 1718-1728The first of Samuel Sewall’s many appointments was that of special commissioner to the Court of Oyer and Terminer presiding over the Salem witchcraft trials. He and the other members of this commission were responsible for convicting and sentencing nineteen people to death. The Court, due to its hysterical tenor, inevitably lost its public support and was dismissed. The Superior Court of Judicature was established soon after the close of the Court of Oyer and Terminer and consisted of several of the judges from that court, including Sewall. He was the only commissioner to admit his error publicly, and probably did so due to superstition rather than true remorse. He was the last of the original five judges of the Superior Court of Judicature.

Benjamin Lynde, Sr. (1666-1745) Chief Justice 1729-1745Benjamin Lynde was the first justice on the Superior Court of Judicature to have been educated as a lawyer. He was admitted into the honorable society of the Middle Temple at the Inns of Court in London to study law. He was quite proud of that fact, and in an address to a jury remarked that “they would hereafter have the benefits of Inns of Court education superadded to that of Harvard College.” Judging by observations made by colleagues, he did much to improve the young court’s procedures. “An impulse seems to have been given to improvement in the forms of proceedings,” a colleague wrote, “and the general course of administering justice, although it was still but in its infancy.”

Paul Dudley (1675-1751) Chief Justice 1745-1751Paul Dudley earned his first degree from Harvard at age fourteen and read law in the province for a short time. He then journeyed to England, for the “advantage of studying in the Temple,” at one of the Inns of Court. Upon his return he served as Attorney General for several years until his appointment to the Superior Court of Judicature. As a justice, he implemented new procedures for the advancement of court proceedings that greatly aided the administration of justice. Like many of his compatriots, Dudley’s interests were diverse. He published several essays on the natural history of America, which brought him attention in England and landed him an appointment to the Royal Society at London.

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“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3


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Stephen Sewall (1704-1760) Chief Justice 1752-1760 Stephen Sewall attended Harvard College and was an instructor there for twelve years until his appointment to the Superior Court of Judicature as an associate justice in 1739. Of his years as a judge, one colleague wrote, “Quickness of apprehension and a capacity to look thoroughly into a subject were united in him in the highest degree I ever saw in any of my acquaintances.” Of his general temperament, another biographer commented, “His donations to the poor were very frequent and liberal...more than

Thomas Hutchinson (1711-1780) Chief Justice 1761-1769It was said that Thomas Hutchinson possessed a rare ability to clearly and intelligently state the case upon which the Court was to decide. According to a traditional anecdote, juries would, after listening to his associates speak, see Hutchinson rise and would remark “now we shall hear something which we can understand.” Hutchinson, who was politically ambitious, became acting governor when Francis Bernard left the Colony in 1769. Though unable to preside at the trial of the British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre, he did attempt to exert his influence. As a staunch Loyalist he applied pressure on his successor, Benjamin Lynde, to acquit the defendants. This caused Lynde to offer his resignation several times, a gesture which Hutchinson derisively characterized as cowardice.

Benjamin Lynde, Jr. (1700-1781) Chief Justice 1769-1771Benjamin Lynde, Jr., had served as a Naval Officer, accompanied the Commission to Hampton on the boundary settlement of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and sat for eleven years as judge in the Suffolk County Court of Common Pleas before being appointed an associate justice in 1745 to fill the vacancy left by the death of his father, Benjamin Lynde, Sr. In 1769, Governor Bernard left for England and Chief Justice Thomas Hutchinson was obliged to act in his stead. Lynde assumed the seat of chief justice, although he was not formally appointed until 1771. He resigned over the controversy of Crown payment of judges’ salaries. He was also “not...inclined to ride the Circuit longer,” and accepted the position of Judge of Probate for Essex County, a post he held until the Revolution.

Peter Oliver (1713-1791) Chief Justice 1772-1775Peter Oliver, characterized by contemporaries as a “Loyalist by birth, education and instinct, a man of courage, firmness, learning and character,” became a marked man when the troubles with England began. In 1772, when the Crown proposed to take over the Province’s responsibility of payment of the justices, all members of the court except Oliver declined. The hostility against him was inflamed, and his home in Middleborough was burned to the ground. The House impeached him, prompting grand jurors at more than two courts to refuse to take their oaths. When the British forces evacuated Boston in March of 1776, Oliver joined them.

John Adams (1735-1826) Chief Justice 1775-1777Occupied with creating a new, sovereign nation, John Adams never took his seat on the Supreme Judicial Court. Between October 1775, when he was appointed to the bench, and February 1777, when he resigned, Adams devoted his energies to the Continental Congress, the Saratoga Convention, and numerous debates on currency, regulation of pricing, and the French Loan. In November 1776, he was elected Commissioner to France and this, in addition to his many other obligations, forced his resignation from the bench.

William Cushing (1731-1810) Chief Justice 1777-1789When John Cushing resigned after serving as an associate justice from 1747 to 1771, his son William was elected to take his place. William Cushing was the only justice retained by the Revolutionary Council when it reorganized the courts. William Cushing presided at a criminal action tried at Worcester that operated to legally abolish slavery in the state in 1783. At that trial, a man had been charged with assault committed in attempting to repossess a slave. Cushing charged the jury that the 1780 Massachusetts Bill of Rights declared “all men are born free and equal.” Later, Cushing’s determination and courage also helped to ensure that the court continued to meet regularly despite opposition from participants in Shays’ Rebellion. His excellent reputation was rewarded when, upon the organization of the Supreme Court, President Washington appointed him associate justice. He was later offered the seat of Chief Justice, but declined due to ill health.






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Nathaniel Peaslee Sargeant (1731-1791) Chief Justice 1790-1791Doubting his capacity to fulfill the office and concerned that he might hang should the Revolution fail, Sargeant declined his first appointment to the Court in October 1775. He was, however, a patriot at heart, disapproving of what were seen as the arbitrary measures of British administration. He served as a delegate from Haverhill to the Second Provincial Congress, and in 1776, when appointed to the bench, was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. When Chief Justice William Cushing was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, he was made chief justice. On the bench, Sargeant was viewed as able, independent, and impartial. Off, he harbored strong anti-Loyalist sentiments and sought the abolition of slavery.

Francis Dana (1743-1811) Chief Justice 1791-1806When Dana was offered the position of Chief Justice in 1791, he delayed his acceptance to protest the salary. Then, during his first term, he refused to appear in a robe in objection to what he termed the political appointment of Associate Justice Thomas Dawes, Jr. In consequence, no justice of the Supreme Judicial Court appeared in a robe until 1901 when Oliver Wendell Holmes reinstituted the tradition. As Chief Justice, Dana played a significant role in the development of American law after the Revolution, insisting that it use English Common Law as its foundation. During Dana’s tenure, the opinions of the Court were first formally published. In 1803, the Legislature established the post of Reporter of Decisions, who was directed to “obtain true and authentic reports of the decisions ... and shall annually publish the same.”

Theophilus Parsons (1750-1813) Chief Justice 1806-1813When Theophilus Parsons authored The Essex Result in 1778, he outlined the main principles for a republican government. John Adams later followed the document when he drafted the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. Parsons inherited Supreme Judicial Court dockets that were three years behind, but he soon cleared up the backlog by insisting on speedy trials and refusing lawyers latitude to argue untenable points. Concerned with the lack of reporting of American judicial decisions, Parsons took the opportunity afforded by each case he heard to establish rules of general application, thus forming the law of the new Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Parsons also continued use of English Common Law despite widespread hostility toward all British institutions, and restated it to suit American needs.

Samuel Sewall (1757-1814) Chief Justice 1813-1814Sewall entered government service as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and later represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1796 to 1800. In 1798, he was selected by the House to act as a manager of the impeachment hearings of Tennessee Senator William Blount, the first member of the Senate in U.S. history to be expelled from that chamber. Although he served as an Associate Justice for thirteen years, Sewall presided as Chief Justice for only eight months before his death in 1814.

Isaac Parker (1768-1830) Chief Justice 1814-1830According to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story (1779-1845), the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court turned to Isaac Parker in its search for “a mind to do, in some degree, what Lord Marshfield has done in England, [namely] to breathe into our common law an energy suited to the wants, the commercial interests, and the enterprise of the age.” Parker’s decisions were rarely reversed, and came to be recognized as authoritative in states other than Massachusetts as well as in the federal courts. In 1817, after being inaugurated as the first Royall Professor of Law at Harvard, Parker presented the plan that led to the establishment of Harvard Law School.

January 9: Lemuel Shaw was born.

1781






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This was the year of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, and one of the delegates to this convention was the Reverend Joseph Tuckerman, who had gotten the blues in the previous year by witnessing a slave auction in Charleston, South Carolina. An interesting factoid is that, despite what he had just witnessed, at this convention he assumed that free black citizens would not be eligible for state office, just as he assumed that white women would likewise be ineligible (some habits of mind don’t go away very easily, or, at least, don’t go away very easily when they maybe disturb somebody else’s life agenda but fail to disturb one’s own personal life agenda).

(Lemuel Shaw, who had been a state senator, was another delegate to this convention for amending the Massachusetts Constitution. When he would become Massachusetts Chief Justice and serve in that capacity for three decades — would he be less of a fool in regard to race than this reverend?)

(Charles Turner, Jr. was another delegate to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention)

(John Keyes was another delegate to the convention for amending the Massachusetts Constitution.)

(During this year and the following one, the Reverend James Freeman was serving as another delegate at the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention.)

Although nonsubscribers to the official state religion had been barred from holding public office and had been obligated by the letter of the law to pay taxes and penalties to the state for the maintenance and support of the established commonwealth church, at least the tax provisions had been unenforced since 1799, and in this year the new state constitution eliminated at least the test of religious affiliation for office.

Lemuel Shaw, with few precedents to guide him, drew up a charter for Boston, which would stand until 1913. Boston transformed itself from a town into a city by adopting this new charter and proceeding to elect a mayor. Their 1st mayor would be John Phillips, Wendell Phillips’s father (Wendell himself was in this year graduating from the Boston Latin School.

1820

1822






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Lemuel Shaw became Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

August: Dr. James Cowles Prichard pioneered “the term monomania, meaning madness affecting one train of thought … adopted in late times instead of melancholia.” (Herman Melville’s father-in-law, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, would utilize this concept “monomania” in a legal opinion in 1844, and Melville would deploy it in MARDI AND A VOYAGE THITHER in 1849, and then in MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE in 1851 as the defining characteristic of the psychology of the maimed Captain Ahab.) As what in this year would have been considered to be a prime instance of such monomania, in this year there appeared Lydia Maria Child’s infamous APPEAL IN FAVOR OF THAT CLASS OF AMERICANS CALLED AFRICANS.

(The author’s “madness affecting one train of thought” was immediately recognized,

and in an attempt at a cure her libraryprivileges at the Boston Athenæum

were summarily revoked.)The Reverend William Ellery Channing walked down to Child’s cottage from his home on Beacon Hill, a mile and a half, to discuss the book with her for all of three hours, but not because he agreed with her — the Reverend Channing considered Child misguided and a zealot. Child later commented that she had “suffered many a shivering ague-fit in attempting to melt, or batter away the glaciers of his prejudices.” The window of

1830

1833






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William Davis Ticknor’s Old Corner Bookstore was smashed because this APPEAL was on display. Having

overheard his parents discussing APPEAL (and perhaps having heard of that smashed window at the Old Corner Bookstore, which had been smashed by someone leaning against or being shoved against it), the 11-year-old Edward Everett Hale considered heaving a stone at it through the shop window. This is the book that a manager of the American Bible Society refused to read for fear it would make him an abolitionist, and in fact it would be what the 22-year-old Wendell Phillips would be reading just as he was abandoning the practice of law in order to devote his life to abolitionism.






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Here is the cover of a modern edition of that offending treatise:

Outspoken in her condemnation of slavery, Mrs. Child pointed out its contradiction with Christian teachings, and described the moral and physical degradation it brought upon slaves and owners alike — not omitting to mention the issue of miscegenation, and not excepting the North from its share of responsibility for the system. “I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken,” she wrote in the Introduction, “but though I expect ridicule and censure, it is not in my nature to fear them.” As a direct result of this, she would lose her editorial post with The Juvenile Miscellany (if you are so impolite and inconsiderate that you mention that we routinely molest our black servants, we certainly cannot allow you to have contact with our children).






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Construction, on Worth Street near Broadway, of the Broadway Tabernacle, a Congregational church. The builder was Joseph Ditto, assisted by the “mechanic” Isaac M. Dimond. The “guiding spirit” of the project was the revival preacher Charles Grandison Finney and this New-York structure would host the annual meetings of numerous moral reform groups during the 1830s and 1840s.

Sensing the coming of a nervous breakdown, Dorothea Dix departed for a vacation tour of England.

During this year Narcissa Prentiss Whitman and Eliza Spaulding were making themselves the 1st white women to go all the way across the North American continent, and William Procter and James Gamble were entering into a Cincinnati partnership which was to become known as Procter & Gamble.

During this year and the next, the Great Trek of the Boers (Dutch farmers) away from British in South Africa was taking place: they would found the Republic of Natal in 1838 and the Orange Free State in 1854.

Under a case Commonwealth v. Aves, any slave henceforward brought into Massachusetts was immediately free. This followed the 1772 British case Somerset v. Stewart. New York State and Pennsylvania had overridden the Somerset v. Stewart decision by the enactment of statutes, New York granting 9 months transit (until 1841) and Pennsylvania granting 9 months transit (until 1847). A black fugitive named Med was advancing the claim that once her slavemaster had brought her onto the free soil of Massachusetts, he no longer had any right to hold her in bondage. Judge Lemuel Shaw (portrait on next screen) was enabled to the principles of the British common law to agree, rather than insist upon the application of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793. This precedent of Judge Shaw’s would hold until, in 1842, the US Supreme Court would insist that the respective states had an obligation to one another to enforce the respective property rights of citizens of all states.

1836






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August 1, Monday: Abraham Lincoln was re-elected to the Illinois General Assembly (by this point he had made himself a leader in the Whig party).

The case of the two allegedly enslaved women seized in the port of Boston on the previous Saturday morning had been delayed by the fact that Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, who had signed the writ of habeas corpus, was absent from his upstairs courtroom over the weekend. At this point, however, the legal proceedings could not be further deferred. When the attorney A.H. Fiske asked for a further postponement while evidence was being brought from Baltimore to the effect that the two women were still enslaved, the opposition attorney Samuel Eliot Sewall argued that since all human beings were born free, the presumption of the court must be that the women were free and, unless and until demonstrated otherwise, must be allowed to exit the courthouse upon their own responsibility. The Chief Justice, however, saw a narrower issue: “Has the captain of the brig Chickasaw a right [under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793] to convert his vessel into a prison?” Since he had done nothing to bring himself within the provisions of that act, “the prisoners must therefore be discharged from all further detention.” At that point Mr. Turner, the alleged agent for Mr. Morris, arose and implied to the court that he would make a fresh arrest under the provisions of said act, and inquired whether a warrant would be necessary for such purpose. A constable was dispatched to lock the only door leading downstairs. Someone cried out “Take them!” The spectators in the courtroom began a chant of “Go! Go!” and stormed forward while Justice Shaw stood at the bench shouting “Stop! Stop!” The Justice made a dash for the courtroom door and attempted to himself hold the door against the excited crowd. The only officer in the room, a man named Huggerford, was seized and choked. The crowd bore the two women away through the private passageway normally used by the judiciary, shoved them into a carriage, and drove them out of the city. As the carriage passed over the Mill Dam, the horses were held at a full gallop while the toll money was thrown at the attendant. According to one Boston merchant paper, this was action threatening “the very existence of the state.” According to another paper, however, the Daily Evening Transcript, “The Judge stated that they (the women) must be brought back to be regularly discharged in open court.”

In the South Atlantic, the HMS Beagle and Charles Darwin returned to Bahia, Brazil.

August 3, Wednesday: The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society held a special meeting to express their “deep regret and decided disapprobation” of the tumultuous conduct of the persons involved in the “unjustifiable” courthouse “incident” of several days before. However, what had occurred could not be considered to have been an “unpardonable” offense, since it had been one developing out of misinformation and misapprehension, and since it had occurred only after, it was thought, the women had been discharged by the law. It was to be noted that although the judge had tried to hold the door, there was no report that he had been physically harmed. The Daily Evening Transcript reported that “the Chief Justice considers the prisoners as virtually discharged,” evidently because he had never been given an opportunity to respond to Mr. Turner’s request for a warrant to make a new arrest. The Boston Mercantile Journal poured oil on the troubled waters by assuring its readership that, had Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw been granted an opportunity, he would have remanded the women to Mr. Turner’s custody.






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August 18, Thursday: The presence of a young slave named Med had been discovered in a home on Pinkney Street in Boston. The girl was alleged to be the property of a New Orleans relative of the occupants. The attorney for the slavemaster actually burst into tears at the prospect that little Med might be set free by the judge and thus severed from her mama, a slave in New Orleans. The judge, however, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, was less impressed by the crocodile’s tears, and by the accusation “mistaken benevolence” which this crocodile managed to blurt out, than by documentary evidence available to the court that it was their intention to sell this child Med once they had her safely back home in the Deep South.

The Alert and Richard Henry Dana, Jr. the island of Fernando Naronha.

AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT, A REPORT FROM OUR SAILOR:

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal:

5th day Morning returned to Lynn to attend the Qrly Meeting - it was a large Meeting but not as large as I expected -Thos Anthony was much favourd in testimony after which James Emmons a person not a Member preached & I thought for a thing wholly wrong there was considerable good in his communication —& as this may be read by some who may not take my meaning where I may not be here to explain it may just say I believe it was wrong for him to impose his testimony on the Meeting yet most of his observations were pretty good & did not disturb the Meeting as much as I have known such offerings to do — Then Hannah Robinson appeared pretty well & then Thos Jones after which the Meeting closed - the part for buisness was pretty well conducted — I dined at Micajah C Pratts after which I returned to the Meeting House to another Sitting of the committee - & then went back to Micajahs to tea, & to Isaac Bassetts to Lodge.—

Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw’s most famous case, Commonwealth v. Hunt, 45 Mass. (4 Metc.) 111, a case in regard to the Boston Journeyman Bootmakers Society. According to Leonard Levy’s biography of Shaw, this decision amounted to “the Magna Charta of American trade-unionism, for it removed the stigma of criminality from labor organizations” — in that it intercepted the state government’s application of its law of criminal conspiracy (think RICO) to such associations.

1842

Thursday, August 18th. At three P.M., made the island of Fernando Naronha, lying in lat. 3 55S., long. 32 35W.; and …

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS






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October 14, Monday: At the Navy Yard in Charlestown, Herman Melville was paid off.

There had been all of 163 seaman floggings recorded in the frigate USS United States’s log during her voyage home — which amounted to a steady display before the crew of at least 2 and often 3 such government-sponsored public tortures per week.

As the frigate had docked on the 11th the first order of business had been to take the purser’s 40-year-old personal servant Robert T. Lucas into protective custody — because this American black’s slavemaster Fitzgerald had presented him in Norfolk, Virginia to serve the US Navy in return for being provided his wages of nine dollars a month, and in the normal course of operations the vessel had now entered a port of a free state. Judge Lemuel Shaw would in “Commonwealth v. Fitzgerald, in the matter of Lucas” rule that the Fugitive Slave Law, being in violation of justice and humanity, could be construed only in the strictest manner:

Under the statute of the United States of 1837, slaves cannotbe enlisted in the naval service. It seems that in a state whereslavery is permitted, the United States may make a contract forthe employment of a slave, which will be binding in that state,but cannot be enforced in a state where slavery does not exist.Where the master of a slave places him on board a United Statesvessel, and the vessel comes into the port of a free state, theslave cannot be restrained of his liberty. [The legal questionwould be whether when] a vessel, conveying slaves from one slavestate to another, should be cast away on the coast of a freestate, the slaves would become free ... The purser of the frigateUnited States, by the leave of the secretary of the navy, tookon board that ship his slave in the port of Norfolk, Va., theslave was entered on the muster roll, and his master drew hiswages. The frigate being ordered into the port of Charlestown,Massachusetts, it was held that there was no law to authorizehis restraint ... enlistment is a contract, and none but a freeperson can enter into a contract. Slaves can make no contract.... he was still a slave, and therefore under the control of hismaster. In the eye of the law he could have no will of his own.... As therefore Lucas is not lawfully enlisted in the UnitedStates service, and cannot be held there by his former owner,he must be discharged.

Henry Thoreau wrote from Concord to James Munroe & Co in Boston, to obtain copies to distribute of Waldo Emerson’s speech of August 1st celebrating “EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES” .

Concord Oct 14th

James Munroe & Co,Please to send me a dozen copies of Mr. Emerson’s Address by the bearer—

1844

From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.

“EMANCIPATION IN THE ... INDIES....”

Any similar comment from you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_United_States_(1797)






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Yrs respecty

Henry D. Thoreau.

August 1: Herman Melville got married with Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of Lemuel Shaw, the Chief Justice of Massachusetts. That night, coincidentally of course, there would be a brilliant display of northern lights over the city of Boston.1

1847

1. If the earth moved for these newlyweds, that of course would need to be put down also as coincidence. Nuptials being transacted, the couple would settle in New-York, where the groom was to write reviews for the Literary World under Evert Augustus Duyckinck. During this year, publication of OMOO: A NARRATIVE OF ADVENTURES IN THE SOUTH SEAS, a narrative found by its audience to be titillatingly suggestive of its creator’s sexual adventurousness. There seems to be no evidence that Henry Thoreau ever glanced at this or any of Melville’s later works, after his initial perusal of TYPEE in the fall of 1846 (Thoreau seems to have stepped past Melville into more original sources such as William Ellis’s POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES).

SKY EVENT

AURORA BOREALIS






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Elizabeth Smith Miller, a white woman needless to say, appeared on the streets of Seneca Falls, New York, in “turkish trousers,” soon to be known as “bloomers.”

George Washington Briggs, a white man needless to say, printed up an American edition of Jane Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.

Learn how the hoity-toity live! Be aware of the anguish and torment

and uncertainty of their social striving!

At very much the other end of the accepted local social scale, Henry Bibb presented his NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF HENRY BIBB, AN AMERICAN SLAVE, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF.

[T]he only weapon of self defence I could use successfully,was that of deception.

We know that Bibb wrote the narrative himself because we have the testimony of the editor Lucius C. Matlack –a white man needless to say– that he not only personally witnessed some of this self-writing but also then preserved the evidences of it in order to remove any possibility of doubt:

[T]he writer of this introduction is well acquainted with hishandwriting and style. The entire manuscript I have examined andprepared for the press. Many of the closing pages of it werewritten by Mr. Henry Bibb in my office. And the whole ispreserved for inspection now. An examination of it will showthat no alteration of sentiment, language, or style wasnecessary to make it what it now is, in the hands of the reader.The work of preparation for the press was that of orthographyand punctuation merely, an arrangement or the chapters, and atable of contents — little more than falls to the lot ofpublishers generally.

1849






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Also, in Wilmington, Delaware, Mary Ann Shadd put out a 12-page pamphlet, “Hints to the Colored People of the North.” This focused on antislavery reform and building a collective consciousness for blacks. Writing to the free Black community of the northern states, Shadd targeted the economic fragility of the antebellum Black proto-bourgeoisie: “We forget that we are, as a people, deficient in the ‘needful’ to support such things.” What was important was a collective liberation: “what profits a display of ourselves? Is it to be seen by one another? How does that better our condition?” Frederick Douglass’s North Star would take note of this pamphlet’s identification of “black imitation of the conspicuous consumption of whites” as a problem. Martin Robison Delany would characterize its author as “a very intelligent young lady, peculiarly eccentric.” Following this pamphlet, Shadd wrote to Douglass’s North Star about the corrupt influence of the black church over the freed blacks and insisted that the way to improve the condition of free blacks was to reject materialism “without waiting for the whites of the country.” She invited blacks to be “producers instead of mere consumers.”

In this year in which Harriet Tubman was escaping from slavery in Maryland, the Maryland Supreme Court, in response to a suit by Benjamin Roberts to have his daughter admitted to a white school, was establishing the doctrine known as “separate but equal” — and Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, who it goes without saying was a white man, was announcing the unanimous decision of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in the case of Roberts v. Boston, that the city had the unimpeachable power to racially segregate its schools if it chose to do so.

“It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.”

— Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141






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In this year, also, a British naval commander –who it goes without saying was a white man– was confessing that their 19th-Century war upon the international slave trade had been quite as utterly ineffectual as today’s “War on Drugs,” with a slippage rate of some 95 captives out of every 100 being successfully spirited past their blockading ships and retailed into their destination markets:

During 26 years, 103,000 slaves have been emancipated [in thecourse of our naval anti-slavery patrolling activities] whilein the same period, 1,795,000 slaves were actually landed in theAmericas.

At about the age of 15, the right hand of Anthony Burns was mangled in machinery (machinery which as a matter of course was entirely unshielded) while working for, it goes without saying, a white man who had hired him from his master. Nearly an inch of bone would be left permanently sticking out from his right wrist. (In addition, his face in adult life would be scarred by a burn, which is presumably why in the image we have of him his pleasant countenance is turned to one side.)

THE TRAFFIC IN MAN-BODY






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January 4: The Boston Daily Evening Traveller summarized the trial of the prisoner Washington Goode by saying that “though we believe no one now actually living” (an interesting phrase) “saw him strike the blow,” court testimony had made it very likely that they had found the right man — for instance, the blade of Goode’s knife had been demonstrated to be longer than the depth of the puncture wound. Also, from across the street on a dark and stormy night, a witness had observed the clothing worn by the attacker to resemble the clothing of the accused.2 At the conclusion of this dramatic “trial,” Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw put a good face on things by delivering a 3-hour speech to the 12 white3 men of the jury of the defendant’s peers, and then this jury of the defendant’s peers put a good face on things by staying out for a full 35 minutes before bringing back the necessary verdict, that the black defendant was guilty as charged.

2. The case of Professor John White Webster a few years later would be said to be a precedent-setting case for the finding of guilt on the basis of evidence that was exclusively circumstantial, but I have difficulty with that conceit because I simply cannot locate in this Washington Goode case any evidence that was other than of a circumstantial nature. It seems to me that the difference between the Washington Goode case and the John White Webster case was not at all any significant difference in the nature of the evidence, but merely an enormous difference in the social standing of the accused individual!3. We can know with certitude that they were white not only because contemporary records say that they were white but also because we have a record that once during this period a black man had appeared in a Boston courtroom in response to a jury summons issued in his name — and the court had simply told him to go away, that of course there must have been some mistake!

COLDBLOODED MURDER






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January 15: In downtown Boston –where everything that happens of course happens for the greater glory of God– Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw lectured Washington Goode for an hour and a half on the habits of “intemperance” which he had had, the “ungodly” associates which he had had, the “dens of crime” which he had frequented, etc., informed him that having led such a life there was simply “no hope” that the governor of the state might reduce his sentence. The lecture probably was just what Seaman Goode needed. The judge then consigned him to be hanged by the neck, on May 25, Friday, 1849 (this seems to have been a traditional day upon which to conduct public hangings), until he was dead.4 The opponents of the death penalty, to wit, the Standing Committee of the Massachusetts Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, would have a little more than four months to mobilize public opinion to bring pressure to bear on Governor George Nixon Briggs:

During those four months 24,440 signatures would be collected, petitioning the Governor Briggs to commute Seaman Goode’s sentence, from death by hanging to life in prison without any possibility of parole. For instance, Friend Joseph Ricketson, Friend Daniel Ricketson’s brother who, if I mistake not, was a birthright Quaker in good standing with his Monthly Meeting, reported that:

In addition to the 24,440 signatures mentioned, there was one petition, from Woburn, Massachusetts, bearing a total of nine signatures, which demanded that Governor Briggs remain steadfast in the plan of “exicution.”

An article would appear in the Boston Republican, pointing up the fact that in France the guillotine had been adopted, after consultation with medical men, as the least painful mode of execution, and that since the last hanging in Boston, “the Ether discovery has taken place.”

The question now arises, how shall the hanging be performed herein Boston.... Shall not the convict share also the advantage ofthis benign discovery? He is to be hanged by the neck. Shall notthis be done with the least possible pain? If we follow thespirit of the law, there would seem to be no doubt that it mustbe done with the least possible pain. And it seems equally clearthat it is within the discretion of the Sheriff, to permit anyform of alleviating the pain, which is consistent with the onething imposed upon him by the law; namely, the hanging of Goode,by the neck, until he is dead. We will not undertake todetermine, whether Humanity does not require, that the convict,if he chooses, shall be allowed the benefit of ETHER. We contentourselves with saying that it is clearly within the discretionof the Sheriff to permit the pains of the convict to be thusalleviated.

4. In fact, Boston had not hanged anyone for simple homicide since 1826, almost a quarter of a century before, and there was another prisoner, Augustus Dutee, whose sentence to be hanged was being commuted during this period to life in prison — but then, we may presume that Augustus Dutee was a white man, not only because his sentence was commuted but also because the documents do not comment on his race as they would most assuredly have commented had he been anything other than white. In addition to Dutee, seven other murderers were then serving life in Massachusetts prison after having had their sentences to be hanged commuted by the state governor.

Why Sir, even the boys, and they are worth saving, for we havenothing else to make men, and even Governors of, are now saying inour streets, “it is only a nigger.”

I have exerted myself very much for the last month in behalf ofWashington Goode; there were several petitions here and weobtained 746 signatures.






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The petition to commute the sentence of seaman Goode to life in prison without opportunity for parole that was being circulated and sponsored in Concord (either by Anna Maria Whiting, one of the town’s leading abolitionists, or by Caroline Hoar, the wife of Rockwood Hoar) is still in existence and bears, on the men’s side of the sheet, the signature of Henry David Thoreau as second in that column. It bears, on the women’s side of the sheet, the signature of his younger sister, Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau, as 5th in that column, followed in immediate succession by the signature of his mother, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, the signature of his elder sister, Helen Louisa Thoreau, the signature of his aunt Louisa Dunbar, and the signature of his Aunt Jane Thoreau. The signature of his father John Thoreau, Sr., however, appears nowhere on this petition. Why not? Thoreau’s father was 62 years old at this point and still very actively engaged in his home business. Is one to suppose that he, quite alone in his home, wanted Seaman Goode to dance on air?

The full text of that petition, as it came to be circulated in the Prisoner’s Friend, had been as follows:






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WE, THE UNDERSIGNED, solemnly protest against the intendedexecution of Washington Goode, as a crime in which we would underno circumstances participate, which we would prevent, ifpossible, and in the guilt of which we will not, by the seemingassent of silence, suffer ourselves to be implicated.

We believe the execution of this man will involve all who areinstrumental in it in the crime of murder — of the murder in coldblood of a helpless fellow being.

The arguments by which executions are generally defended arewholly wanted here. The prisoner is not one who in spite of goodinstruction and example, for purposes of avarice, revenge orlust, deliberately planned the murder of a fellow-being. Theintended victim of law was a man of misfortune from birth, madeby his social position, and still more by the color which Godgave him, the victim of neglect, of oppression, of prejudice, ofall the evils inflicted upon humanity by man. If in a paroxysmof drunken rage, he killed his opponent, (and this is the utmostalleged against him,) his case comes far short of premeditatedmurder.

But even this fact is extremely doubtful. It is supported onlyby the most suspicious testimony, and such as would not haveweighed with any jury to touch the life of a white man. And sincethe trial, facts have come to light materially lessening thecredibility of the evidence which led to conviction.

The glaring unfairness of his mode of trial is of itselfsufficient ground for this protest. The maxim which gives to theaccused a trial by his peers was essentially violated. In acommunity where sympathy with a colored man is a rare andunpopular sentiment, the prisoner should have been tried by ajury composed partly, at least, of his own race. This violationof the principles of equal justice demands our solemn protest.

We claim also that the petition of more than 20,000 of our fellow-citizens to have this man’s life spared, demands respect. Such anumber of voluntary petitioners, all upon one side, indicates thewill of the sovereign people of the State, that the penaltyshould be commuted. Our respect for the right of the people to avoice and a just influence in the administration of publicjustice, also demands this solemn protest against the legalmurder of Washington Goode.






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December: Before Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, attorney Charles Sumner argued that the doctrine of “separate but equal” treatment of the races was an inherent contradiction — simply because Boston’s 2,085 black students were being educated in segregated schools, their education was obviously unequal and therefore essentially discriminatory and therefore contrary to the legal principle of indifference to person. Judge Shaw found this argument unpersuasive.

In Russia, a most exceedingly realistic mock execution of Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevski and others was staged by the Tsar.

BANG-Hey-I’m-Still-Alive!

After Waldo Emerson declined to keep his promise to write a review of A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, James Russell Lowell reviewed it for Massachusetts Quarterly Review. Briefly, it would seem he felt that Henry Thoreau might make a good nature writer or travel writer if some editor were to discover some way to prevent this author from being so self-indulgently digressive and philosophical and autobiographical. Here is Lowell as he would seem in 1880 to an English caricaturist:






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In about this year, Albert Sands Southworth (1811-1894) and Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808-1901) photographed Herman Melville’s father-in-law. Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw:

1850






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May 4, Thursday: Professor John White Webster’s lawyers submitted a petition for a writ of error against Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, because of his allegedly faulty instructions to the jury:

Nathaniel Hawthorne paid his first visit to the Boston Athenæum, as the guest of a paying member. He might not be willing himself to become a paying member rather than a moocher, but he certainly recognized quality when he saw it:

An issue of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal:

The library is in a noble hall, and looks splendidlywith its vista of alcoves.

CHAMBERS’ EDINBURGH JOURNAL

ISSUE OF MAY 4

Hawthorne’s "American Notebook" in the Pierpont Morgan Library.

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/50/MAY/4may1850_Chamberss.pdf






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Mid-September: For $6,500.00 (of which $3,000.00 was borrowed from father-in-law Lemuel Shaw) the Melvilles “bought the farm” near the summer residence of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and near where the Hawthornes were living, something they would learn to regret and regret and regret, the farm being the 160-acre “Arrowhead” near Mount Greylock and North Adams, Massachusetts with the “Captain David Bush” house dating to 1780 constructed around one of those colonial massive central chimneys:

(This was in the sticks, of course, but since they would accommodate three household servants there, we shouldn’t exactly get the impression that the family was roughing it.)

The mountain known as Greylock is in the Berkshire Hills along the north-west border of Massachusetts, north of Pittsfield and in the vicinity of the town of North Adams. It is the highest point in the state. Its name is said to be derived from that of an early 18th-Century chief of the Waranokes.

April 7, Monday: The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s first sermon as a Methodist circuit-rider.5

Herman Melville’s father-in-law Judge Lemuel Shaw refused to help save from slavery the teenage runaway Thomas Simms (Sims).

Soon Waldo Emerson sought consolation in his journal:

A foot-note of the Report of the Senate of Massachusetts on the case would put the matter of responsibility most succinctly:

1851

5. Conway’s journal for the critical years 1851, 1852, and 1853, never published, is now present on the internet in holograph image at http://deila.dickinson.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/ownwords&CISOPTR=23390

...a fine old farm-house –a mile from any otherdwelling, and dipped to the eaves in foliage–surrounded by mountains, old woods, and Indianponds....

AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II

It is now as disgraceful to be a Bostonian as it was hitherto acredit.... I met an episcopal clergyman, & allusion being madeto Mr Webster’s treachery, he replied “Why, do you know I thinkthat the great action of his life?” I opened a paper today inwhich he pounds on the old strings in a letter to the WashingtonBirth Day feasters at N.Y. “Liberty! liberty!” Pho! Let MrWebster for decency’s sake shut his lips once & forever on thisword. The word liberty in the mouth of Mr Webster sounds likethe word love in the mouth of a courtezan.... What a moment waslost when Judge Lemuel Shaw declined to affirm theunconstitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law!

RESISTING THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/19/00DECADE/04/1904_MoncureDanielConwayI.pdf

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/19/00DECADE/04/1904_MoncureDanielConwayII.pdf






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It would have been impossible for the U.S. marshal thussuccessfully to have resisted the law of the State, without theassistance of the municipal authorities of Boston, and thecountenance and support of a numerous, wealthy, and powerfulbody of citizens. It was in evidence that 1500 of the mostwealthy and respectable citizens —merchants, bankers, andothers— volunteered their services to aid the marshal on thisoccasion.... No watch was kept upon the doings of the marshal,and while the State officers slept, after the moon had gone down,in the darkest hour before daybreak, the accused was taken outof our jurisdiction by the armed police of the city of Boston.

Moloch in State Street, by John Greenleaf WhittierTHE moon has set: while yet the dawnBreaks cold and gray,Between the midnight and the mornBear off your prey!

On, swift and still! the conscious streetIs panged and stirred;Tread light! that fall of serried feetThe dead have heard!

The first drawn blood of Freedom’s veinsGushed where ye tread;Lo! through the dusk the martyr-stainsBlush darkly red!

Beneath the slowly waning starsAnd whitening day,What stern and awful presence barsThat sacred way?

What faces frown upon ye, darkWith shame and pain?Come these from Plymouth’s Pilgrim bark?Is that young Vane?

Who, dimly beckoning, speed ye onWith mocking cheer?Lo! spectral Andros, Hutchinson,And Gage are here!

For ready mart or favoring blastThrough Moloch’s fire,




Steel engraving made from a drawing by William Henry Bartlett in 1839 or 1840



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Flesh of his flesh, unsparing, passedThe Tyrian sire.

Ye make that ancient sacrificeOf Man to Gain,Your traffic thrives, where freedom dies,Beneath the chain.

Ye sow to-day; your harvest, scornAnd hate, is near;How think ye freemen, mountain-born,The tale will hear?

Thank God! our mother State can yetHer fame retrieve;To you and to your children letThe scandal cleave.

Chain Hall and Pulpit, Court and Press,Make gods of gold;Let honor, truth, and manlinessLike wares be sold.

Your hoards are great, your walls are strong,But God is just;The gilded chambers built by wrongInvite the rust.

What! know ye not the gains of CrimeAre dust and dross;Its ventures on the waves of timeForedoomed to loss!

And still the Pilgrim State remainsWhat she hath been;Her inland hills, her seaward plains,Still nurture men!

Nor wholly lost the fallen mart;Her olden bloodThrough many a free and generous heartStill pours its flood.

That brave old blood, quick-flowing yet,Shall know no check,Till a free people’s foot is setOn Slavery’s neck.

Even now, the peal of bell and gun,And hills aflame,Tell of the first great triumph wonIn Freedom’s name.

The long night dies: the welcome grayOf dawn we see;Speed up the heavens thy perfect day,God of the free!

circa April: When I read the account of the carrying back of the fugitive into slavery, which was readlast sunday evening –and read also what was not read here that the man who made the prayer on the wharf wasDaniel Foster of Concord I could not help feeling a slight degree of pride because of all the towns in theCommonwealth Concord was the only one distinctly named as being represented in that tea-party –and as shehad a place in the first so would have a place in this the last & perhaps next most important chapter of the Histof Mass. But my second feeling, –when I reflected how short a time that gentleman has resided in this town, –was one of doubt & shame –because the men of Concord in recent times have done nothing to entitle them tothe honor of having their town named in such a connexion.






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October: Publication of a ms that had been entitled “The Whale,” as MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE, dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1833, Dr. James Cowles Prichard had pioneered “the term monomania, meaning madness affecting one train of thought … adopted in late times instead of melancholia.”

Melville’s father-in-law, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, had utilized this concept in a legal opinion in 1844, and Melville had deployed it in 1849 in MARDI AND A VOYAGE THITHER, and here he deployed it as the defining characteristic of the psychology of the maimed Captain Ahab. This book was considered, however, by Herman Melville’s boss at the Literary World, Evert Augustus Duyckinck, to be immoral.6 Immoral it may not be —

but is it accurate? It states that the skeleton of Bentham hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, and although it is true that Bentham had suggested that the bodies of the dead be used as remembrances of them, and invented the term “auto-icon” for such use, and had suggested that the dead person’s face might be preserved with copal varnish, it is also the case that his own face looked so gruesome after death and autopsy that the embalming surgeon preserved the body merely by placing a waxen image on

6. One wonders whether Bronson Alcott ever read this MOBY-DICK book. In Chapter 35 we read that you’ll never get rich if you let yourself get taken in tow by a “sunken-eyed young Platonist.” In Chapter 78 we read of a honey-collector in Ohio who leaned into a honey tree, slipped, and was embalmed, and then Melville hits us with this punchline: “How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there?”






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top of his dressed-up skull.

His body bones are not within the dummy underneath that authentic wax-encrusted skull in the closet at Cambridge, but this Melvillian disposition of Bentham’s body bones is something of which I have not elsewhere seen confirmation:

But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of thestranded whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his trueform. Not at all. For it is one of the more curious things aboutthis Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of hisgeneral shape. Though Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton, which hangs forcandelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctlyconveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman,with all Jeremy’s other leading personal characteristics; yetnothing of this kind could be inferred from any Leviathan’sarticulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mereskeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fullyinvested and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis






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that so roundingly envelopes it.

There was a speed and pulling contest between various designs of locomotives on the Western Railroad between Wilmington MA and Lowell MA. William Mason, a textile manufacturer of Taunton MA, witnessed this contest and determined to enter the business of manufacturing locomotives. Perhaps some of Mr. Mason’s locomotives would assist some Americans in obtaining the comparative freedom of Canada, Americans such as this Henry Williams who was fleeing his father and owner, locomotives such as this one pulling the 5PM train north out of Concord, upon which our Henry had positioned this fleeing Henry.

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD






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May 28, Sunday: Early in the morning, Judge Lemuel Shaw of the Supreme Judicial Court sentenced the murderer James Wilson to be “confined to hard labor in the House of Correction for one year from the 26th of May, 1854, and then to be taken to the place of execution, and hanged by the neck until dead.” He then left the courthouse, freeing it for the important proceedings of the Burns case.

Judge Edward Greeley Loring then sat, and ruled that since the defense would be allowed more time to prepare if someone was accused of writing a bad check for $25.00, he considered that in a case affecting a man’s liberty, it was reasonable and within the discretion of the court to allow some further delay.

In his Ascension Sunday sermon the Reverend Theodore Parker condemned Edward Greeley Loring, a teacher at Harvard College who doubled as a judge of probate in the Massachusetts court system, for issuing the warrant as United States Commissioner for Anthony Burns’s arrest, and thus, in effect, for causing the murder of the 1 out of the 184 courthouse guards, James Batchelder who had been unfortunately shot to death during the citizen riot. The Woburn ladies of the congregation took up a collection and sent Commissioner Loring thirty pieces of silver.

May 28. 12 M. —By boat to Lee’s Cliff. The night-warbler , after his strain, drops down almostperpendicularly into a tree-top and is lost.

May 28: The inhumanity of science concerns me, as when I am tempted to kill a rare snake that I mayascertain its species. I feel that this is not the means of acquiring true knowledge.

September 1, Monday: William Ellerton Alger was born at Boston.

Henry Thoreau wrote to Bronson Alcott in Walpole, New Hampshire.

Concord Sep 1st ’56Mr Alcott,

1854

1856






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I remember that in the spring you invited me to visit you. I feel in-clined to spend a day or two with you and on your hills at this sea-son, returning perhaps by way of Brattleboro. What if I should take the cars for Walpole next Friday morning? Are you at home?— and will it be convenient and agreeable to you to see me then?— I will await an answer.I am but poor company, and it will not be worth the while for you to put yourself out on my account; yet from time to time I have some thoughts which would be the better for an airing. I also wish to get some hints from September on the Connecticut to help me under-stand that season on the Concord;– to snuff the musty fragrance of the decaying year in the primitive woods. There is considerable cel-lar room in my nature for such stores, a whole row of bins waiting to be filled before I can celebrate my Thanksgiving. Mould is the richest of soils, yet I am not mould. It will always be found that one flourishing institution exists & battens on another mouldering one. The Present itself is parasitic to this extent.Your fellow travellerHenry D. Thoreau

Lemuel Shaw, Herman Melville’s father-in-law, wrote to his son Samuel that:

I suppose you have been informed by some of the family,how very ill, Herman has been. It is manifest to mefrom Elizabeth’s letters, that she has felt greatanxiety about him. When he is deeply engaged in one ofhis literary works, he confines him[self] to hard studymany hours in the day, with little or no exercise, &this specially in winter for a great many daystogether. He probably thus overworks himself & bringson severe nervous affections. He has been advisedstrongly to break off this labor for some time, & takea voyage or a journey, & endeavor to recruit....






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April 21, Tuesday: Lemuel Shaw, Jr., Herman Melville’s brother-in-law, wrote his brother Samuel:

Henry Thoreau received a letter from Eben J. Loomis presumably in Cambridge.

April 21. Tuesday. Mr. Loomis writes me that he saw two barn swallows [Barn Swallow Hirundorustica] in Cambridge April 1st! I have the Corema Conradii from Plymouth, in bloom.It snows hard all day. If it did not melt so fast, would be a foot deep. As it is, is about three inches on a level.

1857

Elizabeth has gone to Pittsfield to set her house inreadiness to receive her husband whom she expectssometime in May. A new book by Herman called “TheConfidence Man” has recently been published. I have notread it; but have looked at it & dipped into it, & fearit belongs [to] that horribly uninteresting class ofnonsensical books he is given to writing — where thereare pages of crude theory & speculation to every lineof narrative — & interspersed with strained &ineffectual attempts to be humorous. I wish he couldor would do better, when he went away he was dispirited& ill — & this book was left completed in thepublisher’s hands.

EBEN J. LOOMIS






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Ailing, Lemuel Shaw retired after thirty years as Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Assured of an inheritance from his father-in-law, Herman Melville sailing around the Horn on the clipper Meteor, abandoned the voyage at San Francisco, then settled in New-York.

This was the San Francisco he had found:

Since about 1855 somebody had created a MINING SCENE WITH A FLUME AND MINERS, INCLUDING A CALIFORNIA INDIAN (?) IN FOREGROUND.

During this year Melville had “Misgivings” about our fair land linked so tightly to human slavery:

When ocean-clouds over inland hillsSweep storming in late autumn brown,

And horror the sodden valley fills,And the spire falls crashing in the town,

I muse upon my country’s ills– The tempest bursting from the waste of TimeOn the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.

1860

VIEW THIS DAGUERREOTYPE

http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/Exhibits/nativeamericans/lg30.html

You may consult this in Journal of Melville’s Voyage in the Clipper Ship, “Meteor,” published in 1929.




This drawing is by Mark Summers.



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Nature’s dark side is heeded now—(Ah! Optimist-cheer disheartened flown)—

A child may read the moody browOf yon black mountain lone.

With shouts the torrents down the gorges go, And storms are formed behind the storm we feel:The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.

March 30, SaturdayLemuel Shaw died.

March 30. High water, — up to sixth slat (or gap) above Smith's second post. It is said to have beensome nine inches higher about a month ago, when the snow first went off.R.W.E. lately found a Norway pine cut down in Stow’s wood by Saw Mill Brook.According to Channing’s account, Walden must have skimmed nearly, if not entirely, over again once since the11th or 12th, or after it had been some time completely clear. It seems, then, that in some years it may thaw andfreeze again.

1861






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CHIEF JUSTICES

OF THE

MASSACHUSETTS SUPREME JUDICIAL COURT

George Tyler Bigelow (1810-1878) Chief Justice 1860-1868When George Tyler Bigelow graduated from Harvard at age 19, he was deemed too young to begin a career in law and so was sent to Maryland to gain a broader knowledge of the world through teaching. Upon his return to Massachusetts, he read law in his father’s office and was admitted to the bar in 1835. Bigelow served in both chambers of the state legislature and as a common pleas judge, and was later appointed an Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, where he eventually succeeded Lemuel Shaw as Chief Justice.

Reuben Atwater Chapman (1801-1873) Chief Justice 1868-1873

Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice 1830-1860

George Tyler Bigelow, Chief Justice 1860-1868

Reuben Atwater Chapman, Chief Justice 1868-1873

Horace Gray, Chief Justice 1873-1882

Marcus Morton, Chief Justice 1882-1890

Walbridge Abner Field, Chief Justice 1890-1899

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Chief Justice 1899-1902

Marcus Perrin Knowlton, Chief Justice 1902-1911

Arthur Prentice Rugg, Chief Justice 1911-1938

Fred Tarbell Field, Chief Justice 1938-1947

Stanley Elroy Qua, Chief Justice 1947-1956

Raymond Sanger Wilkins, Chief Justice 1956-1970

G. Joseph Tauro, Chief Justice 1970-1976

Edward Francis Hennessey, Chief Justice 1976-1989

Paul Julian Liacos, Chief Justice 1989-1996

Herbert Putnam Wilkins, Chief Justice 1996-1999






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Unlike many of his predecessors, Reuben Atwater Chapman was not born into a family of wealth or social prominence. His early education as a western Massachusetts farmer’s son was in the common schools of his county. Before devoting himself to law he pursued several different paths, applying the whole of his efforts to every experience. Due to this background, he later recalled with great satisfaction his role as Massachusetts elector-at-large when he cast his ballot for Abraham Lincoln for the Presidency of the United States. Chapman regarded the science of jurisprudence not merely as “the collected reason of ages” but rather as “combining the principles of original justice with the infinite variety of human affairs.” Loathe to see justice defeated by technicalities, he served as a commissioner in framing the statutes which simplified the proceedings, practice, and rules of evidence in court.

Horace Gray (1828-1902) Chief Justice 1873-1882Fellow Harvard Law School students Horace Gray and C.C. Langdell studied law by examining all the decided cases bearing upon the point immediately under consideration. Langdell went on to implement the case-study method of instruction at Harvard. Gray became Reporter of Decisions of the Supreme Judicial Court, which was a prominent position viewed as a stepping-stone to the bench. Appointed an Associate Justice at the age of 36, the youngest man ever made a judge of that court, Gray reputedly was gifted with the ability to glance at a printed page and retain what he read. This remarkable faculty enabled him to study legal questions as he had in school, and his judicial opinions typically made a chronological examination of all important decisions bearing upon a question at issue.

Marcus Morton (1819-1891) Chief Justice 1882-1890After being admitted to the bar, Marcus Morton served as a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1853, and of the lower house of the Legislature in 1858, serving with his father, Marcus, in the same sessions. Morton is said to have been thorough, reliable, and rapid in assimilating materials and dispatching business, and he decided cases according to his convictions, learning, and native shrewdness. Possessing a direct and vigorous sense of justice, he viewed cases comprehensively, aiming at “substantial justice” rather than what he described as “the sharp quillets of the law.” His jury summaries were characterized by their simplicity, impartiality, and accurate sense of proportion.

Walbridge Abner Field (1833-1899) Chief Justice 1890-1899Walbridge Abner Field possessed a wide grasp of principles, mastery of procedures, and sound common sense. Before taking a seat on the bench, he was a math instructor at Dartmouth College, an Assistant U.S. District Attorney, and then an Assistant Attorney General of the United States. His appointment to Chief Justice in 1881 met with unqualified approval. Hon. James Dunbar eulogized him by saying “He had the simplicity of an open ingenuous mind, and the grasp and reach and analytic power of the trained reasoner and disputant.” Field’s precision and absolute conscientiousness made the Court’s move from its old quarters in the Court House on Court Street to the “new” Court House in Pemberton Square run quite smoothly.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) Chief Justice 1899-1902Holmes’ book, THE COMMON LAW, published in 1881, established his reputation as a legal scholar of the first magnitude. It also led to a professorship at Harvard, and to an appointment as Associate Justice on the Supreme Judicial Court in 1882. Later, after having been elevated to chief justice, Holmes wrote one of his earliest and best-known dissents in Vegelahn v. Gunter (167 Mass. 92) where he upheld the right of striking employees to picket their employer’s premises. After twenty years of eminent service in Massachusetts, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Holmes an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, where he seat for thirty years before retiring at the age of ninety-one.

Marcus Perrin Knowlton (1839-1918) Chief Justice 1902-1911






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During his tenure on the Supreme Judicial Court, Marcus Perrin Knowlton wrote 1,570 majority opinions and 29 dissents, a volume of output exceeding that of all but one of his predecessors. Knowlton’s successor, Arthur Prentice Rugg, remarked “No other magistrate in the history of Massachusetts has contributed so much to the visible fabric of our jurisprudence...with the single exception of Chief Justice Shaw.” Upon his death the Springfield Republican noted, “It was no uncommon thing at the close of the arguments in a long and complicated case for him to state his findings fully and in detail before leaving the bench, and it was not uncommon that this offhand statement became the formal report of the case to the full court.”

Arthur Prentice Rugg (1862-1938) Chief Justice 1911-1938Arthur Prentice Rugg was first noted for his skill and success as a trial lawyer, and was appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court at the early age of forty-four. For the next thirty-two years, twenty-seven of which were served as Chief Justice, he helped to shape Massachusetts jurisprudence by writing a total of 2,945 opinions. Fred Tarbell Field wrote: “It is not an exaggeration to say that nearly the entire body of the law of the commonwealth as declared by the court can be found stated-in many aspects first stated-in opinions written by him.”

Fred Tarbell Field (1876-1950) Chief Justice 1938-1947Despite being discouraged from a career in the law by his uncle Chief Justice Walbridge Abner Field, Fred Tarbell Field pursued his legal ambition. He graduated from Harvard Law School, served in the office of three consecutive Massachusetts attorneys-general where he developed an expertise in tax matters, and, after embarking in a private practice, was eventually appointed an Associate Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court. Appointed directly from the bar, he was the first justice in twenty-four years to come to the bench without prior judicial service. It was said of the opinions he wrote while serving as chief justice that once he “had completed an opinion there was little else that could be said with profit on the point.”

Stanley Elroy Qua (1880-1965) Chief Justice 1947-1956Stanley Elroy Qua held a great distaste for verbosity and what he called “wobbly thinking,” and would instruct lawyers to “Write opinions at whatever length you wish, but cut them down.” His own opinions were characterized by economy and clarity, and according to one eulogist, usually arrived at “a conclusion which instinct as well as intellect applaud(ed).” Still vital, capable, and sagacious when he retired after serving twenty-two years on the court, Qua deplored the commonly held proposition that a judge should retire at seventy.

Raymond Sanger Wilkins (1891-1971) Chief Justice 1956-1970Raymond Sanger Wilkins was a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, served as a field artillery officer in World War I, was a member of the Supreme Judicial Court for twenty-six years and chief justice for fourteen. Of Wilkin’s tenure on the bench, Justice Ammi B. Cutter wrote, “In a period of change, he guided the court with perception and restraint, properly recognizing new legal concepts without disregarding the virtues of certainty and stability...His opinions are clear, unusually compact, thorough, and precise.” Of his many achievements off the bench, one stands out as illustration of his multi-faceted nature. Upon the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his college class, Wilkins conducted the Boston Pops Orchestra in a performance of his own composition.

G. Joseph Tauro (1906-1994) Chief Justice 1970-1976Having used innovative and persistent leadership to overhaul many of the procedures of the Superior Court, including the adoption of rules allowing oral discovery in civil cases, G. Joseph Tauro was appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court, where his efforts to improve the Commonwealth’s court system continued. Recognizing an urgent need to alleviate the intolerable caseload crushing the court, he worked in cooperation with the governor, the legislature, and the bar to help establish the Appeals Court as the Commonwealth’s intermediate appellate court. Thus, the Supreme Judicial Court was able to concentrate on those cases of broad social impact.

Edward Francis Hennessey (1919- ) Chief Justice 1976-1989






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Edward F. Hennessey presided over the Supreme Judicial Court during a period marked by upheaval in, and improvement of, the Massachusetts court system. During his tenure it was reorganized, and the Board of Bar Overseers and the Judicial Conduct Commission were both created. As a justice, Hennessey exhibited a fundamental concern for fairness and human dignity. Of particular note were his decisions relating to individual liberties. While the U.S. Supreme Court retreated on personal rights issues, Hennessey’s Supreme Judicial Court moved forward, recognizing the function of the Massachusetts Constitution in not only protecting those personal rights but in expanding them in such areas as women’s rights, race discrimination, the right-to-counsel, and the right to privacy.

Paul Julian Liacos (1929-1999) Chief Justice 1989-1996By age twenty-three, Chief Justice Liacos had already been admitted to the bar and had earned a master’s degree in law from Harvard. After teaching at Boston University for two decades, he was appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court where he has developed a reputation as a scholar, a civil libertarian, and the court’s liberal anchor. He is an authority on the law of evidence and is the author of the state’s leading treatise on evidence. On his appointment as chief justice, he stated that his first priority was to make the courthouse safe for the public and the employees.

Herbert Putnam Wilkins (1930- ) Chief Justice 1996-1999Herbert Putnam Wilkins is the son of another chief justice, Raymond S. Wilkins. Herbert Wilkins followed in his father’s footsteps by attending Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and was appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court by Governor Frank Sargent in 1972. He served as an associate justice for twenty-four years before being appointed chief justice in 1996. Chief Justice Wilkins has a reputation as a moderate jurist and is considered an expert in probate and corporate law.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at <[email protected]>.

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

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Bearing in mind that this is America, "where everything belongs," the primary intent of such a notice is to prevent some person or corporate entity from misappropriating the materials and sequestering them as property for censorship or for profit.



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Prepared: April 2, 2013






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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request wehave pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out ofthe shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). Whatthese chronological lists are: they are research reportscompiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data moduleswhich we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining.To respond to such a request for information, we merely push abutton.






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Commonly, the first output of the program has obviousdeficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modulesstored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, andthen we need to punch that button again and do a recompile ofthe chronology — but there is nothing here that remotelyresembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know andlove. As the contents of this originating contexture improve,and as the programming improves, and as funding becomesavailable (to date no funding whatever has been needed in thecreation of this facility, the entire operation being run outof pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweakingand recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation ofa generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward andupward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place your requests with <[email protected]>.Arrgh.

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