LIFE OF WALTER QUINTIN GRESHAM
1832-1895
CHAPTER I
BIRTH, ANCESTRY, AND EARLY YEARS
Mrs. Gresham's birth
and ancestry - Conditions in Kentucky in the 40's and '50's - Her
father's religion and politics
Meets Walter Q. Gresham, a law student at Corydon - His birth and
ancestry
Account of "Old Uncle Dennis" Pennington, one of Indiana's first
settlers and foremost anti-slavery men
Pennington's Long Legislative Career- Change of Indiana's
capital from Vincennes to Corydon
Harrison County's first settler, Major John Harbison - Rescue of
Harbison's stepchildren from the indians
Gresham's school
days, study of law and admission to the bar - His partnership with T.
C. Slaughter - Early practice.
I was born in Louisville, Kentucky,
February 11, 1839. Thomas McGrain,
my father, was a native of Dublin, Ireland. After the execution of
Robert Emmet, my grandfather kept up his opposition to the British
government until he learned that if he would escape prosecution, and
perhaps the fate of his leader, he must leave his native land, so he
fled to America. He brought with him his two sons Thomas, my
father,
then seven, and James, two years younger and settled at Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. It was planned that my grandmother, Catherine Bacon
McGrain, and the two daughters, Eliza and Marie, who were older than
the boys, should follow when a home had been prepared. But they never
came. Instead, on the death of my grandfather, which occurred a few
years after his arrival in Pittsburgh, they accepted the invitation of
my grandmother's only brother, Major Matthew Bacon, an unmarried man,
to make their home with him in Dublin.
Matthew Bacon had entered the British
army in early youth as an ensign,
served his crown loyally through many grades, mostly in India, until
retired as a major, and then lived to a ripe old age. He died in 1867,
at No. 3 Hume Street, Dublin, surviving his sister and nieces. After
their death my Uncle Matthew wrote, in 1862, that while he would
liberally remember his church (the Roman Catholic), he did not propose
to leave it his all, and he wanted my sister, Lyde, to come and cheer
his declining days. She went to Dublin, lived with him until he died,
and then remained there. My father said he was glad to have my sister
go because it closed the family breach that had existed since Emmet's
time. Matthew Bacon's sympathies, like those of many British subjects,
whether Englishmen or Irish, during our family quarrel, as I prefer to
call "The War of the Rebellion" or * The War between the States," went
with the American government, and he was much gratified that my husband
went into the "Yankee" army. Thus he ran counter not only to the views
of his government, but also to the views of his nephew, my father, and
of his grand-niece. I early learned that we should be tolerant of the
opinions of others and that political views never should, as they too
often do, mar social relations.
My grandfather left some money to his
two sons, which their guardian
appropriated to his own use. That inbred Irish spirit of revolt and his
strong trait of self reliance prompted my father, while yet in his
early teens, to lead his brother from the guardian's home. They went to
work for a tinner, the first opening that presented
itself. They
soon learned the trade, and before his majority my father had a shop of
his own. He prospered, and in due time married Matilda Reed, the
daughter of a Presbyterian minister from the north of Ireland. From
Pittsburgh, with his young wife, he moved to Frankfort, Kentucky, where
he established a tin and hardware store. His business prospered at
Frankfort, but he wanted a larger field, so he moved to Louisville,
where he built a foundry for the manufacture of stoves. The Louisville
venture succeeded from the start. We first lived on Second Street, in
the house still standing next to Christ Church on the north. It was
there I was born.
My father was born a Roman Catholic,
but had become a Methodist. Later
on he became a Presbyterian, through the influence of my maternal
grandmother, Jane Gray, who lived with us. But with all my father's
changes of religion, he never entirely lost his predilection for and
connection with the Roman Catholic church. Every Christmas he gave a
present to all the Catholic orphans in town. For a time he sent several
of my sisters and myself to a Roman Catholic convent at Bardstown,
Kentucky.
One day my father brought home with
him, from the Catholic orphan
asylum, a boy named Daniel G. Griffin, who had come to work in the
store. His parents were Irish immigrants, who had settled for a time in
Nova Scotia, but died soon after they reached Louisville. I remember my
mother saying, "We have eight children now; don't you think we have
enough without adopting others? His answer was Irish: "But, my dear, I
was an orphan once myself." That settled it. Dan was received into the
family, educated with the rest of us, and sent to the Kentucky Military
Institute along with my brother Tom. The only time he ever crossed my
father was when he "went in" as Adjutant of the 38th Indiana
Volunteers. Before his death and before the close of the war, he was a
brevet brigadier general of volunteers.
While my father was a pro slavery
man, he was not, at least at the
start, wedded to the system. He early took to other kinds of property
than the few slaves he owned. I only remember Horace, the porter in the
store, and a few household servants —Winnie Johnson, the cook, her son,
Booze, and a couple of maid servants. I called Winn "Mammy." She was
always my friend, and made me the confidant of all her secrets, except
who was Booze's father. My mother with her Pennsylvania training never
could comprehend the negro character, and was not unlike many a woman
who had even been reared among them, no match for them in finesse.
In politics my father was a Whig and
a great admirer of Henry Clay. On
the occasion of one of Mr. Clay's visits to Louisville it was
before
1850 my father took my eldest brother, one of my sisters, and myself to
a reception at the Louisville Hotel to see him. I still remember how
gracious Mr. Clay was to me, a small girl. When the Whig party broke up
and the American or Know-Nothing party took its place in Kentucky, my
father became a Democrat, and later, after the assaults of the
Abolitionists, an extreme pro slavery man and Secessionist.
One summer we occupied the country
place of General, afterwards
President, Zachary Taylor, a few miles east of Louisville on the Ohio
River. It was considered an old place even then. It was built in 1790
by Richard Taylor, a Virginian by birth, one of Kentucky's early
leading citizens and the father of Zachary Taylor. It
still stands
well preserved.
There was a path the darkies had,
near to and up and down the river,
with by-paths which they traveled at night from one place to another.
The whole family, including the darkies, lived well. My father's
business often took him to New Orleans. He sent us thence oysters by
the barrel, bananas by the bunch, and venison by the quarter. Many were
the midnight suppers old Winn had in the kitchen. While my father was a
most liberal provider, he insisted on young girls eating light suppers.
Often I would get up in the night and partake of Winn's spread. "Just
starvin the chilun to death," she would say. And then when I would
not want to get up in the morning and could eat nothing, my father was
sure I had eaten too much supper. But he never knew about the second
supper. Old Winn was an excellent cook but never had a recipe. After I
was grown I asked her for one. Her answer was, "I ain't got no
receipt.' "How do you cook without a recipe?" I inquired. "I jest
makes things accordin' to what I'se got,' was her reply. We liked the
Taylor place so well we stayed there a year. I remember that at
Christmas I saw and enjoyed eggnog for the first time.
The taste for country life thus
acquired led my father, on October 10,
1849, to trade with Colonel Peter Kintner for the Cedar Glade Farm,
near Corydon, Indiana. A store on Main Street in Louisville was given
for the farm. Of course, the Colonel got the better of the bargain. He
was able to live in ease in Paris on the rental of the store, which
enhanced in value as the years went by, while we lived in Louisville
and on the farm, and kept open house at both places.
By the middle of the '50's we gave up
our Louisville residence, but my
father continued in business there until 1862. My father was not a
sharp trader; he never made money that way. He was an easy master. He
made it possible for Horace to buy his freedom. Horace was an educated
darkey, and the superintendent of a colored Sunday school in
Louisville. Before his freedom I often went with him to teach a class
of eight little mulatto girls, pretty and almost white. Several were
the daughters of their masters.
There was not much severity or
physical cruelty visited on the slaves
in Louisville or in that part of Kentucky with which I was familiar.
The fear of being sold down the river was a great deterrent influence
on the slave, and public opinion had its restraining influence on the
master. A sale "down the river" always created a great commotion among
the slaves and the children. The slaves never protested to the masters,
but the latter always heard of it, for the white children never failed
to carry the statements made by the slaves to the elders, would ask
questions, and avow their sympathy in terms that hurt more than the
assaults of the Abolitionists, who, we were taught, were fiends
incarnate.
Winnie, our cook, and her son Booze
went with us to Indiana. The boy
remained there and thus secured his freedom. While Winnie was in
Indiana she was free, but a slave when she returned with us to
Kentucky a status that illustrates the Dred Scott case. But
Winnie was
only a nominal slave; when she tired of Corydon she would go to
Louisville. She died there shortly before the breaking out of the war.
One day, when he was making a fire, Booze showed me the inside of his
hand and said: "See, Miss Tillie, She getting white. I'll be white same
as you when I gets to heaven." Flint indeed would have been the heart
that would not have been touched by such a plaint! And the generous
sentiments of the child were reflected in the utterances of the early
Southern jurists.
The Massachusetts Abolitionists like
Wendell Phillips were not the only
men who at that time realized that slavery was a mistake from an
economic standpoint. My father saw it, and it was partly to get away
from slavery that he bought his Indiana farm; and yet he became a
violent Secessionist. There were men in Kentucky who had inherited
slaves, but who, aside from the question of morals, preferred other
kinds of property because they regarded it as more profitable and
safer. They converted their, marketable darkies into other property.
The movement down the river was narrowing slave property. And in the
Cotton States the negroes were as well cared for as in Kentucky. They
were too valuable animals not to have the best of medical attention.
The
aged and infirm the Kentuckians could not sell, and they could not
emancipate them without giving a bond that they would not become public
charges. The bond involved liabilities that young men did not like to
incur. They coined the expression "nigger man," which they applied to
the man who owned large numbers of slaves. But the great mass of the
large slave holders outside of South Carolina were not Secessionists.
They called themselves Cooperationists. "Cooperate and compromise," was
their platform.
October 12, 1832, Mississippi
prohibited, after May 1, 1833, the
importation of slaves to be sold as merchandise, and after January 1,
1845, even actual settlers could no longer bring their slaves with them
into the State. But the "unconditional and immediate emancipation" of
the Abolitionist platform terrified them, and so "riled" the hotheads
that Beauregard fired on the flag at Sumter before Jefferson Davis gave
the word. I believe Mr. Davis did not want that shot fired. Recognized
as one of the most capable military men of the South, the little
Frenchman never afterwards was a favorite of the President of the
Confederate States of America. The bombardment of Fort Sumter
illustrates the folly of leaving to the discretion of a mere military
man the decision as to whether or not a nation shall be plunged into
war. Since the war many a Southern man and woman, in the privacy of the
home, has made this criticism of Jefferson Davis. At times he left too
much discretion to subordinates, at others not enough. Over and over I
have heard them say that that shot at Sumter was a mistake. Surely a
whole people should not be punished for the mistakes of a few leaders.
While I was a school girl at Cory
don, fourteen years of age, I met a
young law student, Walter Quintin Gresham. It was at a party. I was the
"little girl in a red dress" chaperoned by two older sisters. Not yet
twenty one, tall, handsome, and always well dressed, his antecedents
and his character came under the closest scrutiny of my family. He was
the pupil of Judge William A. Porter. After the fashion of many of the
lawyers of that time, Judge Porter had his office in the same yard or
enclosure within which stood the residence, a handsome brick dwelling.
The law office in one corner of the lot was one story of two rooms with
bookcases extending from the floor to the ceiling on all the walls, and
filled to overflowing with text books and reports. It stood under a
great elm tree with its front door opening into the street.
Colonel William Gresham, the father
of Walter Q. Gresham, was born in
Mercer County, Kentucky, September 17, 1802. He was the eldest son of
George Gresham, who was born near Petersburg, Virginia, October 9,
1776. Lawrence Gresham, the father of George, was born in England. In
1759, when a small boy, Lawrence was sent to Virginia to live with his
uncle, "indentured", it was called. After securing his "freedom" at his
majority, Lawrence served for a time in the ranks-of the Continental
army. While yet a young man, George Gresham joined the stream of
emigrants pouring into Kentucky. He "carried along" with him his
father, Lawrence, then in feeble health, and his mother. In 1801, in
Mercer County, Kentucky, George Gresham married Mary Pennington, the
only sister of Dennis Pennington, who was foremost in shaping the
constitutional and public policy of Indiana, and who was the first
counselor and adviser of Walter Q. Gresham. And safe and sane '' Old
Uncle Dennis " proved himself to be.
In 1809 George Gresham moved his
family, and entered land in Harrison
County, Indiana, where the hamlet of Lanesville is now located. He gave
ground for the churches and graveyards. In one of these cemeteries
there are buried Lawrence, George, and William Gresham, representing
three generations, and representatives of several subsequent
generations.
The mother of Walter Q. Gresham,
Sarah Davis, was born near
Springfield, Washington County, Kentucky, September 15, 1807. Her
father, John Davis, a native of Virginia, was of Scotch Irish descent,
and while yet a boy was brought by his father, Edward Davis, with the
balance of the family, from Virginia to Mercer County, Kentucky. There
were five hundred in the company including the slaves. John Davis
married, in Mercer County, Kentucky, Sally Sitz, a woman of Welsh
parentage. In 1815 he moved to Harrison County, Indiana, taking with
him the minor children of his large family of ten sons and six
daughters. Of the sixteen, fourteen lived to be three score and ten and
several past ninety, and all reared large families. Sarah, one of the
youngest, whose statements were the basis of many assertions in this
volume, was but five months short of one hundred when she died.
November 3, 1825, William Gresham
married Sarah Davis. They went to
live in a log cabin on land his father had entered, within a mile of
the father's house. On this spot Sarah lived eighty one years.
William Gresham was elected by
popular vote a colonel in the State
militia, and in 1833, although a Whig, was almost unanimously elected
sheriff of Harrison County. January 26, 1834, he was stabbed and
instantly killed while aiding a constable to arrest a desperado named
Levi Sipes.
There survived William Gresham, his
widow, Benjamin Q. A. Gresham, two
daughters, Mary Andremead and Sadie, and two younger sons, Walter
Quintin, born March 17, 1832, and William G., born July 30, 1833.
Sarah Gresham had anti-slavery views
as strong as any Abolitionist's.
She told her boys stories of the evils of slavery. She often dwelt on
the fact that she and her sister had told "Uncle Anthony" in Kentucky
that it was a sin to sell Madge down the river from her baby. She took
pride in the fact that her father moved to Indiana Territory because
Kentucky was a Slave State, and she was fond of telling how, when a
very young man, he refused as a gift from his father a strong young
negro to help him in his farming. She was wont to say, "Slavery is a
sin." But she could and did "separate the sinner from the sin," for she
was tolerant, and instead of envying the Southern women their negroes,
she pitied them. With but a few years' schooling in Kentucky and
Indiana Territory, and none of the advantages of travel, she had a
facility, directness, and force in expressing her views seldom
excelled. And what is difficult for most women, she could listen until
it was her turn to talk.
In one respect only did the boys give
the mother anxiety. It was right
for them to go out to battle for the Union, or, as she saw it, to free
the slaves but she interdicted their going to the Ohio River to
swim.
In this she could not control them. It was four miles to the river,
through rugged, hilly country called "The Knobs," but as elevating to
the imagination as the mountains of Switzerland. The boys grew rapidly,
and were large and powerful for their ages. Each had a horse, a hunting
dog, and a gun, and early developed into good marksmen. They were
favorites arid natural leaders. At sixteen Ben was stronger than any
man in the entire neighborhood, and possessed physical and moral
courage of the highest order. As the two younger boys developed, they
were only behind Ben, of all the men in the neighborhood, in physical
prowess.
As the Gresham boys grew up, they
conducted the farm and went to school
in a log schoolhouse that stood in the Gresham woods. Walter was the
student of the three, and was the image of his father. He studied
botany in the fields. He knew every tree, flower, and shrub, and spear
of grass, their seeds, and how they germinated. He studied the birds
and animals. When fifteen years of age, happy in the possession of his
first pair of boots, Walter went to church. The church services were
held in the evening in a log school-house. During the service a heavy
rain fell, swelling a small creek they had to cross to get home, almost
beyond fording. The minister, being a small man, hesitated when they
came to the stream, remarking, "I fear to try to cross." Young Gresham
told him if he would get on his back he would carry him across. The
minister did so, reaching the other side in safety. Some one asked the
boy if he did not feel afraid to undertake it. "No," he said, "why
should I, when I had the man of God on my back?"
Dennis Pennington, "Old Uncle
Dennis," was appointed by the Circuit
Court of Harrison County, administrator of Colonel Gresham's estate,
and by the Governor, sheriff of Harrison County, to fill out the
unexpired term. He was approaching sixty at the time he became a
candidate to succeed himself, and his opponent, a young man, made a
speech at a gathering in which he said that Pennington, although a
worthy man, was incapacitated, by reason of the infirmities of age,
longer to serve the people. In his reply "Uncle Dennis" said he would
challenge his opponent to a wrestling bout, and if he could not
speedily demonstrate his superiority he would retire from the contest
and urge all of his friends to vote for the younger man. The challenge
was declined, and Dennis Pennington was triumphantly elected to
the
only lucrative office he ever held, unless it be taking the census of
Indiana Territory in 1815 or the census of Harrison County, Indiana, in
1850.
A Whig in politics, Dennis Pennington
never hesitated to oppose the
principles and traditions of his party. As a candidate for
lieutenant governor of Indiana, he opposed internal improvements and
especially the construction of the Wabash and Erie Canal. He argued
that the construction of the railroads, which would soon come, for
they were a success in the East, would destroy the utility of the canal
and entail a loss of all the money expended on its construction.
Limited in education, phonetic in his style of spelling, Dennis
Pennington was impassioned at times, and almost always, where many
educated and talented men fail, effective as a public speaker. But the
people of the northern and central parts of the State went almost
solidly against him and he was defeated. And although much of the water
of the Wabash River, it is said, was used in the construction of the
Wabash Railroad, its operation soon verified Dennis Pennington's
prediction.
"Old Uncle Dennis" was generous with
the widow and the young children
in the division of the fees which had accrued at the time of Colonel
William Gresham's assassination. Samuel J. Wright, for convenience of
administration, was appointed guardian of the five Gresham children.
But it was only a nominal guardianship. The mother and "Uncle Dennis"
looked after them.
The mother married Noah Rumley. From
this marriage, there were three
children. Anthony named after Anthony Davis died in infancy. Mandy and
Kate lived to mature womanhood, Kate to three score and ten. For their
younger half sisters, the boys always manifested the greatest
solicitude, while the girls in turn thought their big brothers were
invincible. They saw them followed by droves of boys, who made the
Gresham homestead their headquarters. During a visit to a neighbor in
the southern part of the county in the midst of the war, Kate heard a
great deal of the Knights of the Golden Circle, and how they were going
to subvert the government. While the meetings were held at night, they
were not secret, and were attended by men from Kentucky. One morning at
breakfast, after an all night session, Kate said to the head of
the
family, "Ben and Wat and Bill will soon be home from the army and you
had better be careful about your meetings." After that the meetings of
the Knights were in secret.
The views of the mother, supplemented
by the stories of "Old Uncle
Dennis" and the sermons of Dennis's brother, the Reverend Walter
Pennington, an itinerant Methodist preacher, made the Gresham boys
anti-slavery as they lisped their alphabet. It was partly for Walter
Pennington that Walter Quintin Gresham was named.
Because of his relations with Walter
Q. Gresham, and because he was one
of the foremost men, if not the foremost man from a practical
standpoint, in the formative days in Indiana, Dennis Pennington and his
family deserve more than passing mention. He was born in Cumberland
County, Virginia, May 18, 1776, the fourth son of Edward Pennington,
who reared six children, five sons and one daughter, Mary, who married
George Gresham.
In the Fall of 1797 Dennis Pennington
rode with Henry Clay much of the
way from Virginia to Kentucky. He seconded Henry Clay in the latter's
efforts in 1799 to make Kentucky a Free State, she had come in in 1792
as a Slave State, and then went prospecting on the north side of the
Ohio River in the Northwest Territory. Meanwhile he farmed, taught
school, and married. At Louisville he crossed the Ohio to Clarksville,
laid out in 1784 on part of "Clark's Grant" of 150,000 acres of land
given by the State of Virginia to General George Rogers Clark and his
troops for capturing Kaskaskia and Vincennes.
On his way to the legislature, to
conventions, to the river, or just to
see the boys, "Old Uncle Dennis" would stop over night at the Gresham
homestead. His visits so excited her boys, the mother said, that she
sometimes dreaded his coming. "Wat would ask questions until
midnight,
tumble and toss the balance of the night, and then pester the life out
of us for books about France, Spain, George Rogers Clark, and the
Northwest Territory."
It was from Dennis Pennington that
the Gresham boys first heard the
story of how Clark, with a few Virginia troops and frontiersmen, took
Kaskaskia and Vincennes, and added to the Union all the territory
northwest of the Ohio River. At both these places he found slaves, who
had been introduced in 1700, and it was his assurance to the French
that Virginia, a Slave State, would allow them "to retain their
possessions and to enjoy their ancient rights and liberties," that
caused them to side with him and make his conquest of the British
garrison at Vincennes possible. "Early was the seed of strife sown,"
said "Old Uncle Dennis," and Walter Q. Gresham never forgot this in all
his contact with the pro slavery men.
Uncle Dennis told the boys of his
many visits to General Clark; how he
often found him in his log home, looking out on the Falls of the Ohio
and berating the injustice of his native State and of the National
government. Long before General Clark took to strong drink, lands
granted to him by Virginia had been sold on execution on judgments that
had been taken against him on bills he had drawn on Virginia in payment
of supplies for troops who, under his leadership, were carrying her
flag to victory and glory. Not until the time of, and due to the
efforts of Senator Daniel W. Voorhees, did the United States pay the
estate of George Rogers Clark the obligations it assumed when it "took
over from Virginia the Northwest Territory." The old man also told the
Gresham boys how, in his bitterness and resentment to his native land,
General Clark accepted a commission as major general through Citizen
Genet of the French Republic, but for the sole purpose, as Dennis
Pennington always contended, "of driving the Spanish from the
Mississippi Valley." Their American history the Gresham boys learned as
they learned their letters, and as well.
Clarksville, now almost deserted, was
at the time of Dennis
Pennington's first visit a pretentious village. Located at the foot of
"the Falls," General Clark expected it to become a great city, but when
the steamboats came it was no place for them at low water, and at high
water the swift current and "big eddy" made it a dangerous place for
boats to land. The '' Buffalo Trail,'' which became the Vin-cennes Road
from the Falls, ended at Clarksville, for there the buffalo crossed the
Ohio River in their migrations from the Illinois or prairie country to
Kentucky.
It was out the Buffalo Trail, or the
Vincennes Road, turning to the
south at the head of "the Knobs," that the Harbisons, Penningtons,
Rumleys, Davises, and Greshams went into the country lying between the
Vincennes Road and the Ohio River. And thus it was that the first
settlement in Harrison County, south of the Vincennes Road and before
the settlement at Corydon, was at Lanesville, nine miles southwest of
New Albany, as the crow flies.
It was near Lanesville that William
Pennington, Dennis's brother,
settled, lived, and died. According to the local historian, elder
members of the Pennington family were in advance of Dennis in Indiana,
and settled in Lanesville in 1792. But according to the traditions in
the Gresham family, the Penningtons were not the first settlers in and
about Lanesville. The mother of Walter Q. Gresham is my authority for
the statement that Major John Harbison preceded them all.
Major Harbison was a native of
Pennsylvania. One of the traditions is
that he was a Revolutionary soldier, but more likely he got his title
as an Indian fighter. He moved to Kentucky, and there is no doubt he
was as desperate an Indian fighter and daring an explorer in the
Northwest Territory as Boone was in Kentucky. As a man of affairs and
as a legislator he was Boone's superior. That he was in Indiana and
camped in and about Lanesville as early as 1792 is possibly true. He
may have been there even earlier, for he crossed from Kentucky and
Tennessee to the lake region many times, at periods when it was more
dangerous to traverse that region than to go through Kentucky.
During the period between the treaty
of peace with Great Britain in
1783 and Jay's treaty in 1794, the treaty of Greenville in 1795, and
the supplementary treaties with the Indians when the latter finally
acknowledged the supremacy of the ''Thirteen Fires," the thirteen
original States, Major John Harbison was typical of the men who
persisted in boring into the Northwest Territory in defiance of the
British soldiers still at Detroit and near Fort Wayne, of the Indians,
of the congress under the confederation, of Washington himself, and of
the government under the Constitution. Claiming the country by conquest
because the ally of the Indians had surrendered at Yorktown, the hardy
backwoodsman was as merciless as Walter Q. Gresham thought the
government of the United States became to the aborigines.
But when Major Harbison first visited
the Lanesville neighborhood, he
was not then seeking a place to settle; he was searching for Mrs.
English's children, who had been stolen by the Indians. Dr. English was
killed by the Cherokee Indians at Bean's Station, Tennessee. Among the
children carried into captivity were Mrs. English's two daughters,
Elizabeth and Virginia, and a son, Matthew.
"Get me my children and I will marry
you," is the way the widow
answered Major Harbison's proposal. He first stole Virginia away from
the Indians and then effected Matthew's exchange. Elizabeth, who was
four years old when she was captured, had lost all knowledge of her own
tongue at thirteen when she was recaptured by ''stratagem." Matthew,
her brother, when the Major's party located her near Detroit, returned
to the wigwams, saying he was disgusted with the whites and would never
again leave the Indians. After a few days the Indians' suspicions were
allayed, and Elizabeth was allowed to go to a distant spring. There she
was prevailed on, almost compelled, by her brother and Major
Harbison
to start with them at once for Kentucky. After a few years she regained
her own language, and in Marion County, Kentucky, married Dennis
Pennington.
Virginia English, always called
"Jinnie," married William, or "Billy"
Pennington, in 1804. It was one of the first marriages in Indiana
Territory, and the first in what is now Harrison County. This is a
matter of record. They always lived near Lanesville, within a mile of
where Walter Q. Gresham was born. Jinnie had a mind of her own. One
day, after she and Billy had been married fifty years, with children
and grandchildren scattered over several counties, Billy came home in
great trepidation. "Jinnie," said he, "we must hitch up at once and go
to Cory don and get married over again. The preacher who married us has
been indicted for horse stealing, and the conference has met and taken
away his license, thus rendering null and void all his acts. We must
get married over again at once, I tell you," Billy concluded. Jinnie
argued that a marriage that had been contracted in good faith and lived
up to for fifty years could not be affected, no matter what might have
happened to the preacher who tied the knot. Billy was insistent, and
the discussion became warm. Finally Jinnie closed the debate: "Well,
when Jinnie marries again it will not be to Billy Pennington."
Splendidly endowed by nature, Aunt
Jennie was a frequent and always
welcome guest at the Gresham homestead. Sometimes her visit would run
into days. "Aunt Betsy," as Elizabeth Pennington was called, was not
behind her sister in natural gifts, to which was added all the finesse
and cunning of her childhood's captors. And when it came to Indian
stories, Aunt Jennie did not have to draw on her imagination. She
had
all the tribes and the chiefs at her fingers' ends. She could tell
about Harmar's and St. Clair's defeats, and of "Mad Anthony" Wayne's
victory, and of scores of Indian fights not mentioned in any of the
local histories.
Elizabeth and Virginia English
Pennington were supposed to be distant
connections of William H. English, the Democratic candidate for
Vice President in 1880, and a leading man in southern Indiana in
ante-bellum days.
Major John Harbison died of cancer on
May 1, 1829, and was buried in a
cornfield a few rods back of his home and about half a mile west of
Lanesville, on the south side of the present New Albany and Corydon
Pike and within a mile of where Walter Q. Gresham was born. For years
the children were frightened by stories about his ghost and the ghosts
of the Indians he had slain appearing' just after nightfall. Here
it
was he built his first log cabin. It was years before he entered the
land, for it was not until after the final treaties with the Indians in
1804 that the land offices were opened up. No stone marks his grave,
although for that time he was a man of means and owned much realty. In
1818 it is recorded he sold one tract for $2,000 cash. His will, which
was probated May 4, 1829, and recorded in Will Record "A," at page 154,
discloses that while he acted with Dennis Pennington in politics as an
anti-slavery man, he did not free all his slaves. The appraisement of
his personal property is interesting as disclosing the values of that
time. One bay mare and colt were valued at $30; one speckled cow and
calf, at $7; one long horned cow and calf, at $10; while a white backed
heifer was considered to be worth $3. Seventeen head of young hogs
were valued at $12; one clock, $30, and one secretary, $20.
A grandson of Major Harbison, James
Harbison, was a schoolmate of
Walter Q. Gresham. During the Civil War Jim belonged to the Knights of
the Golden Circle, but was one of the Knights who voted for Gresham for
Congress in 1866 as against his own party candidate, Michael C. Kerr.
Elvira Boone was the first white
child born in southern Indiana outside
of Clark's Grant. She was born at Laconia, Boone Township, Harrison
County, in 1804. Elvira's father, George Boone, was a cousin of Daniel
Boone. George Boone and Squire Boone, a brother of Daniel Boone, were
among the early settlers in what is now Boone Township, Harrison
County. They were friends and fellow explorers with Dennis Pennington,
but, unlike him, they were pro slavery men. As woodsmen, the Boones
were Dennis's superiors, but when it came to politics, Dennis
Pennington, supported as he was by his stepfather-in-law, Major John
Harbison, excelled them, as he did the other pro slavery men. After
Indiana became a Free State some of the Boones returned to Kentucky.
One, Hiram, became one of the large slave holders in Meade County, and
after the Civil War moved to Texas.
It was in the Summer of 1801, or
1804, most likely the latter year,
that Dennis Pennington and his party of explorers selected the forks of
Indian Creeks, now the town of Corydon, as the site of his future
habitation. There were schools of fish in the streams, and game
abounded. They made a small clearing, planted some turnip seed, and
went back to Kentucky for the women, children, and household effects.
When they returned six weeks later, they were surprised to find the
deer had not disturbed the turnips, which had fully matured. Within the
present boundaries of Corydon, Dennis made his camp and built his log
cabin near the spring, in part shaded by the great Constitutional Elm,
so called because some of the sessions of the convention that adopted
Indiana's first constitution were held under its expanding arms.
In 1815 Dennis Pennington
moved to a
point four miles northwest of
Corydon on the Vincennes Road, "the Barrens it was called, because of
the absence of timber. His brother, Walter, soon joined him there. Here
they built a log Methodist meeting house, Pennington's Chapel. In the
old churchyard sleep Dennis and Walter and many of the younger
generations of the Penningtons.
Before selecting the Corydon site,
Dennis Pennington made a number of
trips through the Indiana wilderness. On one he followed the Buffalo
Trail from Clarksville to Vincennes, where he first met William H.
Harrison, who, on January 10, 1801, assumed the reins of the Indiana
territorial government, which had been organized March 3,1800. He
had
previously visited Cincinnati and Chillicothe, the latter the capital
of the Northwest Territory. At Chillicothe he conferred with General
St. Clair, the Governor of the Northwest Territory, and also with
Thomas Worthington, a Virginian who had freed his slaves, about fifty
in number, and moved with them in 1797 to Ross County, Northwest
Territory, settling near Chillicothe. The anti-slavery people in that
part of the Northwest Territory soon to become the State of Ohio, had
succeeded in being cut off from their pro slavery fellows in what is
now Indiana and Illinois.
Never for self or pelf, and one of
the best practical politicians of
his or any other time, Dennis Pennington decided to go into the contest
in Indiana. As a matter of policy he supported Governor Harrison and
Attorney General Randolph, a pro slavery Virginian, in their official
aspirations.
December 28, 1802, Governor Harrison,
as president of a convention that
he had been instrumental in assembling in Vincennes, memorialized
Congress to suspend for ten years the Sixth Article of the compact
between the United States and the people of the Northwest Territory,
"that there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in said
territory, because it had prevented the country from populating and had
been the reason of driving many valuable citizens possessing slaves to
the Spanish side of the Mississippi.
It was from the lips of that old
Virginian, Dennis Pennington, that
Walter Q. Gresham first learned that it was John Randolph of Roanoke,
the chairman of the committee of the House to which this memorial .was
referred, who on March 3, 1803, wrote the report against it.
Then, on September 22, 1803, Governor
Harrison and Judges Vanderburgh
and Davis provided for the introduction of slavery under the indenture
system and made these indentures assignable. These laws were mainly
copied from the Virginia and Kentucky codes. Under the ordinance of
July 13, 1787, until the legislative period arrived, the governor and
judges were the legislative body. Indentures drafted under these laws
were for forty, fifty, and ninety years. Judge Vanderburgh was a
slave holder and he held slaves until his death at Vincennes in 1817.
Indiana Territory having attained a
population of 5,000, the requisite
number under the ordinance of July 13, 1787, to entitle it to a
legislature, its first General Assembly was elected, met at Vincennes
July 2, 1805, and confirmed the governor's and judges' indenture law.
Under the ordinance, while the lower house of the legislature was
elected by the people, the upper house, or the "council," as it was
called in the ordinance, composed of five members to serve for five
years, was selected by the president from ten names nominated to him by
the members of the House. Instead of selecting the five men, President
Jefferson delegated this authority to Governor Harrison by inclosing to
the governor commissions signed in blank. Governor Harrison filled in
the blanks with pro slavery men. And thus it was that the Second
General Assembly of the Indiana Territory, on September 17, 1807,
without the pretext of the indenture laws, provided for the
introduction of slavery into the territory. Herein lay the cause of the
Reverend Walter Pennington's bitter assailment of Thomas Jefferson.
These laws, retained by the Illinois
territorial legislature and
validated by the Illinois Constitution of 1818, became infamous in
history as "The Illinois Black Laws." In them Abraham Lincoln could not
even make a dent. The Illinois Supreme Court was rendering decisions on
the question of slaves and the Black Laws until 1865.1 And not
until
the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the
United States were they finally got rid of.
October 10, 1807, Dennis Pennington
was one of the speakers at the
famous mass meeting at Springville, Clark County, Indiana, at which the
doctrine of " Squatter sovereignty/' or "Leave it to the people/1
was
first advanced. Springfield was the first county seat of Clark County.
Not a vestige of it remains today.
After reciting the history of the
slavery question, the Resolutions proceeded:
As to the interest of the Territory,
a variety of opinions exist; but
suffice your memorialists to state, that it is a fact that a great
number of citizens in various parts of the United States are preparing
to and many of them have actually emigrated to this territory to get
free from a Government which tolerates slavery. The institution of
slavery is either right or wrong, and if Congress should think with us,
that it is wrong, that it is inconsistent with the principles on which
our future constitution is to be formed, your memorialists will rest
satisfied that at least this subject will not be by them taken up until
the constitutional number of the citizens of the Territory shall assume
that right.
Congress concluded to leave it to the
people. As to who actually drew
this Springville memorial, the record is silent, but as to who wrote
its principles into the statute and constitution of Indiana, there
is
no ground for speculation. "Let Governor Harrison be reappointed and
let Jonathan Jennings go to Congress; what we want is the legislature,
said Dennis Pennington.
February 27, 1809, Congress amended
the ordinance of July 13, 1787,
providing that the councilors, or upper branch of the legislature,
should be elected by the people, and authorizing the governor to
apportion the territory for this purpose. In the apportionment a
councilor and a member of the House were given by Governor Harrison to
Harrison County, which on April 11, 1808, had been organized out
of
Clark and Knox counties.
At the election, April 2, 1810, Major
John Harbison, Dennis
Pennington's stepfather-in-law, was elected councilor from
Harrison
County, while Dennis Pennington himself was elected from that
county
to the House, where the
anti-slavery men
were in an overwhelming majority.
When they assembled, over anti-slavery men like John Paul and Richard
Rue, soldiers of George Rogers Clark and General William Johnson,
Dennis Pennington was elected Speaker of the House, and continued to be
re-elected to that position at each succeeding session of the
territorial legislature.
At the first session in 1810, not
only did Dennis Pennington lead in
repealing the legislation we have mentioned, but he took the
affirmative and helped pass the acts prohibiting the introduction of
indentured negroes into the territory, the act against the unlawful
removal of negroes from the territory, and the act against kidnapping.
The kidnapping of a favorite, and there were such cases, aroused the
greatest resentment among the anti-slavery people.
Repressive laws against emancipation
and attachment for certain of
their slaves, especially those who had been domestic servants, brought
many negroes or mulattos to the Northwest Territory. The few slaves
the Penningtons owned they freed before they left Virginia. But "Aunt
Fannie" did not want to be left behind, so she was carried along to
Pennington's Chapel. She lived for years in Walter Pennington's family
and died one of the free negroes of Corydon.
It was the rough and uncouth Dennis
Pennington who drove Governor Posey
out of Corydon, not the chills and malaria, for there was just as much
of the latter in early days on Silver Creek, at Clarksville, and on
Beargrass, at Louisville, as on Indian Creek, at Corydon. A Virginian
by birth, rising to be a colonel in the Continental army, General Posey
had been a member of the Kentucky legislature and a senator from
Louisiana before President Madison appointed him Governor of Indiana.
Succeeding Governor Harrison, the head of the pro slavery party,
Governor Posey at sixty three, in feeble health and never much of a
politician, was no match for Dennis Pennington, then in his prime, with
the territorial legislature in the hollow of his hand.
As the census enumerator in 1815,
Dennis Pennington carried the
anti-slavery propaganda into every household. And as a means of
stirring up the people to elect the right kind of delegates to the
convention that had been authorized to submit a State
constitution,
Dennis Pennington objected to Governor Posey to the return of negroes
and mulattos claimed as fugitives, and there were such, without
what
is now called "due process of law, or contrary to his act
against
kidnapping and the fugitive slave law that President Washington had
signed. June 10, 1816, that convention, with Dennis Pennington one of
its members, met and wrote a clean cut anti-slavery clause in the
constitution for the State of Indiana.
The efficiency of Dennis Pennington's
system is attested by the fact
that during the decade from 1810 to 1820, the number of free negroes in
Indiana increased from less than 400 to over 1,200, while in Illinois
they decreased from 600 to 450. During the same period, the number of
slaves in Illinois, under the "Black Laws/1 increased from 168 to 917.
In Indiana, in 1800, there were but 28 slaves; in 1810, 237, due
entirely to the governor's and judges' laws. The territorial
legislation of 1810 arrested their increase, and in 1820 the Indiana
Supreme Court, at one sitting, in construing the anti-slavery clause
of the Indiana constitution freed all slaves then in the State except
the few who were held as slaves prior to the ordinance of June 13,
1787. In keeping faith with the French at Kaskaskia and Vin-cennes,
Governor St. Clair with Washington's approval had held that the
ordinance did not free any persons who were slaves on and prior to the
date of its enactment. Dennis Pennington also helped to abate the
pro slavery movement to Missouri via Clarksville and the Vincennes
Road. If the negro slave, while his master was on his way through
Indiana, ran off, the master received no aid from the State in
capturing the runaway. The Louisiana Supreme Court
had declared that
one breath of free air with the master's consent rendered the slave
forever afterwards free. But in Illinois it was different. The "Black
Laws and "comity will protect the slave holder " while passing through
Illinois. Hence it was that the route via Shawneetown, Illinois, to
Belleville and East St. Louis, and thence across the Mississippi,
became the popular route for the Kentucky and Tennessee slave holder
migrating to Missouri.
One day Dennis Pennington said,
"Boys, the capital will have to leave
Vincennes and come to one of the river counties. For us to get it at
Corydon, we must have ready a fine county courthouse, suitable for the
capitol, in which the Legislature and Supreme Court may meet, when we
ask them to come. Accordingly, in 1811, the Harrison County Courthouse
was completed. It is still standing, a two story building, sixty feet
square, with walls of stone two feet thick. One of the few historic
buildings in the Mississippi Valley, the State has taken steps to
preserve it.
February 12, 1813, Dennis Pennington,
as a member of the legislature
from Harrison County, introduced the following resolution: "Resolved,
that the capital be removed from Vincennes, because it is dangerous to
continue longer here on account of threatened depredations of the
Indians, who may destroy our valuable public records." It passed
unanimously. Then the lobby talked about Harrison County's fine
courthouse. March 11, 1813, Corydon, by the act of that day, was named
the capital from and after May 1, 1813. There it remained until 1824,
when it was moved to Indianapolis.
When the Mexican War came on, Ben
Gresham was nineteen. He and Edward
L. Pennington, of the second generation of Penningtons, immediately
enlisted in the Second Indiana Volunteers. Pennington was elected
second lieutenant, and Ben, over many men twice his years, first
sergeant of Company "I" of that regiment. Its colonel,
William Bowles, was a friend of
Jefferson Davis, and afterwards, as a
member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, in southern Indiana,
received a commission from the President of the Confederate States of
America. This regiment was afterwards called the "Running Regiment."
But Ben always claimed that the running retreat at Buena Vista was due
to express orders which he heard Colonel Bowles himself give.
The return of Ben from the Mexican
War enabled Walter, then seventeen
years of age, to accept the place "Uncle Dennis" had arranged for him
in the office of his guardian, Samuel J. Wright, auditor of Harrison
County. The boy entered upon his work with a zest. His first task was
as minute clerk to the board of county commissioners. His nights were
devoted to study. When fall came, he retained his position, doing his
work at nights, and attended the Corydon Seminary, conducted by James
G. May, a descendant of the North Carolina Quakers who settled Salem,
Washington County, Indiana. In two years young Gresham completed the
course of study in May's Academy. His acquaintance grew rapidly, and he
soon was a general favorite with all classes in town.
That service as amanuensis to the
board of county commissioners was an
admirable apprenticeship to the law. " Uncle Dennis " divined what was
in his favorite. An order that the boy wrote helped formulate at the
dictation of the three unlettered men, he soon heard denounced on the
streets of Corydon by Samuel Keen, an eminent lawyer, as the
"ultimatum" of the board of county commissioners. "They possess more
power than the Legislature, the Governor, and the Supreme Court
combined," declared the irate lawyer. One of the anomalies of our
American system is that boards of county commissioners possess
legislative, executive, and judicial powers of the highest order.
William T. Otto, who lived in New
Albany, but whose duties as Circuit
Judge brought him to Corydon at stated intervals, took an interest in
the young student and early directed his reading in the English
classics. Judge Otto, a native of Philadelphia, where he studied law in
the office of one of the Ingersolls, and afterwards became reporter of
the Supreme Court of the United States and one of the best educated and
accomplished lawyers of his time, united with "Old Uncle Dennis" in
advising the boy to study law, and stimulated the youthful mind by
legal stories. One that made an indelible impression was how Horace
Binney, the best of all the Philadelphia lawyers, spent a year in
London, England, searching the unpublished records, and reviving the
memory of the old clerks who could tell of the saying of this or that
chancellor, and then came back and defeated Daniel Webster, in the
Girard will case.
Meantime Walter Q. Gresham was
transferred to the office of the clerk
of the courts of Harrison County. When court was in session he entered
the orders in the order book as they were made by the judge, and in
vacation made up a complete record of the decided cases. In this way he
acquired an insight into the practical workings of a lawsuit and
learned much of the unwritten law precedents and gossip that is so
valuable to the practicing lawyer and judge on the bench.
The Winter of 1850 and 1851 he again
taught a term of school in the log
schoolhouse on the Gresham farm. He had taught his first term before he
turned sixteen. He was an exacting teacher, and more progress was made
by pupils in that six months than in the same length of time before or
since, according to the statements of some of those who were in
attendance. School out, he returned in the spring to Corydon and worked
in the office of the clerk of the county until the following September,
when he entered the Indiana State University at Bloomington, where he
remained but one year.
In September of 1852 he took up the
study of law in the office of Judge
William A. Porter, who was a graduate of Miami University and had
settled in Corydon in 1827. In his legal education, so far as it bore
on the slavery question, he was fortunate, as will appear in the next
chapter, in his technical legal preceptor, whose exposition of the
underlying principles, with the concrete illustrations from actual life
which "Old Uncle Dennis" furnished, were so luminous that it was a
delight to dig into the musty law books. Judge Porter, the typical
old style lawyer, tall, gaunt, cold, calculating, well-to-do, and
conservative to the last degree, was a master of his profession. He had
served as prosecuting attorney and probate judge, and for those days
was a lawyer of wide practice and experience. He also had had much
experience as a legislator, having served four terms in the Indiana
legislature, during one session as speaker and two terms in the Upper
House or Senate. In those days there were few law schools. The one
connected with the State University at Bloomington, in which Judge Otto
was a professor, Walter Q. Gresham had not the means to attend. But he
gained from Judge Otto as much as he would have derived as a member of
his law school more, perhaps. Judge Porter was a teacher as well
as
lawyer, who, according to the usage's of those times, took the pains to
instruct his pupil. The practical knowledge of forms and court
procedure that Walter Q. Gresham had acquired dispensed with
instructions on theories. It was with principles that the judge
familiarized his pupil. And in the beginning of that course parts of
Blackstone's and Kent's Commentaries, definitions and legal terms, were
so well memorized that they never were forgotten. Environed as he was,
Walter Q. Gresham gained a better literary and legal education than
nine tenths of the modern college and law school graduates. In that
little office under the great elm tree he spent his days and most of
his evenings for almost two years. Meantime he joined the Masons,
mingled much with the people of the town, went to parties, and
deprecated the activities of the Underground Railroad.
April 1, 1854, on the motion of Judge
Porter, young Gresham was
admitted to practice in the Circuit and Common Pleas Court. Soon
afterwards a partnership was formed with Thomas C. Slaughter, his
senior by fifteen years, under the firm name of Slaughter and Gresham.
Mr. Slaughter was a man of much business and legal ability.
The junior member brought to the firm
an important piece of litigation.
May 18, 1854, the partition suit of Stanley Young, Jr., against his
brother Robert H. Young, his mother, and his other brother and sisters,
was begun in the Harrison County Circuit Court. Stanley Young, Jr., had
been a schoolmate of Mr. Gresham's at Corydon. There was a bond of
sympathy between them in that each had lost his father at the hand of
an assassin.
Although not of age, Stanley Young
had been named as one of the
executors of his father's will. During the July term, 1850, of the
Harrison County Circuit Court, Colonel William C. Marsh shot and killed
St. Clair Young, Stanley's father, in a quarrel which grew out of a
trivial affair. Marsh was indicted for murder, but after
continuing
the case from term to term, his lawyer, Samuel Keen, in September,
1853, when the State was not ready, forced it to trial, and secured a
verdict of "Not guilty." Judge Otto was on the bench. Both Marsh and
Young had large farms on the Ohio River and were men of wealth for
those days. St. Clair Young left a large amount of personal property
and much real estate in Harrison County, also property in Meade and
Hardin counties, Kentucky. In the will, which was written in his own
hand, Young recited that one of his sons-in-law, John Timberlake, had
received more than his wife's share of the estate, which should be
considered as an advancement in adjusting the interests of the other
children, and that as he disliked him, his son-in-law Timberlake should
account to the estate for all over and above what Mrs. Timberlake would
take as an heir. By another provision a trust was created for the
benefit of Mrs. Timberlake and her minor children. But in the event
that she should many again, it was provided she should lose certain
provisions that were peculiarly favorable to her. She promptly
renounced the will and took what the law allowed in such cases. It was
a complicated lawsuit from the beginning, and was not finally settled
until August, 1861. Stanley Young was a delicate, silent young man, but
a thorough gentleman. Unlike Mr. Gresham, he cherished a resentment
against the slayer of his father. At first it was expected, or rather
feared, that some day he might resort to violence. As the years passed
and nothing happened, it was supposed that he had forgotten his malice,
when, suddenly, in 1858, during a term of court at Brandenburg, he
shot Colonel Marsh dead without warning, and at the risk of killing his
friend and attorney, Mr. Gresham.
As a lawyer, Walter Q. Gresham was a
success from the start. He
developed at once into a good advocate, without the florid style of
oratory then so common. He possessed invective and could be
impassioned, but in the main he addressed himself to the reason of his
hearers, whether on the bench, on the jury, or at the hustings. He
studied the reports of the English common law and chancery courts, and
especially the decisions of Chief Justice Marshall and Chancellor Kent,
and attempted to acquire their exactness of language and clearness of
statement. Simplicity coupled with clearness is the most powerful
weapon in debate. He early realized the flexibility of the equity
principles of Chancellor Kent, in seeking fraud and deceit, and was
able to apply them at the bar and subsequently on the bench. The moral
side never escaped him. The expression, "sound in morals as in law,"
afterward used from the bench, sometimes brought criticism on him,
from lawyers, litigants, and interests whose schemes to defraud he
would "cut across lots" to circumvent.
One of his contemporaries, a
Virginian by birth, Judge W. N. Tracewell,
himself a successful practitioner, told me that up to the time Walter
Q. Gresham went on the bench he enjoyed the trial of a lawsuit more
than any man he ever knew. As a young man, he had no fear of meeting
the older members of the bar and was put up against them by his partner
and his old preceptor.
The practice of Slaughter and Gresham
extended to a large part of the
Second Congressional District, which was composed of the counties of
Clark, Floyd, Harrison, Crawford, Perry, Scott, Orange, and Washington.
The partners went regularly to all terms of court in Crawford, Orange,
Washington, and Perry counties. Judge Slaughter was born in Corydon,
but his parents were Kentuckians. The 'firm also had business in Meade,
Hardin, Breckinridge, and Hancock counties, Kentucky, and, in turn, had
much of the business of the Kentuckians who came to the Harrison County
courts. In those days, there was great commerce on the Ohio River, and
much admiralty business fell to the firm of Slaughter and Gresham. Mr.
Slaughter was of a delicate constitution, and as he disliked traveling,
the circuit rounds of this work devolved on the younger man, and it was
to his liking. His old preceptor, Judge Porter, employed him to
look
after much of his business and to try or assist in the trial of all
cases on the circuit. He followed the business of the firm to the
Supreme Court of the State and in the Federal courts at Indianapolis.
And as a young housekeeper, I know their practice was remunerative.
