Tri-Counties Genealogy & History by Joyce M. Tice History of Bradford County by Bradsby Bradford County PA Chemung County NY Tioga County PA

Tri-County Genealogy & History Sites Home Page How to Use This Site Warning & Disclaimer No Unauthorized Commercial Use Return to Bradsby Table of Contents Say Hello to  Joyce Retyped by Stephen Kovacs

Joyce's Search Tip - December 2007 - Do You Know that you can search just this Bradsby book by using the Bradsby button in the Partitioned search engine at the bottom of the Current What's New Page?

Chapter XVII

ATTORNEYS
 

The First in the County – Story of A. C. Stewart – List, With

Time of Coming – List of Present Attorneys – Etc.

With the civil organization of the county came the first attorney, Alpheus C. Stewart, who remained in Towanda a few years, and then was overtaken by Greeley’s advice to "go West, young man." About 1815 Mr. Stewart folded his tent in Bradford and turned his face toward the wild and distant West, and finally located in Belleville, Ill., the county seat of St. Clair county, situated about fourteen miles, a little south of east, from St. Louis. Here the young lawyer soon found clients and friends, and here in a few years came a tragic end, one that forms an episode in the early history of that section of the country. In the society of young men of the place there was one who had, from some trivial cause, a misunderstanding with Mr. Stewart. The other young men, loving their fun, urged on the difficulty, and finally, with Stewart’s knowledge, a duel was arranged, but all except the challenger knew that the guns were to be loaded only with powder and wadding. But when on the ground, the young man, suspecting something, slipped a bullet in his gun and, at the word, shot Stewart dead. He fled the country, but was finally overhauled, returned, tried, convicted and hanged – the first legal execution in Illinois, and therefore memorable in the State’s history. A. C. Stewart was a bright young man and was a most unfortunate victim of those miserable idiots that think it funny to play practical jokes.

Simon Kinney was the second lawyer to locate in the county, and he also went to Illinois and located in what is now Bureau county, in that State. He was a personal friend of Daniel Webster, and Sage

of Marshfield once visited Kinney and purchased a farm near the latter’s. Col. H. L. Kinney, a son of Simon, went to Illinois, and commenced a career as lively and brilliant as a romance. He contracted to build the canal from Chicago to Joliet; and built several "boom" towns, opened free hotels on a vast scale, made a great fortune, spent it with prodigal extravagance, and disappeared. Shortly appeared in the "Lone Star" State when it was a separate empire, made other fortunes, spent them, and for his day and time was a veritable golden Count of Monte Cristo; finally, after going through much exciting experiences in the late war, to the Confederate cause, he then went to Mexico, headed an insurrection, and in a port sally, was fairly riddled with bullets by the assailants. If true of any one surely it was of this man, "life’s fitful fever is o’er."

C. F. Welles came here as a lawyer, or became a lawyer, in 1813; he was the first Prothonotary of the county, and one of the leading and most influential citizens. A brief sketch of this distinguished man may be found in the chapter "Athens."

The same year Edward Herrick located here. This fact is a part of the permanent records of the county, and we have a township, "Herrick," as well as a village, "Herrickville."

David Scott’s name appears on the first county court records, 1813, and the same year appear the names of Garrick Mallory, Robert McClure, John Evans, Ethan Baldwin, Darius Bullock, Charles Catlin. The next year we find but one name added, and so on for several years. A great change in the practice of the law has come with the past seventy-five years. The law and the practice were literally English, you know. The Common Law of England, as well as certain statute laws, was in force here the same as in England. The qualification, or rather the slight difference lay in the Legislative enactments of the State.

The law pleadings were purely English, as laid down in Blackstone and Chitty’s commentaries and forms. The law of evidence was literally as it came to us in the standard English books on those subjects. The decisions of the English courts were the law here, the same as in Great Britain, except where they were in conflict with our statute laws. An English lawyer, therefore, fifty years ago, had to make but little preparations for the change if he wanted to come to America to practice his profession.

It would be the customs of the professions here that would, perhaps, bother him more to learn than the differences then existing in the law of the two countries.

The great lawyers they had here in those days, and it is no exaggeration to say that we had many really great men in the profession, were all of the kind that were known as "Circuit Riders." They had to know the law better than their English brothers. They traveled over wide circuits, going with the judge from county to county on horse-back, and in their saddle bags were their wardrobes and their law libraries. Hence, as they made the long trips, sometimes like sailors; only after months returning home for a short rest, when they would resume their trip and go over again the same ground. Two trips a year, as

there were two courts a year in each county. The counties were then much larger than now, and often it was many miles’ ride to some new county seat.

In law pleading we have parted widely from much of the old English forms, and so abundant and varied are our statutes, and the increase of our courts and our many decisions, that now in this respect it may be called the American system. We retain the old English rules of evidence more nearly literal than anything else of the English law.

The law and the courts, in their broadest meaning, are one of the most marvelous outgrowths of civilization; evolved through the long centuries antedating the morning of authentic history. The vastness of the court machinery itself staggers the mind when it first comprehends something of it – courts, clerks, officers, lawyers, jurors, criminals on hand, cases dragging through generations, and cases in actual trial running through days, weeks, months, and sometimes, years, and are never completed. Great and magnificent buildings, and the armies of attendants, employees, the written records of rooms full, vaults full, and thousands of busy pens making every day more; the countless libraries, and law schools, and offices and court rooms are some of the palpable evidences of this institution. Behind and beyond these are the mysteries – the learned technicalities – the Draconian Code, the black-letter and the comparatively modern Coke upon Littleton are some of the conjuring that have grown from what must have been a very simple beginning. Indeed, why should not the common mind reel and stagger under the glimpse of realization of the stupendous whole.

Cui bono? What inherent principle is it in our nature that has rendered all this vast and involved machinery a necessity to our common mankind? Very much the same it prevails in all organized communities or nations. Is the demand for all this an artificial creation? Appearances would indicate that it was a natural and spontaneous outgrowth, like that of marriage, or war, some forms of religion, or the universal ideals of beauty in women or horses. It is singular that some able biologists, like Spencer, has never taken this subject in hand, and at least tried to account for its universal outcropping in every civilization, and in substantially much the same form in all. The technicalities of the law are a phenomenal curiosity. The most august courts, where are the longest black gowns, the biggest wigs and the stuffiest figurative woolsacks, are often the splendid arenas for the legal gladiatorial contests. The cause celebres are where are decided the contests of the pennant winners among the great attorneys – simply legal tournaments where wealth and fame is in winning, "knocking out," as it were, the attorney on the other side, and where often the poor client cuts about as much figure as an ancient almanac. Then, for instance, you look carefully over the Myra Clark Gaines ejectment case – where millions are involved, and generations come and pass away, and the case goes on and on. Or Dickens’ fanciful case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce; its last sad scene, where the pale young man drags himself into court, and wearily listened to learned arguments that he can not understand, and finally gropes his way out of

the court-room and lies down and dies. Another case where it was in court one hundred years, and, the parties all being dead, it was then discovered that what was once a great estate was all gone, and the last penny was a little short of being enough to pay the costs.

"The curiosities of the law" ought to be some day the title of a great book that would reflame the fires of the old maxim, that truth is stranger than fiction.

There is one other thing about the study of law that is striking in its features. Perhaps has much or more than any other school, it teaches the importance of authority of precedent. Hence the perhaps gross incongruities you may sometimes meet in the courts in a democracy that have been transplanted from the ancient monarchy. Wigs and gowns are simply comical in this country, where theoretically every voter is a sovereign. The uniform and tin star of a roundsman; the ceremony of kissing the Bible in making oath, about which you will find they are very particular about in the older States, but which is now substituted in the West by generally holding up the right hand; the retention of the grand jury and the necessity of their formal and once hypercritical bill of indictment before you could put a man on trial. The fictitious John Doe vs. Richard Roe are now about obsolete, but at one time, and for centuries, all ejectment suits were in the names of these unfortunates, and above all is the general faith that the older a precedent the better is the law and the more binding its authority. There must be a close relation existing between the science of law and the science of state craft. The lawyer and the statesman are esteemed as one to a large extent.

The American law student when he commences his reading is put to the study of Blackstone exactly as in the student in England. This is the standard book on which all is based, even if Blackstone did believe that there were in ancient times swarms of witches and ghosts, but thought that modern cases needed careful looking into before believing. He writes most eloquently of the "garnered wisdom of the ages," and tells the young student in glowing sentences that in the knowledge of the law, at least, the past was the Golden Age; that here is the Pierian spring where he may drink long and deeply of the health-giving waters.

When you divest yourself of these accumulations that have gathered around the law, and think of it a moment in that mood, you can not but realize that once all this wonderful thing must have lain bundled up in the simple Golden Rule; if there is either right or wrong, justice or injustice that is not included in this short and simple rule of life, you can not imagine what it is.

Do as you would be done by, is the simple lesson easily understood by the savage or the child. To add to this statutes and laws neither extends its meaning, application, nor simplifies its terms. Simple as this is it must have been the source from whence came all this stream of law-making, law practice, law libraries, courts and officers, as well as the great and powerful profession of the lawyers.

The pioneer lawyer was, like the pioneer farmer, compelled to be a man of far greater resources within himself than his modern brother.

The times are drifting away from the ancient technicalities of the law as well as from the ancient severity of the church dogmas. Men have grown more liberal as they have become less and less technical. The modern lawyer fits up his office, and there is usually a court library near at hand, and he has long ceased to ride the circuit. He stays at home with his books and practice, and no longer is every successful attorney presumed to have Chitty’s forms committed to memory. He may now write a warrantee deed in fewer words than it once required lines, if not pages.

Again the profession of the law, like that governing skilled mechanics, is divided up into specialties, and this immensely lessens the labors of the preparatory work of learning the profession or trade. We now have our criminal lawyers, chancery lawyers, corporation lawyers, constitutional lawyers, etc. dividing the necessary preparatory work after the manner, for instance, of that of the workmen in a watch factory. This division of labor is peculiarly an American innovation on the old, and while it is destroying the old-fashioned all-around workmen or professional men, it is perhaps bettering the work as well as lessening the time required in serving an apprenticeship. In Europe a man must yet serve a seven years’ apprenticeship to be a licensed watchmaker. In the American watch factories you will find girls working machines and making very perfectly the one piece of the watch to which they confine their entire labor, and two weeks’ apprenticeship was all that she required to learn her trade well. In her line she can probably do more in a day than the European seven-year-trained man can do in a week, and do it better. Striking off into specialties is the strong tendencies of modern times, found as distinctively in the learned professions as in the trades. In medicine there is the general practitioner, the surgeon, the eye-and-ear doctor, the corn doctor and the horse doctor, and for nearly every disease a specialist. In theology there is the revivalist, the organizer, the church builder, etc. It is the art of doing one thing, and thereby doing it better than one can many things.

Lawyers now gather in the great cities and work for a salary for large corporations. They seek no other employment than that of the one man or firm who hires them by the year. They simply need to know the law necessary to the business of their employer, and in that respect they are invaluable advisers.

It is these circumstances that have carried us beyond the age when the statutes required every lawyer to have a license before allowed to practice. In fact the law requiring this is a mere fashion – the relic of a past age. It is impossible to imagine how a community or State would suffer if this ancient law should be abolished. The man in search of a lawyer never inquires as to whom it was that signed the license.

The following is a list of attorneys of the past, and the date of their admission as entered of record in Bradford county since 1813:

The following is a list of the members of the Bradford county bar now in practice, arranged according to seniority of admission:
 

In other words there are fifty-seven attorneys now in practice in the county.

Joyce Tip Box -- December 2007 - If you are not navigating this Tri-Counties Site via the left and right sidebars of the Current What's New page you are doing yourself a disservice. You can get to any place on the site easily by making yourself familiar with these subject and place topics. Try them all to be as familiar with the site's 16,000 plus pages as you can. Stop groping in the dark and take the lighted path. That's also the only way you'll find the search engines for the site or have access to the necessary messages I may leave for you. Make it easy on yourself.