SKETCH OF JOHN HOWE PEYTON,
by
william frazier, a. m., of yale.
"My personal acquaintance with Mr. Peyton," says Mr. Frazier in the History of Augusta County, "commenced in October, 1824, when I entered upon the practice of my profession at the Staunton bar. He was then, as I learn from his biography, in his fifty-seventh year, and from that circumstance only, it might be inferred he had passed his climatric. Certainly nothing in his physical appearance or his forensic display betokened a decay of power, bodily or mentally.
"Yet having amassed a handsome fortune, he established himself in a beautiful home, surrounded by a large and interesting family, and he felt himself entitled to some relaxation from the arduous demands of his profession—or at least from its drudgery. He, therefore, relegated to the younger members of the bar all minor causes, in the matter of taking depositions and the like vacation duties. But for ten years following the date of my introduction to him, there was hardly an important or celebrated cause tried at the Staunton bar, whether in the State Courts or the United States Courts, without the aid and illumination of his splendid intellect; whilst also in Albemarle, Rockbridge and Bath counties, he largely participated in the like weighty causes.
"In the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, his reputation throughout the State enlarged the theatre of his professional service much beyond that of his local circuit.
"I wish it were in my power to give a just and discriminating analysis of his processes in the investigation and conduct of a great cause, or even a fair description of his style of forensic argument. This much may be safely said: that he seized, by apparent intuition, upon the strong and dominating points in a case, not infrequently finding those, or some of them, buried out of sight from a scrutiny less searching than his, beneath a mass of irrelevant or conflicting testimony.
"Having thus entrenched himself in one, or a few strong positions, his array of the facts was so masterly, his presentation of them so luminous, and his arguments from them so logical, that he rarely failed to carry the tribunal with him safely and irresistibly to his conclusions. Discarding thus the minor points and less material phases of the cause from his examination and discussion, or dismissing them in a few rapid, searching sentences, his debate was conspicuous for its compactness and logical order. Accordingly, his speeches did not ordinarily exceed one hour, and even in the most complex and voluminous causes they rarely went beyond two hours. I can recall but one occasion in which he consumed nearly three hours. His style was fluent, but not of that fluency which comes of redundant words and phrases, for I have never listened to one so terse and vigorous. I think it can be said there was hardly a superfluous word, and every sentence bore upon the conclusion aimed at. It was, therefore, never a weariness to hear this great advocate, and the promiscuous audience followed his argument, his sarcasm or his invective, with as much apparent interest as did court and jury.
"It has been written of him that he was equally versed and at home in every department of the profession (unless admiralty and maritime law be excepted) but I think it was as a common law lawyer that he excelled, and that it was in the common law he found his chief delight. He was perfectly conversant with the principles of the Feudal law and immemorial usages of England as expounded by Littleton, Coke, Bacon, and all the fathers and great interpreters of English jurisprudence.
"Having come to the Bar while special pleading was yet a legal science and carefully practiced system, and before popular and not too well informed legislatures sought to 'simplify' the practice of the law by Statutes of Jeofails, he was, without doubt, one of the most practiced and expert special pleaders of his time. His naturally astute and logical mind, finding its expression through the channels of a terse and luminous style, caused his pleadings in all their stages to be master pieces of art.
"His fame as a prosecutor of the pleas of the Commonwealth has never been surpassed, if equaled, in Virginia. On this field he achieved triumphs of the most brilliant kind. His pride in his profession, and the great principles of right and justice underlying it, no less his inborn contempt for chicanery and fraud, not to speak of crime in its grosser forms, combined to make him a terror to evil doers. Some critics, even among the profession, sometimes were disposed to censure him as too harsh and unrelenting towards the prisoner at the bar, but if every circuit throughout our land possessed at this day so able, fearless and conscientious a prosecutor as did the Augusta and the surrounding circuit at that happier day in our history, perhaps we might find less cause to deplore the depreciation of the public morals, which so painfully invest the present era.
"It would be a halting and very defective sketch of this eminent jurist which failed to speak of his striking originality. Negatively speaking, there were little or no common-place and hum-drum in his forensic arguments, his debates in the Senate or his addresses from the hustings to his constituents. In a positive sense, his speeches, at least on great occasions, and when his powers were thoroughly roused, rarely failed to be marked by some flash of genius. I recall a conversation just after the close of a protracted and laborious term of the Augusta Circuit Court, in which the late Judge Lucas P. Thompson and Gen. Briscoe G. Baldwin bore the leading parts. The last named was paying generous tribute to Mr. Peyton's force and originality. Judge Thompson remarked, that he had never seen Mr. Peyton go through a cause, deeply interesting and moving him, in which he did not utter some view or sentiment illuminated by genius, or, at the least, some illustration marked by a bold originality, and he instanced two causes, tried at the late term, one a civil suit and a very heavy will case, in which he made a novel and searching application of a familiar fable of Æsop. I forbear to give its details, because both the critic and his subject have passed from earth.
"In the same cause, three signatures were to be identified and proved, that of the testator and also of the two attesting witnesses, all three having died since their attestation. Many witnesses were called to prove the genuineness of the three names. Opposing counsel sought to badger the witnesses, by urging them to specify what peculiar marks there were in the handwriting and signatures, whereby they could speak positively as to their identity and genuineness. This, of course, for the most part they could not do, and in the argument of the cause before the jury, the same counsel strove to throw discredit and contempt upon those witnesses (all men of good character) for their failure and inability so to describe the quality and the peculiar marks and the calligraphy of the signers as to show they were familiar with their handwriting. In his reply to those sallies of his opponents, Mr. Peyton swept away the whole airy fabric by a single happy illustration:
"'Gentlemen,' he said, 'you have often been assembled in crowds upon some public or festive occasion. Your hats have been thrown pell-mell in a mass with perhaps a hundred other hats, all having a general resemblance. Suppose you had attempted to describe your hat to a friend or servant, so that he might go and pick it out for you. It has as many points, for description as a written signature—its color, height of crown, width of band, lining, &c. Do you think that a friend or servant could, by any possibility, have picked out your hat for you? And yet when you went yourself, the moment your eye would light upon it, you instantly recognize it among a hundred or five hundred hats. Familiarity with it has stamped its picture on your mind, and the moment you see it, the hat fills and fits the picture in your mind, as perfectly as the same hat fits your head.'
"The jury were evidently won, and gave full credence to the ridiculed witnesses.
"The other instance during the same term (cited by Judge Thompson,) occurred in the celebrated prosecution of Naaman Roberts for forgery—in forging the name of Col. Adam Dickinson to a bond for $600.00.
"The body of the bond was confessedly the handwriting of the prisoner at the bar. That was admitted. The signature was a tolerably successful attempt at imitating the peculiar handwriting of Adam Dickinson. But no expert could look at the whole paper and fail to see a general resemblance between the body of the instrument and the signature, raising a strong conviction in the mind that both proceeded from the same hand.
"The defense strongly insisted upon excluding the body of the instrument from the view of the witness, by covering it with paper or turning it down, and so confining the view to the signature only—upon the familiar doctrine of the law of evidence forbidding a comparison of various handwritings of the party as a ground for an opinion upon the identity, or genuineness of the disputed writing. And this point was ably and elaborately argued by the prisoner's counsel.
"The learned prosecutor met it thus:
"'Gentlemen, this is one entire instrument, not two or more brought into comparison. Let me ask each one of you, when you meet your friend, or when you meet a stranger, in seeking to identify him; what do you look at? Not his nose, though that is the most prominent feature of the human face; not at his mouth, his chin, his cheek; no, you look him straight in the eye, so aptly called "the window of the soul," you look him in the eye, but at the same time you see his whole face. Now put a mask on that face, leaving only the eyes visible, as the learned counsel would have you mask the face of this bond, leaving to your view only the fatal signature. If that human face, so masked, was the face of your bosom friend, could you for a moment identify him, even though permitted to look in at those windows of his soul? No; he would be as strange to you as this accursed bond has ever been strange to that worthy gentleman, Col. Adam Dickinson, but a glance at whose face traces the guilty authorship direct to the prisoner at the bar.'
"This most striking illustration seemed to thrill the whole audience, as it virtually carried the jury.
"Mr. Peyton never was a politician. His taste and predilection lay not in that direction. But no man was better informed of the course of public affairs, or had a keener insight into the character or motives of public men. Once, and so far as I knew, once only, did he participate in the debates of a Presidential canvass. It was the memorable one of 1840, and the speech was delivered from the Albemarle hustings. His analysis of the political character of Martin Van Buren, and his delineation of his public career from his desertion of DeWitt Clinton, down to his obsequious ingratiation with Andrew Jackson, was incisive and masterly and all the more powerful and impressive because pronounced in a judicial rather than a partisan temper. Competent judges, long familiar with the very able harangues and debates on that rostrum, declared it one of the ablest that had been listened to by any Albemarle audience.
"Of his services in the Virginia Senate, I need only say, what every one would naturally expect, they were most valuable from their enlightened conservatism in the prevention of crude and vicious legislation. In the last session of his first term in the Senate, a vigorous effort was made for the passage of a stay-law rather than an increase of taxation.
"It hardly needs to be said that he opposed the former and sustained the latter measure with all the vigor of his honest and manly nature. Nor could he ever have looked with any patience upon that brood of enactments since his day—the stay of executions, homestead exemptions, limitations upon sales of property, et id omne genus, professedly passed in the interest of the poor and the laboring man, yet in fact more detrimental to that class than any other, and most damaging to the State abroad.
"Let me say, in conclusion, that the person and figure of Mr. Peyton were fine and commanding. His carriage was always erect, his head well poised on his shoulders, while his ample chest gave token of great vitality. On rising to address court or jury, there was something more than commonly impressive in his personal presence and whether clad in 'Virginia home-spun,' or English blue broadcloth with gold buttons, (and I have often seen him in both), whenever you saw him button his coat across his breast and slowly raise his spectacles to rest them on the lofty crown, you might confidently expect an intellectual treat of no mean order.
"There never was a broader contrast presented in the same person than that between Howe Peyton, the lawyer, the public prosecutor, or even the Senatorial candidate amongst the people, and the same individual in his own home. Here in the midst of his family, or surrounded by friends, the rigor of his manner relaxed, and he was the model of an affectionate husband and father, and the most genial of companions. He was 'given to hospitality,' and there was no mansion in all this favored region where it was more generously and elegantly dispensed, through many years, than at 'Montgomery Hall.'"