Bart Ridgeley: A Story of Northern Ohio

by A. G. Riddle

The case was not one framed or arranged with any vulgar reference to a forensic display. Cases never will get themselves up for any such occasion; and if the lawyer waits for such a case, he will die unknown. Cases spring out of dry, hard contentions, with nothing but vulgar surroundings; and it is to these, that the real advocate applies himself, breathes upon them the breath of genius and creative power, and clothes them with life, and interest, and beauty, endows them with his own soul and imagination, and lifts them from the level of the common to the height of the remarkable, the unusual, and sometimes of the wonderful; and endeavors to establish between them, and a jury and himself, the bonds of intense sympathy, upon which their emotions and sensibilities will come and go, as did the angels on the dream-ladder of the patriarch.

In the advocate's hour of strength and glory, the formulas of the law burst their mouldy cerements and leap forth into life, tender and beautiful to protect, or awful to warn or punish. Mysteries are unfolded, secrets reveal themselves, hidden things are proclaimed, and courts and juries, awed and abashed, yet elevated and inspired, accept and act upon his conclusions as infallible. For one hour he touches the pinnacle of human achievement.

After all, the effectiveness of the advocate is not so much in what he says, as in the way he says it. One man with real strength arises outside, and batters and bangs with real power, deals forcible blows, and yet does not carry his point; while another, with less intellect, gets up within the charmed circle of the sympathies, by the warm, human side of a jury, whom they don't think of resisting, and could not if they tried.

The speaker usually rises a little outside of the subject, on a sort of neutral ground, and Bart made the transit of this, naturally and simply. He graphically explained to the jury those legal phantoms, John Doe and Richard Roe; how Richard was always maltreating and dispossessing John, and how John was always going to law with Dick, and was hence an immense favorite with lawyers; and how, when Dick is sued, he always, having got up a muss, notifies the actual party in possession, and who ought to have been sued; tells him he must look out for himself, and hurries off to find where John has squat himself into other property; and thereupon he thrusts him out again, and so on. It was a fiction invented by the English lawyers to try the right of two parties to the possession of real estate; because they could do it in no other way, and the 4th of July had not freed us from this relic of antiquity. The issue here was, whether Fisk had a better right to the possession of this land, than had Cole; and whatever did not in some way help to enlighten them on that issue, had no business to be said at all.

In a few happy strokes, he sketched the defendant buying this land, packing up, bidding adieu to the dear down-country home, and his toilsome journey into the woods, arrival, and purchase, and poor, hard life of toil and deprivation: here was his all. He sketched the plaintiff as a well or ill-to-do gentleman, of a speculative turn of mind, whose eye coveted the rich bottom-lands of the defendant; and finding him helpless and poor, searched out the weak place in his title, hunted up obscure relatives, and procured for a song sung by themselves, their signatures to a deed of property of which they had never heard; he had proven that John Williams, Junior, son of John Williams, Senior, was born out of wedlock, had gone grubbing back into forgotten burying-places, and disinterred the dead, searched out the weakness of their lives; had raked out a forgotten scandal, carefully gathered it up in its rottenness, and had poured it out, before the jury; and the frailty and infamy of an unhappy woman, and the crime of one wretched man, were the sole virtue and strength of his case—sole source of his title to the land in dispute. And the plaintiff demanded that the law in its honor should now rob poor Cole of his homestead, and of the graves of his children, that John Fisk—or rather, Sam Ward—might possess that to which he had just the same moral right, that Dr. Myers had to the horses he stole. And this learned Court, and gentlemen of the jury, pioneers in these receding woods, are to be the instruments of this transfer.

The language was simple and plain, the imagery bold and striking, and the closing sentences were pronounced with great fervor. The jury shrank from the issue, which might have a possible conclusion, and looked eagerly for any escape, as jurors will.

The young advocate clearly opened out the nature of the defence of adverse possession, and the philosophy upon which it rested; and explained that the defendant, to meet the plaintiff's paper case, must show that he and those under whom he claimed, had been in the open, continued, and notorious possession of the property for twenty years, before suit was brought, claiming to be the owners. This the defendant was to show, at the peril of destruction; and in a few happy sentences he brought the jury to feel an intense anxiety that he should succeed.

Then he turned back the years, blotted out the highways, re-planted the forests, till the court house dissolved, and a wondrous maple wood crowned the hill on which it stood. And so back, till the Indians returned, and elk and panthers roamed at will. Then he pointed out a sorrow-stricken, moody, brooding man, seeking a "lodge in the vast wilderness," hunting the spring, and building his shanty, making his clearing, and planting a few apple seeds, brought from his old home; and picking up the section of the tree trunk, he read off from its end, "twenty-nine years ago!"

He sketched in rapid, natural lines, the life of the recluse, the necessities of his situation, his keeping cows, and the means of restricting their range; dwelt upon the evidence of the tree fences, and argued that the fact that two of them were used for that purpose, was conclusive that the other sides were also fenced, for without them no enclosure could exist. And he referred to the well known universal custom of that early day.

Lord! how those old and somewhat mythical tree fences grew, and came out under his hands! The hunters had herded elk in their angles; bears had been trapped in their jungles; the doe hid her fawn in their recesses; wolves and foxes had found lairs in them; birds had built nests in them; men in search of strayed cattle had climbed upon them to listen for the tinkling bell; balm and thyme, wild sun-flowers and celandine had made them fragrant with perfume, and bright with color.