"Immediately after entering upon his duties, the Cadets were organized into a battalion of two companies, with a colonel of Cadets, an adjutant, and a sergeant-major, for its staff; and within the year he created a 'Commandant of Cadets,' to be an instructor of tactics.
"The division of classes into sections, the weekly rendering of class reports, showing the daily progress, the system and scale of daily marks, the establishment of relative class rank among the members, the publication of the Annual Register, the introduction of the Board of Visitors, the check-book system, the preponderating influence of the 'blackboard,' and the essential parts of the Regulations for the Military Academy, as they stand to this day, are some of the evidences of the indefatigable efforts of Major Thayer to insure method, order, and prosperity to the institution. When relieved, at his own request, the upward impetus given to the institution had attracted general observation."
General Thayer evidently believed that "peace hath her victories" as well as war, and nobly acted in accordance with his intelligent, earnest convictions.
"Joel Parker was born at Jaffrey, N. H. After studying in the academy at Groton, where the late President James Walker was one of his schoolmates, he entered the Sophomore class at Dartmouth College in February, 1809, at the early age of thirteen, and graduated in 1811, not yet seventeen years of age. After his graduation he studied law at Keene, and with his brother Edmund at Amherst, and entered the bar of Cheshire County, at the October term in 1817, at the former place, where he at once engaged in practice.
In the year 1821, contemplating a change of residence, he visited the West, and was admitted to practice in the Circuit Court of the United States at Columbus, Ohio, in January, 1822; but, fortunately for his native State, returned in the latter year, and devoted himself assiduously to his chosen pursuit.
Free from domestic cares, affianced only to his profession, he early gained an honorable position by the steady exercise of natural abilities well adapted to its pursuit. He was industrious, thorough, minute, painstaking, cautious, persistent, and untiring. "Judge Parker's mode of practice in the trial of cases," writes an early professional associate, who still enjoys a ripe and honored age, "to take down the testimony in full of the witnesses in writing, and to cross-examine them at great length as to all the circumstances they might know relative to the case, contributed greatly to change the previous practice of the witness' first telling his story of what he knew, followed by a brief cross-examination, with only a few notes, made by the counsel, of the leading points of the testimony."
Of Judge Parker's judicial life in New Hampshire, Charles Sumner, in 1844, wrote: "It will not be unjust to his associates to distinguish. Mr. Chief Justice Parker as entitled to peculiar honor for his services on the bench. He may be justly regarded as one of the ablest judges of the country."
The event which brought Judge Parker more conspicuously before the public, and undoubtedly contributed justly and largely to give him a wide and established reputation for vigor, independence, learning, and capacity, was his controversy with 14 Mr. Justice Story of the Supreme Court of the United States in regard to the proper construction of a clause—it might even be said the meaning of a word [lien]—in the Bankrupt Law of 1841; a controversy which became political in other hands, and threatened to reach the magnitude of a conflict between the United States and New Hampshire.
After the experiences of this generation, such a collision seems trifling; but it involved subjects of grave importance, and was a contest between no insignificant combatants,—not without interest at this day to a student of common or constitutional law.
It began in 1842, when Story and Parker were each in the full vigor of judicial life, and enthusiastic crowds of young men were learning the science of the law from Story's lips. It ended seven years after, when Story had passed away, and Parker was lecturing where Story taught, to young men who now revere the memory of both. He had laid aside the honor and labors of the office which required him to engage in the struggle; and, in the first year of his service as a professor in the school to whose success and reputation Story had so largely contributed, the court which Story had adorned declared the survivor victorious. Like Entellus, he might say,—