Diary in America, Series One

by Frederick Marryat

The striped pig, I have already mentioned; but were I to relate all I have been told upon this head, it would occupy too much of the reader’s time and patience.

The mass of the citizens of the United States have certainly a very great dislike to all law except their own, i.e., the decision of the majority; and it must be acknowledged that it is not only the principle of equality, but the parties who are elected as district judges, that, by their own conduct, contribute much to that want of respect with which they are treated in their courts. When a judge on his bench sits half-asleep, with his hat on, and his coat and shoes off; his heels kicking upon the railing or table which is as high or higher than his head; his toes peeping through a pair of old worsted stockings, and with a huge quid of tobacco in his cheek, you cannot expect that much respect will be paid to him. Yet such is even now the practice in the interior of the western states. I was much amused at reading an English critique upon a work by Judge Hall (a district judge), in which the writer says, “We can imagine his honour in all the solemnity of his flowing wig,” etcetera, etcetera. The last time I saw his honour he was cashier to a bank at Cincinnati, thumbing American bank-notes—dirtier work than is ever practised in the lowest grade of the law, as any one would say if he had ever had any American bank-notes in his possession.

As may be supposed, in a new country like America, many odd scenes take place. In the towns in the interior, a lawyer’s office is generally a small wooden house, of one room, twelve feet square, built of clapboards, and with the door wide open; and the little domicile with its tenant used to remind me of a spider in its web waiting for flies.

Not forty years back, on the other side of the Alleghany mountains, deer skins at forty cents per pound, and the furs of other animals at a settled price, were legal tender, and received both by judges and lawyers as fees. The lawyers in the towns on the banks of the Susquehannah, where it appears the people, (notwithstanding Campbell’s beautiful description,) were extremely litigious, used to receive all their fees in kind, such as skins, corn, whiskey, etcetera, etcetera, and, as soon as they had sufficient to load a raft, were to be seen gliding down the river to dispose of their cargo at the first favourable mart for produce. Had they worn the wigs and gown of our own legal profession, the effect would have been more picturesque.

There is a record of a very curious trial which occurred in the state of New York. A man had lent a large iron, kettle, or boiler, to another, and it being returned cracked, an action was brought against the borrower for the value of the kettle. After the plaintiff’s case had been heard, the counsel for the defendant rose and said:—“Mister Judge, we defend this action upon three counts, all of which we shall most satisfactorily prove to you.

“In the first place, we will prove, by undoubted evidence, that the kettle was cracked when we borrowed it.

“In the second, that the kettle, when we returned it was whole and sound.

“And in the third, we will prove that we never borrowed the kettle at all.”

There is such a thing as proving too much, but one thing is pretty fairly proved in this case, which is, that the defendant’s counsel must have originally descended from the Milesian stock.

I have heard many amusing stories of the peculiar eloquence of the lawyers in the newly settled western states, where metaphor is so abundant. One lawyer was so extremely metaphorical upon an occasion, when the stealing of a pig was the case in point, that at last he got to “coruscating rays.” The judge (who appeared equally metaphorical—himself) thought proper to pull him up by saying:—“Mr —, I wish you would take the feathers from the wings of your imagination, and put them into the tail of your judgment.”