[GEORGE E. BADGER.]
BY WM. A. GRAHAM.
My acquaintance with Mr. Badger commenced in the latter part of the summer of 1825. He had already completed his service as a judge, which office he resigned at the close of the spring circuit of that year; had contested the palm of forensic eloquence and professional learning with Seawell and Gaston, with a wide increase of reputation, at the recent term of the Supreme Court, and was returned to the practice in Orange, where he had once resided, in generous competition with Murphy, Nash, Yancey, Mangum, Hawks, Haywood, and others—Mr. Ruffin, hitherto the leader at this bar, having been appointed his successor on the bench of the Superior Court.
He was then a little turned of thirty years of age. One half of his time since his majority had been passed upon the bench, yet his fame as a lawyer was fully established; and though he doubtless afterwards added vastly to his stores of erudition, yet in quickness of perception, readiness of comprehension, clear and forcible reasoning, elegant and imposing diction, in all that constitutes an orator and advocate, he had attained an eminence hardly surpassed at any period of his life. From that time and before it, I know not how long, till the day he was stricken by the disease which terminated his life, in North Carolina, at least, his name was on every tongue. He was not only marked and distinguished, but an eminent man. So bright and shining a character could not but attract general observation; and though
"Hard is his fate on whom the public gaze
Is fixed forever, to detract or praise";
and while, with gay and hilarious nature, frank but somewhat eccentrical manners and unequaled powers of conversation, united with some infirmity of temper, his expressions and conduct in the earlier half of his life were often the subject of severe criticism; yet in the long period of from forty to fifty years, in which he moved "in the high places of the world," no one denied him the gifts of most extraordinary talents and unswerving integrity and truthfulness. Even in the particular in which complaint had been made—an imputed hauteur and exclusiveness—his disposition was either mellowed by time, or, what is more probable, his character came to be better appreciated from being better understood; and for years before the sad eclipse which obscured his usefulness no man enjoyed more of the general confidence and favor of the people, as none had possessed in a higher degree their admiration.
Transferred to the more extended field of jurisprudence administered in the courts of the United States, and afterwards to the Senate of the nation, he took rank with the first advocates, jurisprudents, and debaters of the Union; and the purity of his morals, the elevation of his character, his readiness and accomplishments as a conversationalist, the gayety and vivacity of his manners, rendered him a general favorite with old and young, the grave and gay, in the brilliant society of the metropolis.
George Edmund Badger was born in New Bern, North Carolina, on the 17th of April, 1795. His father, Thomas Badger, Esq., the son of Edmund and Lucretia Badger, was a native of Connecticut, and his birth is recorded to have taken place at Windham, in that State, on the 27th of June, 1766. Having received a good education, he came early in manhood to New Bern, and thence to Spring Hill, in the county of Lenoir, where for some time he taught school, but was then probably a student of the law, and was in due time admitted to the practice in this State. Fixing his residence in New Bern, he early rose to distinction as a practitioner, and appears in the published reports as one of the leading counsellors in the courts of that riding, and in the Supreme Court of the State, from 1792 till his death, which occurred from yellow fever, while in attendance on a court at Washington, in Beaufort county, on the 10th of October, 1799.
The traditions of the profession and of intelligent persons of his acquaintance represent him as a man of determined character and great intellectual and professional ability, and leave the question in doubt whether at the same period of life he was more than equaled by his son. The late Peter Browne, himself one of the first lawyers and men of letters of his time in North Carolina, a contemporary at the bar of the senior Badger, spoke of him, before the entrance of his son into public life, as one of the ablest men he had ever known, and especially as possessing a power to fascinate and control masses of men in the most remarkable degree—a power, he added, which the son might exert with similar effect, if he would.
His mother, by name Lydia Cogdell, was the daughter of Colonel Richard Cogdell, of New Bern, a gentleman of much consideration under the provincial rule in North Carolina, and an active and bold leader in the movement of the Revolution. As early as August, 1775, his name appears second on the list of the committee of safety for New Bern district, appointed by the first Congress of the province (that of Alexander Gaston being at the head). Lydia Cogdell was a person of singular vigor of mind and character, well fitted to encounter the cares and trials of her early widowhood. Her husband had experienced that which has been said to be the common lot of the profession in this country, "to work hard, live well and die poor," and left her with but little fortune to rear three children, of whom George was the eldest and the only son.
According to her narrative, he manifested no fondness for books, and made little progress in learning till about seven years of age. At that period she placed in his hands Goldsmith's Animated Nature. He was delighted with its perusal, and she never found it necessary to stimulate his thirst for knowledge afterwards. His preparatory course was taken in his native town of New Bern, and at the age of fifteen he entered Yale College. There he passed through the studies of the freshman and the sophomore classes, when his education, so far as it depended on schools, was brought to a close. A relative, a man of fortune, at the North, who had hitherto furnished the means for his college expenses (his own patrimony being wholly insufficient), and from whose bounty he had hoped to pass on to graduation, suddenly withdrew his support and left him to his own exertions. Of the motives of this unexpected arrest in his college career, on which so much might have depended, it is useless, now at least, to speculate or inquire. But it will be a source of gratification to his friends to be assured that it was attributable to no demerit in our student. True, his contemporaries at Yale differ widely in their estimation of his capacities while there. The Northern students, who belonged to a different society, regarded him as a frolicsome youth, averse to mathematics, and fond of novel-reading, who gave no indications of superior endowments. On the other hand, a college classmate (Thomas P. Devereux, Esq., of Halifax) and member of the same society, who knew him intimately throughout life, and was five and twenty years associated with him at the bar, affirms that "he was beyond dispute the first boy of his class, composed of seventy individuals, many of them afterwards distinguished men." He was not, says this friend, "a hard student of the prescribed course. Perhaps I ought to add that he was remiss in his college duties, but he was eager for information to a most wonderful degree, and among his fellow-students he exhibited the same intellectual superiority we have seen him so steadily maintain among men." To the same source I am indebted for the following observations concerning his elocution, which I repeat for the advantage and encouragement of the young. "I think," he remarks, "that the thousands who listened to the fluency with which Mr. Badger spoke, the clearness of his enunciation, the exact accuracy of his sentences and the carefulness of their formation—the right words always in the right places—will be surprised to learn that in his youthful attempts in debate he was almost a stammerer. I have heard him say he owed exemption from downright stuttering to his father, whom he remembered with affection, though under five years of age at the time of his decease, who would not permit him to speak while he hesitated in the least, but required him to stand by his side perfectly silent, until he had collected himself and arranged his thoughts. He, himself, often asserted that any one could speak fluently who thought clearly and did not lose his presence of mind."