The History of Orange County New York

by Unknown

Some amelioration of the intolerable conditions under which circuit terms were held in Newburgh and Goshen was effected through the election in 1870 of Judge Calvin E. Pratt, whose conservatism, affability and dignity won for him universal respect. This improvement was extended by the election in 1880 of Judge Edgar M. Cullen, whose high sense of absolute fairness to all suitors alike led him to devote as much time and thought to a case involving a trifling amount as to one involving large interests; though even he was merciless in his infliction of night sessions upon the attorneys during the hot June term at Goshen, a course to which he felt impelled because of his inability to remain longer than one week and his desire to crowd as much work as possible into that wholly inadequate time.

The comfort and convenience of the Orange County bar and the interests of litigants were served to a still greater degree by the election in 1882 of Judge Charles F. Brown. Though he could not extend the trial terms beyond two weeks, on account of his assignments to other counties, still he held a special term every Saturday at Newburgh where, by consent of counsel, many cases were tried that otherwise would have been tried before a jury, thus affording great relief to the overtaxed calendars of the trial terms.

From that time to the present there has been a steady reaction against feverishness and ferment as a suitable atmosphere for judicial proceedings and a gradual return to calm, neutral, deliberate, dignified, decorous methods of judicial procedure, until finally, for the first time in the history of the county, a four-weeks' term of court was held in February, 1907; this being one of the first fruits of the formation of the ninth judicial district, consisting of the river counties alone—a change which was opposed by some Orange County lawyers but which is now generally recognized as, in the highest degree, conducive to the convenience and interests of the bar and of the public, though it does involve some additional burdens upon jurors.

Forty years ago the familiar excuse made by judges for dispatching business with unseemly haste was their solicitude for the time and convenience of the jurors. Indeed there never was a judge more popular than Judge Barnard among jurors, witnesses, spectators and the public. They admired the celerity of his movements and they were vastly entertained by his caustic remarks to counsel. But his remarks about counsel and witnesses during the progress of the trial were far more entertaining and racy than any the public was permitted to hear. The favored persons privileged to hear these were his associates upon the bench of the old Oyer and Terminer, since abolished and now merged in the Supreme Court. They were drawn from the justices of the peace of the county and with the presiding judge constituted the criminal branch of the court. Squire George A. Durland, of the town of Greenville, who sat in this capacity next to Judge Barnard at many terms of court, never tired of telling about the trenchant, scathing, witty commentary kept up by the judge upon every incident of the trial, the counsel engaged in it and the witnesses sworn upon it.

During Judge Barnard's entire tenure of office the plea of not taking up the time of the jurors was invoked to override every other consideration. Not even death itself was superior to it or sacred from it. When Mr. Winfield died on the tenth of June, 1888, and court convened at Goshen on Monday, the eighteenth of June, Judge Cullen suspended the regular business of the court at four o'clock to allow a suitable tribute to his memory, including several addresses in addition to the resolutions. But when Judge Gedney died, a month later, there was no opportunity to take formal action upon his death at a trial term until the regular November term. Accordingly, when court convened at Newburgh the twelfth of November an informal request was made to Judge Barnard for an opportunity to pursue the same course in respect to Judge Gedney's memory that had been adopted at Goshen in respect to Mr. Winfield. Judge Barnard promptly and firmly refused to allow the time of the jurors to be taken up in this way, adding: "Why, he's been dead some time, hasn't he?" So it became necessary to change the plan and to offer simply a motion "that a committee be appointed to present at a meeting of the bar of Orange County to be hereafter called suitable resolutions." That there should be further delay in honoring the memory of this great lawyer and brilliant advocate, after there had already been a necessary delay of four months, is not a reproach that rests upon the bar of Orange County. As the motion occupied only two minutes it was promptly granted and the committee purposed to present the resolutions at the following term of court to be held at Goshen in January, 1889, which was expected to be presided over by Judge Brown. But when Judge Brown was transferred to the Court of Appeals he became disqualified from holding the term and Judge Barnard unexpectedly took his place. Admonished by previous experience no attempt was made to present the resolutions at that time or to apply for permission to make addresses in honor of Judge John G. Wilkin, who, also, had meantime died. So the tributes of the Orange County bar to Judge Gedney, Judge Wilkin and Surrogate Henry A. Wadsworth, whose death also had occurred, were massed together at a meeting of the bar presided over by Judge Brown on Saturday, the second day of February, 1889, seven months after the death of Judge Gedney, without those customary adjuncts to the dignity of the occasion—the crowded court room; the attendance of litigants, jurors and witnesses from all parts of the county; the solemn pause in the business of the court; the impressive silence; the strained, eager attention of old friends in the audience to the last tributes of respect for one they loved; all of which were not only appropriate but, indeed, imperative in honoring one who had so often held that very court room silent, captive, enthralled by the spell of his genius.

If Judge Gedney's brethren had felt, in the first instance, that a tribute to his memory at a mere meeting of the bar would be appropriate and adequate, it would not have been delayed seven months, as such a meeting could have been called at any time after his death. That it was not so called shows the strength of a sentiment which was ruthlessly trampled upon by judicial contempt not merely for all the traditions of the bar but for all the sacredness of love and death.

At the same time the bar always recognized with gratitude the earnest desire on the part of Judge Barnard to transact all the business that he could and to accommodate the bar as much as possible. It was this disposition that led to his constant signing of ex parte orders without looking at them, trusting to the honor of the bar not to impose upon him and, also, to a motion by the other side to vacate any improvident order. The lawyers, through long custom, so came to prefer this system that they resented any departure from it by new judges who could not take this view of their duties. When Judge Brown's transfer to the second division of the Court of Appeals led to the Newburgh special terms being taken by Judges Cullen and Bartlett, the bar practically boycotted them in favor of Judge Barnard's Saturday term at Poughkeepsie, merely because both Judge Cullen and Judge Bartlett manifested a very decided preference to know what they were signing. Gradually, however, the lawyers learned that this course was not intended as a reflection upon the bar, but as a help to it, in preventing any such mistake or oversight as might lead afterwards to serious consequences. Of this I once witnessed a striking illustration. An attorney desired an order to examine a party before trial in a case in which the examination of his adversary was absolutely essential to his success in the litigation. Judge Bartlett sent the affidavit back to him three times for correction and the order was finally sustained in the Court of Appeals because of the sufficiency of the affidavit. All this involved to Judge Bartlett conscientious labor and minute examination which he might well have shirked and which judges generally consider counsel have no right to expect of them or to impose upon them.

Judge Barnard was the most conspicuous of all the judges in his anxiety to save the lawyers the trouble of travel in order to transact their business. He instructed the Orange County attorneys to mail to him an order designating a referee of their own choice, to compute the amount due in foreclosure cases, with the report of the referee signed by him in anticipation of his appointment, together with the judgment of foreclosure; whereupon he signed at the same time both the order of reference and the judgment of foreclosure, promptly mailing them back, although it was physically impossible that the referee should have acted in the interval between his appointment and the judgment. This practice, which is now regarded as irregular and which even the most accommodating judges now discountenance, resulted in no harm, for it rested upon the most implicit good faith on the part of the attorneys, while the confidence of the judge was never, in a single instance, abused. An incident strongly illustrating this trait of Judge Barnard also grew indirectly out of Judge Brown's transfer to the Court of Appeals. Judgments of foreclosure in cases in Sullivan County had usually been taken before Judge Brown at Newburgh because, though in another judicial district, Orange County is an adjoining county and this is permitted by the code. But soon after judge Brown left Newburgh an attorney, overlooking the fact that Dutchess County does not adjoin Sullivan, sent the papers in a Sullivan County foreclosure case to Judge Barnard to be signed by him on Saturday at Poughkeepsie. His eagle eye at once noticed that the action was in Sullivan County and that he had no jurisdiction to act in the case in Dutchess County. Any other judge would have returned the papers, calling attention to the difficulty. But did this satisfy Judge Barnard? Not at all. This would not have advanced the business. This would not have "helped out the boys." So he struck out the word "Poughkeepsie" in the order and judgment and in his own handwriting substituted the word "Newburgh," thus making himself, by a legal fiction, sit in an adjoining county for five minutes, for the purposes of that case, though he was actually in Poughkeepsie all that day, and though he never held a Saturday special term in Newburgh in all his life. Judge Cullen and Judge Bartlett would have felt that they were inviting impeachment by such an act, and yet Judge Barnard was moved solely by the desire to facilitate the business of the attorneys in every possible way. To him an irregularity meant nothing unless it meant also a wrong. But those days have passed and have been succeeded by better days, in which it is recognized by the courts and the lawyers alike that they should co-operate in making even their routine practice so regular as to exclude any possibility of error.

There will be no sigh in this retrospect over the better days of long ago, no wail about the "good old times." The better days are now and the good times have come at last. The new generation of lawyers now entering upon their active career has reason for gratification that the facilities for the orderly, deliberate, tranquil trial and hearing of their causes, with the prospect that even and exact justice will be rendered in them, are greater to-day than at any previous period in the history of the county. There never was so good an opportunity for a young, ambitious, able advocate to win fame at the bar of Orange County as there is to-day. While the subjects of litigation and the conditions of business have somewhat changed in the last fifty years, human nature has never changed. Juries respond to-day as readily as then to the touch of a master spirit. When jurors ask nowadays why they do not hear such speeches at court as their fathers have told them about the answer generally given is that judges frown upon anything like display and hold the lawyers down to business. The business of an advocate is to make a good speech and no judge ever was able to stop a good speech. Let no young lawyer seek indolent refuge in the pretext that the judges will not give him a chance. Let him not, with difficulty, fold his restless pinions lest they be arrested in their soaring flight by judicial insensibility. No, the reason that forensic eloquence has so lamentably declined in Orange County lies not in the hostility of judges, but in the absorption of lawyers themselves in the merely material, sordid aspects of life, to the exclusion of any interest in those liberal arts and erudite pursuits which alone can anoint the hesitating lips with the honey of eloquent discourse. The field is clear for another Winfield or Gedney.

It is the fashion to say that the influence of the bar has declined—that the legal profession, as a body, does not enjoy the same measure of public respect which was paid to it in the early days of the republic, or exercise now that ascendancy over public opinion which once it exerted so powerfully and so naturally. It is true, indeed, that coincidently with the stealthy, sinister growth in the Northern States of the modern machine methods of party management the lawyer has been gradually and inevitably displaced as a leader of public opinion. It is only in the South that the influence of the lawyer among the masses is still unshaken because there the appeal of candidates is still made directly to the people who, through their primaries and in other republican ways familiar to the fathers and founders of the nation, express their preference and give effect to their choice.