HENRY W. PAINE.
By Prof. William Mathews, LL.D.
Among the callings acknowledged to be not only useful, but indispensable to society, there is no one, except the medical, which has been oftener the butt of vulgar ridicule and abuse than the legal. "Lawyers and doctors," says a writer on Wit and Humor in the British Quarterly Review, "are the chief objects of ridicule in the jest-books of all ages." But whatever may be the disadvantages of the Law as a profession, in spite of the aspersions cast upon it by disappointed suitors, over-nice moralists, and malicious wits, it can boast of one signal advantage over all other business callings,—that eminence in it is always a test of ability and acquirement. While in every other profession quackery and pretension may gain for men wealth and honor, forensic renown can be won only by rare natural powers aided by profound learning and varied experience in trying causes. The trickster and the charlatan, who in medicine and even in the pulpit find it easy to dupe their fellow-men, find at the bar that all attempts to make shallowness pass for depth, impudence for wit, and fatal for wisdom, are instantly baffled. Not only is an acute, sagacious, and austere bench a perilous foe to the trickery of the ignorant or half-prepared advocate, but the veteran practitioners around him are quick to detect every sign of mental weakness, disingenuous artifice, or disposition to substitute sham for reality. Forensic life is, to a large extent, life in the broad glare of day, under the scrutiny of keen-eyed observers and merciless critics. In every cause there are two attorneys engaged, of whom one is a sentinel upon the other; and a blunder, a slip, an exaggeration, or a misrepresentation, never escapes without instant exposure. The popular reputation of a lawyer, it has been well said, is but the winnowed and sifted judgment which reaches the world through the bar, and is therefore made up after severe ordeal and upon standard proof.
These observations are deemed not inappropriate as an introduction to a sketch of the life of one of the most eminent lawyers of New England, whose career may be regarded as signally worthy of imitation.
Henry William Paine was born August 30th, 1810, in Winslow, Maine. His father, Lemuel Paine, a native of Foxborough, Mass., was a graduate of Brown University, and a lawyer by profession, who began practice in Winslow, Maine, in partnership with Gen. Ripley, afterwards the hero of Lundy's Lane. Owing to poor health, Mr. Paine, sen., soon abandoned the law for other pursuits. He was familiar with the representative English authors, and specially fond of the Greek language and literature, which he cultivated during his life. He had a tenacious memory, and could quote Homer by the page. Henry Paine's mother, Jane Thomson Warren, was the daughter of Ebenezer T. Warren, of Foxborough, the brother of General Joseph Warren, who fell at Bunker Hill. Of the three children of Lemuel and Jane T. (Warren) Paine, Henry William was the second.
After the usual preparatory education, Mr. Paine entered Waterville College (now Colby University) in 1826, and graduated in 1830, at the age of twenty, with the highest honor of his class. During the last year of the college course, he was principal of Waterville Academy, then just founded for the preparation of young men for college. He spent eight hours a day in charge of his pupils, of whom there were eighty-two, and at the same time kept up with his class in the college studies. As a teacher he was greatly beloved and respected by his pupils, whose affection was won by no lack of discipline, but by his kindly sympathy, encouragement, and watchful aid in their studies. He had an eye that could beam with tenderness, or dart lightnings; and it was a fine moral spectacle, illustrating the superiority of mental over physical force, to see a bully of the school, almost twice his size, and who, apparently, could have crushed him if he chose, quail under his eagle gaze, when arraigned at the principal's desk for a misdemeanor. It is doubtful if ever he flogged a scholar; but he sometimes brought the ruler down upon the desk with a force that made the schoolroom ring, and inspired the lawless with a very wholesome respect for his authority. The fact that from that day to this his office has always been a kind of Mecca, to which his old pupils, whether dwellers in "Araby the Blest" or in the sandy wastes of life, have made pious pilgrimages, shows how deeply he was loved and how highly he was honored as a teacher.
Immediately after graduation Mr. Paine was appointed a Tutor of Waterville College, and discharged the duties of that office for a year. He then began the study of law in the office of his uncle, the late Samuel S. Warren, of China, Maine, and continued the study in the office of William Clark, a noted lawyer in Hallowell, Maine, and, for a year, in the Law School of Harvard University, where he was the classmate of Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips and B.F. Thomas. In the autumn of 1834, he was admitted to the bar of Kennebec County, Maine. Beginning his professional career at Hallowell, he prosecuted it there with signal success till the summer of 1854, having for twenty years a practice not surpassed by that of any member of the Maine bar. During the sessions of 1836, 1837, and again in that of 1853, he represented the citizens of Hallowell in the lower house of the State Legislature. He was also for five years Attorney for Kennebec County. During his stay in Maine, he was repeatedly offered a seat on the bench of the Supreme Judicial Court of that State; but, having an unconquerable aversion to office of every kind, civil or political, he declined to accept the honor pressed upon him. In 1853 he was offered by his political friends, then the dominant party in the Legislature, a seat in the United States Senate; but he refused to be nominated. In the summer of 1854, in accordance with a long cherished resolve, which he had been prevented from executing before by a promise to his father that he would not leave Maine during that parent's lifetime, he removed to Cambridge, Mass., and opened a law-office in Boston. Here he at once entered upon a large and lucrative practice, both in the State and Federal courts, which kept steadily increasing for over twenty years, till declining health and partial deafness compelled him to withdraw from the courts of justice, and confine himself to office business. During this period, his opinion on abstruse and knotty points of law was often solicited by eminent counsel living outside of Massachusetts, and he sent written opinions to attorneys in nine different states. As Referee and Master in Chancery, he was called upon to arbitrate in a great number of difficult and complicated cases, involving the ownership and disposition of large amounts of property. His decisions in these vexed cases, which often involved the unravelling of tangled webs of testimony, and the consideration of the nicest and most delicate questions of law, were luminous and masterly, and so impartial withal, that the litigants must have often been convinced of their justness, if not contented,—etaim contra quos statuit, aequos placatosque dimisit.
In 1863 and 1864 Mr. Paine was nominated, without his consent, by the Democratic party of Massachusetts, a candidate for the office of Governor. With much reluctance he accepted the nomination, but, as he expected, and doubtless to his joy, failed of an election. In 1867, on the resignation of Chief Justice Bigelow, the office of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts was offered by Governor Bullock to Mr. Paine, who, not wishing to give up his large and profitable practice at the bar, declined to accept. This decision, though a natural one, is much to be regretted by the citizens of this state. Coming from an eminently judicial mind, his decisions, had he sat on the bench, would have been models of close, cogent reasoning, clearness, and brevity, worthy of the best days of the Massachusetts judiciary.
Shortly after his removal to this State Mr. Paine was associated with Rufus Choate and F.O.J. Smith in the defence of Judge Woodbury Davis, of Portland, Maine, who had been impeached by the Legislature of that State for misconduct in his judicial office. In an editorial article upon the trial, which appeared after its termination, in the Kennebec Journal, published at Augusta, the Hon. James G. Blaine, the writer, declared epigrammatically that, in the defence of Judge Chase, "Paine furnished the logic, Choate the rhetoric, and Smith the slang."