What is the oldest mine of any kind in the United States?
C. D. Adams.
Answer.—It is generally conceded by those who are read up in the history of mining and metallurgy in this country that the oldest mining enterprise of the United States, still active, is the Mine La Motte, in the lead district of Eastern Missouri, opened about 1720 under Renault, of Law’s notorious Mississippi Company. It was named after La Motte, the mineralogist of the expedition. It has been worked at intervals ever since it was opened, and is in successful operation now. There are silver mines in New Mexico and Arizona, some of which may have been opened by the Spanish adventurers of the latter part of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth. Some of these ancient mines were operated by the Toltecs and Aztecs years before the Spanish invasion, but it is not easy to identify them. So there are copper mines in the Lake Superior region in which the tools and mining marks of ancient miners of pre-historic times were found by the pioneers of the present American mining companies. Where the first colonists of Virginia got the ship-load of “fool’s gold” which they sent back to England, to the great disgust of the London company, is not certainly known; but it is known that at the same time, in 1608, they shipped a quantity of iron from Jamestown, which yielded seventeen tons of metal, the first pig iron ever made from American ore. There are diggings in North and South Carolina and Georgia, now overgrown with forests, which are supposed to have been excavated by the followers of De Soto and his immediate successors between 1539 and 1600. The first recorded account of the discovery of coal in the United States is contained in Hennepin’s narrative of his explorations in the West, between 1673 and 1680, when he saw the coal outcrop in the bluffs of the Illinois River, not far from Ottawa and LaSalle; but coal was first mined in the Eastern States in the beginning of this century.
LAWYER PRESIDENTS AND CONGRESSMEN.
Wilmington, Ill.
What per cent of our Presidents and representatives in Congress have been professional lawyers? Is it growing more or less common to elect lawyers to these places?
L. F. Hazelton.
Answer.—Of the Presidents, John Adams, Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Jackson, Van Buren, Tyler, Polk, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Lincoln, Hayes, and Garfield were lawyers; and Arthur was a successful legal practitioner until appointed Collector of the Port of New York by President Grant. Washington was a surveyor until he entered the army. Madison was studying law when elected to the Virginia Convention of 1776, after which he became absorbed in political life. Monroe studied law under Jefferson, but did not really enter the profession, being called off into military and political affairs. Harrison entered military and political life early, and was kept in it most of his days. Taylor and Grant rose to the Chief Magistracy by distinguished military services. Johnson was a tailor until he got into political life. As to Congress, its membership has been too numerous for a full investigation. The proportions indicated below will hold good, in all probability, for the whole of the last or Forty-seventh Congress. The two Senators and six of the eight Representatives from Alabama, both Senators and three of the five Representatives from South Carolina, one Senator and seven of the nine Congressmen from Virginia, both Senators and all the four Representatives of Arkansas, in that Congress were lawyers, or, at least, had been admitted to the bar; so were both Senators and twelve of the nineteen Representatives from Illinois, the two Senators and six of the nine Representatives from Iowa, both Senators and eight of the eleven Representatives of Massachusetts, one Senator and sixteen of the thirty-three Representatives of Pennsylvania. The South is more given to the practice of choosing lawyers, or persons with a smattering of the law, to represent them in Congress and the Legislature than the North. Planters, who never seriously expected their sons to practice, educated them in the law formerly, as one of the qualifications for political life. The olden prestige of the law as one of the learned professions, and the one that led most directly to political promotions, had its influence on the sons of the wealthy and their sires, not in the South only, but in the North; nor on them only, but on the people. There is some rational force also in the popular conception that lawyers are or should be peculiarly fitted to be law-makers. The tendency in the North for some years past, as indicated by the above statistics, is to choose fewer lawyers and have commerce and the great industries of the country represented by their conspicuous leaders.