Early in his professional career he became an ardent politician. He was a Jeffersonian Democrat, and at the bar of his residence stood almost alone in his partisan position. As such a party man he went into the State Legislature, and became an acknowledged leader. He possessed that great quality for a leader, the faculty of extempore speaking, joined with the ability to condense and elucidate the topics he took in hand. But he never submitted the convictions of his judgment to party dictation; and soon after his entering the arena of legislative warfare, he bravely stemmed party tide in advocating an increase of salaries for the State judges. The latter were all federalists, and it was not to be wondered that the republicans of that day, who wore in their noses the rings of party, should shrug their shoulders at the prospect of benefiting political opponents. But by his firm conduct, and by his confident assertion and able arguments in favor of the measure, it was carried. And to Joseph Story, more than any other man, Massachusetts is indebted for the opportunity of employing ablest judicial officers, without making their families beggars.
It is the disgrace of our country that its judicial officers are the most poorly paid of all professions and pursuits. And in every section of the Union, that distinguished lawyer who accepts a seat upon the bench, must hold the glories of his honor at a very high price, to surrender his ordinary professional emoluments for the wretched pittance which the various States dole out for days of public toil and nights of private study. We desire to look no further than this Empire State for examples. This Empire State, with its magnificent resources and proudly developing energies, should be the last to unite in adjudging its judicial officers to the labors of galley slaves, and to then pay them by the year less than a ballet-dancer receives by the month in all its principal cities. Two thousand five hundred dollars per year is the astounding sum which this same Empire State pays to its highest judicial officers. If we reverse the saying of Walpole, and read "every price has its man," we may not wonder if Dogberries and grandmothers are occasionally found upon the bench, dispensing their honest but destructive platitudes, and their Malaprop constructions of commercial law, to juries of astounded merchants.
From the arena of State politics, Mr. Story next changed his position to the temple of national discussions at Washington. His career in Congress was, however, limited to one session, and to a vacancy-seat occasioned by a death. He declined re-election; for in the words of his autobiographical account of this portion of his career, he had lost all relish for political controversy, and had found that an entire obedience to party projects required such constant sacrifices of opinion and feeling, that he preferred to devote himself with singleness of heart to the study of the law, which was at all times the object of his admiration and almost exclusive devotion. Public sentiment, however, forced him again into the State councils at home, where more liberty of professional engagement was permitted. He was in political life but a brief period again, before, in his thirty-second year, President Madison pressed his acceptance of a vacant Associate Justiceship in the Supreme Court of the United States, which had been declined by Levi Lincoln and by John Quincy Adams, then in Russia. Although the acceptance involved the surrender of heavy professional emolument, the high honor, the permanence of the tenure, and the opportunity of gratifying his juridical studies that he so much loved, joined in compelling his acquiescence.
"The atrocious crime of being a young man," which had compelled a hatred of William Pitt the younger, in a former day, was now brought up against him by many whose party subserviency fairly blushed before his manly integrity, and by others who envied him his success. But one year at the Circuit silenced all complaint. And in his thirty-third[pg 179] year he was acknowledged to be the able jurist whom, at his death in his sixty-sixth year of age, a whole nation mourned.
Dismissing for the present all consideration of his judicial life, and all estimate of his ability upon the bench, and passing over nearly twenty years of his life, we meet him in the possession of his fourth great honor in life—but an honor which was ever the first prized by him in all his after career—the appointment of Law Professor in Cambrige Law School.
Mr. Nathan Dane, whose Abridgement of American law in many volumes had obtained for him the gratitude of the profession at large, and the more substantial testimonial of pecuniary profit, had determined, about the fiftieth year of Judge Story's life, to repay the law some of the profits which its votaries had bestowed upon him, by donating ten thousand dollars for the establishment of a new professorship. He annexed to his donation, however, the condition that Judge Story should be the incumbent. To the great delight of the donor, and of the College Fellows, the Judge assented, and was inaugurated as Dane Professor of Law, with a special view to Lectures upon the Law of Nations, Commercial and Maritime Law, Federal Law and Equity—a station which he filled to the day of his lamented death.
This brief survey of his life presents him then in several public aspects; as a student, as an advocate, as a statesman, as a judge, and as an expounder of the great principles of law, which he worshipped with an idolatry of love.
To speak of his political career would not belong to the scope of our article. And to sit in judgment upon his judicial career would be our presumption. Older and abler pens must render their tributes to the extent and varied richness of his legal lore, which, taking root in principles, branched into the minutiæ of detail, under every sun and in every clime where law is recognized as a rule of human action. His judicial fame can never be increased or diminished by individual estimate. The law of patents, of admiralty and prizes, the jurisprudence of equity, and above all, his luminous explorations of what were once constitutional labyrinths, are monuments as indestructible as the Pyramids. If every trace of their original oneness be lost, they will yet live in the hours of future judicial days, in professional acts, and in the guiding policy of a remote posterity. His library of treatises are legal classics; and the worst defects which flippant carpers and canvassers of their claims to merit have discovered in their pages, have been their richness of detail and polish of learning! And no one can deny that as a judge he was the very example which 'Hobbes' in his 'Leviathan,' carried in mind when he thus wrote—"the things that make a good judge or good interpreter of the laws, are first—a right understanding of that principal law of nature called Equity, which depending not on the reading of other men's writings, but on the goodness of a man's own natural reason and meditation, is presumed to be in those most who have had most leisure and the most inclination to meditate thereon; second—contempt of unnecessary riches and preferments; third—to be able in judgment to divest himself of all fear, anger, hatred, love and compassion; fourthly and lastly—patience to hear, diligent attention in hearing, and memory to retain, digest, and apply what he hath heard."
Not the least amiable phase of the life of Judge Story, was the attention which he gave to letters and literary pursuits. He was no mere lawyer: no stringer of professional centos. He never hid his heart with the veil of dignity; nor smothered his fresh impulses (preserved intact from worldly rust since boyhood) with the weight of his judicial and professional labors. While he believed that the law was a jealous mistress, he knew that this mistress was too stable and sensible to decree that a gentle dalliance or seasonable flirtation with her maids of honor—Poetry, or the Arts, or Literature, or Love—was an unloyal act. He could turn from Grotius to Dickens, from Vattel to Thackeray. He could digest the points of the elaborate arguments of eminent counsel, and then turn aside to a gentle tonic from the administrating hand of Smollett or Walter Scott. Method was his master-key to all the combinations in the locks of labor.
Twice married he never ceased to eulogize the bliss of domesticity. Surrounded by loving eyes, the currents of his freshened affection flowed deeper and clearer every year. How he treasured home and home joys may be collected in the following lines from his poem on solitude (before referred to), written in his twenty-second year.