THE
New Jersey Law Journal
PUBLISHED MONTHLY
VOLUME XLV FEBRUARY, 1922 No. 2
SOME REMINISCENCES, MOSTLY LEGAL
BY HON. FREDERIC ADAMS, LOS ANGELES, CAL.
IV. Certain Courts and Lawyers.
Ever since my boyhood the drama of the courtroom has interested me more than the drama of the theatre. I well remember my introduction to litigated business. I was a youngster on a visit to Boston when some one took me to a Court where a patent case was on trial. I was duly impressed by the imposing personality of the Judge, but my attention was soon fixed by the witness on the stand, whom I happened to know, for my father had once introduced me to him. He was Professor James Jay Mapes, of Newark, New Jersey, a chemist and inventor, one of whose many activities was the manufacture of fertilizers. I had visited one of his factories, somewhere between Newark and Elizabeth, and was surprised to see him at Boston in the rôle of a mechanical expert in a patent case. As the examination carefully proceeded I concluded, with the rashness of inexperience, that the examiner was a very dull man, for he seemed so slow to get an idea. What I then mistook for dullness I now recognize as professional skill, employed by counsel to unfold to the Court and jury the details of a complex mechanism. I know now more about that case than I did then, for, rather to my surprise, I have recently found a report of it in the first volume of Fisher's "Patent Cases," at page 108. The time was August, 1851, when I was not quite eleven years old. The courtroom was that of the Circuit Court of the United States for the First Circuit. Samuel Colt was plaintiff. The Massachusetts Arms Company was defendant. The counsel for the plaintiff were E. N. Dickerson, C. L. Woodbury and G. T. Curtis, and for the defendant R. A. Chapman, G. Ashmun and Rufus Choate, and the Judge was Mr. Justice Levi Woodbury of the Supreme Court of the United States, who was then testing the validity of the patent for the Colt revolver. The charge is reported in full. The verdict was for the plaintiff.
Judge Woodbury was a New Hampshire man of some note, then in his sixty-second year, called by Thomas H. Benton "the rock of the New England Democracy," who had been Senator of the United States from New Hampshire, and a member of the Cabinets of Jackson and Van Buren, and, on the nomination of President Polk, had succeeded Judge Story as a member of the Supreme Court of the United States. The trial of the case in which I saw him was one of his last official duties, for he died in the following month. He was succeeded by Benjamin R. Curtis, of Boston, on the nomination of President Fillmore.
While I was at the Harvard Law School in 1863-4, Richard H. Dana was United States District Attorney at Boston, and I often saw him at Cambridge, where he lived. His book, "Two Years Before the Mast," was and is a favorite of mine. I suppose that I have read it twenty times, and I hope that the boys of this day read and love it. It is in a class by itself. There is, I think, not in English, and probably not in any language, another account of seafaring life written in the forecastle by one of the crew, who was also a gentleman and a scholar and master of a charming style. The veracity and spirit of the narrative have made it a classic both here and in England. In California it is particularly valued, for Dana was one of the pioneers and had sailed through the Golden Gate on the "Alert" in the winter of 1835-6, many years before the Mexican War and the discovery of gold, when San Francisco as yet was not. When, at the end of the visit, the good ship floated out on the tide, herds of deer came down to the northerly shore to watch the unusual sight. Dana left college and went on this voyage to cure an affection of the eyes. After his return he graduated at Harvard in the class of 1837 and became a lawyer.