The Green Bag VOL. XVIII.
No. 12
BOSTON
DECEMBER, 1906
THADDEUS STEVENS AS A COUNTRY LAWYER W. U. HENSEL THADDEUS STEVENS was born in the first term of George Washington's administration, and he died in the last year of Andrew Johnson's. His experience was not exceptionally extended, but it was stormy. While it lasted most of the history of American jurisprudence was written, but he did not enrich it with any material con tribution. In the great volume which the Marshalls and Websters, and our own Gibson and Tilghman, Binney and Sergeant, and a thousand other leaders of the profession have written, no page is his; nor shall I make bold to hang his portrait in the gallery of great American lawyers. But the fact that he was a Pennsylvanian of first rank, and that before he entered the field of national politics, and long before he became the parliamentary leader of a trium phant party, he had rapidly risen to the front as a trial lawyer, and the observation that so little of his work is recorded in the perma nent annals of Bench and Bar, make suffi cient apology for a brief recognition. His struggle — or, rather, that of his wid owed mother, for her lame boy, the young est and favorite — to get an education, his escapades at Burlington and graduation from Dartmouth, his choice of the law and beginning the study of it under Judge Mat tocks in his native state; his unexplained venture from Peacham, Vermont, to York, Pennsylvania; his engagement there as a teacher in an academy; how, outside of any law school, or even of any lawyer's office he pursued his studies diligently under David Casset, one of the leaders of the local Bar, are all matters of familiar history.
His admission was characteristic of the practice of his time. It may have been •infra dig. in the York of that day to com bine the study of a learned profession with self-support as a school teacher; his alien Yankee ways or caustic tongue may have won him personal enemies. Whatever pre vented his application for admission there, it is certain he rode horseback to Bel Air, the seat of the adjoining county of Harford, in Maryland, and presented himself, an entire stranger, on Monday, August 26, 1816, for membership at a Bar, where, if the gate did not stand open, its latch was loose. The judges sitting were Theodoric Bland and Zebulon Hollingsworth. They, together with Joseph Hopper Nicholson, chief judge, constituted the judges of the sixth judicial district, comprising the counties of Balti more and Harford. A committee of examination seems to have been appointed, and one of the members on it was General Wm. H. Winder, a noted law yer, who had been a distinguished Maryland soldier in the late war with Great Britain, in command of the District of Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. It is also related that Judge Chase, of later impeachment fame, participated in the ex amination, which was held after supper at the hotel; and a pre-requisite of the pro ceedings was an order (by the applicant) of two bottles of Madeira, which satisfactorily passed the committee's test. Then after young Stevens' assurance that he had read Blackstone, Coke upon Littleton, a work on pleading and Gilbert on Evidence, and that he knew the distinction between a contin
