with little or no regard to the public good. They may mystify
themselves and others with disputations on political economy,
proving the most opposite doctrines to their own satisfaction, and
perhaps to the conviction of no one else on earth. They may deserve
reprobation for their selfishness, their violence, their errors,
or their wickedness. They may do our country much harm. They may
retard its growth, destroy its harmony, impair its character, render
its institutions unstable, pervert the public mind, and deprave
the public morals. These are indeed evils, and sore evils, but
the principle of life remains, and will yet struggle with assured
success over these temporary maladies. Still we are great, glorious,
united, and free, still we have a name that is revered abroad and
loved at home--a name which is a tower of strength to us against
foreign wrong and a bond of internal union and harmony, a name which
no enemy pronounces but with respect, and which no citizen hears but
with a throb of exultation. Still we have that blessed Constitution
which, with all its pretended defects and all its alleged
violations, has conferred more benefit on man than ever yet flowed
from any other human institution--which has established justice,
insured domestic tranquillity, provided for the common defense,
promoted the general welfare, and which, under God, if we be true
to ourselves, will insure the blessings of liberty to us and to
our posterity. Surely such a country and such a Constitution have
claims upon you, my friends, which cannot be disregarded. I entreat
and adjure you, then, by all that is near and dear to you on earth,
by all the obligations of patriotism, by the memory of your fathers
who fell in the great and glorious struggle, for the sake of your
sons whom you would not have to blush for your degeneracy, by all
your proud recollections of the past and all your fond anticipations
of the future renown of our nation, preserve that country, uphold
that Constitution. Resolve that they shall not be lost while in your
keeping, and may God Almighty strengthen you to fulfill that vow!
[Illustration: GEORGE E. BADGER.]
GEORGE E. BADGER.
BY WM. A. GRAHAM.
My acquaintance with Mr. Badger commenced in the latter part of
the summer of 1825. He had already completed his service as a
judge, which office he resigned at the close of the spring circuit
of that year; had contested the palm of forensic eloquence and
professional learning with Seawell and Gaston, with a wide increase
of reputation, at the recent term of the Supreme Court, and was
returned to the practice in Orange, where he had once resided, in
generous competition with Murphy, Nash, Yancey, Mangum, Hawks,
Haywood, and others--Mr. Ruffin, hitherto the leader at this bar,
having been appointed his successor on the bench of the Superior
Court.
He was then a little turned of thirty years of age. One half of his
time since his majority had been passed upon the bench, yet his
fame as a lawyer was fully established; and though he doubtless
afterwards added vastly to his stores of erudition, yet in quickness
of perception, readiness of comprehension, clear and forcible
reasoning, elegant and imposing diction, in all that constitutes an
orator and advocate, he had attained an eminence hardly surpassed at
any period of his life. From that time and before it, I know not how
long, till the day he was stricken by the disease which terminated
his life, in North Carolina, at least, his name was on every tongue.
He was not only marked and distinguished, but an eminent man.
So bright and shining a character could not but attract general
observation; and though
"Hard is his fate on whom the public gaze
Is fixed forever, to detract or praise";
and while, with gay and hilarious nature, frank but somewhat
eccentrical manners and unequaled powers of conversation, united
with some infirmity of temper, his expressions and conduct in the
earlier half of his life were often the subject of severe criticism;
yet in the long period of from forty to fifty years, in which he
moved "in the high places of the world," no one denied him the
gifts of most extraordinary talents and unswerving integrity and
truthfulness. Even in the particular in which complaint had been
made--an imputed hauteur and exclusiveness--his disposition was
either mellowed by time, or, what is more probable, his character
came to be better appreciated from being better understood; and for
years before the sad eclipse which obscured his usefulness no man
enjoyed more of the general confidence and favor of the people, as
none had possessed in a higher degree their admiration.
Transferred to the more extended field of jurisprudence administered
in the courts of the United States, and afterwards to the Senate of
the nation, he took rank with the first advocates, jurisprudents,
and debaters of the Union; and the purity of his morals, the
elevation of his character, his readiness and accomplishments as a
conversationalist, the gayety and vivacity of his manners, rendered
him a general favorite with old and young, the grave and gay, in the
brilliant society of the metropolis.
George Edmund Badger was born in New Bern, North Carolina, on the
17th of April, 1795. His father, Thomas Badger, Esq., the son of
Edmund and Lucretia Badger, was a native of Connecticut, and his
birth is recorded to have taken place at Windham, in that State, on
the 27th of June, 1766. Having received a good education, he came
early in manhood to New Bern, and thence to Spring Hill, in the
county of Lenoir, where for some time he taught school, but was then
probably a student of the law, and was in due time admitted to the
practice in this State. Fixing his residence in New Bern, he early
rose to distinction as a practitioner, and appears in the published
reports as one of the leading counsellors in the courts of that
riding, and in the Supreme Court of the State, from 1792 till his
death, which occurred from yellow fever, while in attendance on a
court at Washington, in Beaufort county, on the 10th of October,
1799.
The traditions of the profession and of intelligent persons of his
acquaintance represent him as a man of determined character and
great intellectual and professional ability, and leave the question
in doubt whether at the same period of life he was more than equaled
by his son. The late Peter Browne, himself one of the first lawyers
and men of letters of his time in North Carolina, a contemporary
at the bar of the senior Badger, spoke of him, before the entrance
of his son into public life, as one of the ablest men he had ever
known, and especially as possessing a power to fascinate and control
masses of men in the most remarkable degree--a power, he added,
which the son might exert with similar effect, if he would.
His mother, by name Lydia Cogdell, was the daughter of Colonel
Richard Cogdell, of New Bern, a gentleman of much consideration
under the provincial rule in North Carolina, and an active and bold
leader in the movement of the Revolution. As early as August, 1775,
his name appears second on the list of the committee of safety for
New Bern district, appointed by the first Congress of the province
(that of Alexander Gaston being at the head). Lydia Cogdell was
a person of singular vigor of mind and character, well fitted to
encounter the cares and trials of her early widowhood. Her husband
had experienced that which has been said to be the common lot of the
profession in this country, "to work hard, live well and die poor,"
and left her with but little fortune to rear three children, of whom
George was the eldest and the only son.
According to her narrative, he manifested no fondness for books,
and made little progress in learning till about seven years of
age. At that period she placed in his hands Goldsmith's _Animated
Nature_. He was delighted with its perusal, and she never found it
necessary to stimulate his thirst for knowledge afterwards. His
preparatory course was taken in his native town of New Bern, and
at the age of fifteen he entered Yale College. There he passed
through the studies of the freshman and the sophomore classes, when
his education, so far as it depended on schools, was brought to a
close. A relative, a man of fortune, at the North, who had hitherto
furnished the means for his college expenses (his own patrimony
being wholly insufficient), and from whose bounty he had hoped to
pass on to graduation, suddenly withdrew his support and left him
to his own exertions. Of the motives of this unexpected arrest in
his college career, on which so much might have depended, it is
useless, now at least, to speculate or inquire. But it will be a
source of gratification to his friends to be assured that it was
attributable to no demerit in our student. True, his contemporaries
at Yale differ widely in their estimation of his capacities while
there. The Northern students, who belonged to a different society,
regarded him as a frolicsome youth, averse to mathematics, and fond
of novel-reading, who gave no indications of superior endowments.
On the other hand, a college classmate (Thomas P. Devereux, Esq.,
of Halifax) and member of the same society, who knew him intimately
throughout life, and was five and twenty years associated with him
at the bar, affirms that "he was beyond dispute the first boy of
his class, composed of seventy individuals, many of them afterwards
distinguished men." He was not, says this friend, "a hard student
of the prescribed course. Perhaps I ought to add that he was remiss
in his college duties, but he was eager for information to a most
wonderful degree, and among his fellow-students he exhibited the
same intellectual superiority we have seen him so steadily maintain
among men." To the same source I am indebted for the following
observations concerning his elocution, which I repeat for the
advantage and encouragement of the young. "I think," he remarks,
"that the thousands who listened to the fluency with which Mr.
Badger spoke, the clearness of his enunciation, the exact accuracy
of his sentences and the carefulness of their formation--the right
words always in the right places--will be surprised to learn that in
his youthful attempts in debate he was almost a stammerer. I have
heard him say he owed exemption from downright stuttering to his
father, whom he remembered with affection, though under five years
of age at the time of his decease, who would not permit him to speak
while he hesitated in the least, but required him to stand by his
side perfectly silent, until he had collected himself and arranged
his thoughts. He, himself, often asserted that any one could speak
fluently who thought clearly and did not lose his presence of mind."
He made known to President Dwight the reception of the letter
announcing the withdrawal of the patronage by which he had been thus
far supported, and the _res angusta domi_ which caused him to bid
adieu to Yale when reaching the portion of her curriculum by which
his expanding mind would have been most profited, and left with the
regrets and kind wishes of that venerable divine and instructor. In
after years when he had established a character, his _alma mater_
honored herself by volunteering a degree to her barely risen junior,
and enrolling his name among her sons with whom he should have
graduated in 1813, as, at a later period, she acknowledged his still
higher advancement in liberal learning, by conferring upon him the
degree of Doctor of Laws.
He appears to have indulged in no unavailing grief at the freak
of fortune which blasted his hopes of a collegiate education, but
returning home, though but little over seventeen years of age,
betook himself at once to the study of the law. His legal preceptor
was his maternal cousin, Hon. John Stanly, of New Bern, who as
an advocate, a statesman, a parliamentarian, a wit and adept in
conversation, is one of the historical characters of North Carolina;
and, who, viewing him as I did, from the gallery of the House of
Commons in my boyhood, impressed me as an orator of more graceful
and elegant manner and action, according to my conception of the
Ciceronian standard, than any public speaker it has ever been my
fortune to hear.
Mr. Badger was granted a license to practice law in the County
Courts in the summer of 1814, and, according to the usual probation,
in the Superior Courts in 1815; the Judges of the Supreme Court
consenting to relax the ordinary rule and overlook his nonage, by
reason of the narrowness of his fortune and the dependence of his
mother and sisters upon his exertions for their support. The war
with England raging in the former year, and an invasion of the State
being threatened by the British forces under Admiral Cockburn, then
hovering on our coasts, Governor Hawkins called out the militia, and
himself took the field, in an expedition for the defense of New Bern
and Beaufort. In this expedition Mr. Badger served as aid-de-camp
to General Calvin Jones, of Wake, with rank of major; but the alarm
soon ceasing, with the retirement of the enemy the soldier was
again resolved into the youthful barrister. A vacancy occurring in
the office of solicitor to prosecute the pleas of the State in that
riding, about this time, he was introduced to public notice by the
temporary appointment from the judge, and made one circuit in that
capacity.
In 1816, the year of his majority, he was returned a member of
the House of Commons from the town of New Bern; and whatever
advantages he may have lost by his retirement from college (and
they were doubtless many and important), it may well be questioned
whether any of the more fortunate youths he had left behind in the
classic shades of Yale were, by this time, better fitted to play a
distinguished part in a deliberative assembly or a court of justice.
Profiting by the instruction, the conversation, the intercourse,
and the example of that accomplished gentleman, Mr. Stanly, and his
compeers, Gaston, Edward Graham, Moses Mordecai, and others, whom
he met at the bar or in society, but above all by his own profound
study, he not only gained great attainments in the law, but (what
is now I fear becoming rare), a familiar acquaintance with the
classic authors of English literature, and with the arts of rhetoric
and composition. He wrote and spoke our language with a readiness,
force, precision, and propriety, the more remarkable because equally
as conspicuous in jocose and trifling conversation (in which he
freely indulged) as in public address. As a critic, whether under
the inspiration of a "good or bad natured muse," he has had few
peers among the judges of "English undefiled." His appearance in
the Legislature was the advent of a new star above the horizon,
somewhat erratic and peculiar in its orbit, but effulgent even in
its irregularities, and shining with a splendor not unworthy of the
oldest and greatest lights of the firmament.
Tradition furnishes anecdotes of many encounters, during the
session, of gladiatorial skill, in which his love of pleasantry and
the _gaudia certaminis_ involved him with the late Attorney-General
Drew, a son of genius and of Erin, and others, with various success:
but it assures us that this, his first and last session in the
General Assembly, closed with a profound impression and universal
acknowledgment of his genius, culture, and high promise for the
future.
The Hon. Thomas Ruffin, the speaker of the House of Commons, who
had been first appointed a judge of the Superior Court during this
session, discovering in Mr. Badger a congenial spirit, alike emulous
with himself of liberal culture and professional distinction,
invited him to take his briefs and pursue the practice in Orange.
The acceptance of this proposition carried him to Hillsborough as
his place of residence for the next two or three years, during
which, having married the daughter of Hon. James Turner, of Warren,
he transferred his home to Warrenton; thence he moved to Louisburg,
where he continued to reside until his retirement from the bench in
1825, when he removed to Raleigh, and there abode during the residue
of his life.
How well he maintained his professional character in the new field
of his practice is observed in the fact that, with but little of
what is known as personal popularity, he was elected a judge of the
Superior Court by the Legislature in its session of 1820, at the
age of twenty-five. In this office he rode the circuits four years
with admitted ability, candor and impartiality, evading no question
and no duty; but he was sometimes thought to err from quickness
of temper and too great readiness to assume responsibility. His
courtesy to the profession won him general esteem. The people,
though sometimes murmuring at the severity of a sentence or a
supposed arbitrary or whimsical order, regarded with equal wonder
the promptness and force with which he discussed questions of law
with the veterans of the bar, and the intelligent, amusing and
instructive conversation with which he habitually entertained his
acquaintances and associates.
I mention a single case in his administration of the law as
illustrative both of the firm and impartial hand with which he dealt
out justice and the jealous care with which the judiciary of North
Carolina has ever protected and maintained the rights of the weak
against the strong and influential. A citizen of great fortune, and
advanced age, who had represented his county in earlier years in
both Houses of the Legislature, having also numerous and influential
connections, charged a free-negro with larceny of his property,
had him brought by warrant before a justice of the peace, prevailed
on the justice to try and convict him of the offense charged, and
to sentence him to punishment by stripes, which were inflicted--a
proceeding allowable by law, provided the offender had been a slave.
But here the culprit was a freeman, and by the Constitution entitled
to public trial in open court before a jury of the country. The
prosecutor, with the justice and constable, was arraigned before
the Superior Court for this violation of law, and their guilt
being established, Judge Badger, who happened to preside at this
term, was strongly inclined to imprison the principal defendant,
and was only deterred by reason of his (said defendant's) age and
state of health; but, announcing that this was omitted from that
cause only, sentenced him to a fine of twelve hundred dollars, the
justice of the peace to fifty, and the constable to ten dollars,
the differences being made on account of their several grades of
intelligence and consequent criminality, as well as of ability to
pay.
From the time of his return to the bar and location at Raleigh,
until the access of disease which suddenly, and, as it proved,
finally arrested his course, he devoted his time to the practice
of his profession, with the exception of a few months, occasioned
by his appointment by Harrison and his continuation by Tyler as
Secretary of the Navy, and such further interruption as was produced
by his occupation of a seat in the Senate of the United States from
1846 to 1855. During his forensic career he was, at different times,
proposed by executive nomination for the bench of the Supreme Court,
both of his own State and of the United States; but the spirit of
party exacted a denial of his confirmation, though no man doubted
his eminent qualification.
If it be true, as remarked by Pinkney, in one of his familiar
letters, published by Wheaton, that "the bar is not a place
to acquire or preserve a false or a fraudulent reputation for
talents," it was eminently so in his case. He had an intrepid and
self-reliant mind, which, disdaining artifice, timidity or caution,
struck out into the open field of controversy with the daring of
conscious power, and shunned no adversary not clad in the panoply
of truth; was as ready to challenge the authority of Mansfield or
Denman, Rosyln or Eldon, if found deflecting from the paths of
principle or precedent, as that of meaner names. If, from want of
opportunity or inclination, he had failed to master the mathematics
of numbers, he made himself proficient in the mathematics of life
(as our law, from the exactness of rule at which it aims, has been
not inaptly denominated), and by a rigorous logic was prompt to
expose whatever could not bear the test of reason. Yet, it was a
logic free from the pedantry of the schools, apparently not derived
from books, and accompanied by a rapidity of mental action, which
gave to it the appearance of intuition. Whether in analysis or
synthetical reasoning, in dealing with facts before juries or the
most intricate questions of law before courts, these faculties were
equally conspicuous, and attended, when occasion called for their
use, with powers of humor, sarcasm, and ridicule hardly inferior to
those of ratiocination. Added to all this, there was a lucidness
of arrangement, an exact grammatical accuracy in every sentence,
a forcible and graceful style which, independent of a clear and
distinct enunciation, a melodious voice and engaging manner,
imparted even to his extemporaneous arguments the charms of polished
composition.
On one occasion, in a case of indictment for blasphemy, the question
had been raised whether the Christian religion was a part of the
common law, with a suggestion that if it was, it might be altered
by statute, Mr. Badger volunteered an argument for the cause of
religion and sound morality. It so happened that, as he opened his
case, a venerable citizen of the State, of great intelligence,
entered the court-room to speak a word to the reporter, expecting
immediately to retire. He was, however, so fascinated with the
manner of the speaker, the splendor of his diction, the copiousness
of his theological and legal learning, the force and clearness of
his arguments and the precision with which they were stated, that
he sat down and heard him to the close, observing, as he withdrew,
"what folly ever to have made him a judge, he ought to have been a
bishop."
Literature, whose office it is to preserve the results of learning,
knowledge, and fancy, has made so little progress among us that
there has not been much effort to save from oblivion the discussions
at the bar or in the deliberative assemblies of the State--the chief
theatres of public intellectual exertion besides the pulpit. Had Mr.
Badger been studious of posthumous fame and bestowed half the time
in reporting his speeches in the more important of his causes on the
circuit, which Cicero recommended and practiced in the preparation
of his orations, the result would have been a most interesting
contribution to American rhetorical literature. There are occasions
enough within the recollection of many, who were present, in Wake,
Orange, Granville, Halifax, and elsewhere, when his utterances,
even if printed as delivered, would have formed a volume of no less
interest than the speeches of Wirt or Emmet, Erskine or Curran,
as well as afforded insight into events, crimes, transactions of
business, and the state of society of our times, such as the muse of
history derives from the records of courts of justice.