Biography of Andrew Scott, Arkansas

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        Date: 16 Dec 2007
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BIOGRAPHICAL AND PICTORIAL HISTORY OF ARKANSAS.
BY JOHN HALLUM.
VOL. I.
ALBANY: WEED, PARSON'S AND COMPANY, PRINTERS.
1887.

Entered according to act of Congress in the year eighteen hundred and eighty-seven,
BY JOHN HALLUM, 
In the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.

NOTE.

  [The following sketches of Robert Crittenden, Samuel Hall, John Taylor, the superior
court, including judges Benjamin Johnson and Thomas J. Lacy, Edward Cross, David Walker,
William Cummins, James W. Bates, Archibald Yell, Terrence Farrelly and Francis Hubbard,
in the order named, were written by General Albert Pike, at the request of the author,
for this work. Such an accomplished author needs no introduction to the American reader.]

PREFATORY.

  What one may now be able to say with knowledge of the men who lived fifty years ago in
Arkansas cannot be expected to be of interest to most of those who live in Arkansas
to-day. The new Arkansas is not the same Arkansas as the old one, but another. There has
been a conquest of the State, peaceful, indeed, by detachments of a great invading army
of men from other States and lands - peaceful, but none the less as much a conquest as
those of England by the Saxons and the Danes were, which almost obliterated from the
memories of the Britons the names of their old heroes.

  It is for this that I have been reluctant to write down what I remember of those men
whom I knew fifty-five years ago, or soon after, and whom I then esteemed worthy, or came
to esteem so afterward, when the animosities and dislikes engendered by political
differences had died out. There are so few now of the descendants of these men left, to
whom such reminiscences can be grateful! There are so few now to whom it is of any
importance or interest that the men of that remote day lived at all!

  One with difficulty brings himself to write of any thing, knowing that what he writes
will be read with indifference or impatience, and, to the larger part of those now living
in Arkansas, the names that I should have to mention will be as strange and unregarded as
those upon the monuments of Assyria and Chaldaea. "The life of the dead," said Cicero,
"is in the memory of the living;" and, if this be true, it is not in my power to bring to
that life again those whom I knew in the early days.

  Neither is there in this any thing to be with reason complained of. For, also, to those
of us who went to Arkansas no earlier than 1832 or 1836, the men who had lived and died
there before us were but the mere shadows of names, in the history of whose lives we felt
no interest. We put ourselves to no trouble to have the names kept in remembrance, but
unconcernedly permitted them to glide away from us into oblivion, no record of their
words or deeds remaining; and with what right can we complain, if we, too, the dead and
living alike, are to the men of to-day only as those are who lived and died in other
lands, when the world was not by a thousand years so old as it is now.

  Moreover, there is not much of adventure or action to be told of these men, that can
make what may be written of them otherwise than wearisome to read. The things that
chiefly interest us in our daily lives are of no interest afterward to any one, and if
recited they seem tame and trivial. When one has but little to tell and that little is in
regard to those for whom most of the living care nothing, it would be wiser to be silent;
yet if what lie may write will give pleasure to one or two, here or there, to whom the
holy Dead are of consequence, he ought not to let the general indifference prevent his
writing.

  WASHINGTON, May 25, 1887.                            ALBERT PIKE.


JAMES W. BATES.
BY GENERAL ALBERT PIKE.

  Judge James Woodson Bates, of Crawford county, had been judge of the superior court
some years before I became an Arkansian. He was a brother of Edward Bates, of Missouri,
afterward attorney-general of the United States. I do not suppose that he ever practiced
at the bar in Arkansas. He was a generous and kindly man, of brilliant genius, said to
have been pronounced, in his younger days, by a distinguished Virginian, to have been the
finest essayist in the State of his birth, Virginia. He was of middle height and size,
his features irregular, but his eyes bright and piercing, his forehead fine, his face
indicative of large and quick intellect. I do not know what his legal acquirements were,
but he was reputed to have been a good judge. It was said that he was no orator; but he
was a polished, keen, brilliant writer, sarcastic as Junius, comparing with other writers
in Arkansas as a swordsman, skillful in the use of the rapier, compare with the heavy,
sabre-wielding cavalryman. His mind was richly stored with knowledge. He was a whig, too,
and had no mercy for his political adversaries. Otherwise than with his pen occasionally,
he took no part in politics, though I did once see him preside over a meeting at Van
Buren, when words and angry replies passed between him and Wharton Rector, whom most men
dreaded, but of whom Judge Bates was not in the least afraid, answering him with sharp
and bitter words.

  He lived with Major Moore, his father-in-law, some twenty-five miles below Van Buren,
and rarely went away from home, being given to study, and caring little for the outer
world, a thoughtful, silent man, a recluse, but no misanthrope; for he was a man of a
very noble nature.

  I met him once just as he rode into Van Buren, and in answer to a question as to his
health, he said, "I am well, but in an ill-humor. I have been afflicted this morning by a
fool. I left home alone, and wished for no companion, but was overtaken by one, a farmer
in the neighborhood, who found it in his heart to bestow all his dullness upon me,
babbling incessantly all the way for twenty miles. There are men, sir, who are so idiotic
that they cannot be made by any hints to understand that sometimes a man who thinks at
all, which most men do not, wishes to commune with himself, and not to be talked to at
all."