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.


WILLIAM CUMMINS.
BY GENERAL ALBERT PIKE.

  Robert Crittenden, Chester Ashley, William Cummins, Absalom Fowler and Daniel Ringo
were the foremost members of the bar at Little Rock in 1833. William Cummins, a man of
middle stature, neither thin nor corpulent, quick, wiry, energetic, was a Kentuckian, a
man of good presence and good manners, with a face expressive of intellect, firmness and
decision. He was a good lawyer and forcible speaker, a zealous whig politician, and a
brave, honorable, trustworthy man, then some forty-five years of age. He married Francine
(only daughter of the princely old Frenchman Frederick Notrebe), who bore him but one
child, a daughter.

  Mr. Notrebe himself was a man who ought not to be forgotten, for he was a very noble
and generous man. I often dined at his houses at the Post of Arkansas, and on his
plantation below that place, on the river, where I met his wife's father and mother, Mr.
and Madame Encime. His granddaughter, Mary Cummins, married Edward Morton, a
Massachusetts man, and is well remembered at Little Rock, in connection with the harsh
and unmanly treatment which she and her little children suffered at the hands of General
Reynolds during the Federal occupancy of the city. They were my nearest neighbors, and I
knew her and her children well, and a few years ago saw her and her daughter and
grand-children at St. Louis. Thus I have known six generations of the family. Among the
pleasantest days of my life were those passed by me at the old post, with Mr. Notrebe,
dear old Terrence Farrelly, Ben Desha, James H. Lucas, Doctor Bushrod W. Lee and Doctor
McKay. What men there were in Arkansas in those days!

  William Cummins offered me a partnership in the law in 1835, when I was a lawyer only
in name, because I owned and was editing the Arkansas Advocate, and might, through it,
aid him in attaining the political honors that he coveted; and the partnership proved a
pleasant and profitable one.

  He was an amiable gentleman, and yet a good hater of his political enemies,- as,
indeed, most of us were in those days. He was not quarrelsome either, but always ready
and never shunning collision with any one. His combativeness was once oddly exemplified,
in a matter in which he had no personal interest. I had written some articles over the
signature of "Casca," in the Advocate, of which I was then the publisher, which if I had
been older and wiser I should not have written, and while they were being published I
stopped one morning to speak to Colonel Sevier, who was sitting on the door-step of one
of the rooms of Ashley's brick row. After we had spoken together a moment or two, he
said: "Look here, Pike, if that man Casca who is writing for your paper gets much more
severe, I shall have to ask you for his name." He said it jocosely, and I replied: "All
right, colonel, when you call for the name of the author you'll get it," and with a laugh
went on my way.

  I told this to Mr. Cummins, and his eyes snapped, as in his sometimes shrill voice he
cried with eager excitement: "Tell him I wrote them! Tell him I wrote them." He would
gladly have fought Sevier in that quarrel, "at the drop of a hat," as used to be said in
Arkansas. But the authorship of the letters was never imputed to him. Sevier and most
others supposed that Judge James W. Bates was the writer. If he had been elected a
representative in congress, he would have served the State well, for he had ability,
readiness, resources at his command of intellect and knowledge and political sagacity.
Withal he was an honorable, upright and generous man.

  How little chance a whig had of political preferment in Arkansas may be judged of by
this that follows, which was vouched for to me about 1844 for a true story.

  Randolph was a northern county, in which there were some five hundred voters,
twenty-five or thirty of whom, only, were whigs; of course this handful of men never put
up a candidate, but about that year two democrats opposed each other for a seat in the
legislature. They were neighbors,- that is, they lived not more than twenty miles from
each other,- and they made a firm agreement that neither should tell any tale of the
other, injurious to him, except when they were together. But it soon happened that one of
them heard that in a speech made at a meeting in some precinct, when he was not present,
the other had told the people that he had on one occasion come upon his competitor in the
woods, just as he was cutting off the ears of a hog that he had shot, which hog, he said,
was in his, the reciter's, mark, and belonged to him. When they met soon after, the
aggrieved candidate lost no time in calling him to account for his breach of contract.
"Didn't you and I agree," he said, "that one of us shouldn't tell any tales on the other,
if he weren't thar to answer for his-self?"

  "Yes, we did so."

  "What did you go and break it fur, then? Didn't you get up down thar at Hominy
Precinct, and tell the crowd that you caught me in the woods three years ago a-cuttin the
ears off o' one o' your hogs?"

  "Yes, I did: what of it?"

  "What of it! Durn your 'ornary hide of you, 'twas a low-down mean trick!"

  "It was true, weren't it?"

  "Well, yes, it wer, but you'd no business tellin it when I weren't thar to contradict
it. Look a-here, now, you just tell that story on me agin any whar, if you dar, and durn
my skin if I don't tell 'em your'e a whig."

  In what esteem as a lawyer William Cummins was held, may be somewhat judged of by an
incident related to me by John B. Floyd, at a much later day secretary of war of the
United States, who was, about 1S36, and for three or four years afterward, planter in
Phillips county, and practiced at the bar there.

  "One day not long ago," he said, " a chap from the country wanted to employ me in a
little case, and after telling me at great length what he called 'the rights on't,' asked
me what I would charge him to'tend' to it. 'Twenty dollars,' I said. 'Twen-ty dol-lars!'
he exclaimed, 'twen-ty dol-lars! why, I kin git Ee-squire Cummins for that.'
Complimentary, wasn't it?"