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.


SAMUEL S. HALL.
BY GENERAL ALBERT PIKE.

  Among the lawyers who were of the Little Rock bar while Arkansas was a territory, one
of the most amusing was Samuel S. Hall, a rather small, dried-up, old man of some sixty
years, queer and quaint, who came there from Satartia, in Mississippi, a lawyer pretty
well read and not without ability, but whose peculiarities were often the cause of
merriment.

  He knew nothing about Latin, but was fond of picking up and using scraps of it. Once, I
was told, in a case before Judge William Trimble, in which Parrott, who died before 1833,
was opposed to him as counsel, Judge Hall, as we always called him, fired off at the jury
all the scraps of Latin that he could remember; and when Parrott replied he uttered half
a dozen long sentences in Choctaw. Hall appealed to Judge Trimble against this, insisting
that Parrott should only use a language fit to be quoted from and which others
understood. Parrott gravely replied that the language which he had used was Latin, and it
was not his fault if Judge Hall did not understand it. Hall resented this and indignantly
denied that the gibberish used by Parrott was Latin; and Parrott proposed to leave it to
the court to decide, to which Judge Hall consented; and the judge decided that, to the
best of his knowledge, Parrott's Latin was as good as Hall's.

  The old gentleman told some of us once that he intended soon to retire from the bar,
and to travel through the United States incog.

  He exploded some of his Latin against me once, I think it was these lines from Horace,
which, whether he used them on that particular occasion or not, he was fond of repeating
ore rotundo:
    "Si quem mobilium turba Quiritium,
    Certat tergeminis tollere honoribus."

  And in replying to him I repeated, knowing he would not understand it, the passage said
in "Ten Thousand a Year," or "The Diary of a Physician," to be in Persius, but which is
not to be found there:

  "Eandem semper canens cantilenam,
    Ad nauseam usque."

  This staggered and confounded the old gentleman, and after court adjourned he had me to
write it down for him, with a translation, and it afterward did him good service.

  In the trial of a man in the circuit court of Pulaski county, Judge Hall, for the
defense, in his speech to the jury, inveighed with some sharpness, at the expense of
Absalom Fowler, who had been hired to prosecute, and who had, of course, done it
savagely, against the taking of money by counsel to prosecute innocent men for their
lives, and was evidently well satisfied with himself and the supposed effect of that part
of his speech upon the jury. Fowler, a hard, harsh, dry man, listened apathetically, and
following Hall, spoke so long before alluding to his denunciation of hired counsel, that
the judge became radiant with the conviction that he would not venture to comment upon
it, when, all at once, Fowler coldly and slowly said, "you have heard, gentlemen of the
jury, what one of the couusel for the defense said in regard to the impropriety of
counsel consenting to be employed to assist the officer of the State in the prosecution
of persons guilty of crimes, the punishment of which is hanging. I remember that the same
gentleman, a few years ago, was hired to prosecute, and did prosecute an innocent and
poor countryman indicted for murder. He fulfilled his contract to the utmost of his
ability, while I defended the prisoner, whom he did his best to hang, and who was
acquitted. He earned his wages, gentlemen, and he received them, according to the
contract of hiring, in the shape of a little, old, scrawny, roached-mane, bob-tailed,
clay-bank pony, which with great pride he led from the court in Saline county to his home
in Little Rock." Discomfited by what he could not deny, the judge collapsed.

  He rode, when going upon the circuit, an old, white, lean mare, that could seldom do
more than strike a slow trot for a few minutes at a time, then subsiding into her usual
walk. Once I left Little Rock with him, to go to the court at Greenville, Clark county,
where, I remember, landlord Sloan fed us on boiled fresh pork, corn bread without butter,
and sweet potatoes for a week. The judge rode the old mare, and I my sorrel horse Davy,
as well known on the roads to Washington and Van Buren as I myself was. During the first
day I stayed with the judge as he plodded along, to the immense weariness of myself and
the great disgust of my horse, it taking us all day to ride to Mrs. Lockhart's on the
Saline. The next day after we had got out of the horrible bottom of the Saline, and were
upon the gravel hills beyond, I said to the judge, " my horse is fretting, and I will
ride ahead for a piece, and wait for you to come up;" and without waiting for an answer
put Davy to his best pace and let him enjoy himself. At the end of a ride of five or six
miles I stopped, and sitting down upon a log waited nearly an hour until the judge came
up, and I jogged on with him a few miles further, and then left him again with a simple
"good-bye." Again he overtook me, and we rode on for five or six miles until he saw that
I was about to repeat the performance, when, wheeling his old mare across the road in
front of me, he said, "see here! you are a young man, and I am an old one. Let me tell
you something. I used, in my younger days, to push and hurry to get to court and be there
before it opened, and I always found that I might just as well have taken my time on the
road, for my business would not have suffered if I had not hurried. So I used to ride
hard, as soon as court adjourned, to get home; and it never happened that Mrs. Hall did
not say to me when I got home, 'why, judge, I did not look for you until to-morrow or
next day.' Now you take my advice and remember that nobody ever makes any thing by
hurrying through life. You'll always get to the end of your journey soon enough, and
may-be be more welcome if you don't get there too soon."

  I kept the old man company until we reached Greenville, and I remembered his advice
always afterward; but I never rode in company with Judge Hall again.

  I see the good, honest, honorable, fair old man now, as I often saw him arguing to
court or jury. He would begin with his feet close together, and holding in one hand a
piece of tobacco, from which, as he talked, he would pick off a small bit, put it into
his mouth and forthwith spit it out, his feet gradually farther and farther apart from
each other until he would have to bring them together again to keep himself from toppling
over. Then he would pause, look with shrewdly twinkling eyes at judge or jury, and say,
"how does my case stand now?"