Biography of Andrew Scott, Arkansas *********************************************************** Submitted by: Joy Fisher < > Date: 16 Dec 2007 Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm *********************************************************** 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?"