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. THOMAS HUBBARD. BY GENERAL ALBERT PIKE. Major Thomas Hubbard, who resided at Washington, Hempstead county, was the Nestor of the bar there when I first went to the court in 1837 or 1838. He had been there then for some years; how many I never knew. He was educated in New York and was a good, sound lawyer, who never permitted himself to doubt the absolute justice of his client's case, or to be convinced that the law was not as it was for the interest of his case it should be, if he could help it. He had a large practice in that circuit and attended to it well, always knowing accurately the facts and being well prepared with all accessible authorities in support of his propositions. It was amusing to witness a pitched battle between him and George Conway. Hubbard was like a heavy line-of-battle ship, maneuvering slowly and changing his course with difficulty, with huge artillery of solid argument and apt authorities, sure of success if his antagonist would but keep still and let him at his leisure bring his guns to bear upon him. Conway was small in size, excitable, quick, nervous, of rapid speech, sometimes incoherent, shifty, skillful to evade authorities, now on this side, now on that, of the more heavily-armed vessel, peppering it with his light guns as a smaller bird stings and exasperates a larger and slower one. Major Hubbard contracted a great affection for his cases and became actually unwilling to see the most aged ones come to an end, as one dislikes to see that of an old friend. He had them of ten, fifteen and even more years of age, resented any attempt to bring them to what he considered untimely trial, and sincerely mourned for them and celebrated their obsequies, when, gray with age, they were gathered unto their fathers. To win one was almost as unwelcome to him as to lose it, when it had become hallowed and sanctified by time. He was a very true and a very honorable man, a staunch whig, a firm upholder of the laws, no time-server and no respecter of persons, of sturdy independence, rooted convictions and .supreme integrity. He was grave and sedate, observant of all the proprieties of the profession, fair in references to and statements of authorities, and well entitled to be remembered kindly by those who knew him. I must leave to others to speak of the living, Turner and Royston and Alfred M. Wilson and others, if there be any who, like myself, have outlived their contemporaries, and there are enough living who knew them to speak of those who came to the State in 1836, and afterward. Frederick W. Trapnall, in appearance every inch a nobleman, of bright, keen, quick intellect, gracefully eloquent, whose proper place was in the halls of congress; of John W. Cocke, kindest and most genial of men, of brilliant genius, impulsive, ardent, eloquent, whom more than any other member of the bar I loved; of Samuel H. Hempstead and John J. Clendenin, and George C. Watkins; of Ebenezer Cummins and George W. Paschal; of William H. Sutton, of Chicot, and many others, whose memories time ought not to be permitted to obliterate. Est enim gloria ea consentiens laus bonorum, incorrupta vox Bene judicantium de excellente virtute.-CICERO.