Biography of Andrew Scott, Arkansas

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Submitted by: Joy Fisher < >
        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.


JOHN TAYLOR.
BY GENERAL ALBERT PIKE.

  This man was hardly entitled to be considered "of the bar" of Arkansas. He was a nomad,
an Ishmaelite, who came to the State, in what year I do not remember, but after 1836, to
tarry for a little while and then seek new pastures. He came from Alabama, where, it was
said, he once ran against William R. King, for a seat in the senate of the United States.
He was a tall, lank man with hair of a dirty red, and repulsive countenance, small and
malignant eyes, an unsocial, repellant churl, with not a drop of the milk of human
kindness in his whole body, a thoroughly read lawyer, especially in the old books, of
which his library chiefly consisted. He had a command of words surpassing that possessed
by any man whom I have ever known, and the greatest possible fluency of speech and skill
in the construction of his sentences, his single fault in that respect being a fondness
for long words derived from the Latin, sometimes, however, eschewing these and confining
himself to the shorter Saxon, in terse, compact phrases and sentences. He was indeed a
skillful master of the English language, and familiar with English literature and the
Latin.

  He brought with him and always used, and the supply lasted as long as he remained in
Little Rock, a quantity of old, coarse, rough brownish foolscap paper, the sheets long
and un-trimmed, on which he wrote with great rapidity, in a running hand, the like of
which I have never seen anywhere; but it was perfectly legible. All the forms of
pleading, process and entries he knew by heart; and he had an accurate and retentive
memory, which never failed him when referring to authorities. 
  When he first appeared in Little Rock, and took an office in Ashley's brick one-story
row, on Markham street near Pitcher & Walters' corner, we all at different times called
upon him and tendered him the usual courtesies of the bar, to which he was grimly
unresponsive, shutting himself up in the shell of his cold exclusiveness. He rented a
house on the edge of the town, beyond Judge Feilds', where he lived with his wife, having
no child [fortunately, as Tristram Burgess said in the senate to John Randolph, monsters
are incapable of propagating their species], in impenetrable seclusion. I never met any
one who had seen his wife. He never, I am sure, crossed the threshold of any house in
Little Rock except his own; and no visitor ever crossed his. We made but one advance
each, toward friendly relations with him; and he never had any with any member of the
bar. He would never ride in company with any other person, or converse with any one
except on business; and licking his lips with his tongue as he spoke (reminding me always
of a venomous snake), his eyes gleaming with malignity, as he hissed out poisoned sarcasm
and vituperation, he seemed to delight in making enemies. No one who heard it, I think,
ever forgot his terrific excoriation in Ozark, of Alfred W. Arlington, who had
imprudently ventured with a wealth of barbaric ornamentation in words, to assail him in
debate.

  He was the most hateable man I ever knew. At one term of the court in Pope county, he
procured himself to be employed by members of one family to bring suits against members
of another, for slander; and at the next term he brought like suits for those defendants
against those plaintiffs, all the suits standing for trial together, and the parties
being chiefly women.

  I should not devote so much space, or indeed any, to this nomad (who always carried
into the court-rooms, in the pockets of his long coat, two large pistols, one of which I
twice saw fall out upon the floor, and who at last fancied and proclaimed that the
lawyers of Little Rock had poisoned his well, and thereupon left the State and went to
Texas), but for the two romances published by Arlington, one of a trial in Conway county
in which he represented him as figuring; and the other of his volunteering to defend, at
Clarksville in Texas, a young woman charged with murder, whom Sargeant S. Prentiss of
Mississippi, Chester Ashley and myself had been employed to prosecute there. Both stories
were pure fictions; I never prosecuted any woman charged with any offense, anywhere; I
never saw Sargeant S. Prentiss in a court-house; he was never engaged with Chester Ashley
anywhere, and was never, I think, nor was Ashley, in Clarksville in his life; I never was
in Clarksville until the fall of 1861; and there was never any such case or trial
anywhere.