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.


DAVID WALKER.
BY GENERAL ALBERT PIKE.

  David Walker, of Washington county, was a practicing lawyer, the foremost in all the
north-western part of the territory when I came to the bar, and for some years before. I
knew him long and well, for I saw him often in the western courts. He was an excellently
equipped lawyer, well grounded in the principles of legal science, a man of logical
intellect, of keen perceptions, of mental energy and force, an impressive and forcible
speaker, and an antagonist to cope with when at the bar was no easy matter for any one. I
have seen greater men and better lawyers, but no one who could more efficiently use all
his resources of intellect and knowledge.

  He was eminently faithful to his clients, and gave to every case all his energies. No
client of his ever suffered loss or injury from his want of diligence or preparation,
where there was time for preparation. He never procrastinated or was dilatory or
neglectful, or a consulter of Ins own ease and comfort. And he always thought, also, with
Lord Bacon, that "every man is a debtor to his profession," and he sought always to
magnify the profession and to help gain for it the respect of the people.

  In politics Judge Walker was a whig, who had convictions, as he had in the law, and was
always true to them. He was not eloquent, otherwise than with the eloquence of
earnestness, sincerity and force of argument; and these made him a fluent and impressive
speaker. He was the candidate of our old whig party, at different times, for the offices
of governor, representative in congress and presidential elector, always the candidate of
a minority (for the State, like the territory, was always irretrievably democratic), and
of course always defeated; but he never took the certainty of defeat into consideration,
to permit it to lessen his zeal or energy in the exposition and advocacy of his political
principles.

  I must leave it to others to speak of him as a judge of the supreme court, for I am not
familiar with his decisions, either as military judge, or as a judge of the supreme court
of the State. After the war ended, I never saw him, not feeling equal, when I was for the
first time long after 1865, in the State, to the fatigue of the journey from Van Buren to
Fayetteville, to visit him. Our intercourse after the war was only by letter. In one of
his letters he told me that he had been for some time occupied in committing to writing,
for publication after his death, his reminiscences of men and things in the early days of
Arkansas, the manuscript having already assumed quite large proportions; and he repeated
some things of which he had spoken. But I think that the manuscript has not been found,
although it is hardly to be believed that he destroyed it.