A Few New Hampshire Notables
Daniel Webster
It was as a lawyer that Daniel Webster received his highest distinction. He was born in Salisbury on January 18, 1782. His youth was spent in the frontier with little opportunity for education. Despite this, he led his college class at Dartmouth at the age of nineteen. He was admitted to the bar in 1805. In 1806, Jeremiah Smith called him "the most remarkable young man he had ever met." Within two years of Webster's moving to Portsmouth, Jeremiah Mason declared Webster his most formidable opponent before a jury.
Daniel Webster lived in his home state of New Hampshire for eleven years after he began the practice of law. When he left for Massachusetts in 1816 he was considered a leading counselor and advocate at the bar. He had received acclaim as a political writer and speaker, and had performed admirably as a member of the national legislature." Within four years of his move to Massachusetts Webster brought the famous Dartmouth College case before the Supreme Court. In that time frame, Webster also brought another case to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, took part in the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, and delivered an outstanding oration at Plymouth.
Webster's earliest work was his most brilliant. It is suggested by his biographers that he became somewhat jaded after years of public notice. As he aged he required some special motivation or a noble theme to incite his best efforts. He had no desire to use his talent for petty causes.
Webster was an accomplished advocate, constitutional lawyer, statesman, and orator. He worked with speed and intensity. On his farms at Marshfield and Franklin, he enjoyed the relaxation of the ocean and the mountains, of the rod and the gun. He used to love to declare his oxen "better company than the United States Senate." Daniel Webster's name appears on the rolls of Doctors of Law at Princeton, Dartmouth, and Harvard.
Levi Woodbury
Levi Woodbury was born on December 22, 1789, the second of ten children born to Peter and Mary Woodbury. Levi attended his native village school of Francestown, New Hampshire, and Atkinson Academy. He graduated with honors from Dartmouth College in 1809, and subsequently studied law with Judge Jeremiah Smith in the Litchfield (Connecticut) Law School and in Boston. Woodbury was admitted to the bar in 1812.
Woodbury practiced law in Francestown and Portsmouth and became politically involved in the War of 1812 as an advocate of President Madison's policy. Woodbury was appointed associate justice of the state superior court in 1817 by Gov. William Plumer, a friend. Woodbury was elected governor himself in 1823. He was Speaker of the House in the state legislature in 1825. He was then chosen to be a United States Senator for the next six years. Woodbury was elected to the state Senate in 1831, but in May was appointed Secretary of the Navy. He became Secretary of the Treasury under President Jackson in 1834 after a strong stand against the Bank of the United States. Woodbury was responsible for many fiscal decisions which benefitted public investors and banks. He tried to convince Congress to use surplus funds for public works. He also attempted to popularize the use of hard money. He retired from office when President Van Buren came to power in 1940. Woodbury came out of retirement and was elected to the United States Senate in 1841.
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After declining an appointment as Minister to Great Britain, Levi Woodbury was nominated by President Polk for the Supreme Court.
Levi Woodbury was one of five Supreme Court Justices from New Hampshire. He took his oath of office in the Circuit Court in New Hampshire before Clerk John L. Hayes on September 23, 1845. It reads,
United States of America
District of New HampshireI, Levi Woodbury, do solemnly swear that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and the sick, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent on me as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States according to the best of my abilities and undertanding, agreeable to the Constitution and laws of the United States.
So help me GOD
Levi Woodbury
September 23rd 1845Sworn to before me:
John L. Hayes Clerk of this Circuit Court of the United States for the District of New Hampshire
In his capacity as Supreme Court Justice, Woodbury sat in the Circuit Court of New Hampshire from 1845 to 1851.
Justice Woodbury was a calm, self-possessed, courageous man, in politics a party man and strict-constructionist. For instance, he was opposed to slavery, but believed the laws protecting the institution of slavery must be upheld until they were changed. Woodbury was a very progressive thinker and speaker. He was an advocate of normal training for teachers, systematic physical education, free public schools, more education for girls, museums designed to educate adults, widespread, simplified educational literature, greater access to information on new inventions, and a more scientific approach to agriculture, all of which were novel ideas for his time.
Justice Levi Woodbury died in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on September 4, 1851.
Nathan Clifford
Nathan Clifford was born in Rumney, New Hampshire on August 18, 1803. He was the oldest child and only son with four sisters. His father, Deacon Nathaniel Clifford, was a small farmer and his mother, Lydia (Simpson) Clifford, was an enterprising and energetic woman. Clifford attended Haverhill (New Hampshire) Academy at fourteen years of age and spent a year at the "Literary Institution" at New Hampton. While at Haverhill Clifford earned his living teaching in the district school and giving singing lessons. Clifford studied law in the offices of Josiah Quincy of Rumney, was admitted to the bar in 1827, and commenced practice in Newfield, Maine.
Nathan Clifford was very aware of his lack of higher education and this made him a more careful and painstaking student. This care, coupled with a strong willingness to work, developed in him the ability to formulate and defend the philosophies of Jacksonian democracy. Clifford entered politics in Maine in 1830 and was elected to the state legislature, staying there for four terms. In 1834 he became the Attorney General for Maine as a reward for his services to the Democratic party. From 1838 to 1843 he was a representative in the United States House of Representatives.
In 1846 Nathan Clifford was appointed Attorney General of the United States by President Polk. Clifford was apparently very nervous about being Attorney General. He was to perform his first official act, a trial, in front of the Supreme Court. A few days before the trial was due to begin, Clifford handed President Polk his resignation. Polk wrote the following in his diary, "I told him if he resigned now it would be assumed by his political opponents that he was not qualified and would ruin him as a public man." Clifford took Polk's advice and withdrew his resignation. He won his first case before the Supreme Court. This proved to everyone, including himself, that he was qualified be Attorney General.
Throughout his term as Attorney General, Clifford was closely involved in policy decision and execution concerning the Mexican War, and went on a diplomatic mission to Mexico at the close of the war to ensure the ratification of the peace treaty and helped establish peaceful relations between the two countries. Clifford stayed in Mexico until the Democrats lost the presidential elections and the Whigs, now in power, recalled him to the United States.
Clifford was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1858. He was confirmed by a narrow margin of 26 votes to 23 in the Senate. Senators were hesitant about placing a pro-slavery Democrat on the Supreme Court. His specialties were commercial and maritime law, Mexican land grants, and procedure and practice. Justice Clifford was assigned to the first circuit, and sat on the bench in New Hampshire extensively from 1858 through 1874. James Bradbury describes the conditions Justice Clifford encountered while hearing cases in the first circuit as follows.
The district judges were most of them of advanced age, and there was a great accumulation of cases upon the docket, some of them of long standing, which needed to be disposed of. An enormous amount of labor was consequently thrown upon Clifford, who determined to clear the docket as soon as it could practically be done...He undertook the task as a conscientious duty, and he applied himself to it with all his energy and with untiring labor of several years until the work was accomplished. The entire year, when not employed in attendance upon the Supreme Court at Washington, was spent in the discharge of his circuit duties, with hardly a day of vacation.
The sudden death of the lamented Judge Shepley entailed, as he regarded it, an immense accumulation of work upon himself; and after a long and exhausting session at Washington, without any rest he entered upon the hearing and adjudication of a mass of grave and difficult cases upon the circuit, and applied himself unsparingly until the docket was cleared. The effort was far beyond even his power of endurance. His health never fully recovered from this terrible strain upon its resources.
Though he rarely declared any legal philosophy about the Constitution, Justice Clifford believed in a sharp dividing line between federal and state authority. His major constitutional contribution may have been his dissent in Loan Association vs. Topeka (20 Wallace 655) in which he set aside "natural law," or any ground other than clear constitutional provision, from the court's reasoning in striking down legislative acts. Justice Clifford's opinions were comprehensive essays on law. They were cited as authorities by other courts. Justice Clifford wrote the opinion of the Supreme Court in 398 cases.
As the Senior Associate, Justice Nathan Clifford was asked to take the lead on numerous occasions in which the court lacked a Chief, though he was never himself to become Chief Justice. Justice Clifford attempted to retain his seat on the Court even after an apoplectic stroke in order to prevent an opposition party President from having the opportunity to appoint his successor. After a year of invalidism, Justice Clifford died on July 25, 1881.
Franklin Pierce
Franklin Pierce was born in Hillsborough on November 23, 1804, the son of a Revolutionary War veteran. Pierce graduated from Bowdoin College in 1824 and then studied under Levi Woodbury of Portsmouth and Edmund Parker of Amherst and at the Law School of Northampton, Massachusetts, before admission to the bar in 1827. He practiced law in Hillsborough and Concord.
His first case resulted in failure and this led him to declare, "I will try causes, and I will win them yet. The next case I have I will try, and if I lose it, the next after it, and so on as long as anyone will intrust me with their cases, if I lose them every one." This led him to devote himself to the study of the skills necessary to successfully try cases. Pierce spent a great deal of time and energy improving his speaking voice and his style of presentation, honing the skills that would make him eloquent beyond compare.
Pierce was fond of using a tactic which is almost mandatory in the practice of law today. As Charles Bell recounts,
He believed that no person should be called to the stand to testify until his knowledge had been verified by personal examination by counsel, and he was in the habit of repeatedly putting his witnesses through their statements, until they were proof against attack or surprise.
He was a practical trial lawyer, without ambition to engage in scholarly legal debates as long as he grasped the information he needed to try the cases he had at hand.
Franklin Pierce was Hillsborough's representative in the State Legislature, was twice a United States Congressman, and was elected to the Senate, a post from which he resigned after five years. He was also United States Attorney for New Hampshire. Lorenzo Dow, a famous evangelist, predicted "that [Pierce] would become a distinguished soldier, would live in the White House, and would die a preacher." Pierce was a general in the Mexican War and the fourteenth President of the United States.
Pierce was well loved and respected by his friends and associates. He was noted for his ease of manner and an exceptionally good temper.
George Weston Anderson
George Anderson was born in Acworth, New Hampshire on September 1, 1861. He began teaching in public schools when he was seventeen years old and used the money to support himself through Kimbell Union Academy, New Hampshire, and Cushing Academy, Massachusetts. He attended Williams College where he performed considerable literary work and engaged in debates. He graduated with honors in 1886.
Anderson graduated from Boston University Law School summa cum laude in 1890 and practiced in a partnership in Boston for six years and then as a sole practitioner. He was an instructor at Boston University law school for three years and a member of the Boston school committee for six years (1894-1900).
He was appointed United States District Attorney for Massachusetts in 1914. George Anderson was also a member of the Commerce Commission from 1917-1918. He received an appointment in 1918 to the First Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Anderson was a trustee of the World Peace Foundation, the Charlesbank Homes, and Cushing Academy. He was involved in innumerable clubs and organizations and was twice married.
George Hutchins Bingham
George Bingham was born in Littleton, New Hampshire on August 19, 1864. He received his first education in public schools, and then at Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and St. Johnsbury Academy in Vermont. Judge Bingham graduated from Dartmouth in 1887 and from Harvard Law in 1891. He was admitted to the New Hampshire Bar in 1891 and practiced law with his father in Littleton. Upon his father's death, Judge Bingham began a practice in Manchester.
Judge Bingham was appointed an Associate Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court in 1902. He declined a nomination for Governor 1908. In 1913, Judge Bingham was appointed by Woodrow Wilson to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the First Circuit; he retired in 1939.
He was a member of the board for New Hampshire State College and a director of Merchants National Bank of Manchester. He enjoyed playing tennis and fishing.
David H. Souter
David H. Souter was born on September 17, 1939 in Massachusetts, moving to Weare, New Hampshire while still a boy. He graduated from Harvard College in 1961 with an A.B. degree. He subsequently attended Magdalen College, Oxford from 1961 to 1963 as a Rhodes Scholar. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1966. Souter received both his A.B. and M.A. degrees in Jurisprudence from Oxford University in 1989.
David Souter has served the state of New Hampshire in the legal profession since his graduation from Harvard Law School. He was an associate at Orr and Reno from 1966 to 1968 and was then appointed to public service as Assistant Attorney General in 1968. He became Deputy Attorney General in 1971 and Attorney General in 1976. Souter was appointed Associate Justice of the New Hampshire Superior Court in 1978 and Associate Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court in 1983. He was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and was sworn in on May 25, 1990 in the Cleveland Federal Building in Concord.
On July 23, 1990, Justice Souter was nominated by President George Bush to the Supreme Court of the United States. He was confirmed by the senate and sworn in on October 8, 1990 as the 105th Justice.
Justice David Souter has been a member and president of the Concord Hospital Board of Trustees, a New Hampshire Historical Society Trustee, a member of the Dartmouth Medical School Board of Overseers, a member of the National Association of Attorneys General, the New Hampshire Bar Association, and the American Bar Association.