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overcame, him. He broke down in his expressions, but came forward to me, and pressing my hand, said: “And this, too, to come from your lip,; and inspired by your kindness.”
I never saw him again because in the following spring I left for the war and he died during that year.
My connection with the Charlestown case was: of very great advantage to me because it brought me prominently and successfully forward as an advocate in the higher branches of constitutional law.
In 1845 I was admitted to the Supreme Court of the United States, upon the motion of the Hon. Levi Woodbury, Jackson's Secretary of the Navy and Secretary of the Treasury.
It was at the same term in which S ward and Lincoln were admitted, and I believe I am now the oldest living practitioner in that court by date of commission.
I was then in my 27th year, and among the youngest, if not the youngest, ever admitted to that court, for in the olden time only the elder members of the bar got to Washington to be admitted.
But I had the fortune to have drawn the specification for the patent of Elias Howe, a native of Massachusetts, for his invention of the sewing machine.
This brought me there to argue a motion in that court, but I did not do so as the case was settled.
The first important case that I argued in the Supreme Court was in 1857.
It was Sutter vs. the United States.
Sutter had been fortunate enough to find gold in the raceway of his sawmill near Sacramento in 1849.
The case involved the effect of the laws and action of the provincial governors of Mexico in granting titles to very extended parcels of lands.
The rules which should govern the distribution of that land and the validity of titles to such land under our treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were under discussion in that case.
It was a leading case upon those questions and affected the title of real property to the value of many millions.
The case brought me somewhat before the people of the Western country, and I have had occasion to argue quite a number of cases since involving questions of Mexican law. This, I belie e, has not happened to any other New England lawyer, certainly not to the extent it has to me.
I was employed by Mr. Speed, the Attorney-General of the United States, to assist Mr. Stansbury in the argument of the case of Milligan vs. the United States.
This case involved questions of new
A. M. Thayer and Co. 1892.
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