The
Vol. I.
No. 3.
Green
BOSTON.
Bag.
March, 1889.
CHIEF-JUSTICE SHAW. IN the judicial annals of Massachusetts the name of Chief-Justice Shaw stands first and foremost among the many distinguished judges who have adorned the bench of the Commonwealth. Lemuel Shaw was born at Barnstable, Mass., on the 9th of January, 1781, and was the son of Rev. Oakes Shaw and Susannah Hay ward. His father was ordained minister of the West Parish of Barnstable in 1760, and continued in the pastorate until his death in 1807. That he was faithful to his people and that they loved him, this long connection shows. The mother was a woman of vigor ous mental and physical powers, and lived to see the honors and successes of her son; dying under his roof in 1839, at the extreme age of ninety-four. Lemuel Shaw's childhood was passed in an old-fashioned New England parsonage — if the minister's house may be so called — in that part of Barnstable known as Great Marshes. Here, as he grew older, he was fitted for college under his father's instruction, leav ing home only for brief final preparation at the school of a Mr. Salisbury at Braintree. In 1796, at the age of fifteen, he entered the freshman class at Harvard. During the winter vacations of the last three years of the course, to help pay the college bills and to relieve his father, he kept a district school. He was an earnest, industrious student, and held a good rank in his class. On leaving college, a position as usher in the South Reading School, afterwards known as the Franklin School, in Boston, was ob tained; and here, as he afterwards expressed it, he " worried through " a year. At the 13
same time he was a writer or assistant editor for the " Boston Gazette." After relinquish ing his position as usher, he entered, as a student, the office of Mr. David Everett, a lawyer at Boston; and on Mr. Everett's re moval to Amherst, N. H., Mr. Shaw went with him, and there completed his term of study. In September, 1804, he was admitted to the bar of New Hampshire, and to that of Massachusetts in the following October. The beginning of 1805 found him in an office in Boston, from which, after a few months, he moved into the office of Mr. Thomas O. Selfridge on the north side of the Old State House. His advancement in the profession could not have been very rapid at first, as he did not argue his first case before the Supreme Judicial Court until 1 810, six years after his admission to the bar. This case may be found reported in the sixth volume of Massachusetts Reports. The amount involved w£s only five dollars, and the future chief-justice lost his case. For twenty-six years Mr. Shaw devoted himself faithfully to the study and work of his profession, but not to the utter exclusion of other studies. A man cannot be a great lawyer who is nothing else. The mind re quires not only diversity of discipline, but generosity of diet. It cannot grow to full, well-rounded proportions on any one ali ment. Mr. Shaw understood this, and read and studied much outside of Coke and Blackstone. While he did not, we think, keep up his intimacy with Greek and Latin, he was at home with the English classics and a master of the English tongue. He liked the elder
