The Green Bag.
RUFUS CHOATE.
RUFUS CHOATE was born in Ipswich, Mass., on Oct. 1, 1799. He grew up in Essex County, Mass., with but ordinary opportunities of schooling. When he was sixteen years old, he entered Dartmouth College; but a brilliant boyhood had already made him sufficiently known to excite in many quarters of old Essex great expectations of his future achievements. His college course increased these expectations. In studies he was immeasurably and easily the head of his class; and one of his tutors has since said that long before he left college he was qualified to be a professor in any university in America.
After graduating, he taught school, but soon adopted the law as his profession, and fell upon the study of it with the most eager application, as if with prophetic instinct of the destined identification of his renown with it. He entered the Dane Law School, where he remained for a few months, and then went to Washington to prosecute his studies in the office of the Attorney-General of the United States, William Wirt. After remaining there for a year, he returned to Massachusetts to enter the office of Judge Cummins, of Salem. In September, 1823, he was admitted to the bar of Common Pleas of Essex County, and opened his office in the town of Danvers. Two or three years later he removed to Salem, and in November, 1825, he was admitted to the bar of the Supreme Judicial Court.
At that period the Bar of Essex County was adorned by able and learned lawyers, men of large experience and high character. It is doing no injustice to any of those eminent men and lawyers to say that Mr. Choate, upon his first introduction to the practice, immediately placed himself in the very front rank of the profession. He was retained at once in important cases, and was erelong one of the leaders of the Essex Bar. He continued in practice at Salem until 1834, in which year he removed to Boston.
Here in the New England metropolis new scenes of professional encounter, new antagonists, and in some degree new law, rose before him. He was still young,—but little over thirty,—yet he entered at once into the lists with the very ablest leaders of the Suffolk Bar, and advanced for seven years through a steady progress of successes and of fame.
In 1841 he was chosen by the Massachusetts Legislature to the United States Senate. He took Mr. Webster's chair in that body when that gentleman entered General Harrison's Cabinet. In the Senate he made those speeches which drew upon him the attention of the nation. Most of them were carefully revised by himself and officially published. The speech on the Oregon question in reply to Mr. Buchanan, those on the tariff, the annexation of Texas, to provide further remedial justice in the courts of the United States, were printed in pamphlet form for popular circulation. The unfortunate encounter between Mr. Choate and Mr. Clay will be remembered by many of our older readers. Mr. Choate was accused of lack of courage, and unquestionably lost much of his prestige by his conduct on that occasion; but after all it is not surprising that he, still young and with comparatively little experi-
