THE SUPREME COURT OF MICHIGAN.
By Henry A. Chaney.
By all accounts the jurisprudence of Michigan in her territorial days was much enlivened by the eccentricities of her first Chief-Justice. This was Augustus Brevoort Woodward, who left his surname to the principal avenue of Detroit, and his ineffaceable mark upon that city in the concentric scheme on which he laid it out; it was he also who drafted the act for the establishment of a University which he is now called the Catholepistemiad of Michigania, and which was to have thirteen professorships, whereof one was to be the Didaxum of Anthropoglossica, and was to embrace, the act said, all the Epistemum relating to language. he was a marvel of personal untidiness, even among pioneers; and his imperious will was such that no mortal man could get along with him unless he submitted to it. He was Chief-Justice from 1805 to 1823; and during the British occupation of Detroit in 1813, he was Proctor's secretary in civil matters, but he bullied Proctor as he had previously bullied Hull. His associates were Frederick Bates and John Griffin, both of Virginia. Bates, who was an older brother of Lincoln's attorney-general, resigned in a year or two, and went to Missouri, where he afterward became Governor. Griffin, who had formerly been a judge in the Indiana Territory, and had asked to be transferred to Michigan, was Woodward's drudge[1] till both resigned in 1823. Bates was followed in 1808 by James Witherell, a man of Massachusetts birth, who had been practising medicine in Vermont. He was a Revolutionary soldier, and as determined as Woodward. He sided with Hull; and as the Governor and Judges made the laws, these two enacted a statute, in Woodward's absence and in spite of Griffin, for the suppression of unauthorized banking, and thereby put an end to the Bank of Detroit, which was one of Woodward's undertakings.[2] The Chief never forgave him; but the inharmonious pair sat on the same bench for a decade and a half. Thirty or forty years later Witherell's son was a judge of the Supreme Court of the State, and his grandson Thomas Witherell Palmer has been United States Senator and Minister to Spain, and President of the World's Fair Commission.
When Woodward and Griffin resigned, Witherell became Chief-Justice, and his associates were Solomon Sibley and John Hunt, of Massachusetts, and James Duane Doty, of New York, who had been clerk of the court and seems to have somehow been detailed to hold court in remote counties. He was then a youth of twenty-four; he was afterward Governor of Wisconsin Territory, and when be died, in 1865, he was Governor of Utah by Lincoln's appointment. It was he who once went fishing with Daniel Webster arrayed in Webster's costly court suit; he had no change of raiment, and Webster rigged him up in the court dress, saying that it would never be of any further use for ceremonial purposes. Sibley remained on the bench until almost the close of the territorial period; it was his son Henry who was the first governor of Minnesota and in 1862 put down the Sioux uprising. Hunt was a competent lawyer, with a crazy delusion that his legs were made of straw. He died in 1827, while still judge, and was succeeded by Henry Chipman, of Vermont, whose father, Nathaniel Chipman, had been Chief-Justice of that State and United States Senator, and whose son Logan has been a conspicuous municipal judge in Detroit, and a representative in Congress. Chipman was a graduate of Middlebury Col-
