boy who had been Chancery reporter and became Attorney-General; and he married a sister of that James V. Campbell who was destined to be one of the most illustrious of his successors on the bench. He was elected judge on an independent nomination; and though personally a Democrat, the Whig candidate, Rufus Hosmer, with drew in his favor. He was one of the early presidents of the Young Men's Society of Detroit, and was an active member of the Board of Education. Since 1862 he has lived upon Grosse He, below Detroit; and though he has kept an office in the city and has since then conducted three of the most obstinate and protracted litigations in the history of Michigan jurisprudence, he has also been an active and zealous agriculturist, and has not scrupled to express a hearty preference for farming as contrasted with the practice of the law. The litigations referred to were the Crane and Reeder case, which for years was a shuttlecock between the Supreme Court and the Circuit;[1] the "Laboratory" case, which involved itself with the politics of Michigan, and set half the inhabitants of the State by the ears;[2] and the case of Perrin v. Lepper,[3] which resulted, after a long series of subsidiary and interlocutory proceedings, in the recovery of a fortune from the estate of an unfaithful administrator.
Johnson was a New-Yorker, born at Sangerfield, Oct. 20, 1809, and admitted to the bar in Genesee County. He came to Michigan in 1837, having stopped for a year or so at Painesville, Ohio. He was in the lower house of the Michigan Legislature in 1845-47, and after having been a judge was twice the candidate of the Democratic party against the late Judge Campbell. He died August 28, 1886, at Jackson, where he had lived for forty-eight years.
Bacon was born at Ballston, N. Y., July 14, 1802, and was graduated at Union in 1824. He studied law in the office of Thomas Palmer at Ballston Springs, and from 1828 to 1833 practised at Rochester. Then he came to Michigan and settled at Niles, where he was prosecuting attorney in 1847. A temperance man and a Presbyterian elder, he was also an enthusiastic Whig of the antislavery kind, and one of the organizers of the Republican party. He was re-elected circuit judge in 1858, and again, after two years' retirement, in 1866, and he died of apoplexy Sept. 9. 1869.
Edward Hancock Custis Wilson was born "on the east shore" of Maryland, near Princess Ann, in Somerset County, August 6, 1820, and he was graduated in 1838 from a Presbyterian institution at Washington, Pa., known as Washington and Jefferson College, where it was not his fault that he was a class mate of Clement L. Vallandigham. He studied law in Somerset County, and moved to Michigan in 1845, where he was prosecuting attorney for Hillsdale County, and for two terms circuit judge. He died at Denver, Nov. 1, 1870.
When it was decided to replace the bench of circuit judges by an independent tribunal, Douglass, Pratt, Green, and Johnson were the Democratic nominees. The Republican party had just come into being, however, and Michigan was its birthplace; the time and circumstances were unpropitious for Democratic candidates. On their defeat they all resigned, that they might the sooner establish themselves in business, for they had been starving on fifteen hundred dollars a year for salary. For the few remaining months of their unexpired terms, Governor Bingham appointed B. F. H. Witherell in place of Douglass, B. F. Graves in place of Pratt, Josiah Turner, in place of Green, and Edwin Lawrence in place of Johnson.
Benjamin Franklin Hawkins Witherell was a son of that James Witherell who nearly fifty years before had been a territorial judge. He was born at Fair Haven, Vt.,
