But let us go back three-quarters of a century, and undertake to determine how the men who then stood at the head of their respective Bars compare with the leaders of the present day, and we shall find ourselves addressed to a task beset with difficulties. In such an attempt we are obliged to rely wholly upon recorded evidence, unless in deed we can deal with that vague, indefinite something, known as the "tradition of the Bar." Well aware that their contemporaries were wont to overpraise these leaders of the olden time, we yet find it hard to resist an inclination to surrender ourselves to the pleasure of joining in the admiration that comes down to us through the medium of Bar-meeting speeches and similar chan nels. On the other hand, the few who are dis posed to magnify the extent of this habit of friendly criticism, may fail to see in their true proportions the really great men who in the earlier days have adorned our Bench and the Bar. I purpose to offer a sketch in merest out line of one who, early in this century, stood in the very front rank of the leaders of the Bar of Rockingham County, New Hampshire. When I claim for that Bar a special distinc tion, I trust that the reader will not dismiss me with the remark that a like claim has more than once been advanced in behalf of other localities; and advanced too with con siderable fervor. Ichabod Bartlett measured his strength with such men as Jeremiah Mason, Daniel Webster, George Sullivan, and Jeremiah Smith. In the art of gaining verdicts Mr. Bartlett was confessedly the equal of any one of these eminent lawyers. They, together with others scarcely less for midable as opponents in the trial of causes, have secured an eminence in legal annals which fully warrants the assertion, I think, that Rockingham County (with its shire towns of Portsmouth and Exeter), at the period mentioned, did indeed possess a
Bar of an extraordinary degree of ability. ' Ichabod Bartlett was born July 24, 1786, at Salisbury, N.H., a small town on the Merrimac, about sixteen miles north of Concord, noted as the birthplace of Ezekiel and Daniel Webster. He was the sixth in a family of nine children of Doctor Joseph and Hannah (Colcord) Bartlett; and the sixth in descent from Richard Bartlett, who in 1633 was a passenger from England in the " Mary & John," and who not long afterward settled in Newbury, Mass. Ichabod's father, Doctor Joseph Bartlett, was the first physician who practiced in the town, having come to Salisbury in 1771, at the age of twenty, after a course of study with his uncle, the well-known Doctor Josiah Bartlett, of Kingston. 1 The paternal grandfather Joseph, who lived at Amesbury, Mass., had married Jane, daughter of Ichabod Colby, a cir cumstance that probably accounts for the Christian name of the subject of this sketch. Ichabod's brothers won success as profes sional or business men. Peter, a physician of fine acquirements, removed from Salis bury, and practiced his profession at Peoria, 1 Mr. Webster once said that he had practiced law, com mencing before old Justice Jackman in Boscawen, who received his commission from George the Second, all the way up to the court of John Marshall in Washington, and he had never found any place where the law was ad ministered with so much precision and exactness as in the County of Rockingham. — Webster as a Jurist, by Joel Parker (1853), p. 25. 2The distinction that Josiah Bartlett (born in Amesbury Mass., in 1729) attained was fully merited. He was a man of sterling worth. While he earned the reputation of a skillful physician, Doctor Bartlett early showed a peculiar fitness for public affairs. He was a signer of the Declar ation of Independence, and of the Articles of Confedera tion. He was made chief justice of the court of common pleas, and later a justice of the Superior Court, and in 1788 chief justice of that tribunal. The Legislature chose him president of New Hampshire in 1790. In 1791 the people elected him to the same office; and, in 1792, under the revised constitution, he was chosen first Governor of the State. Doctor Bartlett was the chief founder and the president of the New Hampshire Medical Society. He died in 1795. There was a mixture of medicine, law and politics in his career, rarely afforded in the lives of our public men.
