Vol. VI.
No. 5.
BOSTON.
May, 1894.
REMINISCENCES OF DAVID DUDLEY FIELD. By A. Oakey Hall. WHILE I was a mourner in Calvary Church in New York City upon the beautiful April Sunday during which funeral services were being held over the bier of the great jurist, I reminded myself of the occa sion upon which I first saw him. It was over half a century ago, when I was a school boy preparing for the University. I had been taken to the court room of the Supreme Court by a relative who as a suitor had em ployed in a pending case the brothers Field as his attorneys and counsellors. Inasmuch as it was my first attendance upon a trial the incident was likely to make, as it did make, a profound impression — one refreshed and deepened in after life when I became hon ored with his friendship, professional com panionship and frequent association. My relative and I first visited the Field law office en route to the City Hall. It was in one of the narrow streets crossing Broadway near Trinity Church. I remember the nar row tin sign on the outer door bearing the inscription, " Law offices of D. D. & S. J. Field." No passer-by in that day and genera tion was prescient enough to foretell that the senior member would acquire a world wide reputation as an advocate and law giver second to none in any country, or that the younger member would become a justic* in the high court which had then re cently lost John Marshall as its Chief Justice and in his place had received an incumbent destined to be an assistant in writing a legal preface through a Dred Scott decision to a volume of civil war.
Behind and through the picture in the Green Bag of the deceased lawyer now be fore me I bring to recollection the tall, erect, alert form of a young man dressed in the height of fashion addressing Circuit Judge Ogden Edwards in an animated manner, rather conversationally than oratorical, and with grace of gesture and posture. The court room was crowded, for it was the first day of term, and my relative busied himself in pointing out to me the celebrities of the Bar, whose names were to me then strange and which of course I cannot recollect. Doubtless among those pointed out or with in sight were young William Kent, soon to take the place of the presiding judge, to edit his father's commentaries and die as professorial successor of Joseph Story at Harvard, or George Wood, or Daniel Lord, Charles O'Conor, David Graham, Charles P. Daly, John Van Buren and James" T. Brady — each then in their heydey of youthful promise. What was the subject of the Fieldien speech I did not understand, but that it gratified my relative was obvious from his after remarks when we left court. What most impressed my youthful mind was the bearing of the lawyer and the mag netism of his presence. Years afterwards my relative, when I had joined the Bar, re ferred to this occasion and said : " I was -much criticised by some of my business friends for giving so important a case to whom they called a couple of Yankee lawyers who had not been long in this city. But I had been a juryman in one of the
