Presidential Lawyers. laymen will quarrel with the preponderance alluded to, because they must recognize that professionals who have been expert students of constitutional and international juris prudence, which intimately concerns presidential duties, should be best selected for those executive trusts that the Federal Con stitution devolves upon the head of the Government. Indeed, each of the military presidents seemed to have recognized that reasoning when it is seen that in selecting their attorney-generals, Washington chose successively those eminent counselors of their generation, Edmund Randolph and Charles Lee, of Virginia, and William Bradford, namesake of a great Pilgrim Father; Jackson, the astute Butler of New York, who had been its illustrious codifier of statutes; Harrison the first, that almost born jurist, John J. Crittcnden, who also served two other lawyer-presidents; Taylor, that pride of the Baltimore bar, Reverdy Johnson; and Grant, five attorney-generals who had each been eminent in their local spheres of professional practice, and among them Ebenezer R. Hoar and Edwards Pierrepont, who had graduated in judicial posi tions. Even President Johnson, the tailor, saw the necessary benefit of having as his legal adviser the brilliant William M. Evarts. And it is greatly to American governmental renown that no president ever selected as his attorney-general an eminent politi cian of his own party, unless he was also an eminent lawyer. Among presidential " lawyers, Jefferson, Lincoln, McKinley, Garfield, Pierce, Hayes, Arthur, Van Buren, Harrison the second, and Cleveland might be selected as the best known in professional practice and perhaps in the foregoing precedence; while Madison, Monroe, Adams the second, Fillmore, Polk and Buchanan could lay claim to prece dence as much of the political as of the legal profession. President Van Buren had been attorney-general of his native State, and Pierce had become so eminent a lawyer
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as to have been tendered, by President Polk, the post of his attorney-general, which, for private reasons, he was compelled to decline. The legal training and legal experience of our new president have been themes of the GREEN BAG in its issue of last November, and need not again be referred to. When governor of Ohio, he was to a large extent his own legal adviser as to official duties; and doubtless, as Cleveland has largely been, President McKinley will again, in the dis charge of executive duties, become to an extent his own legal counselor. General Garfield, whose legal studies were interrupted by the Civil War, had established pre-eminent legal skill by his argument in the Indiana case before the Supreme Court; which upon his admitted logic decided that court-martials could supersede the jurisdiction of a civil court over a civilian offender only when military power prevailed at the locality of offense and trial; a most impor tant decision for this or any other country. His brief as on file in the Congressional lib rary establishes his legal fame, although un happily the weapon of an assassin prevented a concurrent acquisition of presidential fame. President John Adams, a decade before the battle at Lexington, had won legal fame while counsel for the then " town " of Bos ton, in an argument before the Tory gov ernor and his council, in behalf of a mem orial that they should suspend operation of the Stamp Act. He it was who in that legal effort coined the phrase " taxation without representation," in contending that the Act was ipso facto null and void, because it was a measure of taxation wherein the people taxed had no share. His legal triumph was accentuated by his views being reiterated afterwards on the floor of the House of Commons with the result that the Stamp Act soon became repealed. A few years later, young Adams added to his legal rep utation by his acquittal of his clients, Brit ish Captain Preston and members of his military company, charged with participa
