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The Supreme Court of Wisconsin. which, by frequent and botch-work amend ment, had become a bewildering maze of uncertainty. The lawyer charged what the attorney-general regarded as too large a fee. The question of the value of the ser vices was submitted to the jury. On that jury there happened to be a colored man, the first to sit on a jury in that county. The other side had commented on the subject of

large fees of lawyers, and Orton, in closing, must satisfy the plain farmer juryman that fifty dollars a day or upwards for several weeks' work was a reasonable charge. He dwelt, of course, upon the great servi ces of the profession to the cause of civil liberty, naming one after another of the great legal lights, from St. Paul down. When he closed the array by naming Abraham Lincoln, the lawyer "who had penned in the lan guage of a lawyer that immortal proc lamation which had JOHN II. stricken the shackles from four million bondsmen and made them free," his tones and manner and his climax thrilled the audience, for none could listen to Harlow S. Orton unmoved. The colored man, in his ecstasy, could hardly keep in the jury-box, and was with difficulty checked from shouting words of thanksgiving, as his people would do at an outdoor camp-meet ing. It is needless to say that the verdict gave the plaintiff the last cent of his claim. He was of counsel for the defendant in the case of Bashford v. Barstow, mentioned in a preceding page of these sketches. Of

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his work in that celebrated cause — in volving the ousting of a governor by quo warranta — ex-Chief-Justice Cole, who sat on the bench at that trial, says: " He was associated with such eminent and accom plished lawyers as Jonathan E. Arnold and Matt. H. Carpenter, but the burden of the argument upon all motions and questions of law arising in the preliminary proceedings rested mainly on the shoulders of Judge Orton, who seemed by consent to be given the management of that cause in court. The questions involv ed were certainly new — I might say almost of first impression, under our form of government. They could not, of course, arise under any other form. Judge Orton met and discussed these questions with wonderful learning and ability. He was called upon often to discuss them on the spur of the moment, without any time for reflection, examina WINSLOW. tion of authorities, or even to make preparation, and against such lawyers as Judge Timothy O. Howe and E. G. Ryan, whose supremacy at the bar will be questioned by no one. But Judge Orton was not surpassed by any law yer in the case in the efforts he put forth, or in the intellectual powers he exhibited." He was conspicuously connected with the most important and celebrated causes which have been tried in the State, as well as those where the argument was to the court, as those in which his power as an advocate was so potent before the jury.