VOL. IX.
No. 2.
BOSTON.
FEBRUARY, 1897.
JOSEPH STORY. "Greatness and Goodness are not means, but ends! Hath he not always treasures, always friends, The great, good man?" COLERIDGE.
TO the present generation, and espec ially those of it who are not of legal education, the memory of Joseph Story is pepetuated mainly in his son, William Wetmore Story, poet and sculptor, as well as in his grandson, Julian Story, a great painter. But to the generation of lawyers in the quarter century that ended in 1845, the name of Joseph Story re mains a household word to be uttered with love and veneration. Even the later generation of lawyers, who know Joseph Story only through history, will class him with Tribonian, Hale, Mansfield, Marshall and Kent. When the recording angel, fifty-two years ago, called among the spirits of just men made perfect the name of Joseph Story, and he answered adsum, the angel knew him by his record to be a triumvirate of mortal greatness as author, statesman and jurist. None lingering in that great city of the dead, Mount Auburn Cemetery, fail to visit the tomb of Joseph Story; and to recall that his pathetic eloquence dedicated it, served its government for many years; and in it, at the comparatively early age of sixty-six, worn out by excessive mental toil, he was laid away in mortal rest. He was the eldest son by a second wife of Doctor Elisha Story, who was a Boston son of liberty, one of the Indians who des troyed the unjustly taxed tea, and who served as an army surgeon during the Revolutionary era, attached to Washington's army. He
was born at Marblehead when the Declara tion of Independence was three years old, and much of his childhood was passed in that romantically situated seaport, acquain ted with its stately granite sides and with the sound of billows relentlessly breaking, as Mrs. Hemans has described them in her Pilgrim hymn. While yet a schoolboy he selected legal pursuits as his profession. With that end steadily in view, he matriculated at Harvard in the class with William Ellery Channing, with whom he contested fon the valedictory honor; but graduated contented with the English salutatory. He passed from Cambridge, destined to become his lifelong residence, into the law office in Marblehead of Samuel Sewell, who afterwards became chief justice of the Bay State; and he con cluded his law studies in the office of him who, in the time of President John Adams, also became a Massachusetts Supreme Court Judge — Putnam. In the year that opened this century, Joseph Story was called to the Bar and took chambers in historic Salem as a young Democratic Jeffersonian attorney; the only one, indeed, at a Bar theretofore wholly composed of Federalists. Political feeling raged more intensely then than it does even now, and young Story found his full share of Jeffersonian clients. When only two years old as a practitioner, politics brought to him the office of naval officer of the port of Salem which, because it would interfere with his profession, he declined. A year later he acquired oratorical prestige 49
