644
THE GREEN BAG
been but a few years at the Bar, and he postponed the replenishing of his law library to a more convenient season." Throughout the first period of his profes sional career, and while he was laying the foundation of a large practice, he wisely abstained from activity in party politics, though he was a pronounced Federalist. Like many successful lawyers in counties where the so-called Pennsylvania-German is a large and important element, he gained and kept the confidence of a people with whom he seemed to have nothing in com mon. During the next decade, and before his removal to Lancaster, his professional work was frequently and materially inter rupted by bold and aggressive incursions into the fields of political strife, by intense advocacy of anti-Masonry, radical member ship of the General Assembly and the Con stitutional Convention of 1837, and on the Board of Canal Commissioners, by his heroic, eloquent, and effective defense of the com mon school system and its executive patron, who was his dire party foe, and by his in glorious, if not ludicrous, figure in the bloodless " Buckshot War." But his promi nence in politics and in official life added to, rather than detracted from, his success and eminence at the Bar. He continued, as an adviser of clients and trier of causes, to gather practice and reap fortune, and he was tempted to engage largely, and (as often happens to the business ventures of brilliant lawyers) disastrously in manufacturing en terprises and real estate investments. From 1830 to 1840 he continued to be engaged on one side or the other of all im portant litigation in Adams County, and was often called into neighboring courts. The reports of the period tell of his activity and the wide range of his practice; though it was restricted to a rather narrow local ity, it partook of great variety. The meager reports of the arguments of counsel and the few citations of authorities by no means detract from the strength or strenu-
ousness of those earlier contentions; and it is easy to conceive that ejectments for "one hundred and fifty acres of land, with grist mill, saw mill, oil mill, and plaster mill erected on it " (Roth v. McClelland, 6 Watts, 68); questions of "an estate tail in the first taker, or an estate in fee with an executory devise over" (Eichelberger v. Barnitz, 9 Watts. 447); and the disputed freedom or servitude of the son of a manumitted female slave (Scott v. Traugh, 15 Sergeant & Rawle, 17) were just as warmly contested and as learnedly disposed of as the more complex and profound questions which now vex Bench and Bar — and even bewilder the "many-sided" reporter. Though I am warned by the limitations on both my time and my topic not to refer to Mr. Stevens' political career, it may not be altogether a transgression to note, as part of his work as a lawyer, that he was a member from Adams County of the so-called "Reform " Convention of 1837, to revise the Constitution of Pennsylvania. The many volumes which contain the stormy debates and exhibit the partisan virulence of that convocation teem with illustrations of his biting personalities and caustic wit. Poli tics, especially on the anti-Democratic side of pending controversies, was in a somewhat disorganized condition, and Stevens was something of a free lance — being not en tirely satisfied with the Whig leadership — nor it with him. With characteristic con sistency, that in a body to reform the organic law of the Commonwealth mounted almost to offensive obduracy, he battled against recognition of any race or color distinction; and a generation before he came to select a site for his grave or to write his own mem orable epitaph, he refused to affix his name to- the document promulgated as the new Constitution, because it restricted suffrage to "white" males. Nor can I forbear to cite a passage at arms in that convention which may well serve to "point a moral" to those who con stantly bewail the degeneracy of modern
