686
THE GREEN BAG
of the Chief Justice to that city, as fol lows : "When, forty years ago, I entered his office as student of the law, he was the most unpopular man' in Cincinnati. True, his domestic sorrows had made him grave and reserved — had withdrawn him for the time from social intercourse and pleasures. This does not account for his isolation. He was a candidate that autumn for Con gress, but received only five hundred votes. Cincinnati, which had welcomed him at first with open arms, petted and praised him, encouraged the brilliant young lawyer, conferred on him civic honors, brought work to his office, trusting business to his eager and willing care, now averted her face, having become an angry stepmother. "Nine years later, after he had served a term in the Senate, at the election of 1855, when he was chosen Governor by 15,000 majority in the state, the first candidate of a new party, a fullblooded, zealous, intensely hopeful party, he was, in his own home, where he had then lived for twentyfive years, not first, nor even second in the list, but was beaten by the democrat, Medill, by 10,000, by the Know Nothing, or American, Trimble, 2,000. His name came from the ballot boxes of Hamilton county with a beggarly tale of 4,500 votes. A single sentence explains the mystery: He was an Abolitionist, and Cincinnati a suburb of the South." Into such a community came in 1846 this young man born in New England, trained to a belief as a self evident truth "that all men are created equal; that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Happy was it for him that he came into close association with a great man of like views; still happier that of that great man it could be said in the same address: "What helped him, yes, made him, was this: He walked with God. The predomi nant element in his life, that which gave
tone and color to his thoughts and deter mined the direction of all he did was striving after righteousness. Mr. Hoadly entered the office of Chase and Ball as a student in 1846. On his admission to the bar in 1847 he became clerk for the firm, and as Mr. Chase's politi cal activity removed him to a considerable extent from active practice while the busi ness of the firm was large, he became a partner in 1849, the firm then becoming Chase, Ball and Hoadly. Mr. Chase's political activity encouraged his junior partner to take a part in politics, such a part as an antislavery man who believed in political methods and works could take in a proslavery community. While the city in which he lived was proslavery, the state was not, and in 1851 the legislature elected him Judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati for the rest of the term to which the constitutional convention had limited the existence of the court. After winding up the business of that court he returned to the practice of his profession, was city solicitor of Cincinnati in 1855-6, in 1856 was a delegate to the first National Convention of the Republican party at which John C. Fremont was nominated for the presidency, and in 1859 was elected one of the judges of the Superior Court of Cincinnati. The other judges of the court at the time were Bellamy Storer and Oliver Spencer, and the court had a reputation which the abilities and learning of the many distin guished lawyers who have since sat on its bench have long maintained. At that time there were only occasional reports of the decisions of courts inferior to the Supreme Court, and the only report containing any decisions of the Superior Court of Cincinnati during Judge Hoadly 's term is the second volume of Disney's reports. The only reported decision of Judge Hoadly having any general interest is the decision in Farrelly v. Cincinnati, 2 Disney, 516, which is still a leading case in Ohio with reference
