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The Green Bag
save criminals. Evarts was a greater lawyer than orator, and figured promi nently in several of the greatest trials
was equal to Matt H. Carpenter. He added to the learning and literary
in our history. The addresses of Judah P. Benjamin
lawyer, the presence and the silver voice
orator, and perhaps none of the three
accomplishments of
the scholar
and
before juries are said to have been won
of the orator.
derfully impressive and beautiful. After leaving America he became the head of
various writers styled the perfection of
His voice has been by
His reputation for this character of speech, however, lives mainly in tradi
melody. Like most of modern orators he was rather diffuse yet withal inter esting. He belonged to the school of persuasive reasoners who without many passages of supreme beauty managed to make their speeches meet the require
tion, but if this alone be followed he would take high rank indeed, since his
ments of the case and carry conviction with them. A large portion of the elo
the English bar, and was in all probabil ity the most widely learned lawyer of the English-speaking race since 1860.
legal
speeches never failed to elicit
quence lay in the voice of the speaker
the same applause that always greeted
and in his magnetic qualities. Carpenter's contemporary, Ben Hill, known as “the stormy petrel of debate,"
his admittedly splendid political and Parliamentary and occasional ad dresses. After the war, the great jury orators
of the country were notably fewer and less eloquent. Public life still lured the great orators from the bar, while at the
same time public sentiment began to prohibit the public men from accepting
legal employment at the hands of cer tain interests which had hitherto been their chief source of income. Thus
was a great jury orator.
His was a high
type of intellect. He could present an array of facts in a manner almost invin cible. Strength was his chief character istic, and when he indulged in sarcasm, sentiment, or invective, it was generally to make more terrible and potent the effectiveness of his argument. There “was argument even in his declama tion.”
while there were many great lawyers
A very different type was Daniel W.
there were comparatively few really
Voorhees, whose speeches glowed with
great orators.
the fervid, the fiery and opalescent beau
Charles O’Conor first won national
ties of rhetoric.
His defense of John
fame as a lawyer in the case of McFar
Cook, charged with treason in connection
land v. McFarland, and from that day until his death held a high rank both as orator and lawyer. His oratory was
with one of John Brown's raids, was the wonder of its day, and a copy of it printed on silk was sent by some of his
more practical than beautiful, and will
admirers who heard it. The peroration, with its plea for mercy all glowing in golden rhetoric, is one of the best ever
hardly be read for its own interest by any one. Beach, on the other hand, while equally as persuasive, was more eloquent. He possessed the heart, the sentiment, that sways juries, and he
could clothe those sentiments in such beautiful language as to make them worthy of a place literature. Brady was not equal to either of these as an
delivered. In this case the orator was confined to a plea for mercy inasmuch as his client had pleaded guilty, and it
must be confessed that he threw his soul into the task with great fervor and won all the success possible. Even greater, however, was his speech
