The Green Bag
168
been freely naturalized in his court for years. But the significant point is that
a place on the bench.
On Jan. 10, 1898,
President McKinley appointed him Dis
the opinion was written from the depths
trict Judge.
of moral conviction, and was handed
Circuit Court on Feb. 23, 1905.
down on Christmas Eve.
He was promoted to the
It expressed
With his cousin, A. Lawrence Lowell,
the breadth of his humanity, and his
Judge Lowell was the author of a work
freedom from narrow Puritanical pre
on "The Transfer of Stock in Private
judices.
who is also a Lowell can attain the highest level of statesmanlike impar
Corporations," published in 1884. He was honored by Williams College at its last commencement with the degree of
tiality.
LL.D., the degree simultaneously con
It showed that a Bostonian
Judge Lowell was the son of George Gardner Lowell and Mary Ellen (Parker)
Lowell, and was born in Boston on Jan. 7, 1855.
His father was a son of Francis
C. Lowell, the manufacturer, nephew of John Lowell, Jr., founder of the Lowell
Institute, and cousin of federal Judge John Lowell, who died in May, 1897. The son was educated in private schools in which he was fitted for Har vard College. He was graduated in
1876, and immediately after entered the Harvard Law School, where he remained until 1879. From May, 1880, to Febru
ary, 1882, he served as private secretary to Chief Justice Horace Gray, after
ward Justice of the United States Su preme Court. Later he practised with the legal firm of Lowell, Stimson & Lowell, the other members being Fred eric J. Stimson and A. Lawrence Lowell. He married in 1882 Cornelia Prime Baylies, daughter of the late Edmund
Lincoln Baylies of New York and Taun ton.
As a Republican he was elected to the Boston Common Council in 1889, serv ing for three years, and in 1895 he was chosen a member of the lower house of
the legislature and served three or four terms, holding the chairmanship of im
portant committees like Ways and Means and Taxation. He would doubtless have been Speaker had he chosen to remain in the legislature instead of accepting
ferred upon Governor Charles Evans Hughes of New York and Francis E. Leupp, former United States Commis sioner of Indian Affairs. The Lowells are a family of lawyers, Even his kinsman, James Russell Lowell. attended Harvard Law School and was admitted to the bar. Two John Lowells
have been federal judges, one being appointed by Vashington, the other by Lincoln.
The second John Lowell was
considered the highest authority in the country on bankruptcy, and the Lowell bill, introduced in Congress in 1882, was an important predecessor of the present bankruptcy statute. Judge Francis C.
Lowell was appointed to the federal bench when the present bankruptcy law was undergoing its first tests, and he had a great deal to do with its administration and interpretation.
President Eliot, at the banquet given Judge Lowell in Boston on his retirement in 1884, remarked that the Lowell family illustrated “the power of a dynasty of character." A rich heritage came to Francis Cabot Lowell, a heritage of talent and character as well as of refine
ment transmitted by generations of afiluence, and he made the most of it, adding new lustre to the fame of a family which, according to the tests by which real distinction is measured, doubtless ranks as the first family of his native state.
