VOL. XVI. No. 4.

APRIL, 1904.

HE material for an exposition of the life

Tof Mr. Justice Grier is even more meagre

than is customary in the case of great judges. Two wholly inadequate notices appeared during his lifetime. One was in Biographical Sketches of Eminent American Lawyers, edited by John Livingston of the New York Bar and printed in 1852. The other was in The Forum, by David Paul Brown of the Philadelphia Bar, printed in 1856. And there have been divers brief, even attenuated allusions to his life and work in various magazines. These are practically all that there are, except his published opinions, out of which to construct a biography. The proceedings of the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States upon his retirement furnish no further data. If there were other proceedings after his death nine months later, Mr. Wallace did not print them in the reports. The present writer, therefore, is assured of the necessarily inadequate character of this sketch, especially as from the nature of the biographical articles in this magazine, he is debarred from going into a discussion of the cases which are at once Mr. Justice Grier's monument and his life.

As has been noted before in this series of papers, the seclusion of the scholar and of the judge presents no aspect of dramatic interest. It is a life of daily and uneventful toil, consecrated to a great public duty and to one of the greatest of the sciences. But

unlike natural science, jurisprudence holds within its domain no possibility for any great or startling discovery, that awakens and astonishes the imagination and admiration of men. No doubt its steady pursuit conduces to the public weal no less benignly. But that pursuit is not amenable to popular notoriety. Its achievements are those of the closet, where the ancient lamp of learning burns steadily. Its paths are through forest glades, along blazed trails. Only once or so, in a century, has it been given to some master mind to strike out a new path,-to be a pioneer. And that opportunity is to be compelled by no one. It comes unsought and unheralded, almost uncontrolled. Yet it is one of the glories of the judicial history of our race that whenever it has come, there has been a man capable of meeting it; of taking it up and making it at first peculiarly his own and then of handing his achievement down to coming generations as a great and priceless legacy. Of such as these the names of Sir Edward Coke, Lord Holt, Lord Hardwicke, Lord Mansfield, Lord Stowell, and our own great Marshall leap to the front. And after them throng an innumerable list of great jurists, who lacked only the opportunity to win a place beside those still greater ones. If Mr. Justice Grier was not one of those who could have grasped such an opportunity and risen to such heights, he was at the very least a very sound lawyer and a very great judge, who for nearly a quarter of

a century administered his high office with distinction.

Robert Cooper Grier was born on March 5, 1794, in Cumberland county, Pennsylvania. He was the eldest of eleven children. His father, the Rev. Isaac Grier, a Presbyterian clergyman, eked out an existence by preaching to three congregations, running a farm and keeping a grammar school. He was a good Greek and Latin scholar, and grounded his oldest son so thoroughly in the classics, that to the end of his life the learned justice read his testament in the Greek. It is easy to picture the son's boyhood of hard work and hard study, in a sparsely settled rural district, until 1811, when he entered the junior class of Dickinson College. There, sixteen years before, his distinguished Chief upon the Supreme Court of the United States had graduated.

For the next thirty-three years we have very few facts and dates. They are uninteresting and will be set down as succinctly as possible.

Upon the completion of his course in 1812, the future justice remained at the college for a year as an instructor. He then returned to his home in order to help his father conduct the institution, which under his presidency, had grown from an academy to a college. This was in Northumberland County, whither the Griers had moved in 1806. The father died in 1815, and Robert Grier succeeded to the presidency of the college. There he taught chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, Greek, Latin, and went fishing. In addition he studied law. In 1817 he was admitted to the bar and began practice in Bloomsburg, Columbia County. One of two facts is sufficiently patent. Either Robert Grier was a genius, or a very slight smattering of law passed muster. In 1818 he moved to Danville, in the same county, where he resided until, on May 4, 1838, he was appointed, by Governor Wolf, President Judge of the District Court of Alleghany

County. He then removed to Alleghany City, which place he kept as a domicile until 1848, when he took up his residence in Philadelphia.

This appointment seems to have been unsolicited. It was made because of his professional eminence. His practice had been lucrative and extensive from the beginning His ability and great fidelity to his clients were immediately recognized and appreciated by the community. It is said, too, that despite his pressing need for money, his benevolence was such, that he took and carried on many cases for indigent clients without remuneration. During these years he also supported his mother, and brothers and sisters, and gave the latter a liberal education. Consider for a moment the courage and large heartedness of a man who could assume such a burden. This noble act compels admiration and disposes one's favorable judgment. It was not, therefore, until 1829 that he found himself at liberty to marry. His wife was Miss Isabella Rose, whose father owned an extensive estate on the banks of Lycoming Creek, which later came into the possession of Mr. Justice Grier. There he yearly took his recreation with his trout rod, accompanied by intimate friends.

For

Mr. Justice Grier's eminent fitness for the place on the Supreme Court of the United States, made vacant by the death of Mr. Jus tice Baldwin in 1844, was conspicuous. twenty years he had been prominent at the bar. For six years he had made an enviable record as a judge. He had the entire confidence of the bar of his court, and its affection to a distinguished degree. His influence with and reputation in the community, were such that his charges to juries disposed of the cases upon questions of fact. His name was sent to the Senate on August 4, 1846, by President Polk, and the following day his nomination was confirmed. He sat upon the Supreme Court of the United States for over twenty-three years,

adorning it with his learning, an able and a great judge. The record of his high judicial service is contained in the thirty volumes of reports from 5 Howard to 8 Wallace. It bears abundant testimony to his diligence, research, sound judgment and great firmness. But Mr. Van Vechten Veeder in this magazine has so recently and so adequately praised Mr. Justice Grier's judicial English, setting forth an example of it, together with a most satisfactory list of his more important opinions, that I shall not attempt iteration of them here. He never based an argument upon a mere technicality, but sought out some broad principle upon which to place the decision of a case. His aspect and bearing upon the bench were dignified and inspiring. He was a large man of vigorous muscle, with a kindly and scholarly face. His courteous manner won him the affection of the bar, as his learning and ability won its respect and admiration. Until stricken with paralysis in 1867, he was never absent from a sitting of the Court, and when on December 14, 1869, he was constrained to send his resignation to President Grant, to take effect on February 1, 1870, it was accepted in a note of cordial praise and affection by the executive. This resignation called forth from his associates upon the Bench and from the Bar expressions of sorrow at his loss so marked and cordial as to show that they were by no means perfunctory. He lived long enough to attend the funeral of his successor, ex-Secretary Stanton, and died on September 25, 1870.

I have within so short a time called attention in these pages to the conditions and circumstances under which the work of the Supreme Court of the United States was done during the years of Mr. Justice Grier's service upon that Bench, and to the historical events during the years of his boyhood and early manhood, which might have had an influence in moulding his character and forming his ideas, that it seems worse

than unnecessary to more than refer briefly to some of them here. Suffice it to say that his first years upon the Supreme Court were troubled by the ever-increasing anti-slavery agitation, the questions arising out of the Mexican War, and those brought to the front by the natural growth of the country in population and commerce; the last years by the vexatious questions of Reconstruction; and the intermediate period by those of the Civil War. Under the leadership of Taney, the power of the States to make internal improvements was established. Under the leadership of Chase, the power of the national government to wage war and procure the sinews therefor, was triumphantly asserted. Mr. Justice Grier ably performed his full share of all this work. But I venture to think that his talents and learning were better adapted to the solution of problems of private law. He was especially learned in the law of real property, trusts and probate. But his admirable contributions to the science of jurisprudence in nearly all its branches are not so well known among the lawyers of today as their merits deserve. The terseness and clearness of his style, his strong grasp of the principles of the case before him, make all his judicial opinions interesting reading. They are learned, but not overburdened with learning. They are the products of a strong mind that thought clearly and logically, and he was able to express his judgments in a language that was peculiarly adapted to convey his meaning to the minds of others. He was a life-long Democrat and a strong supporter of the Federal Government. His high conception of the judicial duty and function is everywhere apparent. He sought to administer the law. No man has ever sat upon the Supreme Court of the United States with fewer idiosyncrasies and preconceived conceptions of what the law ought to be. His sole purpose was to ascertain what the law was and then to administer it. He worked

out and applied the principles of jurisprudence which best conserve justice. He had no belief in the shifty expositions of individual and ephemeral conceptions thereof, which are so rampant in these latter days, to the disorder and the blinding of that very justice, which they protest so loudly that they serve. His whole life was devoted to his profession and he was never led from its diligent and quiet pursuit by outside interests. As nearly every eminent judge has been, so he too was a student and widely read. It is unfortunate that so little concerning him has survived the years, but this is too often the fate of a

great judge. His name becomes, in time, only an authority, a synonym, an abstraction. His life work is represented by a citation. But the citations of Mr. Justice Grier's judgments will always carry weight with students of jurisprudence. And this is the laurel crown for which every real judge hopes. He is not solicitous for his own fame, but eager only to further the fair name of that great science whose high priest and oracle he is, and so best subserve his fellowmen to the end of time.

Such a man and such a judge was Mr. Justice Grier.