Rollinsford Revisited: the Sacred and Profane Memories of Chief Justice Charles Doe
| Citado como | Vol. 54 No. 2 Pg. 0030 |
| Páginas | 0030 |
| Año de Publicación | 2014 |
Fall, 2013
My past is small, uninteresting, insignificant. My present is calm and prosperous. My future is vague, shadowy, but hopeful. Now manhood is at hand, and the responsibilities of it are being developed. The curtain of years is rising and the drama of life is opening. The stage of the world's time appears and the scene of my destiny will be performed soon...
-Opening diary entry of Chief Justice Charles Doe, age 22.
July 15,1852.
Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there s no room for the present at all.
-Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.
INTRODUCTION - A SECRET HISTORY
This article explores a secret diary penned by New Hampshire's greatest Chief Justice: Charles Cogswell Doe - a man to whom Wigmore on Evidence is dedicated and whom Professor Roscoe Pound of Harvard called one of the ten greatest jurists in American history. The diary, written in the thick of Doe's coming of age at 22, upends some of the conventional legends about Doe - such as his scant reading or farm boy disposition in his younger years.[1] Neither proves to be true in this memoir penned 162 years ago.
The diary was quietly kept by descendants of Doe's third of nine children, Haven, until 2003 when it was donated to the library at the Woodman Institute in Dover, New Hampshire by Doe's great-granddaughter, Jessica Doe Terrill and her late-husband Robert. Ms. Terrill, 87 at the time of this writing, now resides in Pennsylvania.
The 78-page diary neatly scrawled on pale blue paper and handsomely bound, covers eight months between July 1852 and late February of 1853. It opens a window on Doe as a young man, his thoughts and his experiences as he was studying law by night and apprenticing with a prominent Dover attorney by day. Doe left little by way of personal memoir, frustrating historians and his biographer.[2]
Doe eschewed the limelight, even refusing to be photographed more than several times in his lifetime because, among other reasons, he refused to sit still.[3] Ironically, this diary with its precious revelations, is virtually unknown to historians of the law, unaware that a transcription was quietly published in the Strafford County Genealogical Record in three parts.
The diary is grandly entitled: "Biography. Journal. Common-Book, et Omnium Gatherum of Chas. Doe. Commenced July 15,1852."[4] Doe took pen to paper and committed to keeping this diary in a guest room at abolitionist and Free Soil candidate for President Senator John Parker Hale's mansion in Dover, concluding the maiden entry with a carpe diem sentiment: "The time is short, life is to be lived, destiny to be fulfilled, and the word is 'Forward.'"[5] The pages that follow can be read alternatively as a "fever chart for melancholy," as the poet Anne Sexton once wrote, or as a description of the sometimes raucous life of a young lawyer-in-the-making - dating, smoking, drinking, and party-going.
The diary captures early glimmers of the fierce independence of Doe as he grapples with coming of age. Details of an early romance, Doe's first substantial legal job, politics, religion, and recreation are interspersed with accounts of court cases, interminable Baptist revival meetings and icy riverside baptisms. The diary records his graveside musings where he pined for lost love, beach days in Maine, and steam boat hij inks on the Isles of Shoals. Legendary Senator Daniel Webster, a freshly-elected President Franklin Pierce, abolitionist Senator Hale, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among other personages known and unknown, make frequent cameos. Perhaps most of note and most controversial, dark questions of race and class in the zenith of slavery also creep into the diary written in the tense decade leading up to the Civil War. Doe's view on slavery in his youth may suprise contemporary readers.
At the time of the diary's writing, Doe was apprenticed to Dover lawyer Daniel Christie, the preeminent legal teacher of the period, who at one time could boast of having trained half the New Hampshire Supreme Court.[6] Doe had lived exactly one third of his life at this point and would soon enter Harvard for further legal education following an erratic academic career including stints at Berwick, Exeter, Andover, and Kennebunk Academies, then Harvard and Dartmouth (what he calls in the diary a "rude and clownish education"). To put his age further in context, Doe would shortly be elected Clerk of the New Hampshire State Senate1 (after a few years of giving stump speeches for the Democrats) and go into partnership with Charles Woodman - and - within seven years, at the age of 29, hold a seat on the New Hampshire Supreme Court - a seat he would occupy until his death, with the exception of two years when Doe's political party fell out of favor.6 Thus, for 20 of Doe's 42 years as a lawyer, he served as Chief Justice; a record hard to match.
1 The office of Senate Clerk survives today and is still elected by the twenty-four members of the State Senate
Five years ago I wrote on the Jenatos family's discovery of 1,764 books that constituted Charles Doe's personal library; a library that had been uncovered remarkably intact from a Rollinsford, New Hampshire barn - volumes that now reside at Harvard Law School for scholars to study.[7] Doe's marginalia, poems, and drawings laid bare personal details of a man that shaped New Hampshire jurisprudence more than any other. This new diary discovery is even more of a dramatic pulling back of the curtain on the coming of age of this great figure, a man whose portrait even today the Justices of the New Hampshire Supreme Court face on the opposite wall when they entertain oral argument.
I call this article "Rollinsford Revisited" because it serves as an even deeper excavation into Doe's past than my prior effort, an excavation that reveals a hopeful youth struggling to come into his own in a tumultous time.
This article, in four parts, introduces the diary and reports on the major themes found in young Doe's entries. Part One examines on his 1 The office of Senate Clerk survives today and is still elected by the twenty-four members of the State Senate. view of slavery - this Part is given special emphasis as it was the issue of the day when Doe was a young man, in the decade before the Civil War broke the nation in half - including Doe's own family. Several heretofore unknown letters written by Doe in his youth round out the ambiguous picture of Doe's thoughts on slavery when he was a young man. Part Two recounts Doe's struggle with organized religion and his hearty embrace of Yankee transcendentalist thought. Part Three explores lost love - perhaps Doe's first - and his reflections on fundamental questions of life and death. Part Four is a brief tour of Doe's recreational world - on the coasts of Maine and New Hampshire - a world that is not unrecognizable to attorneys in New Hampshire today who still frequent some of the same seacoast havens.
The full transcript of the diary as prepared by William E. Went-worth, is is available at the New Hampshire Law Library. It is possible to view the original pages by contacting William Wentworth at the Woodman Institute, an eclectic museum in Dover which includes among its holdings the John Parker Hale mansion where Doe began this diary.
It is well worth a read if for nothing else to get an unvarnished glimpse of the preeminent civil saint of our Bench and Bar—a man like many others before and after him—who had his faults and virtues in mixed measure - a measure that proves the common humanity of an uncommon man: Doe of New Hampshire.[8]
PART I: THE DEVIL AND CHARLES DOE - DOE'S SUPPORT OF THE COLONIZATION MOVEMENT
But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed.
-Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited.
Like Daniel Webster, Doe was a sensitive New Englander morally and politically opposed to slavery. At age 22, Doe considered himself a "strict disciple" of a variant of abolitionism that many contemporary historians have adjudged less-than-favorably: the "Colonization" movement.[9] Colonizationalists believed slaves should be sent back to Africa once freed. Several unpublished letters contemporaneous to the diary also show Doe expressing both derogatory and positive comments about black slaves, painting an ambiguous picture of Doe's sensibilities on the subject of slavery, abolitionism and racial differences in antebellum America.
The historical backdrop of the diary reveals a nation roiling with political and racial tension. The Compromise of 1850 - in which the United States Congress punted on the issue of slavery by allowing a roughly even number of new slave and free states to enter the Union -fueled all the major political debates and elections in every state, North or South. In 1852, there were 16 free states and 15 slave states. When Doe starts the diary in a guest room in Hale's house, not one but two men from New Hampshire would be on the ballot for the presidency: Franklin Pierce of Concord who supported the slavery-appeasing Compromise of 1850, and the first abolitionist Senator, John P. Hale of Dover -a third-party presidential candidate who was on temporary hiatus from the U.S. Senate, having failed to be reappointed by the Hampshire legislature during a brief period of Democratic ascendancy. Pierce would defeat General Winfield Scott in the popular vote by about 300,000 votes - with Hale garnering 156,149 votes as the Free Soil candidate - a party that opposed the Compromise of 1850 and slavery.[10] Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom s Cabin was published in 1852...
Para continuar leyendo
Solicita tu prueba