Baldwin, Joseph Glover (21 January 1815–30 September 1864), attorney and author, was born in Friendly Grove Factory, Virginia, the son of Joseph Clarke Baldwin, a mill owner, and Eliza Cook. He was educated at Staunton Academy (Virginia), where he learned Latin and read widely in English and American authors. He left school at fourteen and became a clerk in the chancery court. This experience turned him toward a legal career, and after private study and law school he qualified as a lawyer at twenty. Baldwin also worked for a time as a newspaperman in Virginia and suffered a disappointment in love. In March 1836 he set out for the “Southwest”—specifically Alabama and Mississippi....
Article
Baldwin, Joseph Glover (1815-1864), attorney and author
Merritt Moseley
Article
Benjamin, Robert Charles O’Hara (1855-1900), journalist and lawyer
George C. Wright
Benjamin, Robert Charles O’Hara (31 March 1855–02 October 1900), journalist and lawyer, was born on the island of St. Kitts in the West Indies. Details about his early life, including the names of his parents and his education, are not known. In the fall of 1869 he arrived in New York, where he worked as soliciting agent for the ...
Article
Bingham, Robert Worth (1871-1937), lawyer, newspaper publisher, and diplomat
William E. Ellis
Bingham, Robert Worth (08 November 1871–18 December 1937), lawyer, newspaper publisher, and diplomat, was born in Mebane, North Carolina, the son of Robert Bingham, an educator, and Delphine Louise Worth. Bingham graduated from the Bingham School, a private school run by his father, and from 1888 to 1890 attended the University of North Carolina (no degree). He married Eleanor Everhart Miller in 1896; they had three children. He received a law degree from the University of Louisville a year later and, settling in Louisville, went into law practice with fellow North Carolinian W. W. Davies....
Article
Birney, William (1819-1907), soldier, journalist, and lawyer
Edward G. Longacre
Birney, William (28 May 1819–14 August 1907), soldier, journalist, and lawyer, was born in Madison County, Alabama, the son of James Gillespie Birney, a lawyer, state legislator, and abolitionist leader, and Agatha McDowell. In 1818 his family had moved to Huntsville, Alabama, and in late 1835 they relocated to New Richmond, Ohio. Birney was educated at four colleges, including Yale University, and graduated from Cincinnati Law School in 1841. He began practicing law in that city and in 1845 married Catherine Hoffman. They would have nine children. For five years thereafter he resided on the Continent and in England. He contributed essays on the arts to English and American newspapers, and he upheld the activist reputation of his family by opposing French troops as a member of a Republican student battalion in Paris. In 1848 he accepted an appointment as professor of English literature at the lycée in Bourges....
Article
Blackford, Charles Minor (1833-1903), lawyer and author
Richard F. Hamm
Blackford, Charles Minor (17 October 1833–10 March 1903), lawyer and author, was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the son of William Matthews Blackford, an editor, and Mary Berkeley Minor. He shaped his life by both emulating and rejecting his parents’ lives and wishes. Although trained in law, Blackford’s father pursued a career in politics and in 1846 moved the family to Lynchburg to take a job as a newspaper editor. Thus his father subjected the family to a precarious living based on party patronage but encouraged his five sons’ interest in political and literary lives. His mother held strong antislavery beliefs and pressured her sons to seek their fortunes away from the taint of the South. Charles was educated at home and at boarding schools; he completed his education at the University of Virginia, earning an L.L.B. in 1855....
Article
Bollan, William (1710?–1782), colonial agent and lawyer
Ronald Lettieri
Bollan, William (1710?–1782), colonial agent and lawyer, was born in England and emigrated from there to America while a teenager. He pursued a legal career by studying as an apprentice under the tutelage of Massachusetts attorney Robert Auchmuty. Little is known of Bollan’s early life and career. However, by 1733 he had begun to gain prominence as an attorney, as evidenced by his acquisition of Harvard College and Boston’s Anglican parish, King’s Chapel, as clients. Bollan was an Anglican, which placed him in a religious minority in Congregational-dominated Boston. By the mid-1730s he had begun to venture into land speculation in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island....
Article
Bork, Robert H. (1 March 1927–19 December 2012), conservative legal theorist, Solicitor General of the United States, federal appellate judge, and writer
Johnathan O’Neill
Bork, Robert H. (1 March 1927–19 December 2012), conservative legal theorist, Solicitor General of the United States, federal appellate judge, and writer, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Harry Philip Bork, a purchasing agent for a steel company, and Elizabeth Kunkle, an English teacher. He graduated from the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut in ...
Article
Bradwell, James Bolesworth (1828-1907), lawyer and publisher
Walter F. Pratt
Bradwell, James Bolesworth (16 April 1828–29 November 1907), lawyer and publisher, was born in Loughborough, England, the son of Thomas Bradwell and Elizabeth Guthredge, farmers. He came to the United States with his family in 1829, settling first in Utica, New York. In 1833 they moved to west-central Illinois and later to Chicago, making the last journey by covered wagon in 1834. They remained in Chicago only a short time before moving to a site near Wheeling, where they lived in a log cabin. As an adult, Bradwell enjoyed recounting the hardships of his early days in Illinois, which included attacks by Indians....
Article
Butler, William Allen (1825-1902), lawyer and writer
Dennis Wepman
Butler, William Allen (20 February 1825–09 September 1902), lawyer and writer, was born William Howard Allen Butler in Albany, New York, the son of Benjamin Franklin Butler, an attorney, and Harriet Allen Butler, sister of Lieutenant William Howard Allen, a naval hero in the War of 1812. His family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1834 when his father was appointed attorney general by President ...
Article
Calhoun, William Barron (1796-1865), lawyer, writer, and politician
Sylvia B. Larson
Calhoun, William Barron (29 December 1796–08 November 1865), lawyer, writer, and politician, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Andrew Calhoun, a merchant, and Martha Chamberlain. His father was one of the founders of Boston’s Park Street Church. Calhoun was prepared for college by Harvard graduate William Wells, then he attended Yale, graduating in 1814. While a senior at Yale, Calhoun was one of the editors of a student publication, the ...
Article
Cane, Melville Henry (1879-1980), lawyer and poet
Linda K. Wright
Cane, Melville Henry (15 April 1879–10 March 1980), lawyer and poet, was born in Plattsburgh, New York, the son of Henry William Cane, a merchant, and Sophia Goodman. Cane’s family moved to New York City when he was six years of age. He received a bachelor of arts degree from Columbia University in 1900 and a bachelor of laws from the same institution in 1903. Cane demonstrated an early interest in writing. As an undergraduate at Columbia, he served as editor in chief of the ...
Article
Cary, Mary Ann Camberton Shadd (1823-1893), African-American educator, journalist/editor, and lawyer
Shirley J. Yee
Cary, Mary Ann Camberton Shadd (09 October 1823–05 June 1893), African-American educator, journalist/editor, and lawyer, was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the daughter of Abraham Doras Shadd and Harriet Parnell. Although the eldest of thirteen children, Mary Ann Shadd grew up in comfortable economic circumstances. Little is known about her mother except that she was born in North Carolina in 1806 and was of mixed black and white heritage; whether she was born free or a slave is unknown. Shadd’s father was also of mixed-race heritage. His paternal grandfather, Jeremiah Schad, was a German soldier who had fought in the American Revolution and later married Elizabeth Jackson, a free black woman from Pennsylvania. Abraham Shadd had amassed his wealth as a shoemaker, and his property by the 1830s was valued at $5,000. He was a respected member of the free black community in Wilmington and in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where the family had moved sometime in the 1830s, and he served as a delegate to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1835 and 1836....
Article
Chester, Thomas Morris (1834-1892), lawyer and Civil War correspondent
R. J. M. Blackett
Chester, Thomas Morris (11 May 1834–30 September 1892), lawyer and Civil War correspondent, was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the son of George Chester and Jane Maria (maiden name unknown), restaurateurs. When, as a young man of eighteen, Chester decided to emigrate to Liberia, he wrote Martin H. Freeman, his former teacher at the Avery Institute in Pittsburgh, that his passion for liberty could no longer “submit to the insolent indignities and contemptuous conduct to which it has almost become natural for the colored people dishonorably to submit themselves.” It was a bold assertion of independence for one who had come of age in a household long associated with the anticolonization sentiments of radical abolitionism. But the country’s willingness to appease southern interests, symbolized by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, persuaded Chester, sometime before his 1853 graduation, to emigrate....
Article
Cook, Ebenezer (1667–1733?), poet and lawyer
J. A. Leo Lemay
Cook, Ebenezer (1667–1733?), poet and lawyer, was the son of Andrew Cook, a planter and merchant, and Anne Bowyer. His father owned Cook’s Point, at the mouth of the Choptank River, Dorchester County, Maryland. Ebenezer evidently divided his time between Maryland and England. He was living in St. Mary’s City, Maryland, in 1694. On 26 September 1700 Edward Ebbitts of Dorchester County delegated his power of attorney to “Ebenezer Cook of the Province of Maryland now Residing in London.”...
Article
Crafts, William (1787-1826), author and lawyer
Ray M. Atchison
Crafts, William (24 January 1787–23 September 1826), author and lawyer, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of William Crafts, an affluent merchant, and Margaret Tébout. The handsome and precocious Crafts studied under Charleston tutors and then went to Harvard College, entering in 1802 as a sophomore. Young Crafts’s geniality and his ease in learning foreign languages brought him popularity and a reputation for both wit and scholarship. After graduation in 1805, he studied law in Charleston at the office of Ford and DeSaussure; but after three years and apparently with only superficial knowledge he returned to Cambridge to pursue a master’s degree....
Article
Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. (1815-1882), lawyer and author
Robert L. Gale
Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. (01 August 1815–06 January 1882), lawyer and author, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Henry Dana, Sr., a poet and journalist, and Ruth Charlotte Smith. After routine earlier schooling, Dana interrupted his attendance at Harvard College because of weakened eyesight aggravated by measles. In August 1834 he sailed from Boston as a common seaman on a five-month voyage around Cape Horn and on to California, where he then worked ashore mainly at collecting, storing, and curing hides. He returned home in September 1836, resumed his studies at Harvard, graduated with the class of 1837, was confirmed in the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. Paul, in Boston, and studied at Dane Law School, Harvard (1837–1840). He was admitted to the bar (1840) and began a lucrative private practice, largely in admiralty law....
Article
Downer, Silas (1729-1785), scrivener and lawyer
John K. Alexander
Downer, Silas (16 July 1729–15 December 1785), scrivener and lawyer, was born in Norwich, Connecticut, the son of Samuel Downer and Phebe Bishop, farmers. The family soon moved to Sunderland, Massachusetts. Downer entered Harvard in 1747 and was ranked twenty-eighth in a class of thirty. Since Harvard students were then ranked according to their family’s social standing, Downer’s low ranking indicates his relatively humble origins. As an undergraduate, he won Brattle and Hollis scholarships. After receiving an M.A. in 1750, he moved to Rhode Island, settled in Providence, and became a scrivener. He married Sarah Kelton in 1758; within a decade the couple had five children....
Article
Durant, Thomas Jefferson (1817-1882), publisher, lawyer, and politician
Bruce Tap
Durant, Thomas Jefferson (08 August 1817–03 February 1882), publisher, lawyer, and politician, was born in Philadelphia, the son of John Waldo Durant and Sarah Heyliger. Little is known about Durant’s life in Pennsylvania. He was educated in public schools before matriculating at the University of Pennsylvania in 1830. At the age of fourteen, however, he migrated to New Orleans, apparently as the result of his family’s economic misfortune. By 1837 Durant, along with partner John C. LaRue, was publishing the ...
Article
Durham, John Stephens (1861-1919), diplomat, lawyer, and journalist
Thomas M. Leonard
Durham, John Stephens (18 July 1861–16 October 1919), diplomat, lawyer, and journalist, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Samuel Durham and Elizabeth Stephens. Two of his uncles, Clayton Durham and Jeremiah Durham, were noted clergymen who helped Bishop Richard Allen establish the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church. A mulatto, Durham studied in the Philadelphia public schools, graduating from the Institute for Colored Youth in 1876....
Article
Ficke, Arthur Davison (1883-1945), lawyer and poet
Dalton Gross and MaryJean Gross
Ficke, Arthur Davison (10 November 1883–30 November 1945), lawyer and poet, was born in Davenport, Iowa, the son of Charles August Ficke, a lawyer, and Frances Davison. As a child he traveled extensively with his parents and came to share his father’s interest in art, although his primary interest lay in poetry. He took an A.B. degree from Harvard and a law degree from the University of Iowa and in 1908 settled into legal practice with his father. In 1907 he married Evelyn Bethune Blunt, with whom he had one son....
