SAMUEL SHELLABARGER, DISTRICT OF CO LUMBIA. (1817.) Celebrated as a lawyer for nearly fifty years. Born in Clark county, Ohio, December 10, 1817. He is of English and Irish descent; was educated in the common schools, the seminary and Miami University, whence he graduated at twenty-four, and which conferred upon him the degree of LL. D. fifty years later. He read law with Samuel Mason, of Springfield, Ohio, and was admitted there in 1846. He was a member of the first Legislature of Ohio, that met in 1851, under the present constitution. Elected to Congress in 1860, he was a member of the Thirtyseventh, Thirty-ninth, Fortieth and Forty-second Congresses. President Grant appointed him Minister to Portugal in 1869, and in 1874-5 he was one of the Civil Service Commission. In the Thirty-seventh Congress he made a speech which attracted wide attention on the lawfulness of the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus by Mr. Lincoln, in the absence of Congressional authority. In the Thirty-ninth Congress he made his famous argument in support of the measure of reconstruction then under discussion, of which Mr. Blaine says: "For closeness, consistency and strength it has rarely, if ever, been surpassed. Other speeches have gained greater celebrity, but it may well be doubted whether any speech in the House of Representatives ever made a more enduring impression, or exerted greater convincing power upon the minds of those to whom it was addressed." In the Forty-second Congress he essentially drew up, reported to the House and managed on the floor, the "Kuklux Bill," which, after most protracted debate, was triumphantly passed. Since 1875 he has been actively engaged in the practice of law, and, although in his seventy-eighth year, is vigorous and healthy. His partner is Jeremiah Wilson, one of the leading lawyers of the District. His career as a lawyer has been long, able and lucrative, many important causes owing their successful termination to his guiding hand. He was of counsel in the Star Route defense, and represented Hayes in his contest for the Presidency. He is a man severely plain, greatly re sembling Abraham Lincoln. Chief Justice Holt. "Soon after Coke, came one who fills, by reason of his mere judicial character and work, the largest space in the history of the English law that is occupied by any of England's illustrious judges. He is one who gave to England a new and a real civilization. This was Chief Justice Holt. Of him it is truly said that he gave splendor to all the after-coming luminaries of the English bench, and that he is the model of which, in England, great judicial character has been formed for the last and best two hundred years of English history."-Remarks of Mr. Shellabarger in United States Supreme Court upon the death of Chief Justice Waite, 1888. The Judiciary of a Country. "The character of a judiciary of a country is so obviously the reflection of the character of its civilization, that we utter mere truisms when we say that the greatness of every State is measured by the learning and the purity of its judiciary; and that the happiness, the liberty and the virtue of every people are best studied in its courts. In these sanctuaries of the law it is that, even in decaying states, liberty and order take their last refuge, and here die."-Idem. |