The gentlemen society is excellent. I say gentlemen, for the number of families is too limited and recent to form an established female society, such as exists in other cities of the same size. There are two gentlemen's clubs, and club life is here very pleasant. All the gentlemen of the city drop in usually of an evening-I mean those who are members. The house is large, the rooms spacious and well-furnished, and the air of a fashionable assembly of gentlemen prevails. There are several theaters which are open Sundays as well as week days; occasionally a fancy danseuse makes her appearance.

The stated preaching of the gospel is also well attended, there being several large churches which are thronged every Sunday. At the present there is an active revival going on-prayer-meeting every day from 12 to 1 and from 4 to 5 in all the churches and they are well attended, it is said. I can't speak from observation.

There is a deep, bitter, and revengeful feeling lingering between the Vigilantes and the Law and Order parties, and everybody is on one side or the other. The markets are excellent, vegetables in abundance and of great luxuriance. We have strawberries, green peas, cucumbers, and asparagus. The meat and fish market is also very fine. At a dinner Saturday evening we had frogs. They put me in mind of Nardi's;* give him my compliments.

In the foregoing letter Stanton expressed the belief and to his wife wrote at the same time that he would be home in six or eight weeks. She repeated this promise so that it became public, whereupon Judge Black protested, writing: "There is no other man living for whom I would have assumed the responsibility I have taken with you. You must succeed or prove that success was utterly impossible. I can't float unless I ride on the wave of your reputation, and I want it to roll high."

A letter of May 2, to Mr. Watson, throws some light on local conditions at San Francisco:

I am still very hard at work. My health seems to continue improving. No asthmatic symptoms have troubled me for more than ten days.

The purpose of my visit will be fully accomplished as far as relates to the business under my charge. That has been quite evident from the investigations already made, and the proof that has been accumulated since my arrival here. There is a good deal of excitement among the parties adversely interested, but it evinces itself in nothing more formidable than a newspaper squib occasionally; and as no opportunity will be afforded for anything else, I hope to get through my employment pleasantly and successfully.

*A. Nardi was the caterer and general manager of the Pittsburg club, which had quarters in Shaler and Stanton's building in Pittsburg, with whom, for several years, Stanton took his meals.

Last week I made a very delightful trip around the Bay of San Francisco and to the missions of Santa Clara and San Gare, and the quicksilver mines. That region of country was more beautiful than any I have ever passed through.

The city is to-day deeply interested in a great race going on, and everybody has gone out to the race course to see a man ride 150 miles in six hours. To-morrow there is to be a duel, it is said. It grows out of the fugitive slave law case, decided since my arrival, and if it takes place, will no doubt be a bloody affair. A great deal of murderous feeling is evinced on the subject. With all of its advantages of climate, soil, and minerals, California is heavily cursed with the bad passions of bad men and I would not like to make my permanent abode upon its soil.

A marvelous thing is now going on here. The mining districts of California are being depopulated by the rush of emigration to the British possessions on Frazer's River. Most disastrous results must follow in California for a season. Nor is it any delusion. There can be no doubt of the richness of the gold fields there.

On August 19, he must have been homesick:

I have fixed the 22d of September as the date of departure, and I am hurrying with impatience to be home. If I reach there in safety, nothing shall induce me to wander off again. Nothing but health would have tempted me on this occasion. That I have regained—whether permanently or not, time only can show. I have seen much, learned much, and have idled away no time. To be at home with family and friends is now the desire of my heart.

On September 3, he wrote:

In July I had no doubt of being able to leave here by the steamer that takes this letter, but the business here is so great that it is impossible to calculate on time beforehand. On Monday I shall close the evidence in the Limantour case, for which I came. And after that there will remain very little more to be done than count the dead and bury them.

For the last few years a set of Mexicans has been plundering the United States at the rate of a million a year without any questions being asked. Having determined to throw a brick at them, I shall stay to see where it hits.

On November 25 he wrote: "Judgment has been entered in favor of the United States in all my cases and my work is done.”

His work was "done" in California only, as he learned when the cases were reopened on appeal in the Supreme Court of the United States; and his task, more complicated and prolonged than he had expected, continued to hold him in California.

Met at the outset by a most extraordinary maze of forgery

and perjury, and unable to find the original grants, he formulated and sent to Washington two bills which were enacted into laws. (May, 1858)-one to compel the production of land papers and records, and the other punishing the fabrication of claims or documents in support thereof. Armed with these, he instituted a personal search of all the archives on the California coast and was rewarded by discovering not only the original grants, but the correspondence showing the fraudulent character of the great Limantour claim. The fraud was defeated; Limantour, abandoned by his lawyers, was indicted and fled the country; and all the spurious grants, including that covering the great Alameda quicksilver mine, were defeated.

Before returning (in January, 1859) he gathered and digested the Spanish and Mexican land laws and decisions and the documents relating to grants and reversions which, found in over four hundred volumes, are now a very valuable part of the Government records.

His fee was twenty-five thousand dollars and the Government paid his expenses to, from, and in California.* A quarter of a million dollars would not have been unreasonable compensation, for he prevented a stupendous robbery of the Government and of San Francisco; saved the administration from disgrace; won where everybody else had failed; settled the land titles of California; and changed the character of Pacific coast civilization.

*The passage from New York to San Francisco cost $300; boarding, lodging, washing, etc., at the International Hotel, from March 19, 1858, to January 2, 1859, $1,102.88; passage of Stanton, Lieut. Harrison, and James Buchanan, jr., from San Francisco to New York, $851.25; transporting baggage across the Isthmus of Panama, $25.60.

CHAPTER XIII.

TRIAL OF DANIEL E. SICKLES.

Stanton left San Francisco on the morning of January 3, 1859, and was with his family in Washington during the first days of February, having been absent a week less than a year. His asthma was comatose and his general health greatly improved; but he had not become fully rested when, on Sunday, February 27, 1859, Daniel E. Sickles, member of Congress from the city of New York, in front of his residence in Washington, shot and killed Philip Barton Key, exclaiming: "Key, you scoundrel, you have dishonored my home; you must die."

Sickles-talented, handsome, and dashing-had resided, when first married, in the household of James Buchanan in London, his host being then United States Minister at the court of St. James, and himself Secretary of Legation. His wife, of Latin origin, the daughter of the composer Baglioli, had deep, dark, lustrous eyes and, at twenty-three, "was remarkable for something especially soft, lovely, and youthful in the type of her peculiar beauty." Key, son of the author of the "Star Spangled Banner," was tall, polite, talented, polished, and a widower. His sister was married to George H. Pendleton of Ohio; his father's only sister was the wife of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, and he himself had been for some time United States Attorney for the District of Columbia. The social, official, and political prominence of the parties involved gave the tragedy great significance.

On Thursday following the grand jury brought in an indictment against Sickles for murder, and on April 4, following, the trial began with Stanton as senior attorney for the defense. Although the property qualification for jurors, as established by the laws of Maryland in 1777, had for years been a dead letter in the District of Columbia, Prosecutor Robert Ould brought it up in this case for the purpose of debarring from jury service citizens against whom no other objections would lie. Stanton made a strong endeavor to

have that barbaric rule left where it had lain so many years undisturbed, but the Court sustained the prosecuting attorney, and no one who could not swear that he owned property in the District valued at eight hundred dollars above his debts, was allowed to serve.

One peculiarity of the trial was admitting testimony and rulings from the trial of a colored slave woman in North Carolina for the purpose of excluding written evidence favorable to Sickles, and during the next moment ruling out the testimony of a free colored woman which was known to be unfavorable to Key! Stanton contended that the "prosecution, in their thirst for blood, had not only forgotten the institution of slavery, but modern society and law as well." J. M. Carlisle, a very able attorney, attempted to gain favor with the jury, most of whom were slave-holders, by assailing Stanton for making what he called an "anti-slavery speech," but there was hearty applause when Stanton retorted in a loud voice: "The doctrines which I have maintained here to-day in defense of homes and families will be the proudest record I can leave to my children." Hitherto negroes had been allowed to testify in the District of Columbia, but Judge Crawford refused to admit the evidence of any colored person in this trial, as otherwise there would be placed on record the inculpating testimony of Negro Gray, in whose house, rented for the express purpose, Key held clandestine meetings with Mrs. Sickles.

The case was fought tenaciously. On the eighteenth day Stanton began to sum up for the defense, a distinguished audience crowding the court-room. A portion of his address, which was rugged and powerful throughout, is reproduced* from the official stenographic notes of Felix G. Fontaine :

Family chastity, the sanctity of the marriage bed, the matron's honor, and the virgin's purity are more valuable and estimable in law than the property or life of any man. The present case belongs to that class on which rest the foundations of the social system. Here in the capital of the nation, the social and political metropolis of thirty millions of people, a man of mature age, the head of a family, a member of the learned profession, a high officer of Government, intrusted with the administration of the law, and who for years at this bar has demanded judgment of fine, imprisonment, and death against other men for offenses against the law, has himself been slain in open day in a public place because he took advantage of

*The full speech appears as the 10th selection in Snyder's "Great Speeches by Great Lawyers," a volume containing the world's best examples of learning, logic, eloquence, truth, justice, and power in oratory.