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PREFACE TO VOLUME TEN xxiii

wealth. Nevertheless, it was not these momentous isaues that at-
tracted the majority of the legal professton, but rather the person-
ality of the judge who proposed to try the cage, for His Honor was
probably the most violent, the moat feared and the best-hated par-
tisan who ever sat upon the Federal bench.

Then follows this account of Judge Samuel Chase:

Tt waa not in his judicial capacity alone that Samuel Chase had
earned his reputation. In the stirring days preceding the Revolu-
tion he had been one of the “Sons of Liberty” who had attacked the
Dublic offices of Baltimore during the Stamp Act and later he and his
band had actually compelled a group of old malcontents, including
bis own father, to take the oath of allegiance to the Continental
Congress, Nor were these the only manifestations of such playful-
ess credited to hia account, for when certain Pennsylvania Quakers
had refused to illuminate their houses in honor of a Revolutionary
wuccess, he had swooped upon the offending citizens with his fol-
lowers, bundled them into carts and deported them in the depth of
winter to Virginia, where they were unceremonfously deposited and
left to shift for themselves,

All this youthful bolsteroueness, however, would probably have
been attributed to exuberant vitality and misdirected zeal had not
‘his conduct as a member of the Maryland Colonial Legislature and
the Continental Congress been almost equally turbulent and provo-
cative of riot. The man was, however, an incorrigible bully, with
@ genius for offense and when at the close of the war he found him-
self a member of the Maryland House of Delegates, he straightway
became Involved in political broils which regulted in an attempt at
his impeachment, But here his fighting qualities stood him tn good
stead, for he not only fought his enemies to a standstill, but he had
himself rewarded, firat with the Chief-Justiceship of the Criminal
Court of Baltimore, and then with the Chief-Justiceship of the Gen-
eral Court, both of which offices he tenaciously held and adminis-
tered in flagrant deflance of the law until his action was officially de-
elared unconstiutional, Nevertheless, his name was writ large in
the Declaration of Independence, his personal honeaty, courage and
patriotism were unquestioned, and although he had at first opposed
the Conatitution ha had become in course of time the most ardent
of Federal enthusiasts.

Such was the man whom Washington had appointed to the Fed-
eral bench in 1796 and there was to be nothing in his conduct of
that office to belfe his previous record. Domineering, fearless, vain,
confident and honest, he had many of the qualities necessary to es
tablish the authority of the new court, but mo one did more then he
to make his tribunal obnoxious to the bar. With a good claesical

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