Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 December 1884 — AN UNPUBLISHED SPEECH OF TOM MARSHALL. [ARTICLE]

AN UNPUBLISHED SPEECH OF TOM MARSHALL.

I never but once heard Kentucky’s greatest natural orator; and this occasion so impressed itself upon ray memory as to be indelible. In 1862 a friend said to me end day that the renowned Tom Marshall was at the court house, in Chicago, and was shortly to make a speech in a case before the Circuit Court. I hastened to the court room, where I found that the quietly-circulated report of his presence had accumulated a large audience. The case was a suit for malicious slander, in which the leading lawyer for the proseoution was* Mr, Martin, now resident of Wisconsin, and one of the most genial and pleasant gentlemen one will meet in a week’s travel. After the old English custom, as well as the custom which prevailed to some extent in early days in our Eastern States, Mr. Martin usually bore into court with him a green bag, iu which he carried his briefs and such law books as ho had occasion to use in the trials of his cases. Of this bag more anon. As I entered the court room Mr. Martin was concluding his speech for the prosecution. It appears that Marshall had just been introduced to tho court as assistant counsel for tho defense, a few minutes before Martin began his speech. It was understood that the great Kentuckian had been upon a prolonged “lark,” and had volunteered in this case as a mere freak, and to furnish spoit for a number of friends. Martin was evidently disconcerted by the appearance of such an antagonist, and I found him making a deprecating appeal to the jury. “I wain you, gentleman,” he said, “against being dazzled by the brilliancy of the celebrated orator who is to follow me. I have endeavored to present to you the facts in this case; and it behooves you to be faithful to your oaths, and keep vour mind Upon the truth, so as not to lie seduced therefrom by the poetry that yon are about to hear." Marshall arose. He was then about 60 years of age, and the intensity with which he had lived made him look older. He was very tall, with a massive frame, and an eye that no age could dim, glaring from out of cavernous sockets. He raised his spectacles upon his great forehead, and looked from one juryman to another until he had surveyed the whole group. W T hen lie began speaking his voice was so husky that he could hardly be heard by those nearest to him. He had a severe cold, which had settled upon his lungs, and seriously impeded his speech throughout ; and yet before he had concluded I, for one. forgot that there was any impediment to his eloquence. From notes taken at the time I reproduce as nearly as possible the substance of his opening remarks: “Gentlemen of the jury, I have come before you, a stranger in a strange community, to plead the cause of a poor man against a conspiracy to fix a stigma upon his character, and to crush him wiih the weight of an enortuous amercement, or to incarcerate him in a penitentiary dungeon. All unprepared ss I am. 1 appear, by the courtesy of this court to make such poor plea as I may in behalf of a fellow-citizen of our common country, where speech should be everywhere as free as the air we breathe.

“The learned gentleman -who lias preceded me has warned you, my countrymen. to beware of the poetry that I should introduce. Gentlemen of the jury. God pity me, I am no poet! I would to Heaven that I were! I have never made one true rhyme. So much the worst for me! 1 have never drunk of Heliconian spring. But, gentlemen, ouch is the strength of this case, and ouch is the wrong attempted to be perpetrated upon my client, that it might well draw tears from the most callous heart; and should 1, stirred by its thrilling interest, be moved to words of fervor, I pray you to remember that what the distinguished gentleman may call poetry, may nevertheless be the burning troth. “Truth, gentlemen, is coeval with poetry—both are immortal, eternal; and it grieves me that a member of the profession, in which it is my pride to be enrolled and the pleasure of my life to nerve, should seek to dissever these tw n-sister*. ' “When the gentle bard of Avon tnned

liis harp to strains that echoed to the farthest ends of earth and rang down the listeningtend enraptured ages, did he not crystallize iu the undying verso the truths of human life, and record in truth’s own essence the beatings of nature’s rhythmic heart, to be read till time Bhall be ho more? “When Milton, the blind prophet of the federation of humanity, Sang such strains as awoke the conscience of great England, what but clarified, eternal, omnipotent truth did he sweet though were his measures with the tragranoe of the softest Italian airs? “And, when David sang in the-courts of Jehovah Jireli, or when Miriam went forth with timbrel in hand to shout over Egypt’s dark sea the freedom of her people, did either of them sing anything but living, breathing, glowing, heavenly truth ? “When the morning stars sang together for jov, ’twas the first song of time, tlte primal poem of the universe. Thus yon see that the Almighty began his grand Providence with choral harmony, which has continued to this hour, iu the rolling seasons, in the requiem of heaving sea and breaking surf, in the carols of birds, and in the murmurs of rippling streams. “The gentleman should have risen as I did, this morning, and gone out to see the glorious orb of day / mount up the horizon from out of the bosom of your sublimely beautiful lake ; and I ask him to gaze, on the morrow, upon that resplendent and majestic scene, and then tell me, though it bo a poem repeated by a beneficent Allfatker in his infinite loving-kindness day by day for the comfort and delight of the dwellers in tliis rarely beautiful city, if it be any the less a radiantly impressive truth.

“May God in his mercy, and may yon, gentlemen, in yonr kindly commiseration, forgive my learned opponent for his sacrilegious onslaught upon the divine gift of Heaven to a fallen world; and may he long live to repent him of his so great wrong. It may be that, in the mysterious deptbir of yonder green bag, the profound and original counsel for the prosecution may have found some precedent for the assumption that poetry is inimical to or incompatible with truth; but neither in my collegiate curriculum nor in the course of professional practice through a life which, as you see, is wearing toward its close, have I ever before known such a position to be seriously maintained in the presence of an intelligent jury or of any other tribunal. And I assure the gentleman that, if he shall succeed in establishing this new legal maxim, a meed of fame is in waiting for him, beside which the bays that encircle the heads of a Bacon, a Littleton, a Coke, a Blackstone, or a Story, will wither and shrivel, and leave him and his green bag alone and unapproachable in their supreme immorality." And Marshall then proceeded to a review of the points in tho case as he had been enabled to gather them,in the course of Mr. Martin’s speech, from the counsellor the defense; and one by one he attacked the arguments of the “gentleman of the green bag,” analyzing the whole case with a keenness and vigor which constituted a new revelation to me in legal oratory. Ho seemed to be thoroughly wrapped up in the case, and his intense earnestness com* municated itself to the audience, which he carried wi th him, as did he also the jury, to the end of his wonderful speech. The closing of. Mr. Martin was utterly ineffective to stem the tide of sympathy that set in in behalf of the defense, and the jury rendered, if my memory serves me correctly, a verdict for the accused without leaving their seats. As Marshall was retiring from the court room, I heard one of his friends ask him (referring to the passage in his speech about the sunrise on Lake Michigan) what lime he rose that morning. “ ‘No more of that, Hal, an thou lovest me!” replied the inimitable Tom, grimly smiling- “You know devliah well I had only gotten out of bed, and swallowed my cocktail and breakfast, when I came into court. ” C. IF. Waite, in Chicago Current