Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 February 1886 — JERE BLACK’S ORATORY. [ARTICLE]

JERE BLACK’S ORATORY.

Story of His Impassioned Speech in Defense of Lamden P. Milligan fCorrespondence Pittsburg Dispatch.] They tell a story of a friend of 'a Western Congressman who happened to be at the capital, sight-seeing, at the time the historic Milligan case was on trial before the Supreme Court. This Congressman was to make a great speech on a certain day, on some question or other, and his friend went up to the Capitol to hear „it. He somehow-’ missed hio way in the building, however, and wandered into the court-room instead. There he saw a man of towering figure striding back and forth in the narrow space before the bench, arguing the case of the defendant, Milligan. Oratory is captivating to a Western man, and he stayed to listen a few minutes. Judge Black was denouncing trials by military commissions, and painting the iniquity of all the extrajudicial tribunals that ever in all history usurped the prerogatives of the duly established courts. He instanced Herod, who, when unable to single out from the multitude of children the Christ child, who was to be King of the Jews, tried all the babies] for prospective treason, convicted them, decreed their death, and had his sentence carried out with such alacrity and zeal that in one day the whole land was filled with mourning and lamentation. He cited Nero trying the whole Christian church in a body on the charge of setting fire to Borne, and sending them to the cross. He described Macbeth’s hired murderers, “the commission organized in Banquo’s case, which sat upon him that very night in a convenient place beside the road, where it was known he would be graveling.” He pictured Lola Montez, minister and mistress to the King of Bavaria, and her “commission”—“a pack of British bull-dogs, trained to tear the flesh, and mangle the limbs, and lap the life-blood”—and much more which I cannot accurately recall. The Westerner stood and drunk it in with eager ears and eyes, that hung on, every gesture of the orator, until, at the climax of the Montez instance, Black thundered out: “It gives me unspeakable pleasure to tell you the sequel. The people rose in their wrath, smashed down the whole machinery of oppression, and drove out into uttermost shame king, dogs, and strumpet ” Then the listener rushed out of the chamber, rushed into the hall of the House, pushed past the door-keeper, down the aisle to the desk where his friend was in the midst of his speech, and, plucking him by the coat-tail, exclaimed in a voice so loud as to be'heard a dozen seats around: “Wind her up, Bill! Wind her up, and come over here and listen to old Jerry Black givin’ ’em h—l.”