The 1900s: Law and Justice: Deaths

THE 1900s: LAW AND JUSTICE: DEATHS

William Boyd Allison, 81, senator from Iowa instrumental in establishing the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887, 4 August 1908.

John Peter Altgeld, 55, former governor of Illinois who wrote Our Penal Machinery and its Victims (1884), pardoned the three surviving men convicted in the 1886 Haymarket bombing, and protested President Cleveland's use of federal troops against Pullman strikers (1894), 12 March 1902.

Susan B. Anthony, 86, leader of the woman suffrage movement who was arrested in 1872 for voting in Rochester, New York, convicted, and refused to pay a $100 fine; she argued that laws were meaningless if they contradicted what was right, 13 March 1906.

Robert Charles O'Hara Benjamin, 45, West Indian-born lawyer and teacher who practiced law throughout the United States and fought for legal and political rights for blacks; he was murdered for registering black voters, October 1900.

James Coolidge Carter, 77, one of New York's leading lawyers; he vigorously opposed an attempt to codify New York laws in 1880s because he believed that law emerged from society and custom, not from the legislature, 14 February 1905.

James Clagett, about 70, lawyer who practiced throughout the West; he was a delegate from Montana to Congress, served in Nevada's territorial legislature, and presided at Idaho's constitutional convention, 1901.

Grover Cleveland, 71, former district attorney of Erie County, mayor of Buffalo, governor of New York (1882-1884), and president of the United States (1885-1889, 1893-1897); as president he used federal troops to put down the 1894 Pullman strike; he advised President Roosevelt on the 1902 coal miners' strike; he was appointed a trustee of Equitable Assurance Company after the 1905 scandal, 24 June 1908.

Charles Francis Donnelly, 71, Irish-born Boston lawyer, counsel to the Catholic Church in Massachusetts; he chaired the state Board of Health, Lunacy, and Charity and proposed giving alcoholics the same treatment as the mentally ill, 31 January 1909.

Ignatius Donnelly, 69, land speculator and Populist leader in Minnesota; he wrote books on the world of the future, including Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century (1891), and was Populist candidate for vice president in 1900, 1 January 1901.

William Maxwell Evarts, 83, the "Prince of the American bar"; he successfully defended both President Andrew Johnson in his 1868 impeachment trial and Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in his 1874-1875 adultery trial; he also served as U.S. secretary of state and senator from New York, 28 February 1901.

John Brown Gordon, 71, Georgia lawyer, senator, and railroad developer who was active in restoring "home rule" after Reconstruction, 9 January 1904.

Laura De Force Gordon, 78, one of California's first two women lawyers (1879) and one of the first women admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court (1887); she was a newspaper publisher before successfully suing for admission to law school, 6 April 1907.

Horace Gray, 74, U.S. Supreme Court justice, 15 September 1902.

Andrew Haswell Green, 83, New York lawyer and commissioner of Central Park who revised state tax laws in 1881 and in 1897 drafted a report to consolidate Queens, Kings, Richmond, and New York Counties into New York City; he was murdered on his doorstep by an insane man who mistook him for someone else, 13 November 1903.

Galusha Aaron Grow, 84, Speaker of the U.S. House (1861-1863) and Homestead Act sponsor, 31 March 1907.

John A. Halderman, 75, Kansas lawyer and politician who as American consul to Siam introduced postal and telegraph systems and suppressed liquor traffic, 21 September 1905.

George Harding, 75, patent lawyer whose first patent case involved Samuel F. B. Morse's telegraph; he used models to demonstrate workings of telephones, reapers, and blast furnaces, 17 November 1902.

Johnlnnes Clark Hardy, 89, Philadelphia judge and professor of law who established law of equity in Pennsylvania and wrote many books on law, 29 December 1905.

Nathaniel Harrison Harris, 66, San Francisco lawyer who had also practiced in Mississippi and South Dakota, 23 August 1900.

Benjamin Harrison, 67, Indiana lawyer and politician; after a term as president (1889-1893) he wrote books on the U.S. Constitution and championed the rights of people in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, 13 March 1901.

Henry Baldwin Harrison, 80, Connecticut lawyer and politician who in 1854 proposed a state personal liberty bill to nullify the federal Fugitive Slave Act, after the Civil War championed the rights of blacks to vote, and chaired the state legislature's committee on railroads, 29 October 1901.

Samuel Dexter Hastings, 86, Massachusetts lawyer, abolitionist, and advocate of prohibiting liquor and tobacco, 26 March 1903.

David Bremner Henderson, 65, New York lawyer and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (1899-1903), 25 February 1906.

William Wirt Henry, 69, grandson of Patrick Henry; he practiced law and wrote history in Richmond, Virginia, 5 December 1900.

Robert Andrews Hill, 89, U.S. district judge in Mississippi (1868-1891) who urged the state to rescind laws in conflict with federal laws, such as those barring blacks from voting, 2 July 1900.

Walter Barnard Hill, 54, one of Georgia's leading lawyers who at age twenty-one had helped revise Georgia's legal code, 28 December 1905.

Henry Hitchcock, 72, first dean of Saint Louis Law School, president of the American Bar Association (1889-1890), 18 March 1902.

George Hoadly, 76, professor at Cincinnati Law School (1864-1887) and governor of Ohio (1883-1885) before becoming a New York corporate lawyer, 26 August 1902.

George Frisbie Hoar, 78, senator from Massachusetts and chairman of the judiciary committee, 30 September 1904.

James Stephen Hogg, 54, Texas lawyer and former governor; as state attorney in the 1880s he had acted against insurance and railroad companies, 3 March 1906.

George Frederick William Holls, 46, New York lawyer specializing in international law; he attended New York's 1894 constitutional convention and the 1899 Hague peace conference, 23 July 1903.

Isabella Beecher Hooker, 84, founder of the Connecticut Women's Suffrage Association in 1870; she presented a bill, which passed in 1877, to the state legislature making husbands and wives equal in property rights, 25 January 1907.

William F. Howe, 74, lawyer nicknamed "Habeas Corpus Howe" because he specialized in homicide cases and used theatrics and legal skill to win acquittals in the face of imposing evidence; he helped revise New York's penal code in 1882, 1 September 1902.

William Wirt Howe, 75, lawyer, writer, justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court, and U.S. attorney for eastern Louisiana, 17 March 1909.

Richard Bennett Hubbard, 68, lawyer nicknamed the "Demosthenes of Texas"; he served as U.S. attorney for west Texas and American minister to Japan in the 1880s, 12 July 1901.

Robert William Hughes, 80, Virginia newspaper editor and federal judge who edited U.S. circuit court Reports, 10 December 1901.

Edward Christopher James, 59, New York lawyer, 24 March 1901.

Lucy Bagby Johnson, 72, woman thought to be the last slave to be returned to the South under the Fugitive Slave Law, her January 1861 trial enraged Cleveland; she returned to the city after the war, 1906.

Henry Demarest Lloyd, 56, lawyer, writer, and reformer who helped Clarence Darrow present the miners' case during the 1902 coal strike, 28 September 1903.

Josephine Shaw Lowell, 61, founder of the Consumers' League; her report on the poor law in Westchester County, New York, led to her 1876 appointment to the state Board of Charities, from which she resigned to spend more time attacking the problems of industrial workers; she wrote Public Relief and Private Charity (1884) and Industrial Arbitration and Conciliation (1893), 12 October 1905.

Louis Emory McComas, 61, justice of the District of Columbia Supreme Court (1892-1899), lecturer on law at Georgetown, and drafter of an organic law for the Philippines and Puerto Rico, 10 November 1907.

Johann Most, 50, anarchist expelled from his native Austria who spent two years in prison in America in the 1880s for inciting violence and one year in Blackwell's Island penitentiary after President William McKinley's assassination, 17 March 1906.

Rufus W. Peckham, 70, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court since 1896; as a district attorney in Albany, New York, he had prosecuted train robbers, 24 October 1909.

Wheeler Peckham, 72, brother of Justice Rufus Peckham and founder and president (1892-1894) of the Bar Association of New York; his own appointment to the Supreme Court in 1894 was blocked by New York senators, 27 September 1905.

Orville Hitchcock Platt, 77, Connecticut patent, real estate, and corporate lawyer who offered an amendment to the Cuban constitution, which restricted Cuba's ability to form alliances, and chaired the U.S. Senate patent committee and judiciary committees, 21 April 1905.

John Henniger Reagan, 86, Texas lawyer and judge before the Civil War, and the Confederacy's postmaster; he helped write state constitutions of 1866 and 1875 and headed the state railroad commission (1891— 1903), 6 March 1905.

John Sherman, 77, Ohio lawyer and politician who dominated American politics after the Civil War; to garner support for the 1890 antitrust law, sponsors attached his name to it, 22 October 1900.

Thomas Jefferson Simmons, 68, chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, 12 September 1905.

Charles Henry Simonton, 74, federal district and circuit court judge in South Carolina who lectured on federal courts in 1896, 25 April 1904.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 86, writer and sponsor of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention for women's political rights; she worked to pass New York's married women's property act in 1848, 26 October 1902.

Albion Winegar Tourgee, 77, judge in North Carolina during Reconstruction who in the Plessy v. Ferguson case (1896) argued that segregation of races violated the Fourteenth Amendment, 21 May 1905.

John Louis Waller, 57, former slave born in Missouri; as American consul at Tamatave, Madagascar, he was arrested in the 1895 French invasion of that island, charged with passing secrets to the Malagasy resistance, but released after pressure from the U.S. government, 13 October 1907.

Stephen Mallory White, 48, California lawyer and politician who fought corruption and corporations, 21 February 1901.

Marshall Jay Williams, 65, chief justice of the Ohio Supreme Court and first dean of Ohio State University College of Law, 7 July 1902.

William Lyne Wilson, 57, classical scholar from West Virginia who as congressman supported income tax and opposed trusts and monopolies, 17 October 1900.