Читать книгу John E. Parsons - Paul DeForest Hicks - Страница 9

Only eighteen when he graduated from NYU, Parsons later recalled: “What was to be my occupation in life had remained in abeyance. My choice inclined to be a banker as furnishing the opportunity most quickly of making a fortune [but] no opportunity came … In the autumn of 1848 I determined to try the law, although with no very definite purpose to become a lawyer, if an opportunity offered of being employed in a banker’s office.”

He once told a group of lawyers that he had first considered becoming a lawyer in his youth when he visited the Jay family burial ground that bordered his family’s property in Rye: “As I stood in front of the square monument erected to the memory of John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States; distinguished as a lawyer and as a statesman and, looking at that stone and having in mind the memory of that man, I found some temptation to become a member of that profession which he considered so illustrious …”

Because of his ambivalence about a legal career, Parsons had no incentive to enroll in one of the few law schools that then existed. Harvard and Yale had opened law schools in 1817 and 1826, respectively, followed by NYU in 1835 and Columbia in 1858. According to Theodore Dwight, Columbia’s first law school dean, when the school was founded, “it was considered at that time mainly as an experiment … Most of the leading lawyers had obtained their training in offices or by private reading, and were highly skeptical as to the possibility of securing competent legal knowledge by means of professional schools.”

John E. Parsons outwitting opposing counsel (cartoon courtesy of David Parsons)

Therefore, Parsons followed the path taken by most of those who aspired to enter the legal profession—by serving as clerks to practicing attorneys before passing examinations that qualified them to be admitted to the bar. Prior to 1847, admission to the New York State bar required several exams and could take up to ten years for someone to qualify, first as an attorney, then as solicitor and finally as a counsellor. Amendments to the state constitution in 1847 eliminated distinctions between categories of lawyers and allowed any man (no women were then lawyers) over twenty-one with “requisite qualifications” to practice at all levels of the state’s courts.

Despite the easier licensing requirements and proliferation of lawyers, growth of banking and commerce in New York City attracted many talented attorneys, most of whom practiced individually or in small firms. Through his uncle, James Hewitt, Parsons was fortunate to obtain a clerkship with the establishment firm of Gerard & Platt, whose office at 79 Nassau Street was in the heart of New York’s business and financial district.

An article in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly painted a Dickensian picture of what a young law clerk in a New York firm faced in the days just prior to the Civil War: “The offices, the paraphernalia, the methods of drawing papers, the details of practice, all were simplicity itself … Wooden or cane-bottom chairs, oilcloth-covered tables, pine bookcases, old-fashioned foolscap on which to draw pleadings … The solitary clerk … kept the books for his chief on the munificent salary of five dollars per week …”

By taking notes for James Gerard in the court room, Parsons was able to observe the styles and tactics of various trial lawyers. A favorite and winning tactic of Gerard, according to Parsons, was to “take a seat as near as was possible to the jury, establish personal relations with them, and conduct the trial in a conversational way until there was such a feeling and sympathy between Gerard and the jury that he had won the trial before the summing up.” He later told a graduating class at NYU Law School that Gerard liked to say that the quality that made a lawyer successful was “spontaneous combustion.”

While Gerard was a successful litigator, his partner James Platt was, in Parsons’s view, “better versed in the law than any lawyer whom I have known.” Because Platt had injured his eyes, Parsons read the reports of cases to him and heard his instructive comments. A great friend of Parsons’s, Joseph Choate, once said of that early legal training: “He went back to the reports, the real embodiment of the existing law, and mastered them individually in the same way as they were subsequently used collectively under the system that bears the name of Professor Langdell [who introduced the case method at Harvard Law School].”

During his clerkship with Gerard & Platt, one of their clients got him interested in a venture to build a canal in Nicaragua. As he later confessed, “there came a time when [the client] was expected to return from Europe with important concessions. The shares began to advance. I put all that I had in them; it turned out the concessions were not obtained, so I was made to realize that I had to work for a living.”

After spending two years in his first clerkship, Parsons moved to the firm of Benedict & Boardman where he broadened his legal education and also improved his pay, first to six and then to eight dollars per week. The training he received from Andrew Boardman in real estate law provided a solid foundation for his later expertise in that area of the law. In a landmark case (Dunham v. Williams) decided in 1867, Parsons convinced New York’s highest court to apply the civil law of the Netherlands rather than the common law rule in deciding title to the bed of a road that dated back to the Dutch colonial period in New York.

Parsons also had a valuable role model in Charles O’Conor, a partner in Benedict & Boardman who had won a high-profile divorce case, representing the wife of Edwin Forrest, one of the best-known actors in the country. When Forrest died in 1872, eight years after the divorce became final, Parsons was then one of the lawyers who obtained a large award of unpaid alimony for Forrest’s ex-wife.

Recognizing that the Forrest case had helped to establish O’Conor’s position as “perhaps the ablest member of our Bar,” Parsons went on to represent a number of clients in celebrated divorce cases during his long career. One of the most contentious and protracted of these was the De Meli divorce suit that was tried over many months, beginning in June 1883. Parsons represented Mrs. Florence De Meli, who charged her husband, Henry, with cruelty. He, in turn, counter-claimed for divorce on the grounds of adultery and desertion.

After Mrs. De Meli fled their home in Dresden, Germany, to escape his abuse, her husband obtained a German divorce, which the New York courts ruled was invalid. He brought witnesses from a German spa to give evidence of her infidelity. The newspapers had a field day, with one Times article carrying the headlines “Horrid Girls Who Carried on with Her Husband—Baron Von Geyso’s Playful Letters—Mr. De Meli Accompanied by His Female Cook on His Travels.”

As reported by the Times, the normally dispassionate Parsons pulled out the stops in his summary statement, asking the jury: “Shall the result of this suit be that Mrs. De Meli shall be driven from this court an outcast, her character gone, a thing to be pointed at with scorn; that she shall be deprived of her children and the recognition of her friends forever? Shall she be compelled to return to a man who [is] a beer-drinking, child-beating, euchre-playing, absinthe-sipping, staggerer through the streets?”

The judge found that, under New York law, there had to be actual evidence of physical abuse to grant the plaintiff a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, but he also found that there was insufficient evidence of adultery to support the defendant’s cross-suit for divorce. He also ruled that Mr. De Meli had to reimburse his wife for her legal costs, including $500 for Parsons’s attorney fees. The case, however, continued through two appeals and was not resolved until 1890 when the New York Court of Appeals upheld all of the trial judge’s rulings, leaving Mr. and Mrs. De Meli unhappily married (under New York law) until the husband’s death in 1915.

When his client in another divorce case was the husband, Parsons told the jury in his opening remarks, “I am here in discharge of the highest duty to which a lawyer is called—to preserve the home; to prevent it from bursting asunder of the sacred relation of the husband and wife; to prevent those innocent children from going forth into the world without the care of a father, without a share in his fortune …” The case was decided in favor of his wealthy client.

After he was admitted to the bar in 1852, Parsons was offered a junior partnership by Benedict & Boardman, but he decided to strike out on his own. His uncle James gave him space in his office at the corner of William and Pine Streets where he hung out his shingle. He recalled that for quite a while his only clients were “members of my family, and one or two persons of little importance whom I advised on mortgage investments.”

Fortunately, his career took a leap upward when a friend from NYU introduced Parsons to a successful young lawyer, Lorenzo B. Shepard, who invited him to become his partner. Within months of forming the firm of Shepard & Parsons in 1854, the New York County District Attorney died in the wreck of the steamship Arctic, which sank after a collision in the north Atlantic with the loss of more than 300 lives.

Lorenzo Shepard was appointed to fill the vacancy, and, shortly afterward, Parsons was surprised to find on his desk a letter from Shepard that read: “Dear Sir, I have the honor to inform you that I have been appointed by his Excellency, Horatio Seymour, Governor of the State, to be District Attorney of this County, and I hereby appoint you to be my assistant.” Parsons went next door into Shepard’s office, and protested that he did not know anything about criminal law, to which Shepard replied, “It is very important that you learn as quickly as you can.”

After agreeing to serve as Shepard’s sole assistant district attorney, Parsons spent seven months preparing all the indictments and prosecuting almost all of the cases. Toward the end of his career, Parsons wrote later in a diary that “I have always considered this experience as a principal factor in contributing to such success as later came to me as a court lawyer.”

When their brief sojourn in the District Attorney’s office ended, Shepard and Parsons resumed their private law practice, but Shepard, who had become increasingly active in Democratic politics, was elected New York City’s Corporation Counsel in 1855. He also was made “Grand Sachem” (head) of the political organization known as Tammany Hall, replacing Fernando Wood who was elected to his first term as Mayor of New York that year.

Shepard remained his nominal partner, but Parsons, who operated the firm essentially by himself, managed to develop a number of new clients. Among them were Peter Cooper, (the noted inventor and philanthropist) as well as his son Edward and son-in-law, Abram Hewitt (both future mayors of New York City), all of whom would play important roles in Parsons’s life.

His law practice was beginning to flourish when Lorenzo Shepard died suddenly at the age of thirty-six in September of 1856. Within only a few months, however, Albon P. Man, one of the most respected business lawyers in New York, invited him to become a partner in the firm of Edwards and Man. The partnership became Man and Parsons in 1863 when Edwards retired, and lasted until 1884.

Among the talented young lawyers who were students and clerks at the firm was Edward M. Shepard, a son of Lorenzo Shepard, who later became a partner of Parsons. For a brief period in the 1860s, the firm also employed a bright young law clerk named Elihu Root, a recent graduate of NYU Law School, who later became a close friend and colleague of Parsons.

In 1913, when Root was serving a U.S. senator from New York, he wrote Parsons: “It is hard to realize what a change in elevators and stenographers and typewriters and telephones have made. I don’t know of any better law offices now or any more workmanlike or effective argument or trial of causes of any sounder law that could be found in the office of Man and Parsons in the year 1867.”

Included among the firm’s clients were many wealthy New York families whose business interests and estates often involved lawsuits that required Parsons’s courtroom skills. Another lawyer who was a clerk at the firm later reported that he reviewed some seventy cases that had been tried by Parsons and found that he had succeeded in every trial as well as with those he argued on appeal.

In one case, he represented a woman whose previous lawyers had failed to win her a share of her father’s estate in a prolonged legal fight with her brother. A newspaper account of the trial, describing the questioning of the brother by Parsons, said that the witness “had to endure a fire of questions, which many men of means would give a tidy sum to avoid.” The court’s finding that the plaintiff was entitled to one-third of the estate was credited by the newspaper largely to the skills of Parsons in cross-examining witnesses.

Occasionally, however, he was on the losing side, especially when he had to defend a hopeless cause. That was the case when the tobacco company tycoon and sportsman, Pierre Lorillard, instead of settling, was sued for $40,000 in damages because of necessary repairs to a leaky yacht he had sold to a Wall Street banker. Although he lost the case, Parsons had the pleasure of sparring in the court room with his great friend and frequent adversary, Joseph Choate, including these exchanges that appeared in the Times:

“I object to that,” said Mr. Parsons. “I must protect Mr. Lorillard from these affidavits.”

“I agree with Mr. Parsons on that,” answered Mr. Choate, “that ‘poor Mr. Lorillard,’ as he has been called, needs protection.”

“Even if he is rich Mr. Lorillard, he still needs protection,” retorted Mr. Parsons. After Lorillard had finished being questioned by Choate, he sat down and whispered something laughingly to Parsons, who said to Choate,

“Mr. Lorillard wants to know if you don’t think he’s a good witness.”

“Very good, very good, indeed,” replied Mr. Choate. “It’s the first time he’s ever been examined as a witness,” said Mr. Parsons, “so you’ve had a virgin opportunity.”

There were numerous other cases that brought Parsons and Choate together in the court room, usually on opposite sides. Newspapers and magazines delighted in capturing and reporting their witty ripostes, including one widely quoted exchange during a trial in a Westchester County court in which Parsons, who had a home in the county, cautioned the jury not to be swayed by “Mr. Choate’s Chesterfieldian urbanity.” To which Choate retorted that his style could not match the “Westchesterfieldian suburbanity” of Parsons.

When the two legal lions faced off in an 1898 case, a Times article reported that “Mr. Choate severely handled Mr. W. H. Hurlburt, a witness for the will.” According to the Times reporter, when it was time for Parsons to interrogate Hurlburt (his client), he began: “Mr. Choate having frequently sneered at you as a ‘Yale man’—he being a Harvard man.” Choate promptly moved to strike that statement, adding, “I never sneer.”

Speaking at a birthday dinner for Parsons in 1914, Choate said, “I always admired one great trait of his, which has been the secret of his success, and that was his absolute self-control. No matter what happened, in any controversy in which we were engaged, he never lost his self-control.” Choate must have missed a session in the famous Fayerweather will contest when Parsons became so aggravated at one of the opposing counsel that he told him: “Never speak to me again, in or out of court.”

Parsons had to face this nemesis, William Blaikie, in another court room battle in 1901. Blaikie represented plaintiffs who sued Parsons’s firm, claiming that it had collected too much in fees from a settlement it had won on their behalf. The Times reported that “These two lawyers were arrayed against each other in the Fayerweather will contest and fought each legal point very bitterly. The same legal fencing has developed in the present action.”

During a trial in 1877, Parsons’s opponent was a distinguished older lawyer, Joshua Van Cott. According to a report in the Brooklyn Eagle, after Parsons completed his presentation of the case, Van Cott said in his opening statement: “I never rise to answer my friend in an important case without a feeling of oppression. He is a great artist in the construction of evidence and also in the construction of a case, and his gifts in that line excite in my breast apprehensions of the impression he is producing.”

At the 1914 birthday dinner for Parsons, Joseph Choate told the gathering: “My recollection of Mr. Parsons dates back nearly fifty years, and during that time … we have been very closely united in the bonds of friendship and the bonds of hostility. We have been fighting as well as we could all the time, and I do not know which got the better of it. We took very different views of life and of the business of lawsuits. I thought the great object of a lawsuit was to get all the fun out of it I could, and I generally succeeded; and Mr. Parsons thought that the object was to perform a stern and serious duty to his conscience and his clients.”

Parsons believed he owed a serious duty to his clients even when their activities were scandalous, as occurred when he represented a man in a child custody battle. Reporting on the judge’s decision, the Times noted that “the father became acquainted with the mother in an assignation house, and the child was born of illicit intercourse.” Parsons won an award of custody for his client by proving that the mother was then keeping a house of prostitution.

In a series of complex trials and investigative hearings over many years, Parsons skillfully defended one of his more colorful clients, Theodore Davis, who managed to avoid disbarment and even jail for alleged fraud and perjury. After amassing a fortune from successful investments in speculative ventures, Davis purchased a large mansion in Newport and became a respected archeologist in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. In representing clients like Davis, Parsons recognized that he, as a lawyer, had to weigh the reputational risk against both his duty to the client as well the financial rewards.

As his reputation for winning cases grew, Parsons’s courtroom appearances often received wide coverage by newspapers in New York and elsewhere in the country. None, however, received more attention than the case brought in 1888 by Clara Campbell, an aspiring opera singer, against Charles Arbuckle, a millionaire coffee merchant. The plaintiff, described by one reporter, as “somewhat beyond her prime” sued Parsons’s client for breach of promise of marriage, claiming damages of $250,000.

The plaintiff’s evidence included letters between the couple, signed “Bunnie” (Campbell) and “Baby Bunting” (Arbuckle) that became the talk of the town, if not the entire country. The Times reported that “Miss Campbell was on the stand during the entire day, and Mr. Parsons was as studiously and politely provoking as usual in his cross-examination.”

The Times reporter, who was obviously a close observer of Parsons’s courtroom style, noted that Miss Campbell revealed “she has a temper of her own, which Mr. Parsons was glad to discover.” However, “she has it under the completest kind of subjection, which was not so pleasing to the defendant’s leading counsel, whose most brilliant achievements are accomplished when he provokes a witness to anger by force of his own exasperating serenity.”

It is curious that Arbuckle and Campbell did not settle their dispute out of court and thereby avoid the humiliation that resulted from the trial publicity. Even though Parsons did not win a verdict for his client, he managed to persuade the jury to award “Bunnie” only $45,000, less than one-fifth the amount she sought. It was not until 1935 that the New York State legislature passed a law that abolished the cause of action for damages based on a breach of promise to marry.

In one of his few criminal cases, Parsons headed a team of experienced trial lawyers who defended a well-known New York businessman named Jacob Sharp, who was described in the newspapers both as a “boodler” and “a gentleman of colossal infamy.” Sharp was accused of bribing a city alderman to support his bid for a valuable surface railroad franchise along Broadway, a prize he had been attempting to win for many years.

The Times report of the trial referred to Sharp’s counsel team as “those eminent gentlemen and upright citizens, who, presumably through their belief that he has been wrongfully accused, have contracted to use all their talent and energies to assist Mr. Sharp in escaping punishment.”

Parsons opened the case for the defense with an address to the jury that lasted more than four hours, but, according to the Times, he “never lost their attention.” The trial lasted five weeks and, despite the efforts of Parsons and his co-counsel, the jury returned a verdict of guilty. The judge then sentenced Sharp to four years in the penitentiary at Sing Sing.

The defense lawyers expedited an appeal all the way to the Court of Appeals, which reversed the verdict of the trial judge, based on errors in his admission of evidence, and granted a new trial. When Jacob Sharp died before a new trial began, articles carrying details of the case appeared in newspapers all over the country (e.g. The Omaha Bee: “Jake Sharp, King of the New York Boodlers Expires”).

Interest in the case was generated not only by evidence of New York official corruption but also by concerns about judicial due process and public fairness. It was not just his family and lawyers who would have agreed with the headline in the Springfield, Ohio, Daily Republic that Sharp was “at last beyond the reach of courts and newspapers.” Memories of the case lingered a long time.

When one of the appellate judges, Joseph Potter, died nearly twenty years later, the New York Tribune noted that, “The most conspicuous act of Judge Potter’s successful judicial career was the granting of a stay of proceedings in the case of Jacob Sharp, who was convicted of bribery … He granted the stay despite the strong opposition of many of the public …”

Beginning in the 1870s, competition between New York’s surface and elevated railways was fierce, resulting in numerous lawsuits that provided lucrative business for Parsons and other lawyers. Adding to the conflicts was a law (the Street Railway Act) that required approval of new lines from owners of at least half of the value of property along the proposed line.

Representing owners of property along Third Avenue, Parsons spent years in hearings before transit commissioners, followed by trials and appeals in the lower courts before the Court of Appeals finally ruled for his clients in 1882. One newspaper noted that “This decision (Story v. New York Elevated R.R. Co.) is one of the most important ever handed down by a court in this state.”

That decision spawned a multitude of other elevated railroad cases, which brought considerable fame and financial success to Parsons and other lawyers in the following years. According to an article in an 1893 issue of the Yale Law Journal, more than two thousand such cases were constantly pending, with millions of dollars of damages (not to mention attorneys’ fees) at stake. It was a major battle between the interests of private property and small business owners and those of developers, entrepreneurs and capitalists.

The Story case was only one of nearly 150 cases Parsons argued before New York’s Court of Appeals, in addition to the more than 30 cases in which he represented clients before the U.S. Supreme Court. Even though he still tried cases and handled appeals well into his seventies, he, like other leading lawyers of his time, increasingly was retained to advise clients in his office rather than to represent them as an advocate in the courtroom.

Speaking at a memorial service in 1902 for his friend and fellow lawyer, William Allen Butler, Parsons might have been describing his own legal career when he said: “Mr. Butler was too sound and sagacious an adviser in his office, too brilliant and successful an advocate in the courts to devote himself exclusively to one or the other of the two main divisions of the profession … Perhaps his most effective work was as an advocate, and especially in the appellate courts, where his deep knowledge of the law, his phenomenal memory, his remarkable powers of elucidation and illustration of legal principles, and his temperate and almost judicial attitude of mind, were most effectively brought into play …”