JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK.

THIS distinguished jurist was born on his father's farm

in a locality known as "Pleasant Glades" in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. His immediate ancestors were Scotch-Irish and German, whose graves may be seen in the old churchyard near where they originally settled on their arrival in America. His mother, Mary Sullivan, was the daughter of a revolutionary soldier who was from Ireland and who married a German girl at York. After the war had ended, the Captain settled on a farm in Somerset County which was called "Rural Felicity," and where Judge Black passed many happy days of his childhood, at this pleasant home of his grandparents. Judge Black's father was a very prominent man in his county, having been a Justice of the Peace and County Judge for twenty years, besides serving in the Legislature and in the Lower House of Congress.

Judge Black's education commenced in the country schools of his neighborhood and ended, so far as teachers were concerned, at a classical school in Brownsville, in Fayette County. Thenceforth he was a most indefatigable student; it required no great mental effort to retain whole pages of what he had studied, and his love for intellectual pursuits was marvelous. He was especially fond of Latin, though he was equally as assiduous in other branches he took up, realizing that he must very soon commence the struggle of life for himself as his father's financial condition precluded any other course than hard work for his brilliant son.

At the age of seventeen, he was a remarkably bright scholar, to which mental condition he had brought himself by a system of education purely his own, as he had been his own tutor, but he had never gone into any of the studies haphazard. He consulted the educated men he met everywhere and drew from their store of knowledge an idea of what he should read, and when full of doubts as to some particular point, by conversations would clear them up. At this early age, he entered the law office of Mr. Chauncey Forward, as well prepared by a course of general reading and studies as any college graduate, for he had been a most omnivorous devourer of books; had read everything in his father's and grandfather's libraries, which were relatively well supplied for that era. Mr. Forward, under whose direction young Black read law, was one of the foremost advocates in the State and a distinguished politician in the Democratic party; it was natural, therefore, that the student should become impressed with the importance of the great public questions which he had heard discussed so ably in the office where he was fitting himself for the Bar. This resulted in his commencement of that course of promiscuous writing for which Judge Black, through a long series of years, industriously kept up, contributing to many of the best magazines and other periodicals of the age in which he lived, articles upon current topics and the absorbing subjects of the day. His earliest effusions in these particulars were of such sound judgment and logic that they attracted immediate attention.

Like the experience which all young law students can recall, the immense amount of matter he discovered that he must accumulate to become "learned in the law" almost staggered even his brilliant mind but, like others who have the determination and the industry which the task requires, he soon became master of the general principles of his chosen profession, and thereafter it was plain

sailing for one with a mind constructed upon such a basis of logic as he possessed. He was admitted to the Bar in 1831 before he had attained his majority, and his preceptor, Mr. Forward, having been elected to Congress, he turned over to the young advocate all his immense business, such perfect confidence did he have in the ability of his student.

For eleven years Judge Black enjoyed a remarkably lucrative practice, at the end of which time, he was appointed judge of the district in which he had been born and reared, previously serving as Deputy Attorney General of his county, in which capacity he was kept busily engaged before the courts, and his reputation all the time increasing in a wonderful ratio, not for his oratory or persuasiveness before a jury, but for the depth of his legal knowledge, his uprightness of character and his unswerving devotion to the causes of his clients, consequently he very shortly assumed his proper place at the head of the Bar in the State.

In 1851, he was elected by the Democrats to the Supreme Bench of the State; this was the first election held under a constitutional amendment, adopted the year before and he became Chief Justice by drawing the short term, which plan was resorted to to determine, in that first election, who should fill that position. In three years his term as Chief Justice having expired, he was elected an Associate, notwithstanding the head of the State ticket was carried by the opposition party. Of Judge Black's opinions while on the Supreme Bench of Pennsylvania, there is but one verdict. In Mr. Blaine's "Twenty Years of Congress", he says: "The judicial literature of the English tongue may be searched in vain for better models than are found in the opinions of Judge Black, when he sat and was worthy to sit, as the associate of John Bannister Gibson on the Supreme Bench of Pennsylvania." Honorable James H. Hopkins said: "* *But in a comparison

of jurists, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania can boastfully point to Gibson and Black and ask the entire Nation to produce their peers. I do not propose to analyze Judge Black's judicial character nor to present a catalogue of his legal opinions. Every English speaking lawyer knows how much he has contributed to the purity and power and nobleness of our jurisprudence. He has erected his own immortal monument, and in every forum is his cenotaph cherished and honored by the profession he loved and adorned."

In March, 1857, when James Buchanan, of Pennsylvania, became President of the United States, Judge Black was called to his Cabinet as Attorney General. He at once loomed up as the most conspicuous in the coterie of eminent men the President had summoned to his counsel. While at the head of the Department of Justice, in connection with Edwin M. Stanton, Attorney General Black saved to the United States Government more than one hundred and fifty million of dollars in so-called "California Land Claims," most of which had passed the lower courts in favor of the fraudulent claimants, but the nature of their villainy was exposed by the Attorney General before the Supreme Court at Washington and the land reverted to the Government, to which it rightfully belonged.

In 1861, when the Nation was disturbed and thrown into an almost chaotic condition by the acts of the Secessionists, Attorney General Black took decided views against those of the President in relation to the right of a state under the Constitution to leave the Union. The President argued that there was no authority under the organic law of the land by which he could coerce a state to remain in the Union if it chose to withdraw and set up an independent government. The Attorney General, however, as the legal adviser of the administration, upon this most important question of the right of a state to secede, was not the least vacillating or perfunctory; he stated most