Seward's speech on the French Spoliation Claims, lest its acceptance might be construed into interference in a measure pending before Congress. He never spoke ill of any man; he espoused the cause of the oppressed; and was charitable to the poor; he liberated the slaves that came to him as an inheritance, aided them in their employments and took care of them when in want.

He was tall in stature, pale, thin, looked infirm and ready to drop into the grave. Near-sightedness gave him a sort of immobility of expression. He was affected with a morbid sensibility caused by delicate health from early youth; toward the end of his life he looked like a disembodied spirit, for his mind was not affected by his age or the infirmities of his body. He died October 12, 1864, in the eighty-eighth year of his age, and was buried by the side of his mother. He died in Washington poor and neglected; his life went out like a candle expiring in its socket in a deserted chamber.

The lines of Horace attached by him to his autograph sent on June 24, 1864, to Mrs. Alice Key Pendleton, are characteristic of the man:

Justum et tenacem propositi virum
Non civium ardor prava jubentium
Non vultus instantis tyranni

Mente quatit solida.

The judicial life of Jay, Rutledge, and Ellsworth was so short that the interest attached to them as Chief Justices is diminished by the admiration they elicit as leaders of the Revolution, and as statesmen.

All three were appointed by Washington. The judiciary bill was approved September 24, 1789. Jay was nominated and confirmed two days afterward. So great was the opinion entertained of his character and abilities that Washington gave him a choice of the offices under the Government. He preferred the office of Chief Justice as more in accord with his taste, his education, and his habits. Before this he had been Minister to Spain, and President of Congress, and Secretary of State, and had negotiated the Treaty of Peace in 1782-83; he had also filled the office of Chief Justice of the State of New York; and, as a

member of the New York Convention, had taken a leading part in framing the Constitution of that State in 1777. It was he who prepared the address of the Continental Congress to the people of Great Britain, a vigorous, patriotic paper which fixed the eyes of the people upon him.

His skill in negotiating the Treaty of Peace is universally recognized. He induced Franklin to concur with him and John Adams, in disregarding the instructions of Congress, to act in concert with our ally, the King of France, because he believed Vergennes, the French Minister, was playing a double part, injurious to the interests of the United States. At the time the propriety of his conduct was questioned, but subsequent disclosures of contemporary correspondence have vindicated his sagacity. While holding the office of Chief Justice he was appointed Minister to Great Britain, and negotiated the celebrated treaty which, though approved by Washington, was so much condemned by the public. On his return from England, having resigned the office of Chief Justice, he was elected Governor of New York, which office he filled for two terms. During his second term the political tide was turning against the Federalist party to which he belonged.

The Republicans in the New York Legislature introduced a bill to divide the State into election districts, and provide for the choice of Presidential electors by the people in the respective districts; this was defeated by the Federalist majority on Constitutional grounds. After the adjournment of the Legislature, it was thought that the district system would best promote the political interests of the Federal party. Hamilton, in a letter dated May 7, 1800, proposed to Jay that he should reconvene the Legislature for the purpose of having passed the very bill which they had just defeated. Hamilton urged Jay not to be over-scrupulous, and that to the extraordinary nature of the crisis scruples of delicacy and propriety ought to give way. This letter was found among Jay's papers thus endorsed: "Proposing a measure for party purposes which I do not think it becomes me to adopt.'

Washington placed the untried Constitution under the guardianship of a Chief Justice who was not only a lawyer, but a statesman and a diplomatist, and especially a man

familiar with the practical difficulties encountered in the administration of government during the Revolution, and under the régime of the Confederation.

Although the decision rendered by Jay in Chisholm vs. Georgia was reversed by the Constitutional amendment adopted in 1798, yet the tone of the decision, and the logical deduction from its principles, were significant of the change in the structure of the Government erected by the Constitution. The country was startled by the claim that the people of the United States, as the sovereign people of a nation, had established a Constitution by which it was their wish that the States should be bound, and to which the State Constitutions should be made to conform; that the sovereignty of the nation is in the people of the nation, and the residuary sovereignty of each State in the people of each State. This was really the only important case decided by the Court while Jay was Chief Justice.

He sat on the bench robed in the traditionary gown of the English judges, but he discarded the wig to wear the hair off the forehead, tied behind into a cue. He was a little less than six feet in height, well-formed but thin, his complexion without color, his eyes blue and penetrating, his nose aquiline, and his chin pointed. His dress was black; his manner gentle and unassuming, but somewhat chilled by the dignity of the statesman. His style of speaking was quiet and limpid without gesture. He was philanthropic, and desired the extinction of slavery in accordance with a sentiment then prevalent even in the South, whose leading men at that time, especially those of Virginia, as Mr. Webster tells us, "felt and acknowledged that it was a moral and political evil; that it weakened the arm of the free man and kept back the progress and success of free labor."

Jay married in 1774 Miss Livingston who, it is said, was very beautiful. She was the life of fashionable society in Philadelphia while he was Secretary of Foreign Affairs under the Confederacy. Several children were the fruit of this marriage. His wife having suffered from delicate health for several years, died shortly after his retirement from public life.

Jay was by nature of a quick temper, but he kept it under control; he was straightforward and sincere; he

had strong family and local attachments; he had an elevated sense of justice; was tenacious in his friendships and in his enmities; his mind was vigorous, exact, and logical; penetration was its characteristic; but he was not a full or learned man, nor did imagination enlarge the compass of his thought or impart grace and flexibility to his mind. The Bible was his constant study and his religion was a part of his being and displayed itself in the uniform tenor of his life. But the religion which descended to him from his ancestors came tinctured with the spirit of intolerance, which Buckle tells us characterized the Huguenots wherever they had power in France, the result, as he says, of that odium theologicum which is one of the characteristics of civil government when controlled by ecclesiastical influences. Mr. Jay proposed in the New York Convention to exclude Roman Catholics from the privileges of citizenship, but fortunately the proposition was defeated by the spirit of the Revolution, which was stronger than the expiring fanaticism of the age.

When Jay resigned in 1795, Washington at once appointed John Rutledge, of South Carolina, to succeed him. He held the office but six months, having been rejected by the Senate on account of his violent opposition to Jay's treaty with Great Britain, and also, it is believed, on account of mental infirmity, caused by exposure in the swamps of South Carolina during the Revolutionary War. He was a very interesting and remarkable man. His intellectual abilities were great, and his character earnest and resolute. His father was an Irish physician who settled in Charleston in 1734. He soon married a young lady of fortune who was a mother at fifteen and a widow at twenty-six. John was born in 1739 and was the oldest of seven children. Having been fairly educated in the classics, he commenced the study of law at seventeen. After two years he went to London and entered as a student in the Temple. Mansfield was presiding then in the King's Bench; Henley, afterward Lord Northington, was Lord Keeper; Pratt, afterward Lord Chancellor and Earl of Camden, was Attorney-General; and Burke was just rising to fame, and Thurlow was just emerging from obscurity. He remained three years in the Temple, and having been called to the bar, returned to Charleston in

1761. He commenced practice at the Charleston bar when he was twenty-two. His success was immediate. Instead of rising by degrees, he burst forth at once an able lawyer and an accomplished orator. His ideas were clear and strong; his utterance rapid, but distinct; his active and energetic manner of speaking forcibly impressed his sentiments on the mind and heart; he successfully used both argument and wit.

When the news of the passage of the Stamp Act reached Charleston he was chosen, by an assembly of the people, one of the delegates to the first Congress held in New York. Afterward, in 1774, he was sent with his brother, Edward Rutledge, to the Continental Congress. At the meeting to appoint delegates, question arose as to the power which should be conferred on them. Rutledge insisted that they should have plenary discretion, with power to pledge the people of South Carolina to abide by whatever the delegates would agree to; some one asked what must be done in case the delegates made a bad use of their power? His laconic answer was, " Hang them."

The Province of South Carolina on March 26, 1776, adopted a State Constitution and established a State government; Rutledge was chosen President, or Governor. When the British fleet of forty vessels approached Charleston, early in June, 1776, the decision and energy of the Governor caused the superiority of his genius to be acknowledged by all. In the course of a few days five or six thousand men were assembled for the defence of Charleston. General Charles Lee, who had been appointed by Congress to take command in the Southern Department, said that Fort Moultrie was a slaughter pen, and advised Governor Rutledge to order its abandonment. Rutledge declined to give the order, and wrote thus to Moultrie: "General Lee wishes you to evacuate the fort, you will not do so without an order from me. I would sooner cut off my right hand than write one."

In 1780 Charleston fell, and no one could say when the Legislature might again he able to meet. That body, before its adjournment, clothed "the Governor and such of his council as he could conveniently consult with power to do everything necessary for the public good, except take away the life of a citizen without a legal trial,”