Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 1.djvu/757

 U. S. senator by ap- pointment.

THE LAWMAKERS.

Notice has been taken of bygone practicing lawyers and early judges. Let us now consider the men who made laws, and some of the men who administered them. At the head of this list, or of any list of Oregon's great judges, must always stand the name of Matthew P. Deady. Judge Deady was called to the bench so early in his career in Oregon that no estimate of his ability as a prac- ticing lawyer can be made. He studied law in St. Clairsville, Ohio, the county seat of Belmont county, when that county contained the ablest lawyers not only in Ohio, but in all the country west of the Alleghany mountains. His preceptor was William Kennon, who had been a member of congress, a justice of the supreme court, and one of the three commissioners that prepared the iirst Ohio code, being the second state code in the United States to abolish the common law forms of pleading inherited from England. At the same bar was practicing Wilson Shannon, twice governor of Ohio, territorial governor of Kansas, mem- ber of congress, minister to Mexico, and a promising democratic candidate for the presidency; and as has been already stated, a brother of George Shannon of the Lewis and Clark expedition. And members of the same bar were Daniel Peck, the most eminent chancery lawyer in the west, the chairman of the judic- iary committees in the conventions that made the constitutions of both Ohio and West Virginia; and Benjamin F. Cowen, a distinguished judge, and member of congress with an intimate friend of Abraham Lincoln. Young Deady was also frequently brought in contact with Edward M. Stanton who appeared at the same county town in big cases, and who was afterward attorney-general under President Buchanan, secretary of war under Lincoln, and associate justice of the supreme court of the United States. In addition to Deady 's native talents, and his natural and acquired qualifications for the law, he had the example and the teachings of these greatest lawyers in the nation ; and he made the most of his opportunities. His biography will appear in detail in another volume of this work.

Judge Deady 's life work was on the bench of the United States district court. He had been honored by offices before going on the bench; notably that of the presidency of the constitutional convention ; but it is the work he per- formed as a judge, and as a maker of the statutes of Oregon, which establishes his fame for all time. He was appointed a judge by President Franklin Pierce in 1853, at the same time Judge Williams was appointed, and continued to serve as a U. S. judge until the day of his death in 1893, making a longer term of serv- ice on the bench than any other federal judge on the bench at that time. During this long term of service all manner of questions and causes were brought before him for decision. And the volume of his decisions, containing decisions in the most important cases, is unquestioned authority in all the courts, state and na- tional, in the United States. The condition of the country and its system of laws brought before him many new questions which had to be solved and decided from the original principles of justice in a republican form of government; and on these cases he made a notable record. He was the first judge to decide in either England or America that one corporation could not be allowed to incor- porate in the name of another corporation. In statute law he revised and re- wrote all the laws relating to the Code of Civil Procedure, making an entirely new code, as code commissioner for the state, which was adopted by the legis- lature of 1862; and also the Code of Criminal Procedure, in 1864. He also, af- terward, by authority to the legislature, collected, revised and rearranged the laws of Oregon with notes and references, which were published in book form in 1874. Many of the important statutes of Oregon are wholly the work of Judge Deady's brain, notably that providing for the formation of private cor- porations; the Oregon statute on this subject being the first law in the United