Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume One).djvu/197

Rh the 21st of April, 1676. I examined the question and became satisfied that those entries were made on the day when the intelligence was received by the writers. Accordingly I followed President Wadsworth as to the date. The Genealogical Register, under the charge of a Mr. Drake, in two articles criticized my inscription. I replied in the Register and ended my article with a sentence which Drake struck out. The sentence was this: “The testimony of President Wadsworth as to the time of his father’s death is of more value than all the theories of all the genealogists who have existed since their vocation was so justly condemned by St. Paul.”

A few months later I appeared in the court to try a case which involved my client’s reputation for truth, and a thousand dollars in money. To my dismay I saw that Drake was foreman of the jury. I lost my case, but I think justly upon the evidence. My principal witness failed to make good upon the stand the statement that he had made to me in my office. One of the perils in the practice of law is that clients and clients’ witnesses either make misstatements or fail to make full statements of the facts.

In the middle-third part of the nineteenth century, the date of Sudbury Fight was a topic of serious controversy by genealogists and historians. I was responsible for the date that appears upon the monument that was erected in the year 1852. The conclusion that I had reached was condemned by the Genealogical Register and by a committee of the Society. In the year 1866 I reviewed the evidence, on which my opponents relied, and I marshaled the evidence in support of the accuracy of the date that appeared upon the monument. In the year 1876 the town of Sudbury observed the bi-centennial on the 18th day of April, thus giving sanction to the date on the monument.

At the dedication of the Sudbury monument I made the following address: