Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/237

 Hon. Daniel Clark.

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��tor, at Exeter, and was admitted to the bar of Rockingham county in 1837. In the same year he opened an office at Epping, where he remained some eighteen months, and in 1839 removed to Manchester, N. H. This thriving city was then just rising from the ground. Not a mill was running, the canal even being unfin- ished. The only railroad then con- structed in the state was the Nashua & Lowell. The telegraph and tele- phone had not yet been invented. The lumberino; stage-coach was the onlv means of travel. The rates of postage were high, and the mails slow and few. The embryo city was hardly more than a desolate sand-bank, where a few hundred people had gathered, allured by the prospect of business about to spring up with the improve- ment of the water-power at Amos- keag falls. Mr. Clark was among the first to open a law office here. He soon acquired an active practice, which afterwards grew to large pro- portions, and for twenty years he was employed upon one side or the other of nearly every important trial in the county, attending the courts also in Merrimack and Rockingham counties. He was employed in behalf of the state in the preliminary examination in the "Parker murder trial," being occupied almost contiuuouslv for a period of nearly two months. He succeeded in procuring the extradi- tion from Maine of the su[)posed murderers after lengthv trial in that state, and, after a hearing lasting nearly a month before the police court of Manchester, procured their commitment to answer for the crime of murder. Opposed to him as coun- sel were Gen. Franklin Pierce (after-

��wards president of the United States), Gen. B. F. Butler, Hon. Josiah G. Abbott, and the late Charles G. Atherton, — an array of legal talent seldom seen in this state. Mr. Clark was employed for the defence in two capital trials in the fall of 1854, — Curtice's and Marshall's. Marshall was acquitted, and in the case of Curtice the jury disagreed. During the period of his active practice the bar of Hillsborough county was un- usually strong. Among its prominent members were Benjamin M. Farley of HoUis ; James U. Parker of Merrimack ; George Y. Sawyer and Charles G. Atherton of Nashua ; Samuel H. Ayer of Hillsborough ; and Samuel D. Bell and George W. Morrison of INIanchester. General Pierce, of the Merrimack bar, also generally attended the courts in Hillsborough county. Of these emi- nent lawyers, Mr. Morrison is the sole survivor. Gen. Pierce, as a jury lawyer, had no superior in the state. He had a very pleasing ad- dress, was dignified without being reserved, and possessed a magnetic influence over men, which rendered him a formidable antagonist before jurors. But in many respects Mr. Atherton stood at the head of the Hillsborough bar as a lawyer and advocate. He was a man of scholar- ly attainments, possessed a graceful diction, had a good command of language, knew how and when to use sarcasm, could appeal effectively to the passions and prejudices, was thoroughly read in the law. and was perfectly at home in the court-room. With these and other able lawyers Mr. Clark spent the most of his ac- tive professional life, and he was rec-

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