Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 5.djvu/309

 HON. HARRY BINGHAM. 279

that town had fairly entered upon his brilliant career. Charles R. Morrison was in practice at Haverhill, and Jonathan E. Sargent at Canaan, soon removing to Wentworth. In Littleton, as his chief local competitor, he found the late Chief Justice Henry A. Bellows, then in full practice ; while in Coos county, John S. Wells, then in Lancaster, the most brilliant orator, save Franklin Pierce, whom New Hampshire has known for the last half century, stood at the front, with Hiram A. Fletcher, William Burns and Jacob Benton well settled in practice. Associated with and pitted against such men as these, Mr. Bingham took rank with the foremost at a very early period in his professional career. Without going into details, it is sufficient to say that no lawyer in the two counties named (and in these counties there has been, relatively, a greater amount of litigation than in any other) has been engaged in the trial of so many causes during the last thirty years, as has the subject of this sketch, and certainly no one has been more generally successful in the same. Nor is there any lawyer now in active practice in the state whose advice has been more extensively sought, or safely followed, whether by client or attorney. In almost every important case in Grafton county, for the last twenty years at least, Mr. Bingham has been engaged on one side or the other, as attorney or counsel; while in Coos county his services have been in requisition to scarcely less extent. But his practice has by no means been confined to these two counties. It has ex- tended, in fact, into every county in the state, quite largely into Vermont, and even New York, and in the federal as well as state courts. But a few weeks since he argued an important case in the Supreme Court of the United States, at Washington, which went up, on exceptions, from the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York. There are few lawyers of prom- inence in New Hampshire whose lot it has not been at some time to encounter Mr. Bingham as an antagonist at the bar ; and no man, who has been thus placed in relation to him, has failed to entertain thereafter a most profound respect for his abilities. Twenty-five years ago, while yet a young man, he met the Hon. Daniel Clark, then in the meridian of his power and the acknowl- edged head of the Hillsborough bar, in a strongly contested case in the court of that county, and not only won a victory for his client, but proved his ability to contend successfully with the ablest and most experienced among the law- yers of the state.

Any attempt to enumerate the important suits with which he has been con- nected is out of the question here. It would be almost equivalent to under- taking an abstract of the history of litigation in northern New Hampshire for the last quarter of a century. Among the capital criminal trials with which he has been associated, may be mentioned that of Mills, the Franconia murderer, in which he was engaged for the state ; that of Patrick Scannell, of Bethlehem, tiled for the murder of his wife, in 1S62, in which he appeared for the defense, and which resulted in acquittal ; and that of Moses B. Sawyer, charged with the murder of Mrs. John Emerson, at Piermont, in 1874, two trials, each resulting in a disagreement of the jury and being followed by a discharge of the prisoner upon his own recognizance. He was also engaged for the defence in the case of Martin V. Dickey, the .'Ashland murderer, at the spring term in 1878, wherein the result was sentence for manslaughter. The recent civil litigation of note with which he has been connected, includes the celebrated and hard fought case of Laird r-y. the Passumpsic Railroad, wherein he was counsel for the i)lain- tiff; in which there were three trials, resulting in two disagreements, and a final verdict for the plaintiff; also the case of Hilliard vs. Beattie, run- ning on the Coos docket for some ten years past, being a civil suit for damages in a stabbing affray, in which he appeared for the plain- tiff, and finally secured a verdict, though the same has been set aside

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