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 The Green Bag

Vol. II. No. 5.

BOSTON.

May, 1890.

JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK, CHIEF-JUSTICE OF PENNSYLVANIA AND ATTORNEY-GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES. By W. U. Hensel.

HON. JEREMIAH S. BLACK, of Pennsylvania, was known to the profession as Judge Black, jurist and lawyer; to the people he was more generally known as "Jerry " Black, Democrat and advocate. He was born in Somerset County, a rural region of the Keystone State, on the western slope of the Alleghanies. That range of mountains, in his youth, before the days of steam travel and electric news, actually marked the dividing-line for the whole country between the East and the West. In his ancestry were commingled the Pennsylvania German and the Scotch Irish strains of blood, the two principal elements in the early citizenship of Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia and the few adjoining counties where the Quaker had largest influence.

James Black, the grandfather, was in his day a man of consequence, a landed proprietor, and justice of the peace. Patrick Sullivan, his mother's father, was a captain in the Pennsylvania line during the Revolutionary War, a member of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania; and in his latter days he was wont to carry a heavy cane with which to club liars when he met them in controversy. The father, Henry Black, was associate (lay) judge of the county, a member of the Legislature, and Representative in Congress. Neither his father's circumstances nor the educational facilities of that interior region in his day afforded to young Black advantages beyond those of the village schools and of an academic institution in Brownsville, which introduced him to the ancient classics. He devoured Pope and Dryden, Horace and Virgil, with like avidity. At the desk, in the furrow, or by the light of blazing pine-knots on the farm-house hearth, it was his favorite amusement to turn the Horatian Odes and the Æneid into English prose and rhyme of his own construction; he remembered to the time of his death every line of these rude versions of his boy hood. As he grew older, his appetite for English literature strengthened, and it was always directed by a sound discrimination and a refined taste for the masters. He read the plays of Shakspeare for the first time in the second year of his law studies, and be came so perfectly familiar with them that he never again had occasion to refer to the text, though he garnished nearly every speech with most apt quotations from Shakspeare and Milton. " Paradise Lost " disappointed him at first, but afterwards it " took " him " like Niagara."

He loved the associations of rural life; he had great fondness for the "Pleasant Glades" in the lofty basin, two thousand feet above the sea-level, which had been the home of his fathers; he had profound admiration for, and genial fellowship with the sturdy yeomanry among whom his youth was spent, and who came to be known, in the annals of the Commonwealth as " the sons of frosty thunder." But he felt the weight of a mortgage on his father's farm; the purpose to lift it directed him to the choice of the 25