Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 02.pdf/66

 The Green Bag.

Vol. II. No. 2.

BOSTON.

February, 1890.

SEYMOUR D. THOMPSON, LL.D. WE take pleasure in presenting to our readers, in this number, an excellent portrait of Judge Thompson, of St. Louis, who is known to all American lawyers as the author of several useful and practical law books. He is so averse to notoriety that it is with great difficulty we have been able to procure, through friends, the photo graph from which this portrait is copied, and the facts upon which to found a brief sketch of his life.

Seymour Dwight Thompson was born in Will County, I11., Sept. 18, 1842. His father was a Presbyterian clergyman, a graduate of the Theological Seminary at Auburn, N. Y., who moved West at the close of the Black Hawk War. Losing his voice, however, in consequence of asthma, he was obliged to give up his profession, and take to farming to support a numerous family; migrating, as was the way with the farmers of the West, from place to place, finally locating in Fayette County, Iowa. He had lived here only a short time when he was overtaken, with his youngest son, in a prairie fire and burned to death. The family, thus suddenly bereaved, returned to Illinois.

Young Thompson for the next few years had the common experience of a farmer's son in straitened circumstances, bent on getting a good education. Until he was old enough to teach school, he worked around on farms all summer, wherever he could get employment, in order to get money to pay for schooling in the winter. At sixteen he began to teach school part of the time, using the money so earned to go to the higher grade of schools the rest of each year. He thus worked his way at Rock River Seminary, Mt. Morris (I11.), for two years, and at Clark Seminary, Aurora, one term.

When the Civil War broke out he was preparing to enter college, but enlisted in an Iowa regiment as a private at the first call for troops, seeing hard service, and serving until the close of the war, when he was mustered out with the rank of captain. While in the army he married, and on leaving the service found himself in Memphis, Tenn., with no profession or trade, and a growing family to support. During the last year of the war he had been detailed on constant duty as Judge Advocate, and so acquired a leaning toward the legal profession. After various attempts to earn a living otherwise, having obtained employment in the office of the Clerk of the Law Court, he utilized all his spare time in reading law, and was admitted to the bar in 1869. It is a noteworthy fact that among the young lawyers from the North who were practising in Memphis at this time, and who afterwards returned North and became celebrated as legal authors, were also Prof. Melville M. Bigelow, now living in Boston, and Prof. M. D. Ewell of Chicago.

Judge Thompson began his literary work by editing, jointly with Thomas M. Steger of Nashville, the Statute Laws of Tennessee. Their compilation, known as " Thompson and Steger's Tennessee Statutes," received 7