Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 14.pdf/344

 The

Vol. XIV.

No. 7.

Green

BOSTON.

Bag.

July, 1902.

JONATHAN E. ARNOLD: A GREAT NISI PRIUS LAWYER' OF THE WEST. By Duane Mowry. JONATHAN E. ARNOLD was born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, on the six teenth day of February, 1814. His child hood days and school life were spent in his native New England. The opportunities of an excellent education were offered him and they were well improved, as his later life attested. He was graduated from Brown University, and thereafter studied law in the office of John Whipple, of Prov idence. Later he spent one year at the Harvard Law School, and was admitted to the practice of the law before attaining his majority. Mr. Arnold was twenty-two years old when he left New England to establish him self in the practice of his chosen profession in the then undeveloped West. He arrived in Wisconsin during the summer of 1836, just after the act of Congress making Wis consin a territory had gone into effect. It was in September of that year that Mr. Arnold located at Milwaukee, where he at once opened a law office, and where he con tinued in the active practice of his profes sion until his death, which occurred on the second day of June, 1869. Mr. Arnold took high rank in his profes sion almost immediately upon his appear ance in it in his Western home, a position which rapidly developed into the first place as a trial lawyer before juries, and particu

larly as a criminal lawyer. In the defense, in criminal causes, Mr. Arnold did not have a superior in the entire West for more than twenty-five years, and he was, as one of his contemporaries put it to the writer, " with out a peer" in the State of his adoption. This seems like exaggerated statement and fulsome eulogy. Yet members of the legal profession are not apt to indulge such esti mates of their brethren, if there is no war rant for it. The late Chief Justice Ryan, in announc ing the death of Mr. Arnold to the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, made the following just and temperate observations of this great lawyer: " For nearly three and thirty years, Jonathan E. Arnold was a leader of the Wisconsin bar. For all that time, he discharged a large measure of its duties, wore a large share of its honors; a prom inent figure among the distinguished law yers of the territory and State. There are not many court rooms in the State — hone, I think, of many years standing — which his eloquent voice has not filled, which his professional labors have not adorned. For over a quarter of a century, he has filled a large place in the public view; known of all men as a lawyer of fine talent, thorough training, untiring energy, singular address, bold, yet prudent, of remarkable force always, tenderly pathetic at times, of rare