Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 23.pdf/23

 judge Robert Roberts Bishop

3

daughter of Elias Bullard of Holliston, a young woman whose dignity of char

practice of his profession. But, although not personally engaged in the country’s

acter and sweetness of disposition ﬁlled

conﬂict, life for him proved very active

judge Bishop's home with light and contentment for nearly ﬁfty years there after.

and laborious. One of the earliest of his legal battles he fought against Ben jamin F. Butler, and a letter from a

During these early years of profes sional life, political controversies chang

friend dated at Rome, January 18, 1859,

ing year by year had slowly narrowed down to but a single issue, which the struggle between the states in the civil war was to decide. There can be no doubt as to where he stood upon this

vital issue.

A few years since, in allud

ing to the sentiments which those times inspired. he said :—

alludes to this case, speaking of Butler as a "most disagreeable antagonist,”5 and so he ever proved.

Another and more important suit arose in a petition brought by the holders of the "Burdell Bonds” against the Boston,

Hartford & Erie R. R., to have the road declared bankrupt. The policy pursued in railroad management varied much up

to 1870. To one who came to years of maturity before the war and lived as a young man in the time when American slavery was a reality and when it was extending itself with deadly grasp over the territories of the West and acquiring new territory for that purpose, when a large sec tion of the North was bowing down to it from commercial reasons, since Cotton was King. and when the leading northern states men were bowing down to it for even a worse reason—-because no Northern man could be President unless he was (what the younger portion of this company do not understand the meaning of) a dough faoe—to one I say who lived in that time. and has since seen the emancipation and all that has followed, it might be pardoned if he were an optimist, and blindly so, the rest of his days. A younger person cannot realize the sense of degradation under which an ardent young Massachusetts man of that day was obliged to remember that wheresoever the foot of a slave should tread upon English soil he was from that moment a free man. for said Lord Holt, “There is no such thing as a slave by the law of Eng land," and then to think that he himself must live and die in a country under whose ﬂag there were in bondage three millions of shoal‘

Yet in this contest Judge Bishop took no active part, continuing at home,

nursing his young wife's delicate health, and slowly gaining a foothold in the ‘ Essay. "Are we ' g better or worse?" read before the Neighbors’ Club.

In the beginning (1830-1850)

promoters built short lines to accommo date local business, it being believed that long lines must prove impractic able.“ The Civil War also checked the

tendency toward railroad consolidation which had begun between 1850 and 1860,

but after the war the older corporations continued the process of uniﬁcation and new trunk lines were constructed in different sections and across the conti nent. To organize the Boston, Hartford & Erie R. R., its promoters bought out several small lines, most of which were already heavily mortgaged.’ In addi tion they gained control of the tract of land at the foot of Summer street, Bos ton, where the present South Station stands, and by further negotiation acquired rights by virtue of which the promoters hoped to operate a line con necting Boston and Providence on the east, and running through to the Hud son River at Fishkill on the west, and "' Letter from ohn Albee. ' In 1850. alt ough the United States had more miles of track than both England and France. no line of ﬁve hundred miles came under a single management. See Pierre Leroy Beaulieu's United States in twentieth century, 338, and Ernest Ludlaw Bogart's Economic istory of United

States. p. 309. "Chartered in 1863. The stock of one of these lines. Hartford. Providence & Fishldll R.‘R., sold in 1863 at one dollar per share, so low had it fallen.