Distinguished American Lawyers, With Their Struggles and Triumphs in the Forum

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1891 Excerpt: ... BY HENRY WADE ROGERS, LL. D. THOMAS McINTYRE COOLEY, the foremost au. thority on American Constitutional Law, an eminent judge and publicist, was born on the 6th of January, 1824, in Attica, New York. His father, Thomas Cooley, had been a Massachusetts farmer, and had emigrated from that State to western New York, then the "Far West," twenty years before. It is a curious coincidence, that John Marshall, the great Judge, whose name will be forever associated with the Constitutional Law of the United States, was one of a family of fifteen children, and that Thomas M. Cooley, the great commentator of our system of Constitutional Law, was likewise one of a similar number of children. The father Thomas Cooley, was poor, his fifteen children all lived to mature years, and they were early cast upon their own resources. If there be any wisdom in Lord Mansfield's remark: "That the best thing he knew to make a great lawyer, was.great poverty," then was Thomas Mclntyre Cooley fortunate in the conditions which attended his birth and early manhood; for he was born into poverty and destined to contend with adversity. The story of his early life, as he once told the writer, was: "Really too hard to make it pleasant to dwell upon". He struggled with poverty from the first, acquiring the means for attaining his education only by hard manual labor, which extended through the period of professional study. Such education as he obtained, he acquired in the common schools until the age of fourteen, then for four terms he attended private schools taught by classical scholars. The last he attended was taught by Lewis Parsons, a very worthy gentleman, who, after the Civil War, was Provisional Governor of Alabama. In 1840-1-2, Mr. Cooley taught school himself for three or four month...