Racine it was killed by a Captain Smith of a party of drunken sailors at Willis's tavern, west of Kenosha on the Chicago stage road, the weapon used being a bottle of gin. In the meantime Mr. Strong went to Milwaukee and got a sleigh-load of muskrat noses, which out-counted everything. The squirrel hunt was broken up; Mr. Clark had ruined Schuyler Mattison's horse and had to pay $75 damages. Mr. Strong brought suit against Captain Smith for killing the wolf, and the jury, before Justice-ofthe-Peace Mars, brought in a verdict of "guilty," assessing damages at six cents, Norman Clark being on the jury. Mr. Strong was the first city attorney for Racine, having been elected for the first city council in 1848. In 1856-57 he was city railroad commissioner, whose duty it was to look after the city's interests, and to vote its $300,000 stock in the stockholders' meetings of the Racine and Mississippi Railroad. In 1859 the city had a bonded indebtedness of $400,000-railroad, harbor, plank-road, school, and bridge bonds-a burdensome load, on which even the interest remained unpaid, and there was serious talk of repudiation. Mr. Strong opposed this, and warned the people that they were "riding on a stolen railway; using a stolen harbor; traveling over stolen roads and bridges; and sending their children to stolen schools." The city narrowly escaped bankruptcy, but did not repudiate its debts. In the forties and fifties two-thirds of the people hereabouts were Democrats, and Mr. Strong was a Democrat in politics, though temperamentally an aristocrat. His political career may be said to have been limited to the decade between 1841 and 1851; at any rate he held no public office after the latter date. On the organization of the village of Racine in the spring of 1841, he was elected a member of the first board of trustees. It does not appear from the records of the meetings of that first board that the business before them was such as would tax very severely the business or professional capacity of men of the quality of Mr. Strong, and it is surmised that he may have had some such feeling, for he never again appeared as a candidate for an elective village or city office. He was, however, chosen a member of the upper house-the territorial council-of the legislative assemblies of 1838-39 and 1843-47 inclusive, and as member of the lower house in 1849. Before the close of the session of 1838-39 he resigned, and Lorenzo Janes was appointed to serve his unexpired term. Although Mr. Strong maintained a patriotic and lively interest in all political movements during his lifetime, he was indifferent to the appeal of public office, except as it meant opportunity and power to promote the public good; this sounds trite, but is true nevertheless. Strife for his own political preferment was extremely distasteful to him, for he was above the small hypocrisies sometimes practised -often with success-in personal political contests, and his experience had bred in him early a detestation of those methods of courting success, and of the men who practised them. In a Fourth of July address in 1846 he gave utterance to sentiments betokening more than a tinge of cynicism also in his political views, when he said: "Are not the electors all over the Union influenced more or less by personal or local considerations; by unfounded prejudice; by falsehood, asserted and reiterated with the pertinacity of truth; by political intrigue and management, until it has come to be regarded in the minds of many worthy men, almost a disgrace to be chosen to office? They seem to ask, in the language of the poet, How seldom, friend, a good great man inherits Honor or wealth with all his worth and pains! "It is certainly unfortunate that our system of government should in any manner offer a bounty for fraud, intrigue, and hypocrisy, and that that bounty should be some of its highest offices.' In the course of an address before the Lawyers' Club of Racine County on May 7, 1901, Charles E. Dyer2 gave an estimate and appreciation of Mr. Strong, from which I think it worth while to quote the following paragraphs: "As senior at the bar in age and residence, stood Marshall M. Strong. I wish you could have known him. He was an ideal lawyer, and none excelled him in the state of Wisconsin. He was tall, though somewhat stooping; slender, and as clear-cut as a model in marble. His head and face were as purely intellectual as any I ever saw. His great eyes shining out of his face looked you through, and told you that his mind was as clear and bright as a burnished scimitar. When he made manifest his intellectual power in argument or conversation, he made one think of the inscription on the old Spanish sword,-'never draw me without reason-never sheathe me without honor.' "No matter what demonstration of opposing intellect he encountered, he was as cool and impassive as a statue. In the law and in every department of knowledge he was a philosopher. He was quiet, urbane, earnest, unimpassioned, and his logic was inexorable. I do not think I ever heard him laugh aloud, but his argument was so persuasive, and his smile and gesture so gentle and winning, that when once the listener yielded his premises, there was no escape from his conclusion. "Discomfiture was unknown to him. He never exhibited depression in defeat nor exultation in success—a true rule of conduct for every lawyer. Once I saw him in a great case, when Matthew H. Carpenter swept the courtroom with a tornado of eloquence. He sat unaffected, self-controlled, betraying not an emotion, not a fear-only a cheerful smile 2 On the death of Mr. Strong, Mr. Dyer became the junior partner of Henry T. Fuller, who had himself been junior partner in the firm of Strong and Fuller.-Author. of derision. Then he arose to reply, as confident as if he were presenting an ex parte motion, and before he finished Carpenter had not a leg to stand on. "A natural logician, Mr. Strong stated his propositions in such manner that you had to beware lest they should lead you captive, although your relation to the case made it necessary to controvert them. There was no noise in his utterances-no oratory-not the slightest demonstration for effect. He carried one along by processes of pure reasoning. Yet on suitable occasion he was eloquent. He was somewhat like Wendell Phillips, who held his audiences spellbound, yet never made a gesture. His arguments were in the nature of quiet conversations with the court-sometimes refined and perhaps fallacious, generally invincible. Intellect reigned supreme, and he was as pure a man as ever looked upon the sunlight. When Timothy O. Howe, of the marble face, lay in his last sleep, Robert Collyer bending over him at the funeral exercises in Kenosha, taking no Bible text, waved his hand over the bier and said, "This is clean dust.' So was Marshall M. Strong 'clean dust,' living or dead. "I can think of no higher tribute to character than that paid to Mr. Strong, long after his death, by the Supreme Court, in delivering its judgment in the case of Cornell vs. Barnes, reported in 26th Wisconsin. It was a suit for collection of a debt by foreclosure of mortgage security, and involved a considerable amount. The defense was usury, and if there was a usurious contract, it was made by Mr. Strong as the attorney of the mortgagee. In fact he had made the loan for his client and represented him in every stage of the transaction. The usury alleged connected itself with the breach of a secondary contract by Mr. Strong, if there was any breach, and this was the vital point. The lips of Mr. Strong were sealed in death, and our evidence to repel the charge was largely circumstantial. Said the Supreme Court, in its opinion written by Justice Byron Paine: The high character of Mr. Strong, who was well known to the people of this state and to the members of this court, seems also to speak for him when he is unable to speak for himself and repels the assertion that he would thus violate a plain agreement, as unfounded and improbable.' Mr. Charles H. Lee, a bright Racine lawyer and something of a scholar and litterateur himself, who as a young man was a student in the office of Fuller and Dyer, knew Mr. Strong quite well during the years just preceding his death. He also became very familiar with Mr. Fuller's estimate of the man who for many years was his senior partner. Mr. Lee, a few years ago, wrote for me a brief appreciation of Mr. Strong, in which he said: "He had an exceedingly high conception of the duties and dignity of his chosen profession, was liberal and kindly to his juniors at the bar, and always ready to counsel and assist them. He disliked noise or bombast, and while no one in his day was more successful with juries, his arguments were always addressed to their reason, their common sense, their spirit of fairness, never to their passions or their prejudices." Mr. Lee told me also that Mr. Strong was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who always stopped at Racine to visit him when he came West. At the dedication of the memorial tablet erected in the high school for its alumni who lost their lives in the War of the Rebellion, Mr. Emerson made an address. He lectured here also at another time at Titus Hall. Charles E. Dyer has written of his pleasure in meeting Mr. Emerson for a half-hour after this lecture, on invitation of Mr. Strong, of whom he wrote: "On another occasion he had Wendell Phillips as a guest; thus he was a patron of literature and a friend of humanity, as well as an expounder of the law. He was a man of fine literary tastes and accomplishments. During the Rebellion he wrote |