HORACE GRAY

1828-1902

HORACE GRAY was born in Boston on March 24, 1828, and died on September 15, 1902. He graduated at Harvard in 1845, and from the Harvard Law School in 1849, was admitted to the bar of Massachusetts in 1851, was employed to report the decisions of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts for a year or two during the illness of the Reporter, Mr. Cushing, and succeeded him as Reporter in 1854. He held this position until 1861, when he resigned, and for a few years after 1857 he practised law, for a part of the time in partnership with Judge Hoar and Edward Bangs. He was appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts August 23, 1864, and became Chief Justice of that Court on September 5, 1873. He left the Massachusetts Bench to become an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States on January 9, 1882, which position he held for more than twenty years, until his death in 1902. Such is the brief chronological outline of a distinguished

His was a life of rich endowment and great opportunities used faithfully and well. His grandfather William Gray was the largest ship-owner in the country, and a very prominent man before and after the war of 1812. His father, Horace Gray, inherited a fortune, and engaged in the business of manufacturing iron, in which for a while he so prospered that his son was brought up in the natural expectation that, relieved from the necessity of earning his living, he would be free to follow his own bent. He was only thirteen when he entered Harvard, and seventeen when he graduated, so that he was young to have any settled views as to his career, but his taste was for natural history, and for a while he devoted himself to the study of butterflies and birds. He was travelling in Europe when his father's failure in business recalled him to Boston and changed his whole future. He turned to the law as a profession, and at the age of nineteen entered the Harvard Law School. At the age of twenty-three he was admitted to the bar, and his professional life

therefore began early; but his thirst for knowledge and his extraordinary industry had given him a store of learning which fitted him to improve the great opportunity offered him when Mr. Cushing asked him to help him in his work as Reporter. It gave him not only an acquaintance with the bench and the bar all over the State, such as seldom falls to the lot of so young a man, but also a chance to show his fitness to succeed the Reporter. His appointment to that office when he had been only three years at the bar was an endorsement of his capacity by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, and he thus at the outset of his professional life acquired a standing which most successful men struggle for years to attain. Richard Olney bore testimony to the result of his service when he said, 'What was seen in him was unusual learning and extraordinary power of investigation and research, absolute absorption in the law to the exclusion of all other interests, and that passionless temperament and that perfect purity of thought and motive which would be no respecter of persons, but would insure to every suitor his just due under the law.' From that time to the end his pathway was smooth, and his progress to an assured place in the judicial history of his country was uninterrupted.

This is not the place to analyze his qualities as a lawyer and a judge. His ambitions were for judicial preferment; as he wrote to Judge Hoar when the latter's nomination was pending, "The Supreme Court has always seemed to me the greatest judgment seat in the world.' His tastes and his abilities fitted him for the bench, and he won a great reputation. In the words of his intimate friend Senator Hoar: 'Among the great figures that have adorned the Massachusetts bench the figure of Judge Gray is among the most conspicuous and stately.... Judge Gray had from the beginning a reputation for wonderful research. Nothing ever seemed to escape his industry and profound learning.... But while all his opinions are full of precedent and contain all the learning of the case, he was I think equally remarkable for the wisdom, good sense, and strength of his judgments. . . . He was an admirable Nisi Prius judge. I think we rarely have ever had a better. He had the rare gift, especially rare in men whose training has been chiefly upon the bench, of discerning the truth of the fact in spite of the appar