ley as his lawyer in his private affairs, col- lecting and paying out sums for real estate, prosecuting and defending law suits, and sometimes loaning Ethan money on ac- count, when funds were low.35
Ethan Al-
len hired him to defend a Green Mountain Boy whose musket was seized for a debt in 1779. “Charge it to me,” Allen wrote Brad- ley, “my Warriors must not be cheated out of their Fire Arms.”36 Where a lawyer was needed, there he
was, ready and capable. Bradley prose- cuted Justice of the Peace John Barrett in 1785, on behalf of the State, for maladmin- istration, using his office to manipulate the judicial process, encouraging lawsuits and “enhance[ing] bills of Costs to the oppres- sion of the People.”37
Barrett was removed
from office by the governor and council.38 He was an indispensable man for Ver- mont throughout his public life, and for the nation, while he was in the Senate. He was the educated representative of Ver- mont, the opposite of the rough image of Ethan Allen, making the Vermont cause re- spectable. He was a leader of the Senate, said to be capable of defeating any legis- lation that he opposed, more successfully than anyone who had served in that assem- bly before him.39
That was why missing the
critical vote on the War of 1812 was such a blow to him. In his later years, he built a pulpit in his
parlor, and invited the neighborhood in to hear speakers and preachers, on current subjects of interest, and he would preside over the debates, as a judge, ruling upon “all questions of propriety and admissi- bility,” with great humor.40
remembered everything. One Sunday, he asked his son, Jonathan Dorr Bradley, about the new preacher. After hearing one of the lines used by the minister, William Czar pulled down a copy of Bossuet’s Ser- mons, found proof of the minister’s plagia- rism, and “in characteristically strong lan- guage called him a ‘monster,’ ‘hypocrite,’ and ‘imposter,’—and forthwith dispatched him from town.”43 When he retired from public office, he limited his legal work to Windham County, on account of his deafness, and expressed his gratitude for younger members of the bar who offered him “their ears and pens” in assisting him in court. The acoustics of the Newfane courthouse were better than other courts, but even then he need- ed someone sitting beside him, repeating what was said by his opponents and the court.44
At his retirement, he said,
When forty years before I had been stricken with deafness so that left to myself I could not have practiced in Court for a single day and when con- scious of the fact I withdrew from all engagements in other counties and threw myself on the generosity and forbearance of the Windham Coun- ty bar—most nobly did they answer to the appeal and all of them seemed willing to assist me … to fulfill the du- ties of a profession which I ardently loved—for it was when properly fol- lowed a noble profession …45
He was always
interesting, to the last, which occurred in 1830. His family brought him back to West- minster to the family plot. His son was for- ty-eight at the time.
Deafness
On the cover of Carpenter’s collection of William Czar Bradley’s letters is a photo of the subject, cupping his right ear. This was how many remembered him, as a man who was hard of hearing, for whom words were often repeated in a louder voice. The cause was treatment for scarlet fever when he was two years old. As Bradley explained it, the doctor put a “crescent of blistering plaster behind my ear which relieved me as soon as it began to draw, but brought on a roaring and buzzing in my ear which has never since ceased.”41 His granddaughter explained, “His deaf- ness prevented his attending church; and when once importuned to do so by a minis- ter, for example’s sake, his ready reply was, ‘Are we not commanded never to turn a deaf ear to the word of God?’”42 His memory largely made up for his dis- ability. He absorbed books wholesale, and
12 THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • SPRING 2013
His son Jonathan also suffered significant hearing loss, and Mary Rogers Cabot, the author of Brattleboro’s town history, wrote,
If it had not been for his deafness, which prevented his hearing all points of discussion, no man that Vermont has produced would have surpassed him in the debate in the halls of legis- lation. But whatever might have been the qualities that fitted him for a public career, he was most eminent in social and private life.46
Disabilities can inspire some people to develop other powers to compensate. The story of David Boies’s dyslexia, and its im- pact on his legal career, is one of the fea- tured stories of Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath (2013). Gladwell suggests that Boies’s memory and reasoning skills make him one of the nation’s leading litigators, not in spite of, but because of his difficulty in reading.47
Hearing loss is a devastating
disability, not easily overcome, even today with modern equipment, but when your sole aide is a cupped hand, you need to adapt. William adapted. To the end, which came on March 3, 1867, he remained a fixture of his town and
www.vtbar.org
Ruminations: The Bradleys of Westminster
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