by Paul S. Gillies, Esq. RUMINATIONS
The Windham County Courthouse is an art museum, as well as a courthouse. The walls of the courtroom contain the greatest collection of portraits of lawyers and judg- es anywhere in Vermont, and no attorney who appears there in person can escape the penetrating gaze of better lawyers who have graced that room with their wit and strength of character. In the left-hand cor- ner of the courtroom, Stephen Rowe Brad- ley looks out at you. His eyes are sharp, and he appears to be taking his measure of you.
A Father and a Son: The Bradleys of Westminster These sources al-
teresting father and son.2
low us to invade their private lives, in a way neither of them would have expected, and assess their public lives from the inside. The father was our first attorney. Ver-
mont’s highest court admitted him to prac- tice on May 26, 1779.3
He was our first
prosecutor, as state’s attorney in Cumber- land County, and in one letter described himself as attorney general. “[R]eturn peacefully to your families,” he wrote the inhabitants of Guilford, “and your persons and properties will be protected,” after the uprisings of 1783 by residents loyal to New York.4
cern the relationship. The first comes after William, a gifted, brilliant version of his fa- ther, aged thirteen, is expelled from Yale for misbehavior. He returns to Westmin- ster. His father says nothing, but hands the son a dung rake and points him to the pile. After that, the father expels the son from his care. The son leaves for Massachusetts, and reads law with Simeon Strong, at Am- herst.9
After a five-year estrangement, he
He wrote Vermont’s Appeal to the Candid and Impartial World (1779), the first legal articulation of Vermont’s claim to in- dependence from New York. He knew ev- erybody, and everybody knew him. He was among the first rank of patriots to the Ver- mont cause (although he first arrived in Ver- mont in 1779). He was Ethan Allen’s law- yer.5
He was Brigadier General of the Ver-
The largest painting in the room is a por- trait of William Czar Bradley, the son of Ste- phen Rowe. It’s a full-sized color painting of a full-sized man, who practiced law in this room for fifty years. He’s standing, and he’s very serious and determined, perhaps a little tired. The artist who painted it must have known the portrait of the father. Ste- phen Rowe Bradley looks at you; William Czar Bradley looks at the bench.
mont Militia during the war. He success- fully negotiated the claims of New York to ensure Vermont statehood, with Nathan- iel Chipman. He was the first U.S. senator from the eastern side of Vermont in 1791, and served two more terms beginning in 1801, was elected president of the Senate for five terms, while maintaining a private law practice back in Vermont and, accord- ing to his biographer, never losing a case.6 The son was first the son of Stephen
Rowe Bradley, and that legacy was a heavy burden for him, as it would be for anyone.7 In time, after a bad start, the son became a statesman, serving in the Vermont legis- lature and Congress (and then again in the legislature), negotiating the Treaty of Ghent that established the northern border of the state, and enjoying a full and busy career as a Vermont lawyer, with a reputation second to none. His granddaughter wrote of him, “His opinion was law until the highest tribu- nal had decided otherwise,” and believed “no man in the State was more beloved.”8 Granddaughters may gush; it is their right: but the compliment was justified. The son forged his own identity, in his own home town, separately from his father.
The papers of Stephen Rowe Bradley and William Czar Bradley were recently published in paper and digital form.1
Coin-
cidentally, Jessie Haas’s remarkable West- minster, Vt., 1735-2000: Township No. One has also been published, revealing more about the lives of these, Vermont’s most in-
8 The Disruptions
Surveying their stories, there are four critical events that stand out as impor- tant markers, reflecting their characters. From these crises, we see the strong wills of these two gentlemen, and begin to dis-
THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • SUMMER 2013
writes his father a letter of contrition, af- ter Strong’s appointment to the Massachu- setts Supreme Court, that puts the son’s future suddenly at risk. You are “the best friend I had on earth,” he tells his father, but he doesn’t cower. The tone is respect- fully defiant, pleading his filial piety, grate- ful for his home schooling, and unguarded- ly hopeful for a reunion, but mildly blaming the separation on the father.10
Still, no fa-
ther could remain unmoved by such a let- ter, and William returned to Westminster, to his father’s law office. More than a dozen years later, Stephen Rowe Bradley quit public life, despondent over his failure to avoid the War of 1812, and angry with President James Madison, his longtime ally.11
After eighteen years in
the U.S. Senate, he refused to stand for re- election. He blamed himself for missing a critical vote in the Senate on the declara- tion of war, believing had he been present, he could have defeated the decision to go to war.12
According to Benjamin H. Hall,
in his History of Eastern Vermont (1858), Bradley withdrew “altogether from pub- lic life, determined, since he was unable to prevent a needless war, not to continue in any position where he would be subjected to the calumnies and odium of a majority from whom he dissented.”13 The son left Congress just as angry, but at a different president, John Quincy Ad- ams, for reasons unknown. William served in Congress from 1813 to 1815, and again from 1825-1827. He left the Federalist Par- ty and converted to the cause of the Dem- ocrats and Andrew Jackson in 1826, there- by losing his constituency and earning a loss at the next election.14
In 1818, Stephen Rowe Bradley expelled himself from Westminster, after a dispute with the town over taxes. He wanted an abatement, and the selectboard could not act, as one member was away and anoth- er was conflicted—none other than William Czar Bradley—so Stephen turned to the legislature, and the state granted his pe- tition with an act reducing his assessment
www.vtbar.org
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