Scalawag Dreams: Elisha Wolsey Peck's Career, and Two of His Speeches, 1867-1869

Errata

Elisha wolsey peck, president of alabama's 1867 constitutional convention and chief justice of the state's Supreme Court from 1868 to 1873, was born at Blenheim, Schoharie County, New York on August 7, 1799. He was the son of David and Christiana Peck. Historian Joel Kitchens notes that Peck's father was a farmer and a revolutionary war veteran.¹ A biographical sketch published in 1888, the year Peck died, states that he received a "common school education" and that he began to read law in 1819. His apprenticeship was long; but by 1824, when he was admitted to the bar of the Superior Court at Albany, he was ready to practice.² In July of 1824 he was evidently smitten with "Alabama feaver."³ According to one account, Peck and a companion "drove a buggy with a single horse" to Huntsville, Alabama. After a brief stay, he started on horseback for Cahaba, then the state capital, but a chance meeting with a helpful merchant induced him to settle in Elyton, Jefferson County. Having survived a bout of actual fever, he began to practice law. Within a few years he was regarded as the "leading lawyer in the county" and had begun to achieve a reputation before the Supreme Court.⁴

In 1832 Peck and his wife of four years, Lucy Lamb Randall, followed the star of the "flush times" to the state capital, now Tuscaloosa. There, practicing in trial and appellate courts during and after the cotton-and-land boom of the 1830s, he prospered personally and professionally.⁵ Kitchens notes that Peck's household in 1860 included "seven children and nineteen slaves," and that his combined real and personal property was worth $100,000, a very large sum for the time.⁶ The spectacle of a Yankee slaveholder may seem strange to modern eyes, though not necessarily so for Peck's contemporaries. One of Peck's law clerks would later testify matter-of-factly that Peck had been an "anti-slavery man all his life."⁷ Whatever his income from slaves, the bulk of Peck's wealth resulted from victories in court in that era's Darwinian competition of lawyers.

During the antebellum decades literally hundreds of ambitious young men journeyed to Alabama to practice law.⁸ The legal landscape was littered with two-man firms, and if the first rule of survival was to study the traps and snares of the common law, the second was to pick a useful partner.⁹ Peck chose well during his early years in Tuscaloosa, partnering first with Kentucky native Harvey Ellis, "solid, quiet and thoughtful" but forensically talented, and then (1842-1847) with Massachusetts native Lincoln Clark, a brave man whose stern manner fronted considerable intelligence and ability.¹⁰ During his partnership with Harvey Ellis, Peck began to exercise a promising talent for appellate advocacy. He had occasionally appeared before the state Supreme Court during his Jefferson County years. But a growing reputation combined with his fortunate residence at the capital meant that he and his partners could attract well-to-do clients from all over the state.

In the June term of 1836, for example, the two men argued, based on published reports, more than twenty-five cases before the high court.¹¹ Peck continued his appellate successes during his partnership with Lincoln Clark. Of the Supreme Court cases reported for the June term of 1847 (after the capital was moved to Montgomery), he represented causes originating in Covington, Dallas, Lowndes, Marengo, Mobile, Monroe, Perry, Pickens, Russell, Shelby, Tuscaloosa, and Wilcox counties.¹² Among the top-tier lawyers of the antebellum period, Peck was one of the foremost appellate pleaders, in part because of his single-minded concentration upon legal practice. In this he differed from such noted contemporaries Benjamin F. Porter (1808-1868), Henry W. Hilliard (1808-1892) and Alexander B. Meek (1814-1865), brilliant public men who mixed law with literature and reformist politics.¹³ Professionally, Peck was an altogether different animal from William Lowndes Yancey, a talented courtroom orator...