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In 1854, an ambitious young lawyer from Cincinnati who had just passed the Ohio bar exam moved to Indianapolis with his wife to start his life as an attorney.
Benjamin Harrison would go on to carve out a legal career that would include arguing 15 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and one before an International Tribunal in Paris.
Along the way, he would be elected city attorney of Indianapolis (1857) and to statewide office as reporter of the Indiana Supreme Court (1860), a job that involved assembling the court’s opinions and publishing them in annual volumes, which earned him extra money.
He would help found the Indianapolis Bar Association (1878) and help launch the teaching of law at Stanford University (1893) when he accepted an appointment as a non-resident professor of constitutional law.
He also would find time to serve as a Union Army colonel of the Seventieth Regiment of Indiana Volunteers (1862-65); a U.S. Senator from Indiana (1881-87), during which time he argued six cases before the Supreme Court that involved constitutional questions on the taking of private property for public use, the right to determine municipal boundaries and inheritance tax laws, according to the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site; and the 23rd president of the United States (1889-93).
After his presidency, when he went back to law, Harrison’s legal services “were not only widely sought, but well compensated, with Harrison’s fees reportedly averaging $150,000 a year,” the American Bar Association wrote. The ABA added that Harrison “may have been the most accomplished lawyer to occupy the Oval Office.”
Even after his death, Harrison had an impact on law. In 1914, the Benjamin Harrison Law School was formed by a merger of the American Central Law School of Indianapolis and Indianapolis College of Law. In 1936, the Benjamin Harrison Law School merged with the Indiana Law School, and in 1944 the law school became affiliated with Indiana University.
“To his contemporaries in Indiana, Benjamin Harrison had no equal,” Ray Boomhower, author of “Mr. President: A Life of Benjamin Harrison,” said in a direct message. “He always had their respect and admiration for his ability as a lawyer. It served as a steppingstone to his life in politics.”
A slow start
By all accounts, Harrison’s law career got off to a slow start. Historian Charles W. Calhoun wrote in his book “Benjamin Harrison” that clients were so scarce “that he gladly accepted appointment as court crier for the federal district court at $2.50 per hour.”
But in 1855, a local attorney named William Wallace invited Harrison to become a partner. The law firm of Wallace & Harrison, based upstairs at 30½ W. Washington St., gave special attention to collections, according to an ad in the 1857 Indianapolis City Directory. The ad promoted that the firm “will give prompt attention to all business intrusted (sic) to their care, both in the State and Federal Courts.”
Butler University History Professor George Geib, in an article for Traces magazine, wrote that Harrison benefited from the slow start. “It caused him to develop his speaking style, and it encouraged him to enter politics. He became a skilled extemporaneous speaker and a masterful jury pleader in an age when the jury, not the judge, was often the focal point of the law. Courtroom law also directed his early political path.”
In 1857, Harrison strengthened his reputation locally when he assisted in prosecuting a hotel servant charged with poisoning a guest’s coffee.
“The turnaround time on it was fairly short,” Charles Hyde, president and CEO of the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site, said in an interview. Harrison pulled an all-nighter, Hyde said, reading up on pharmaceutical practices and medicines and astonishing everyone the following day by being able to give a deeply erudite explanation of the intricacies of the poisoning just using everything he had been able to teach himself over the previous 24 hours. “Instances like that really bolstered Harrison’s reputation as a lawyer.”
(The Indiana Lawyer photos/Chad Williams)
An examiner of witnesses
The New York Times noted in Harrison’s obituary on March 14, 1901, that when Harrison began practicing law, “he made no specialty, but took everything, from a five-dollar case before a country justice, to a railroad foreclosure suit in the Federal Courts, and in this school of miscellaneous practice he obtained his training as an all-around lawyer.”
The Times went on: “He had few rivals as an examiner of witnesses, and as an advocate he was clear, cogent, and complete. It was not his plan to confuse or persecute a witness, but to quietly, persistently, and courteously press for a full disclosure of the facts. His skill as a nisi prius (original trial court) lawyer was surpassed by his power before the higher and appellate courts, and his briefs are regarded as models of strength and preciseness. He reached his highest development, however, as an exponent of international law.”
Harrison’s most notable case – Calhoun called it “the most noted and arduous assignment of his entire legal career” – was in 1897, when he served as chief counsel for Venezuela in a dispute with Great Britain over the boundary separating Venezuela from the British colony of Guiana. An International Arbitration Tribunal was convened in Paris and heard the arguments. The five judges – two Britons, two Americans and a Russian – awarded nearly all the disputed territory to Great Britain.
“Law is nothing to a British judge, it seems, when it is a matter of extending British dominion,” Harrison wrote to his law partner William H. H. Miller.
Justice through law
In 1896-97, Harrison wrote a series of articles for the Ladies’ Home Journal magazine designed to teach women, who were edging closer to winning the right to vote, about how American government functioned. (The essays were collected and released as a book, “This Country of Ours,” in 1898.)
“A greater reverence for law is a sore need in this land of ours,” Harrison wrote in the book’s introduction. “Perhaps a better knowledge of what the laws are, how they are made, and how their defects may be remedied in an orderly way, will strengthen the conviction that they must be observed by every one.”
Hyde said the importance of justice through law was a constant theme throughout Harrison’s career. Political success is the reason Harrison is remembered. But appreciation for the law was the backbone of his life’s work.
As the words on Harrison’s memorial in downtown Indianapolis say:
His life exemplified
the faith he taught
industry-fidelity-courage
sound statesmanship
and justice through law•
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