Born at Essex, Mass., Oct. 1, 1799: died at Halifax, Nova Scotia, July 13, 1859. A distinguished American lawyer, orator, and statesman. He was graduated at Dartmouth, in 1819, was admitted to the bar in 1823, was elected a representative to Congress from Massachusetts in 1830, and was reëlected in 1832, but resigned his seat in 1834. In 1841 he became the successor in the Senate of Daniel Webster, who accepted the office of secretary of state under President Harrison. He remained in the Senate until 1845, when Webster was reëlected.

Personal

  In him “the elements were so combined,” that all his acquaintances became his devoted friends. So far as I know, even party malevolence spared him. He was pure and incorruptible; and in all our intercourse I have never known him to utter or insinuate a sentiment respecting public affairs which was not of a high tone and elevated character.

  He was a scholar by instinct and by the determining force of his nature. All forms of high intellectual activity had charm and reward for his sympathetic and splendid intelligence. He especially delighted, however, in history, philosophy, eloquence, and the immense riches of the ancient literature. His library was peopled to him with loving minds. The critical and august procedures in history were as evident to him as processions in the streets. No inspiring and majestic voice had spoken from Athenian bema, in Roman forum, in English Parliament whose vital words, even whose tones, did not still echo in his ear. He would have made a Greek professor, elegant in scholarship, rich in acquisition, energetic and liberal in instruction. I am not aware that he ever made special study of theology. He simply took it up, I think, with a literary interest, when its great discussions came in his way; yet Professor Park once said of him, after a half day’s conversation, that “If he had not been the first lawyer of his time, he might have been its most eminent theologian.”

  He was more than a father to me, and I loved him next to idolatry. I studied law with him in 1847 and 1848. The most striking of all his characteristics was his regard for the feelings of others. Whatever he might say in the excitement of a trial in regard to the opposite party, or even of witnesses whom he disbelieved, he was, in his office, and in all professional and social intercourse, most considerate of the feelings of others. I never heard him speak an impatient or angry word in my life. Especially to young men did he show this tender consideration. Webster’s presence overawed a young man; Choate impressed the young man with his greatness, but he did so by lifting him for the time up to his own level. His genius seemed to be an inspiration to every young man who entered his presence; and those who had the honor of his acquaintance regarded him with an admiration akin to hero-worship…. One of Mr. Choate’s characteristics was to idealize everything. His perception of subtile analogies tinged his mind, and appears in his utterances; in his mental atmosphere all things, however common or even unclean, became transformed, beautiful. Another feature was his charity. From those who would borrow he turned not away.

  Mr. Choate was from boyhood a serious thinker, and a believer in the truth of Christianity, though I do not know that he ever became a member of any particular church. But the extreme sensitiveness, so characteristic of him, often led him to parry playfully any attempt on the part of the over-zealous to draw him into conversation on religious subjects…. I should say that one of Choate’s most remarkable traits of character was his unresting, unflagging industry, coupled with a readiness to make any and every sacrifice of his own likings or enjoyment to the one great object of securing the highest position in his profession. This was with him no vulgar ambition, but simply a love of, and a desire for, perfection.

  A man only less than six feet in height, with a full, deep breast, high and unseemly shoulders, hips and legs slender and in appearance weak, arms long, hands and feet large and ill-formed, a head broad, chaste, symmetrical, covered with a luxuriant suit of black, glossy, wavy hair, a face intellectually handsome and equally attractive to men and to women, a complexion dark and bronzed as becomes the natives of the tropical isles of the East, a beard scanty and vagrant, mouth and nose large, lips thin and long, an eye black, gentle and winning in repose, but brilliant, commanding, and persuasive in moments of excitement—we shall have thus and now created an imperfect picture of Rufus Choate as he presented himself to his contemporaries when his physical qualities had not been wasted by disease nor impaired by age…. And to these charms of person and benignity of manners we are to super-add a voice that in conversation, debate, or oration was copious, commanding, sonorous, and emotional, responding like music to every change of thought, and, in its variety of tone and sweep of accent and emphasis, touching and influencing not only the sentiments and feelings but even the opinions and judgments of men. His vocabulary knew no limits except those set by the language itself; and such was his facility in its use as to extort from the stern Chief-Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts the remark, when told that Webster’s new dictionary contained many thousand additional words, “I beg of you not to let Choate hear of it.”

  Was all impetuosity—pouring out torrents of exquisite thought and brilliant language in utter disregard of the length of his sentences or the vehemence of his gesticulation. One might say of him, as Cicero said of Scævola, “Jurisperitorum eloquentissimus, eloquentium jurisperitissimus.” He was certainly the most eloquent of our jurists, and the greatest jurist of our orators.

  How it was that such an exotic nature, so ardent and tropical in all its manifestations, so truly Southern and Italian in its impulses, and at the same time so robust and sturdy in its strength, could have been produced upon the bleak and barren soil of our northern cape, and nurtured under the chilling blasts of its east winds, is a mystery insoluble…. This love of study became a ruling passion in his earliest youth. To it he sacrificed all that the youth of our day—even the best of them—consider indispensable, and especially the culture and training of the body; and when we recall his pale face, worn and lined as it was in his later years, one of his most pathetic utterances is found in a letter to his son at school: “I hope that you are well and studious, and among the best scholars. If this is so, I am willing you should play every day till the blood is ready to burst from your cheeks. Love the studies that will make you wise, useful and happy when there shall be no blood at all to be seen in your cheeks or lips.” He never rested from his delightful labors—and that is the pity of it—he took no vacations.

Lawyer

  Having been for more than twenty years after Mr. Choate came to this bar, his antagonist in forensic struggles, at the least, I believe, as frequently as any other member of it, I may well be competent to bear witness to his peculiar abilities, resources, and manners in professional service. And having, in the varied experiences of nearly forty years, not infrequently encountered some of the giants of the law, whose lives and memories have contributed to render this bar illustrious throughout the land,—among whom I may include the honored names of Prescott, Mason, Hubbard, Webster, and Dexter, and others among the dead, and those of others yet with us, to share in the sorrows of this hour,—I do no injustice to the living or the dead in saying, that for the peculiar powers desirable for a lawyer and advocate, for combination of accurate memory, logical acumen, vivid imagination, profound learning in the law, exuberance of literary knowledge and command of language, united with strategic skill, I should place him at the head of all whom I have ever seen in the management of a cause at the bar.

  When approaching the argument of a great cause, or the delivery of an important speech, his mind was absolutely absorbed with it. The lights were left burning all night in his library, and after retiring he would frequently arise from his bed, and, without dressing, rush to his desk to note rapidly some thought which flashed across his wakeful mind. This was repeated sometimes ten or fifteen times in a night…. Every important and difficult cause took such possession of him that he would get no sound sleep till it was finished. His mind, to use his own illustration, became a stream that took up the cause, like a ship, and bore it on day and night till the verdict or judgment was reached. It is not surprising, then, that he came from a trial so much exhausted. Almost every considerable case was attended or followed with a severe attack of sick-headache…. No one could make a more clear, convincing and effective statement; none held all the resources of the language more absolutely at command. His power over the sympathies, by which, from the first word he uttered, you were drawn to him with a strange and inexplicable attraction, was wonderful. Court, jury, and spectators seemed fused into one mass of willing and delighted listeners. They could not help being influenced by him. Calming the hostility of his hearers by kindness, bending their will to his in delightful harmony, he moved on with irresistible force, boiling along his course, tumultuous but beautiful, lifting them bodily, bearing all with him, and prostrating all before him.

  Many of his admirers contend that he was the greatest lawyer ever living in any age, and there are many good reasons for the assertion. There are in the daily records of this eminent advocate’s life, so many samples worthy the earnest emulation of the student, the lawyer, even the statesman. In reviewing his course of mental discipline, no better could be presented, in all that is required to make the ripe scholar, the thorough lawyer.

  With the ordinary twelve men in a jury-box, Mr. Choate was a wizard. His knowledge of human nature, his wide and deep sympathies, his imagination, his power of statement, with his rich musical voice and his wonderful fascination of manner, made him a charmer of men and a master in the great art of winning verdicts. So far as the writer is able to form an opinion, there has never been at the English or American bar a man who has been his equal in his sway over juries.

General

  The style of Mr. Choate is the style of an orator, not of an author. It will hardly bear a minute criticism, founded on general principles of taste, but must be judged with reference to the character of the speaker and the object of his speech. The tone of his diction is pitched on too high a key for written composition. The same splendid oration which thrilled a popular assembly, or influenced the verdict of a jury, would lose a very important portion of its charm when subjected to the calm, cold judgment of the reader. Besides, it must be admitted, that Mr. Choate’s immense wealth of language, and opulence of fancy, urge him into redundance of expression, and sometimes overload his style with shining words.

  But he does not deal exclusively in those ponderous sentences. There is nothing of the artificial Johnsonian balance in his style. It is as often marked by a pregnant brevity as by a sonorous amplitude. He is sometimes satisfied, in concise epigrammatic clauses, to skirmish with his light troops and drive in the enemy’s outposts. It is only on fitting occasions, when great principles are vindicated and solemn truths told, when some moral or political Waterloo or Solferino is to be fought,—that he puts on the entire panoply of his gorgeous rhetoric. It is then said that his majestic sentences swell to the dimensions of his thought,—that you hear afar off the awful roar of his rifled ordnance,—and—when he has stormed the heights and broken the centre and trampled the squares and turned the staggering wings of his adversary,—that he sounds his imperial clarion along the whole line of battle, and moves forward with all his hosts in one overwhelming charge.

  Mr. Choate’s mind was so complex, peculiar, and original,—so foreign in temperament and spirit to the more representative traits of New England character,—so large, philosophic, and sagacious in vision and survey of great questions, and so dramatic and vehement in their exposition and enforcement,—so judicial and conservative in always maintaining in his arguments the balance and relation of interdependent principles, and so often in details marring the most exquisite poetry with the wildest extravagancies in style,—so free from mere vulgar tricks of effect, and so full of imaginative trickiness and surprises,—so mischievous, subtle, mysterious, elusive, Protean,—that it is no wonder he has been more admired and more misunderstood than any eminent American of his time.

  What a strange, Oriental, enchanted style he has! What gleams of far-off ideas, flashes from the sky, essences from Arabia, seem unconsciously to drop into it! I have been reading him, in consequence of what you wrote. It is strange that with all his seeking for perfection in this kind he did not succeed better. But it would seem that his affluent and mysterious genius could not be brought to walk in the regular paces. He was certainly a very extraordinary person.

  Charles Fox said that “no good speech ever read well,” and, tried by this test alone, those contained in this [“Addresses and Orations”] volume must have been very good ones. Mr. Choate’s speeches certainly do not read well; but if they have this mark of excellence they are disappointing in other and more important qualities. Two-thirds of this collection are historical or literary addresses called forth by special occasions; the rest are political speeches. The latter, contrary to what would naturally be expected, are much the best. All are disfigured by a very bad style. Now and then a passage occurs which is nervous, forcible, and simple, but the sentences are as a rule complex, involved, and of intolerable length. Some of them actually cover a page or more, and read like an unpunctuated catalogue. That Mr. Choate should have made these interminable paragraphs bearable to his listeners would have been an extraordinary feat…. Mr. Choate’s rhetoric, though deeply overloaded and at times strained, is often brilliant, and is always remarkable for an apparently unbounded vocabulary. He was too fond of Latin derivatives, and never adhered sufficiently to strong Saxon words, the use of which by Mr. Webster he highly commends. Yet with all his faults in this respect no one can read this collection and not be struck by the variety and richness of the language.

  As a speaker he was copious, reiterative, and much given to illustrations useful in an argument; as a writer he was more simple and severe. But, however widely his methods differed, the same delicate and touching sensibility, the same vivid and picturesque beauty, the same wealth of thought and power of expression appeared in what was spoken and in what was written. In neither was his brilliant imagery used as a mere embellishment; the visions of beauty in his mind became articulate without effort; the musical flow and rhythm as inimitable as the melody of the murmuring brook. He evidently believed that from the harmony that could exist between a subject and the tone of its discussion might arise a sense of ideal and emotional beauty, pleasing to the mind; that a brilliant style was consistent with directness of thought and simplicity of speech; and that rhetorical and illustrative imagery, employed with taste and judgment,—pictures to the eye and to the mind,—might add to the spirit and force of an argument. Mr. Choate wrote with great freedom, and often spoke with vehemence and rapidity; the words waiting instantly and submissively on the thoughts. When the subject moved him strongly and was to be compressed within the limits of a single discourse, he sometimes rushed through one of those long sentences thought to be peculiar to him. However easy it may have been for him,—and it appeared to be easy,—the work in its nature was unique and difficult.