1. Life of the Hon. Joseph Hopkinson, L L. D-by FRANCIS WHARTON, Esq., of II. Mehemet Ali and the Commerce of Egypt-by JAMES EWING COOLIY, author III. Commercial Legislation-by GEORGE S. BOUTWELL, of Massachusetts, Page 397 V. Laws Relative to Debtor and Creditor, No. 16-Iowa Territory-prepared by E. B. WASHBURNE, Esq., Counsellor at Law, Galena, Illinois, VI. Lights and Shadows of Mercantile Life, No. 3-The Merchant in his Study-by the author of the "Merchant's Daughter," "Virginia," "Julia of Baix," etc., 446 Tariff, or Rates of Duties payable on Merchandize imported into the United States from and after the 30th day of August, 1842, according to the Act of Congress of that date; compiled expressly for the Merchants' Magazine, by Henry Doane, Esq., Clerk in the Square Yard Department of the Custom House in Rate at which Foreign Monies and Currency is taken in the Custom House, Value of Imports from and Exports to each foreign Country in 1841, Commerce of each State and Territory of the United States for 1841, HUNT'S MERCHANTS' MAGAZINE. NOVEMBER, 1842. ART. I.-LIFE OF THE HON. JOSEPH HOPKINSON, LL. Ð. JOSEPH HOPKINSON was born in the city of Philadelphia, in the year 1770. His father, an Englishman by descent, though sturdily devoted to the American cause, from the period when it became distinguished from that of the mother country, had enjoyed in full those opportunities of liberal education which the respectability and wealth of his family afforded. A great lawyer during the dependence of the colonies, one of the firmest and most ardent of the statesmen who took part in the revolution, he became, when the constitution was established, one of its most strenuous and efficient supporters. Eminent not only as a lawyer, but as a literary man, his works take a prominent place in the library of our principal authors; and though the criticism of Dr. Rush, that in humor and satire he was not surpassed by Lucian, Swift, or Rabelais, may be considered too highly colored, there is no doubt the volumes he left behind him, contain some of the most witty and pointed essays of the age. Ample, quick, versatile in his talents, there was scarcely a subject in the great fields of literature and the arts which he had not handled; and of no one could it be said with more truth than of Francis Hopkinson, that whatever he touched, he touched gracefully and usefully. his more There is a similarity between the history of Mr. Francis Hopkinson and distinguished son, which must strike the most casual observer. Both lawyers of learning, and of eminence; both distinguished for their elegance as scholars, and as writers for their brilliancy; both carried from the bar to the bench in the meridian of life, and both filling for almost the same period of time the same judicial office; their lives presented a coincidence which was caused as much by sameness of character as by similarity of circumstance. The features which distinguish the portrait of the father which is placed at the opening of his works-the tall and peaked forehead, the small, quick eye, and earnest expression-will call forth in the minds of those who look on it, the recollection of his son when period of life; and when it is remembered, that the outward likeness was sustained and carried out by a similarity of mind and of dis at the same VOL. VII.-NO. V. 34 position far more remarkable, the parallel becomes one of the most striking that biography can afford. Joseph Hopkinson was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, where he took his degree a short time after the establishment of the constitution. Admitted at the age of twenty-one to the bar in his native city, he entered at once upon a practice whose extent was commensurate, both to his ability and to the circumstances in which he was placed. Of the lawyers of his peculiar generation, there are none whose names appear in the reports of that day so frequently and so prominently as his own; and in those few trials which possessed interest enough to allow of their transmission from that day to this, there is scarcely one in which he did not take part. In the trial of Mr. Cobbett in the Supreme Court of Pennsyl vania, in 1799, he was the leading counsel, and even at that early period of his life, when he was thrown in competition with men whose learning and experience had placed them for years at the head of the bar, he obtained a reputation for oratorical ability and legal soundness, which was excelled by none of his contemporaries. It was at the same period, that the ode, "Hail Columbia," was written; an ode, that without the pretension of any thing besides sound sentiment and true principle, has taken its place with the Marseilles Hymn, and the Rhine Song, at the head of National Lyrics.* On the fourth of February, 1805, Mr. Hopkinson appeared in the Senate chamber in defence of Judge Chase, then under impeachment for high * "It was written," said Judge Hopkinson, in a letter dated a few months before his death," in the summer of 1798, when war with France was thought to be inevitable. Congress was then in session in Philadelphia, deliberating upon that important event, and acts of hostility had actually taken place. The contest between England and France was raging, and the people of the United States were divided into parties for the one side or the other, some thinking that policy and duty required us to espouse the cause of republican France, as she was called; while others were for connecting ourselves with England, under the belief that she was the great preservative power of good government and safe principles. The violation of our rights by both belligerents was forcing us from the just and wise policy of President Washington, which was to do equal justice to both, to take part with neither, but to preserve a strict and honest neutrality between them. The prospect of a rupture with France was exceedingly offensive to the portion of the people who espoused her cause, and the violence of the spirit of party has never risen higher, I think not so high, in our country, as it did at that time, upon that question. The theatre was then open in our city. A young man belonging to it, whose talent was great as a singer, was about to take his benefit. I had known him when he was at school. On this acquaintance he called on me on Saturday afternoon, his benefit being announced for the following Monday. His prospects were very disheartening; but he said if he could get a patriotic song adapted to the tune of the President's March,' he did not doubt of a full house; that the poets of the theatrical corps had been trying to accomplish it, but had not been successful. I told him I would try what I could do for him. He came the next afternoon, and the song, such as it was, was ready. The object of the author was to get up an American spirit, which should be independent of, and above, the interests, passions, and policy of both belligerents; and look and feel exclusively for our own honor and rights. No allusion is made to France or England, or the quarrel between them; or to the question which is most at fault in their treatment of us: of course the song found favor with both parties, for both were American; at least, neither could disavow the sentiments and feelings it inculcated. Such is the history of this song, which has endured infinitely beyond the expectation of the author, as it is beyond any merit it can boast of, except that of being truly and exclusively patriotic in its sentiments and spirit." crimes and misdemeanors. Never before that time, never, perhaps, but once since, had a trial of such high and solemn interest occupied the attention of the country. A member of the supreme court of judicature of the United States was brought before the highest legislative authority of the land, under charge, not of having been guilty of treason against the government, not of having abused the prerogatives of his office for personal aggrandizement, but of having, in times of high political excitement, entered into the contest with all the power with which his judicial In the foremost of the fight, it was said, he had functions invested him. thrown the ermine of justice; and there, with his hand upraised against the chief of the opposing ranks, had he dared the vengeance of those who would have held him within the precincts of the altar of which he had Other charges there were, but they were been consecrated a high priest. -one of them by the unanimous vote of stamped as less worthy of support,the Senate, the others by votes far inferior to those by which the chief topic of the impeachment was supported; and on the day on which the Vice-President took his seat as chief judge in that high court into which the Senate was then converted, it was understood that Judge Chase, if he fell at all, was to fall a victim to the spirit of party which had held so vehement a sway in his own breast, and which had aggravated to so fierce a pitch the vengeance of his antagonists. In the opening speech of Mr. Randolph, who had been selected by the House of Representatives as the manager of the impeachment, Judge Chase had been compared to Warren Hastings, and the trial then in progress, to the great contest which for seven years had rent asunder both houses of the British legislature. In some features there was a similarity. For years the rafters on which the impeachment in both cases was based, had been buried till they had become mouldered and swollen; and when at last they were brought to light, when at last they were laid down as the structure on which the prosecution was to be erected, they were covered with the excrescences of fraud and of obscurity which so long a slumber had wound round them. Witnesses had forgotten their distinct original impressions in the lapse of time, and had mended the garment, which the wear of years had defaced, with patches of whatever color it suited Prosecutors lost the rough homeliness of the their partialities to produce. objects against which their gaze was directed, in the mellow drapery which time and distance had thrown round them, and both prosecutors and judges, forgetting the personal rights and immunities of the defendant at their bar, took up the charge as an historical abstraction, and except when it was necessary for the purposes of invective or personification, dropped from their view the vivid personal claims of the man who of all others was most interested in their decision. In the manner in which the two causes were conducted by the prosecution, there was a wide difference. Never was a more splendid display of oratorical might exhibited than that which was collected in the manager's box at the House of Lords during the impeachment of Warren Hastings. Every department of rhetoric, from the gorgeous imagery of Burke to the steady reasoning of Fox,-every note in the gamut between those two distant extremes which from their very opposition so beautifully harmonized together, was exhibited in that little knot of men who had undertaken the prosecution of the late governor-general of India. In the management of the impeachment of Judge Chase, with the exception of the late Mr. Randolph, there was not a man of original or of distinguished ability engaged; and of all others, Mr. Randolph was the least fitted for the arrangement and the exposition of a case so vast in its extent and so intricate in its features. Well calculated from his unscrupulous audacity, from his bold invective, from his utter heedlessness of remote or contingent probabilities, for the leadership of a minority in the House of Representatives, he possessed neither the discipline of mind, the extent of learning, nor the power of argumentation necessary for so great a task as that which the impeachment of Judge Chase imposed upon him. It is said that once after having, among a vast mass of private and local bills, disposed of a resolution for the payment of the debts incurred in rebuilding the capitol, by moving its reference to the committee of unfinished business, a mechanic who had been gazing for some time at the lank and unhewn limbs, at the roughly sculptured features of the orator, moved from the gallery, with a voice that caused the House to lose at once its self-possession, that Mr. Randolph himself be referred to the same committee. Unfinished and fragmentary in all that he thought, in all that he devised, in all that he executed, his speeches, and above all, his famous speech on Judge Chase's prosecution, present a disorderly compound of materials, sometimes rare but generally worthless, thrown, like the shattered remnants of a shipwreck on the shore, without system, without harmony, and without beauty. If the prosecution was behind the standard of that which conducted the impeachment of Warren Hastings, such was by no means the case with the defence. At its head stood Mr. Hopkinson, then in the opening of a career as rapid as it was brilliant; while next to him were placed Robert Goodloe Harper, one of the most ingenious and most classical controversialists at the bar, and Luther Martin, who as a debater and as a lawyer bore a remarkable similitude to Mr. Law, afterwards Lord Ellenborough, who was the leading counsel in the defence of Mr. Hastings. Sturdy in both body and mind, endued with the properties of a Dacian gladiator in person, and with a toughness, a coarseness, a vigor of intellect that could endure the severest fatigues, could make the most vehement exertions, could sustain the most protracted conflicts, there was no march too forced for him to attempt, and no battle too desperate to deter him from its encounter. “That federal bull-dog" was the title which Mr. Jefferson had given him at the time he was a member of the Constitutional Convention; and if the epithet was applicable to him then, when he was but a junior member of the guard who were circled around the reserved prerogatives of the government, it became far more descriptive of him when in later days, when his old fellow-watchmen had dropped off or deserted from around him, he remained almost the solitary sentinel of that ancient standard which had been surrounded by a great and powerful party. Never till his death, no matter how dark the night was, or how portentous the omens, or how lonely the post, did he cease to give warning in his hoarse voice of the dangers to which his charge was exposed. It was on Judge Chase's trial that his ablest speech was made; and it may safely be said, that as an example of strong Saxon reasoning, as an illustration of the effect which attends that original force of mind, which, not content with overleaping the obstacles in its way, annihilates them in its passage, it has not its equal except among those great speeches delivered by Mr. Fox at the time of the Westminster scrutiny. His client's cause had |