REMARKS

OF

Mr. HENRY PLAUCHÉ DART

Mr. CHAIRMAN:

The Committee has asked me to second these resolutions, with no reason for the partiality that I can discover save perhaps that I am of the same countryside as the late Chief Justice, and if I shall fall into a more intimate or personal view of that great citizen of Louisiana, this must be my excuse.

Chief Justice White was a Louisianian of the third generation, following his father and his father's father with a name that for a hundred years has always counted in the welfare and statecraft of Louisiana. The grandfather came out of Tennessee in that period when the lawyers of the remainder of the Union were hastening to the land of promise, the new Territory of Orleans, and it was his type that President Jefferson had in mind when he recommended to Governor Claiborne to utilize it in the Americanization of his administration to offset the ambitions and desires of the native born who, the President earnestly believed, were too recently released from Spanish tyranny to be able to appreciate their new liberty or to be trusted too far in their loyalty to their new Institutions. Governor Claiborne found in the first White of his Territory not only a man who measured up to the President's ideas, but one who quickly affiliated with the people of the ancient regime and materially aided in the reconstruction of the Territory.

The father of the Chief Justice, the first Edward Douglas White, increased the family prestige and added to the renown of the State. He was a good citizen, sound lawyer, and upright judge. Also, I may add, he was a successful farmer, an exception then as now to the common rule which seldom lets one serve two masters with the full approval of each. But this second White must have been a many-sided and thrifty man, for besides his judicial service he represented his District in the Congress of the United States three or more terms, retiring to be Governor of Louisiana for still four other years, and through it all he maintained his plantation and passed it on to his children.

The Chief Justice was born during that full tide of his father's honors (November 3, 1845), coming not only into a fair and pleasant place but into a great name, which he was destined to lift to broader horizons. The place was that region hallowed in literature as the home of Evangeline, a country watered by bayous, drifting gulfward between the Teche and the Mississippi, the land of Acadia. It was then and for a century had been a center of taste and cultivation, an old civilization dating from the first migration of the French to Louisiana. Within its wide boundaries lay proud St. Martinville, the "Little Paris" of the old French colony, and the village of Thibodeaux, with a cluster of sugar plantations supporting it, among them the birthplace of the Chief Justice, that spread its broad acres westward from the banks of Bayou Lafourche.

From what has been said it would appear that there was already existing in the Chief Justice's family an

heirloom, the White luck, but he was even luckier in the quality of his birth, a country boy! That impalpable difference between the city and the country born, the children of the paving-stones and those of the field and farm, feather light though it may seem, must always be considered in summing up the assets of a man's career. For a time the luck was beclouded, the good and great father passed away while the lad was a child in school; sent thence to Maryland to a boys' academy, he heard there the mutterings of the Civil War and saw the breaking up of the boundaries and the gathering of the people of the North and the South in opposing armies. The boy was sixteen, and like other tens of thousands of his age and experience in both sections of the Union, he entered the ranks as a private soldier on the side for which his people stood, for the State his forefathers had lifted out of the wilderness, for the cause they had taught to their children and for which these children were willing to fight and die. But at sixteen these things are a boy's way, and a boy's way is a long, long way, particularly with a gun in the hand and in battle array. He made a good soldier, too, and he had the soldier's lot, bearing all and giving all, including hardship and sickness and capture. Paroled at Port Hudson in 1863, worn with fever, shut out from friends in the encompassed cities of his region, he began the long, dangerous and toilsome journey across country to his home, falling at last by the wayside and making his peace with God, as the end hovered nigh. Rescued as by a miracle and restored to his mother, the young soldier's campaigning closed, and he resumed his books and began that self education which continued until the last hour of his life.

In 1865 he reached New Orleans and fell into the hands of Edward Bermudez, a Louisianian of like lineage but on the Latin side, a great lawyer already entered on what was to be a long and successful career, and later to be Chief Justice of Louisiana, but not until his young law student had preceded him as Associate Justice on that bench. Bermudez was a great Civilian. He was a master in that system; he knew its sources, the Jus Civile, the Legislation of Justinian, the Custom of Paris, the Partidas of Alphonso, the Recopilacion of Castile and the Nueva Recopilacion of the Indies, the Code Napoleon, the Codes and the history of the law of Louisiana. He knew these things even as you know your Magna Carta the Common Law, the Constitution. He breathed and moved and constructed in the atmosphere of that system even as you do in the atmosphere of Anglo Saxon ideas.

In Bermudez's office, fellow students with White, were young men of like origin, with names like his, of state wide appreciation; fine, ardent fellows full of keen rivalry for the smile of their common mistress, the Civil Law. No matter what White's original endowment may have been, here was a time and place which would make and did make him, as our French cousins would say, a Civilian, notwithstanding himself. That law office was in the Vieux Carré, the heart of old New Orleans, on Royal Street around the corner from the Cabildo where the Supreme Court of Louisiana held its sessions in the Salle Capitulaire, the Audience Chamber of the Governors of Spanish Louisiana. It was from this tribunal that White received in 1868 his license to practice law, his formal admission to the Bar under the statutes of Louisiana, and this is the only degree so far as we know, that the

Chief Justice ever held, at least while he practiced in Louisiana. His alma mater was that old-fashioned law office, and his first opportunity to prove himself came from the same source. Bermudez put into his care one of those cases which are favored of young lawyers, requiring the maximum of labor and responsibility and returning the minimum of honorarium. Bermudez cheerfully told him it was a forlorn hope, if not indeed absolutely hopeless; a comforting introduction, but he added, "You may win your spurs with it," and so it proved. It was the defense of an action brought by the governing body of the Parish of Jefferson, Louisiana, the Police Jury it is called, to recover from a front proprietor of lands on the Mississippi the cost of constructing a levee to keep out its floods.* That obligation was on the proprietor by the immemorial law of Louisiana, but levees had largely disappeared in the havoc of war, and the domestic demoralization that followed left no owner able to fulfill the duty. The Governor of Louisiana thereupon created a Board of Levee Commissioners to superintend the work of reconstruction and his unauthorized act was ratified by the Legislature at its next session, and that body also directed the issuance of bonds and the expenditure of public money for that purpose. General P. H. Sheridan, the military commander of the United States, removed the commissioners and caused others to be appointed. He further ordered the riparian proprietors to repair and strengthen their levees, to be repaid out of these public funds.

* Police Jury vs. Tardos, 22 La. Annual 58 (1870.)