University of Virginia Library

7. SIMON SUGGS, JR., ESQ.,
OF
RACKINSACK—ARKANSAW.

This distinguished lawyer, unlike the majority of those
favored subjects of the biographical muse, whom a patriotic
ambition to add to the moral treasures of the country, has
prevailed on, over the instincts of a native and professional
modesty, to supply subjects for the pens and pencils of their
friends, was not quite, either in a literal or metaphorical
sense, a self-made man. He had ancestors. They were,
moreover, men of distinction; and, on the father's side, in
the first and second degrees of ascent, known to fame. The

father of this distinguished barrister was, and, happily, is
Capt. Simon Suggs, of the Tallapoosa volunteers, and celebrated
not less for his financial skill and abilities, than for
his martial exploits. His grandfather, the Rev. Jedediah
Suggs, was a noted divine of the Anti-Missionary or Hardshell
Baptist persuasion in Georgia. For further information
respecting these celebrities, the ignorant reader—the
well-informed already know them—is referred to the work
of Johnson Hooper, Esq., one of the most authentic of
modern biographers.

The question of the propagability of mo al and intellectual
qualities is a somewhat mooted point, into the metaphysics
of which we do not propose to enter; but that there are
instances of moral and intellectual as well as physical likenesses
in families, is an undisputed fact, of which the subject
of this memoir is a new and striking illustration.

In the month of July, Anno Domini, 1810, on the ever
memorable fourth day of the month, in the county of Carroll,
and State of Georgia, Simon Suggs, Jr., first saw the light,
mingling the first noise he made in the world with the patriotic
explosions and rejoicings going on in honor of the day.
We have endeavored in vain to ascertain, whether the auspicious
period of the birth of young Simon was a matter of
accident, or of human calculation, and sharp foresight, for
which his immediate ancestor on the paternal side was so
eminently distinguished; but, beyond a knowing wink, and
a characteristic laudation of his ability to accomplish wonderful
things, and to keep the run of the cards, on the part

of the veteran captain, we have obtained no reliable information
on this interesting subject. It is something, however,
to be remarked upon, that the natal day of his country and
of Simon were the same.

Very early in life, our hero—for Peace hath her victories,
and, of course, her heroes, as well as war—gave a promise
of the hereditary genius of the Suggs's; but as the incidents
in proof of this rest on the authority, merely, of family
tradition, we shall not violate the sanctity of the domestic
fireside, by relating them. In the ninth year of his age he
was sent to the public school in the neighborhood. Here he
displayed that rare vivacity and enterprise, and that shrewdness
and invention, which subsequently distinguished his
riper age. Like his father, his study was less of books than
of men. Indeed, it required a considerable expenditure of
birch, and much wear and tear of patience, to overcome his
constitutional aversion to letters sufficiently to enable him to
master the alphabet. Not that he was too lazy to learn;
on the contrary, it was his extreme industry in other and
more congenial pursuits that stood in the way of the sedentary
business of instruction. It was not difficult to see that
the mantle of the Captain had fallen upon his favorite son;
at any rate, the breeches in which young Simon's lower
proportions were encased, bore a wonderful resemblance to the
old cloak that the Captain had sported on so many occasions.

Simon's course at school was marked by many of the traits
which distinguished him in after life; so true is the aphorism

which the great Englishman enounced, that the boy is father
to the man. His genius was eminently commercial, and he
was by no means deficient in practical arithmetic. This peculiar
turn of mind displayed itself in his barterings for the
small wares of schoolboy merchandise—tops, apples, and
marbles, sometimes rising to the dignity of a pen-knife. In
these exercises of infantile enterprise, it was observable that
Simon always got the advantage in the trade; and in that
sense of charity which conceals defects, he may be said to
have always displayed that virtue to a considerable degree.
The same love of enterprise early led him into games of
hazard, such as push-pin, marbles, chuck-a-luck, heads and
tails, and other like boyish pastimes, in which his ingenuity
was rewarded by marked success. The vivacious and eager
spirit of this gifted urchin sometimes evolved and put in
practice, even in the presence of the master, expedients of
such sort as served to enliven the proverbial monotony of
scholastic confinement and study: such, for example, were
the traps set for the unwary and heedless scholar, made by
thrusting a string through the eye of a needle and passing it
through holes in the school bench—one end of the string
being attached to the machinist's leg, and so fixed, that by
pulling the string, the needle would protrude through the
further hole and into the person of the urchin sitting over it,
to the great divertisement of the spectators of this innocent
pastime. The holes being filled with soft putty, the needle
was easily replaced, and the point concealed, so that when
the outcrv of the victim was heard, Simon was diligently
perusing his book, and the only consequence was a dismissal
of the complaint, and the amercement of the complainant by
the master, pro falso clamore. Beginning to be a little
more boldly enterprising, the usual fortune of those who
“conquer or excel mankind” befell our hero, and he was
made the scape-goat of the school; all vagrant offences that
could not be proved against any one else being visited upon
him; a summary procedure, which, as Simon remarked,
brought down genius to the level of blundering mediocrity,
and made of no avail the most ingenious arts of deception
and concealment. The master of the old field school was
one of the regular faculty, who had great faith in the old
medicine for the eradication of moral diseases—the cutaneous
tonic, as he called it—and repelled, with great scorn, the
modern quackeries of kind encouragement and moral suasion.
Accordingly, the flagellations and cuffings which Simon
received, were such and so many as to give him a high
opinion of the powers of endurance, the recuperative energies,
and the immense vitality of the human system. Simon
tried, on one occasion, the experiment of fits; but Dominie
Dobbs was inexorable; and as the fainting posture only
exposed to the Dominie new and fresher points of attack,
Simon was fain to unroll his eyes, draw up again his lower
jaw, and come too. Simon, remarking in his moralizing
way upon the virtue of perseverance, has been heard to
declare that he “lost that game” by being unable to keep
from scratching during a space of three minutes and a half;
which he would have accomplished, but for the Dominie's
touching him on the raw, caused by riding a race bare-backed
the Sunday before. “Upon what slender threads hang the
greatest events!” Doubtless these experiences of young
Suggs were not without effect upon so observing and sagacious
an intellect. To them we may trace that strong republican
bias and those fervid expressions in favor of Democratic
principles, which, all through life, and in the ranks
of whatever party he might be found, he ever exhibited and
made; and probably to the unfeeling, and sometimes unjust
inflictions of Dominie Dobbs, was he indebted for his devotion
to that principle of criminal justice he so pertinaciously
upheld, which requires full proof of guilt before it awards
punishment.

We must pass over a few years in the life of Simon, who
continued at school, growing in size and wisdom; and not
more instructed by what he learned there, than by the valuable
information which his reverend father gave him in the
shape of his sage counsels and sharp experiences of the
world and its ways and wiles. An event occurred in Simon's
fifteenth year, which dissolved the tie that bound him to his
rustic Alma Mater, the only institution of letters which
can boast of his connection with it. Dominie Dobbs, one
Friday evening, shortly after the close of the labors of the
scholastic week, was quietly taking from a handkerchief in
which he had placed it, a flask of powder; as he pressed
the knot of the handkerchief, it pressed upon the slide of
the flask, which as it revolved, bore upon a lucifer match
that ignited the powder; the explosion tore the handkerchief

to pieces, and also one ear and three fingers of the
Dominie's right hand—those fingers that had wielded the
birch upon young Simon with such effect. Suspicion fell on
Simon, notwithstanding he was the first boy to leave the
school that evening. This suspicion derived some corroboration
from other facts; but the evidence was wholly circumstantial.
No positive proof whatever connected Simon
with this remarkable accident; but the characteristic prudence
of the elder Suggs suggested the expediency of Simon's
leaving for a time a part of the country where character
was held in so little esteem. Accordingly the influence
of his father procured for Simon a situation in the
neighboring county of Randolph, in the State of Alabama,
near the gold mines, as clerk or assistant in a store for retailing
spirituous liquors, which the owner, one Dixon
Tripes, had set up for refreshment of the public without
troubling the County Court for a license. Here Simon was
early initiated into a knowledge of men, in such situations
as to present their characters nearly naked to the eye. The
neighbors were in the habit of assembling at the grocery,
almost every day, in considerable numbers, urged thereto
by the attractions of the society, and the beverage there
abounding; and games of various sorts added to the charms
of conversation and social intercourse. It was the general
rendezvous of the fast young gentlemen for ten miles around;
and horse-racing, shooting-matches, quoit-pitching, cock-fighting,
and card-playing filled up the vacant hours between
drinks.

In such choice society it may well be supposed that so
sprightly a temper and so inquisitive a mind as Simon's
found congenial and delightful employment; and it was not
long before his acquirements ranked him among the foremost
in that select and spirited community. Although good
at all the games mentioned, card-playing constituted his favorite
amusement, not less for the excitement it afforded
him, than for the rare opportunity it gave him of studying
the human character.

The skill he attained in measuring distances, was equal
to that displayed in his youth, by his venerated father, insomuch
that in any disputed question in pitching or shooting,
to allow him to measure was to give him the match; while
his proficiency “in arranging the papers”—vulgarly called
stocking a pack—was nearly equal to sleight of hand.
Having been appointed judge of a quarter race on one occasion,
he decided in favor of one of the parties by three
inches and a half; and such was the sense of the winner of
Simon's judicial expertness and impartiality, that immediately
after the decision was made, he took Simon behind the
grocery and divided the purse with him. By means of the
accumulation of his wonderful industry, Simon went forth
with a somewhat heterogeneous assortment of plunder, to
set up a traffic on his own account: naturally desiring a
wider theatre, which he found in the city of Columbus in
his native State. He returned to the paternal roof with an
increased store of goods and experience from his sojourn in
Alabama. Among other property, he brought with him a

[ILLUSTRATION]

Turning the Jack, page 129

[Description: 458EAF. Illustration Page. Image of Simon involved in a card game with an "old fogy". The pair are sitting at a small wood table in front of a fireplace, as the old gentleman rests his feet on the bulldog sleeping under the table.]

small race mare, which excited the acquisitiveness of his
father, who, desiring an easier mode of acquisition than by
purchase, proposed to stake a horse he had (the same he
had swapped for, on the road to Montgomery, with the land
speculator,) against Simon's mare, upon the issue of a game
of seven up. Since the game of chess between Mr. Jefferson
and the French Minister, which lasted three years, perhaps
there never has been a more closely contested match
than that between these keen, sagacious and practised sportsmen.
It was played with all advantages; all the lights of
science were shed upon that game. The old gentleman had
the advantage of experience—the young of genius: it was
the old fogy against young America. For a long time the
result was dubious; as if Dame Fortune was unable or unwilling
to decide between her favorites. The game stood
six and six, and young Simon had the deal. Just as the
deal commenced, after one of the most brilliant shuffles the
senior had ever made, Simon carelessly laid down his tortoise-shell
snuff-box on the table; and the father, affecting
nonchalance, and inclining his head towards the box, in
order to peep under as the cards were being dealt, took a
pinch of snuff; the titillating restorative was strongly adulterated
with cayenne pepper; the old fogy was compelled to
sneeze; and just as he recovered from the concussion, the
first object that met his eye was a Jack turning in Simon's
hand. A struggle seemed to be going on in the old man's
breast between a feeling of pride in his son and a sense of
his individual loss. It soon ceased, however. The father
congratulated his son upon his success, and swore that he
was wasting his genius in a retail business of “shykeenry”
when nature had designed him for the bar.

To follow Simon through the eventful and checkered
scenes of his nascent manhood, would be to enlarge this
sketch to a volume. We must be content to state briefly,
that such was the proficiency he made in the polite accomplishments
of the day, and such the reputation he acquired
in all those arts which win success in legal practice, when
thereto energetically applied, that many sagacious men predicted
that the law would yet elevate Simon to a prominent
place in the public view. In his twenty-first year, Simon,
starting out with a single mare to trade in horses in the adjoining
State of Alabama, returned, such was his success,
with a drove of six horses and a mule, and among them
the very mare he started with. These, with the exception
of the mare, he converted into money; he had found
her invincible in all trials of speed, and determined to
keep her. Trying his fortune once more in Alabama, where
he had been so eminently successful, Simon went to the
city of Wetumpka, where he found the races about coming
off. As his mare had too much reputation to get bets upon
her, an ingenious idea struck Simon—it was to take bets,
through an agent, against her, in favor of a long-legged
horse, entered for the races. It was very plain to see that
Simon's mare was bound to win if he let her. He backed
his own mare openly, and got some trifling bets on her; and
his agent was fortunate enough to pick up a green-looking

Georgia sucker, who bet with him the full amount left of
Simon's “pile.” The stakes were deposited in due form to
the amount of some two thousand dollars. Simon was to
ride his own mare—wild Kate, as he called her—and he had
determined to hold her back, so that the other horse should
win. But the Georgian, having by accident overheard the
conversation between Simon and his agent, before the race,
cat the reins of Simon's bridle nearly through, but in so
ingenious a manner, that the incision did not appear. The
race came off as it had been arranged; and as Simon was
carefully holding back his emulous filly, at the same time
giving her whip and spur, as though he would have her do
her best, the bridle broke under the strain; and the mare,
released from check, flew to and past the goal like the wind,
some three hundred yards ahead of the horse, upon the success
of which Simon had “piled” up so largely.

A shout of laughter like that which pursued Mazeppa,
arose from the crowd (to whom the Georgian had communicated
the facts), as Simon swept by, the involuntary winner
of the race; and in that laugh, Simon heard the announcement
of the discovery of his ingenious contrivance. He did
not return.

Old Simon, when he heard of this counter-mine, fell into
paroxysms of grief, which could not find consolation in less
than a quart of red-eye. Heart-stricken, the old patriarch
exclaimed—“Oh! Simon! my son Simon! to be overcome
in that way!—a Suggs to be humbugged! His own Jack to be
taken outen his hand and turned on him! Oh! that I should
ha' lived to see this day!”

Proceeding to Montgomery, Simon found an opening on
the thither side of a faro table; and having disposed of the
race mare for three hundred dollars, banked on this capital,
but with small success. Mr. Suggs' opinion of the people
of Montgomery was not high; they were fashioned on a
very diminutive scale, he used to say, and degraded the
national amusement, by wagers, which an enterprising boy
would scorn to hazard at push-pin. One Sam Boggs, a
young lawyer “of that ilk,” having been cleaned out of his
entire stake of ten dollars, wished to continue the game on
credit, and Simon gratified him, taking his law license in
pawn for two dollars and a half; which pawn the aforesaid
Samuel failed to redeem. Our prudent and careful adventurer
filed away the sheepskin, thinking that sometime or
other, he might be able to put it to good use.

The losses Simon had met with, and the unpromising
prospects of gentlemen who lived on their wits, now that the
hard times had set in, produced an awakening influence upon
his conscience. He determined to abandon the nomadic life
he had led, and to settle himself down to some regular business.
He had long felt a call to the law, and he now
resolved to “locate,” and apply himself to the duties of that
learned profession. Simon was not long in deciding upon a
location. The spirited manner in which the State of
Arkansas had repudiated a public debt of some five hundred
thousand dollars gave him a favorable opinion of that people
as a community of litigants, while the accounts which came
teeming from that bright land, of murders and felonies

innumerable, suggested the value of the criminal practice.
He wended his way into that State, nor did he tarry until
he reached the neighborhood of Fort Smith, a promising border
town in the very Ultima Thule of civilization, such as
it was, just on the confines of the Choctaw nation. It was
in this region, in the village of Rackensack, that he put up
his sign, and offered himself for practice. I shall not attempt
to describe the population. It is indescribable. I
shall only say that the Indians and half-breeds across the
border complained of it mightily.

The motive for Simon's seeking so remote a location was
that he might get in advance of his reputation—being laudably
ambitious to acquire forensic distinction, he wished his
fame as a lawyer to be independent of all extraneous and
adventitious assistance. His first act in the practice was
under the statute of Jeo Fails. It consisted of an amendment
of the license he had got from Boggs, as before related;
which amendment, was ingeniously effected by a careful erasure
of the name of that gentleman, and the insertion of his
own in the place of it. Having accomplished this feat, he
presented it to the court, then in session, and was duly
admitted an attorney and counsellor at law and solicitor in
chancery.

There is a tone and spirit of morality attaching to the
profession of the law so elevating and pervasive in its influence,
as to work an almost instantaneous reformation in
the character and habits of its disciples. If this be not so,
it was certainly a most singular coincidence that, just at the

time of his adoption of this vocation, Simon abandoned the
favorite pastimes of his youth, and the irregularities of his
earlier years. Indeed, he has been heard to declare that
any lawyer, fulfilling conscientiously the duties of his profession,
will find enough to employ all his resources of art,
stratagem and dexterity, without resorting to other and more
equivocal methods for their exercise.

It was not long before Simon's genius began to find occasions
and opportunities of exhibition. When he first came
to the bar, there were but seven suits on the docket, two of
those being appeals from a justice's court. In the course
of six months, so indefatigable was he in instructing clients,
as to their rights, the number of suits grew to forty. Simon
—or as he is now called—Colonel Suggs, determined on
winning reputation in a most effective branch of practice—
one that he shrewdly perceived was too much neglected by
the profession—the branch of preparing cases out of court
for trial. While other lawyers were busy in getting up the
law of their cases, the Colonel was no less busy in getting up
the facts of his.

One of the most successful of Col. Suggs' efforts, was in
behalf of his landlady, in whom he felt a warm and decided
interest. She had been living for many years in ignorant
contentedness, with an indolent, easy natured man, her husband,
who was not managing her separate estate, consisting
of a plantation and about twenty negroes, and some town
property, with much thrift. The lady was buxom and gay;
and the union of the couple was unblessed with children.

By the most insinuating manners, Col. Suggs at length succeeded
in opening the lady's eyes to a true sense of her hapless
condition, and the danger in which her property was
placed, from the improvident habits of her spouse; and,
having ingeniously deceived the unsuspecting husband into
some suspicious appearances, which were duly observed by a
witness or two provided for the purpose, he soon prevailed
upon his fair hostess to file a bill of divorce; which she
readily procured under the Colonel's auspices. Under the
pretence of protecting her property from the claims of her
husband's creditors, the Colonel was kind enough to take a
conveyance of it to himself; and, shortly afterwards, the fair
libellant; by which means he secured himself from those
distracting cares which beset the young legal practitioner,
who stands in immediate need of the wherewithal.

Col. Suggs' prospects now greatly improved, and he saw before
him an extended field of usefulness. The whole community
felt the effects of his activity. Long dormant claims
came to light; and rights, of the very existence of which,
suitors were not before aware, were brought into practical
assertion. From restlessness and inactivity, the population
became excited, inquisitive and intelligent, as to the laws of
their country; and the ruinous effects of servile acquiescence
in wrong and oppression, were averted.

The fault of lawyers in preparing their cases was too
generally a dilatoriness of movement, which sometimes deferred
until it was too late, the creating of the proper impression
upon the minds of the jury. This was not the fault

of Col. Suggs; he always took time by the forelock. Instead
of waiting to create prejudices in the minds of the
jury, until they were in the box, or deferring until then the
arts of persuasion, he waited upon them before they were
empannelled; and he always succeeded better at that time,
as they had not then received an improper bias from the
testimony. In a case of any importance, he always managed
to have his friends in the court room, so that when any of
the jurors were challenged, he might have their places filled
by good men and true; and, although this increased his expenses
considerably, by a large annual bill at the grocery,
he never regretted any expense, either of time, labor or money,
necessary to success in his business. Such was his zeal
for his clients!

He was in the habit, too, of free correspondence with the
opposite party, which enabled him at once to conduct his
case with better advantage, and to supply any omissions or
chasms in the proof: and so far did he carry the habit of
testifying in his own cases, that his clients were always assured
that in employing him, they were procuring counsel
and witness at the same time, and by the same retainer. By
a very easy process, he secured a large debt barred by the
statute of limitations, and completely circumvented a fraudulent
defendant who was about to avail himself of that mendacious
defence. He ante-dated the writ, and thus brought
the case clear of the statute.

One of the most harassing annoyances that were inflicted
upon the emigrant community around him, was the revival

of old claims contracted in the State from which they came,
and which the Shylocks holding them, although they well
knew that the pretended debtors had, expressly in consideration
of getting rid of them, put themselves to the pains of
exile and to the losses and discomforts of leaving their old
homes and settling in a new country, in fraudulent violation
of this object, were ruinously seeking to enforce, even to the
deprivation of the property of the citizen. In one instance,
a cashier of a Bank in Alabama brought on claims against
some of the best citizens of the country, to a large amount,
and instituted suits on them. Col. Suggs was retained to
defend them. The cashier, a venerable-looking old gentleman,
who had extorted promises of payment, or at least had
heard from the debtors promises of payment, which their
necessitous circumstances had extorted, but to which he well
knew they did not attach much importance, was waiting to
become a witness against them. Col. Suggs so concerted
operations, as to have some half-dozen of the most worthless
of the population follow the old gentleman about whenever
he went out of doors, and to be seen with him on various
occasions; and busying himself in circulating through the
community, divers reports disparaging the reputation of the
witness, got the cases ready for trial. It was agreed that
one verdict should settle all the cases. The defendant
pleaded the statute of limitations; and to do away with the
effect of it, the plaintiff offered the cashier as a witness.
Not a single question was asked on cross-examination; but
a smile of derision, which was accompanied by a foreordained
titter behind the bar, was visible on the faces of Simon
and his client, as he testified. The defendant then offered
a dozen or more witnesses, who, much to the surprise of the
venerable cashier, discredited him; and the jury, without
leaving the box, found a verdict for the defendant. The
cashier was about moving for a new trial, when, it being
intimated to him that a warrant was about to be issued for
his apprehension on a charge of perjury, he concluded not to
see the result of such a process, and indignantly left the
country.

The criminal practice, especially, fascinated the regards
and engaged the attention of Col. Suggs, as a department of
his profession and energies. He soon became acquainted
with all the arts and contrivances by which public justice is
circumvented. Indictments that could not be quashed, were
sometimes mysteriously out of the way; and the clerk had
occasion to reproach his carelessness in not filing them in the
proper places, when, some days after cases had been dismissed
for the want of them, they were discovered by him in
some old file, or among the executions. He was requested,
or rather he volunteered in one capital case, to draw a recognizance
for a committing magistrate, as he (Suggs) was
idly looking on, not being concerned in the trial, and so
felicitously did he happen to introduce the negative particle
in the condition of the bond, that he bound the defendant,
under a heavy penalty, “not” to appear at court and answer
to the charge; which appearance, doubtless, much
against his will, and merely to save his sureties, the defendant
proceeded faithfully not to make.

Col. Suggs also extricated a client and his sureties from
a forfeited recognizance, by having the defaulting defendant's
obituary notice somewhat prematurely inserted in the
newspapers; the solicitor, seeing which, discontinued proceedings;
for which service, the deceased, immediately after
the adjournment of court, returned to the officer his personal
acknowledgments: “not that,” as he expressed it, “it mattered
any thing to him personally, but because it would have
aggravated the feelings of his friends he had left behind
him, to of let the thing rip arter he was defunck.”

The most difficult case Col. Suggs ever had to manage,
was to extricate a client from jail, after sentence of death
had been passed upon him. But difficulties, so far from
discouraging him, only had the effect of stimulating his
energies. He procured the aid of a young physician in the
premises—the prisoner was suddenly taken ill—the physician
pronounced the disease small pox. The wife of the prisoner,
with true womanly devotion, attended on him. The
prisoner, after a few a days, was reported dead, and the
doctor gave out that it would be dangerous to approach the
corpse. A coffin was brought into the jail, and the wife was
put into it by the physician—she being enveloped in her
husband's clothes. The coffin was put in a cart and driven
off—the husband, habited in the woman's apparel, following
after, mourning piteously, until, getting out of the village, he
disappeared in the thicket, where he found a horse prepared
for him. The wife obstinately refused to be buried in the
husband's place when she got to the grave; but the mistake

was discovered too late for the recapture of the
prisoner.

The tact and address of Col. Suggs opposed such obstacles
to the enforcement of the criminal law in that part of
the country, that, following the example of the English government,
when Irish patriotism begins to create annoyances,
the State naturally felt anxious to engage his services in its
behalf. Accordingly, at the meeting of the Arkansas legislature,
at its session of 184-, so soon as the matter of
the killing a member on the floor of the house, by the
speaker, with a Bowie knife, was disposed of by a resolution
of mild censure, for imprudent precipitancy, Simon
Suggs, Jr., Esquire, was elected solicitor for the Rackensack
district. Col. Suggs brought to the discharge of the
duties of his office energies as unimpaired and vigorous as in
the days of his first practice; and entered upon it with a
mind free from the vexations of domestic cares, having procured
a divorce from his wife on the ground of infidelity,
but magnanimously giving her one of the negroes, and a horse,
saddle and bridle.

The business of the State now flourished beyond all precedent.
Indictments multiplied: and though many of them
were not tried—the solicitor discovering, after the finding
of them, as he honestly confessed to the court, that the evidence
would not support them: yet, the Colonel could well
say, with an eminent English barrister, that if he tried fewer
cases in court, he settled more cases out of court than any
other counsel.

The marriage of Col. Suggs, some three years after his
appointment of solicitor, with the lovely and accomplished
Che-wee-na-tubbe, daughter of a distinguished prophet and
warrior, and head-man of the neighboring territory of the
Choctaw Indians, induced his removal into that beautiful and
improving country. His talents and connections at once
raised him to the councils of that interesting people; and
he received the appointment of agent for the settlement of
claims on the part of that tribe, and particular individuals
of it, upon the treasury of the United States. This responsible
and lucrative office now engages the time and talents
of Col. Suggs, who may be seen every winter at Washington,
faithfully and laboriously engaged with members of Congress
and in the departments, urging the matters of his mission
upon the dull sense of the Janitors of the Federal Treasury.

May his shadow never grow less; and may the Indians
live to get their dividends of the arrears paid to their agent.