University of Virginia Library

11. CAVE BURTON, ESQ., OF KENTUCKY.

Prominent among the lawyers that had gathered into
the new country, was Cave Burton. Cave was a man of
mark: not very profoundly versed in the black letter, but
adapting, or, more properly, applying his talents to the slang-whanging
departments of the profession. He went in for gab.
A court he could not see the use of—the jury was the thing
for him. And he was for “jurying” every thing, and allowing
the jury—the apostolic twelve as he was wont to call them
—a very free exercise of their privileges, uncramped by any
impertinent interference of the court. Cave thought the
judge an aristocratic institution, but the jury was republicanism
in action. He liked a free swing at them. He had
no idea of being interrupted on presumed misstatements, or
out-of-the-record revelations: he liked to be communicative
when he was speaking to them, and was not stingy with any
little scraps of gossip, or hearsay, or neighborhood reports,
which he had been able to pick up concerning the matter in
hand or the parties. He was fond, too, of giving his private
experiences—as if he were at a love-feast—and was profuse

of personal assurances and solemn asseverations of personal
belief or knowledge of fact and of law. He claimed Kentucky
for his native State, and for a reason that will suggest
itself at once, was called by the bar the Blowing Cave.
Cave had evidently invoiced himself very high when he came
out, thinking rather of the specific than the ad valorem
standard. He had, to hear him tell it, renounced so many
advantages, and made such sacrifices, for the happy privilege
of getting to the backwoods, that the people, out of sheer
gratitude, should have set great store by so rare an article
brought out at such cost:—but they didn't do it. He had
brought his wares to the wrong market. The market was
glutted with brass. And although that metal was indispensable,
yet it was valuable only for plating. Burton was the
pure metal all through. He might have been moulded at a
brass foundry. He had not much intellect, but what he had
he kept going with a wonderful clatter. Indeed, with his
habits and ignorance, it were better not to have had more,
unless he had a great deal; for his chief capital was an unconsciousness
of how ridiculous he was making himself, and
a total blindness as to the merits of his case, which protected
him, as a somnambulist is protected from falling by being
unconscious of danger. He was just as good on a bad cause
as on a good one, and just as bad on a good side
as on a bad one. The first intimation he had of how a case
ought to go, was on seeing how it had gone. Discrimination
was not his forte. Indeed, accuracy of any kind was not his
forte. He lumbered away lustily, very well content if he
were in the neighborhood of a fact or proposition, without
seeming to expect to be at the precise point. He had a good
deal of that sort of wit which comes of a bold, dashing audacity,
without fear or care; such wit as a man has who lets
his tongue swing free of all control of judgment, memory, or
taste, or conscience. He scattered like an old shot-gun, and
occasionally, as he was always firing, some of the shot would
hit.

A large, red-faced, burly fellow, good-natured and unscrupulous,
with a good run of anecdote and natural humor,
and some power of narrative, was Cave,—a monstrous demagogue
withal, and a free and easy sort of creature, who lived
as if he expected to-day were all the time he had to live
in: and who considered the business of the day over when
he had got his three meals with intermediate drinks.

I cannot say Burton was a liar. I never knew him to
fabricate a lie “out and out”—outside of the bar;—his invention
was hardly sufficient for that. In one sense, his
regard for truth was considerable—indeed, so great that he
spent most of his conversation in embellishing it. It was a
sponging habit he had of building on other men's foundations;
but having got a start in this way, it is wonderful
how he laid on his own work.

Cave, like almost every other demagogue I ever knew,
was “considerable” in all animal appetites: he could dispose
of the provant in a way Capt. Dalgetty would have admired,
and, like the Captain, he was not very nice as to the
kind or quality of the viands; or, rather, he had a happy

faculty of making up in quantity what was lacking in quality.
I don't think he ever rose from a table satisfied, though he
often rose surfeited. You might founder him before you
could subdue his appetite. He was as good in liquids as in
solids. He never refused a drink: the parable of neglected
invitations would have had no application to him if he had
lived in those times. You might wake him up at midnight
to take something hot or cold, edible or liquor, and he would
take his full allowance, and smack his lips for more. He
could scent out a frolic like a raven a carcass—by a separate
instinct. He always fell in just in time. He was not a
sponge. He would as soon treat as be treated, if he had
any thing—as under the credit system he had—to treat
with; but the main thing was the provant, and loafing was
one of his auxiliaries. He had a clamorous garrison in his
bowels that seemed to be always in a state of siege, and
boisterous for supplies. Cave's idea of money was connected
inseparably with bread and meat and “sperits:” money
was not the representative of value in his political economy,
but the representative of breakfast, dinner, supper and
liquor. He was never really pathetic, though always trying
it, until he came to describing, in defending against a promissory
note, the horrors of want, that is, of hunger—then
he really was touching, for he was earnest, and he shed
tears like a watering pot. He reckoned every calamity by
the standard of the stomach. If a man lost money, he considered
it a diversion of so much from the natural aliment.
If he lost his health, so much was discounted from life,
that is, from good living: if he died, death had stopped his
rations. Cave had a mean idea of war, and never voted for
a military man in his life. It wasted too much of the fruits
of the earth. An account of a campaign never excited his
horror, until the fasting of the soldiers and the burning of
the supplies was treated of—then he felt it like a nightmare.
Cave had a small opinion of clothes; they were but a shal
low, surface mode of treating the great problem, man. He
went deeper; he was for providing for the inner man—
though his idea of human nature never went beyond the
entrails. Studying human nature with him was anatomy
and physic, and testing the capacity of the body for feats of
the knife and fork. A great man with him was not so much
shown by what he could do, as by what he could hold; not
by what he left, but by what he consumed.

Cave's mind was in some doubt as to things in which the
majority of men are agreed. For example, he was not satisfied
that Esau made as foolish a bargain with his brother
Jacob as some think. Before committing himself, he should
like to taste the pottage, and see some estimate of the net
value of the birthright in the beef and venison market. If
the birthright were a mere matter of pride and precedence,
Cave was not sure that Esau had not “sold” the father of
Israel.

If Cave had a hundred thousand dollars, he would have
laid it all out in provisions; for non constat there might be
no more made; at any rate, he would have enough to answer
all the ends and aims of life, which are to eat and drink as
much as possible.

Cave attended the Episcopal church every Sunday when
there was service—i. e. once a month, and, though his attention
was a little drowsy during most of the services, yet he
brightened up mightily when the preacher read the prayer
against famine, and for preserving the kindly fruits of the
earth to be enjoyed in due season.

Cave was some forty-five years of age at the time I am
writing of:—so long had he warred on the pantry.

He was an active man, indeed some part of him was always
going—jaws, tongue, hands or legs, and to a more limited
extent, brains. He never was idle. Indeed, taking in
such fuel, he couldn't well help going. Even in sleep he
was not quiet. Such fighting with unknown enemies—probably
the ghosts of the animals he had consumed;—such
awful contortions of countenance, and screams—and, when
most quiet, such snorings (he once set a passenger running
down stairs with his trunk, thinking it was the steamboat
coming), you, possibly, never heard. I slept with him one
night (I blush to tell it) on the circuit, and he seemed to be
in spasms, going off at last into a suppressed rattle in the
throat: I thought he was dying, and after some trouble, woke
him. He opened his eyes, and rolled them around, like a
goose egg on an axle. “Cave,” said I, “Cave—can I do
any thing for you?”

“Yes,” was his answer. “Look in my saddle-bags, and
get me a black bottle of `red-eye.”'

I got it; he drank almost a half pint, and went to sleep
like a child that has just received its nourishment.

Burton had largely stored his memory with all manner
of slang-phrases and odd expressions, whereby he gave his
speech a relish of variety somewhat at the expense of classic
purity. Indeed, his mind seemed to be a sort of water-gate,
which caught and retained the foam and trash, but let the
main stream pass through.

But, as honest Bunyan hath it, we detain the reader too
long in the porch.

In the Christmas week of the year of Grace, 1838, some
of us were preparing to celebrate that jovial time by a social
gathering at Dick Bowling's office. There were about a
dozen of us, as fun-loving `youth,' as since the old frolics at
Cheapside or the Boar's Head, ever met together, the judge
and the State's attorney among them. The boats had just
got up, on their first trip, from Mobile, and had brought,
on a special order Dick had given, three barrels of oysters,
a demijohn of Irish whiskey, and a box of lemons. Those
were not the days of invitations: a lawyer's office, night or
day, was as public a place as the court-house, and, among the
members of the bar at that early period, there were no privileged
seats at a frolic any more than in the pit of a theatre.
All came who chose. Old Judge Sawbridge, who could tell
from smelling a cork the very region whence the liquor came,
and could, by looking into the neck of the bottle, tell the
age as well as a jockey could the age of a horse by looking
into his mouth, was there before the bells had rung for the
tavern supper. Several of the rest were in before long.
Burton had not come yet. The old Judge suggested a trick,

which was to get Burton to telling one of his Kentucky yarns,
and, as he was in the agony of it, to withdraw, one by one,
and eat up all the oysters. We agreed to try it, but doubted
very much the success of the experiment; although the
Judge seemed to be sanguine.

Dropping in, one by one, at last all came, filling the room
pretty well. Among them was Cave. That domestic bereavement
which had kept him from such a gathering, were a sad
one. He entered the room in high feather. He was in fine
spirits, ardent and animal. If he had been going, twenty
years before, to a trysting-place, he could not have been in
a gayer frame of mind. He came prepared. He had ravished
himself from the supper table, scarcely eating any thing
—three or four cups of coffee, emptying the cream-pitcher of
its sky-blue milk, a card of spare-ribs and one or two feet of
stuffed sausages, or some such matter; a light condiment of
“cracklin bread,” and a half pint of hog-brains thrown in just
by way of parenthesis. He merely took in these trifles by
way of sandwich, to provoke his appetite for the main exercises
of the evening. When he came in the fire was booming
and crackling—a half cord of hickory having been piled upon
the broad hearth. The night was cold, clear, and frosty.

The back room adjoining was as busy as a barracks, in
the culinary preparations. The oysters, like our clients,
were being forced, with characteristic reluctance, to shell out.
And as the knife went tip, tip, tip, on the shells, Cave's
mouth watered like the bivalve's, as he caught the sound—
more delicious music to his ears than Jenny Lind and the

whole Italian troupe could give out. His spirits rose in this
congenial atmosphere like the spirits in a barometer. He
was soon in a gale, as if he had been taking laughing gas.
Now Cave was as fond of oysters as a seal. A regiment of
such men on the sea-shore, or near the oyster banks, would
have exterminated the species in a season. The act against
the destruction of the oyster ought to have embraced Cave
in a special clause of interdiction from their use. He used
to boast that he and D. L. had never failed to break an oyster
cellar in Tuscaloosa whenever they made a run on it.

Judge Sawbridge made a pass at him as soon almost as
he was seated. He commenced by inquiring after some
Kentucky celebrities—Crittenden, Hardin, Wickliffe, &c.,
whom he found intimate friends of Cave; and then he asked
Cave to tell him the anecdote he had heard repeated, but not
in its particulars, of the Earthquake-story. He led up to
Cave's strong suit: for if there was one thing that Cave liked
better than every thing else, eating and drinking excepted, it
was telling a story, and if he liked telling any one story better
than any other, it was the Earthquake-story. This story
was, like Frank Plummer's speech on the Wiscasset collectorship,
interminable; and, like Frank's speech, the principal
part of it bore no imaginable relation to the ostensible subject.
No mortal man had ever heard the end of this story:
like Coleridge's soliloquies, it branched out with innumerable
suggestions, each in its turn the parent of others, and these
again breeding a new spawn, so that the further he travelled
the less he went on. Like Kit Kunker's dog howling after

the singing master and getting tangled up in the tune, the
denouement was lost in the episodes. What the story was
originally, could not be conjectured; for Cave had gone
over the ground so often, that the first and many subsequent
traces were rubbed out by later footprints. Cave, however,
refreshing himself with about a pint of hot-stuff, rose,
turned his back to the fire, and, parting his coat-tail, and
squatting two or three times as was his wont when in the act
of speaking, began

Cave called for crackers and butter, and, through the
course of the evening, just in a coquetting way, disposed of
about half a tray full of dough, and half a pound of Goshen
butter.

The reader will understand that during the progress of
this oration, though at different times, the members withdrew
to the back room and `oystered.'

“Well, but,” said Tom Cottle—“about the earthquake?”

“Yes—true—exactly—just so—my mind is so disturbed
by the idea that those oysters will be stewed out of all flavor,
that I ramble. Where was I? Yes, I recollect now. I
was commenting on Tom Marshall's attack on Molly Muggin's

testimony. Moll was our main witness. She was an
Irish servant girl, and had peeped through the key-hole of
the parlor door, and seen the breach of promise going on
upon the sofa. Well, I was speaking of Ireland, Emmet,
Curran and so on, and I had my arm stretched out, and the
jury were agape—old Ramkat leaning over the bench—and
the crowd as still as death. When, what should happen?
Such a clatter and noise above stairs, as if the whole building
were tumbling down. It seems that a jury was hung,
up stairs, in the second story—six and six—a dead lock, on
a case of Jim Snipes vs. Jerry Legg for a bull yearling;
all Nubbin Fork was in excitement about it;—forty witnesses
on a side, not including impeaching and sustaining
witnesses. The sheriff had just summoned the witnesses
from the muster-roll at random; fourteen swore one way,
and twenty-four the other, as to identity and ownership; and
it turned out the calf belonged to neither; there was more
perjury than would pale the lower regions to white heat to
hear it. One witness swore”—

Sawbridge.—“But, Cave, about the case you were
trying.”

Cave.—“Yes—about that. Well, the jury wanted to
hear my speech, and the sheriff wouldn't let them out. He
locked the door and came down. One of them, Sim Coley,
kicked at the door so hard that the jar broke the stove-pipe
off from the wires in the Mason's Lodge-room above, and
about forty yards of stove-pipe, about as thick round as a
barrel, came lumbering over the banisters, and fell, with a

crash like thunder, in the grand jury-room below, and then
came rolling down stairs, four steps at a leap, bouncing like
a rock from a mountain side.”

Here Sam Watson inquired how such a long pipe could
get down a “pair of stairs,” and how much broader a staircase
of a Kentucky court-house was than a turnpike road.

Cave.—“Of course, I meant that it onjointed, and one
or more of the joints rolled down. A loose, gangling fellow
like you, Sam, ought to see no great difficulty in any thing
being onjointed. I could just unscrew you”—

“Order! Order!” interposed Judge Sawbridge. “No
interruption of the speaker; Mr. Burton has the floor.”

“Well,” continued Cave, “I had prepared the minds of
the audience for a catastrophe, and this, coming as it did,
had a fearful effect; but the hung jury coming down stairs
on the other side of the building from the lodge, and by
the opposite stairway, hearing the noise, started to running
down like so many wild buffalo. A general hubbub arose
below—old Ramkat rose in his place, with a smile at the
prospect of so much good fining. `Sheriff,' said he, `bring
before me the authors of that confusion.' Just then the
plaster of the ceiling of the court room began to fall, and
the women raised a shriek. Old Ramkat bellowed up—
`Sheriff, consider the whole audience fined ten dollars a
piece, and mind and collect the fees at the door before they
depart. Clerk, consider the whole court house fined—women
and children half price—and take down their names.
Sheriff, see to the doors being closed.' But just then another

section of the stove-pipe came thundering down, and
about the eighth of an acre of plastering fell, knocking down
sixty or seventy men and women; and the people in the
galleries came rushing down, some jumping over into the
crowd below; and a sheet of plastering, about as large as a
tray, came down from above the chandelier, and struck old
Ramkat over the head, and knocked him out of the judge's
stand into the clerk's box; and he struck old Taxcross on
the shoulders, and turned over about a gallon of ink on the
records. Then Pug Williams, the bailiff, shouted out,
`Earthquake!—Earthquake!' and all the women went
into hysterics; and Pug, not knowing what to do, caught
the bell-rope, and began furiously to ring the bell. Such
shouts of `murder! fire! fire!' you never heard. There
was a rush to the doors, but the day being cold they were
closed, and of course on the inside, and the crowd pressed
in such a mass and mess against them, that, I suppose, there
was a hundred tons' pressure on them, and they could not be
got open. I was standing before the jury, and just behind
them was a window, but it was down: I leaped over the
jury, carried them before me”—

Watson.—“The first time you ever carried them,
Cave.”

Cave.—“Not by a jug full. I bowed my neck and
jumped leap-frog through the window, carried the sash out
on my neck, and landed safe in the yard, cutting a jugular
vein or two half through, and picked myself up and ran, with
the sash on my neck, up street, bleeding like a butcher, and

shouting murder at every jump. I verily thought I never
should see supper time.

“In the mean time the very devil was to pay in the court-house.
Old Ramkat, half stunned, ran up the steps to the
judge's platform, near which was a window, hoisted it and
jumped, like a flying mullet, over on to the green, thirty feet
below, sprained his ankle and fell. Frank Duer, once the
most eloquent man at the bar, but who had fattened himself
out of his eloquence—weighing three hundred and ninety,
and so fat that he could only wheeze out his figures of
speech, and broke down from exhaustion of wind in fifteen
minutes—followed suit, just squeezing himself through the
same window, muttering a prayer for his soul that was just
about leaving such comfortable lodgings, came thundering
down on the ground, jarring it like a real earthquake, and
bounced a foot, and fell senseless on Ramkat. Ramkat,
feeling the jar, and mashed under Frank, thought the earthquake
had shook down the gable end of the court-house and
it had fell on him. So he thought fining time was over
with him. He hollered out in a smothered cry, `Excavate
the Court!—Excavate the Court!' But nobody would
do it, but let him sweat and smother for four hours.

“Then Luke Casey, a little, short, bilious, collecting
attorney, as pert and active as if he was made out of
watch-springs and gum-elastic, and who always carried a
green bag with old newspapers and brickbats in it, and
combed his hair over his face to look savage, so as to get up
a reputation for being a good hand at dirty work—Luke

was ciphering the interest on a little grocery account of
fifteen dollars; he had appealed from a justice's court, and
had a big deposition, taken in the case, all the way from
New-York, in his hand; he sprung over three benches of
the bar at a leap, and grabbed his hand on Girard Moseley's
head to make another leap towards a window—going as if
there was a prospect of a fee ahead, and the client was
about leaving town. He leaped clear over, but carried Girard's
wig with him. Now Girard was a widower, in a
remarkable state of preservation, and of fine constitution,
having survived three aggravated attacks of matrimony. He
pretended to practise law; but his real business was marrying
for money. He had got well off at it, though he never
got more than four thousand dollars with any one wife. He
did business on the principle of `quick returns and short
profits.' He pretended to be thirty and the rise, but was,
at the least, fifty. He prided himself on his hair, a rich, light
sorrel, sleek and glossy, and greased over with peppermint, cinnamon,
and all sorts of sweet smells. He smelt like a barber's
shop; and such a polite, nice, easy fellow, to BE sure, was
Girard. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, and yet let him
get hold of a dime, and he griped it so hard you might hear
the eagle squall. He only courted rich old maids in infirm
health, and was too stingy ever to raise a family. He was
very sweet on old Miss Julia Pritcher, a girl of about thirty-five,
who was lank, hysterical, and, the boys said, fitified;
and who had just got about five thousand dollars from her
aunt, whom she had served about fifteen years as upper servant,
but who was now gone the old road. Nobody ever
thought of Girard's wearing a wig. He pretended it was
Jayne's Hair Elixir that brought it out. Fudge! But
Luke caught him by the top-knot, and peeled his head like
a white onion. He left him as bald as a billiard-ball—not
a hair between his scalp and heaven. Luke took the wig,
and hastily, without thinking what he was doing, filed it in
the deposition. Mosely had brought Jule Pritcher there,
and she was painted up like a doll: her withered old face
streaked like a June apple. She needn't have put herself to
that trouble for Girard; he would have married her in her
winding-sheet, if she had been as ugly as original sin, and
only had enough breath in her to say yes to the preacher.

“And now the fury began to grow outside. The smoke,
rushing out of the window of the lodge-room, and the cry
of fire brought out the fire-engines and companies, and the
rag, tag and bob-tail boys and negroes that follow on shouting,
with great glee, `fire! fire! fire!' along the streets.
Ting-a-ling came on the engines—there were two of them—
until they brought up in the court-house yard; one of them
in front, the other at the side or gable end. It was some
time before the hose could be fixed right; every fellow acting
as captain, and all being in the way of the rest. Wood
Chuck, a tanner's journeyman—a long, slim, yellow-breeched
fellow, undertook to act as engineer of engine No. 1.
`Play in at the windows!' cried the crowd outside, `there's
fire there'—and play it was. They worked the arms of the
thing lustily—no two pulling or letting down at the same

time, until at last, the water came. Wood guided pretty
well for a first trial, first slinging the pipe around and scattering
the crowd. But, just as they came pouring out of
the window, thick as bees, he got his aim, and he sent the
water in a sluice into the window; the engine had a squirt
like all blazes; and as Chuck levelled the pipe and drew a
bead on them, and as it shot into the faces of the crowd—
vip, vip, vip—they fell back shouting murder, as if they had
been shot from the window-sill. Old Girard had got hold
of Jule and brought her to, and was bringing her, she clinging
with great maidenly timidity to him, and he hugging her
pretty tight, and they, coming to the window—the rest falling
back—Chuck had a fair fire at them. He played on old
Girard to some purpose—his bald head was a fair mark, and
the water splashed and scattered from it like the foam on a
figure head. The old fellow's ears rang like a conch shell for
two years afterwards. Chuck gave Jule one swipe on one
side of her head that drove a bunch of curls through the
window opoosite, and which washed all the complexion off
that cheek, and the paint ran down the gullies and seams
like blood; the other side was still rosy. The only safe
place was to get down on the floor and let the water fly over.
Old Girard never got over the tic-doloreux and rheumatism
he got that day. The other engine played in the other
window; and the more they played, the more the people inside
shouted and hollered; and the more they did that, the
more Chuck and Bill Jones, the engineer of No. 2, came
to their relief. It was estimated that at least a thousand
hogsheads of water were played into that court-house: indeed,
I believe several small boys were drowned.

“Some one shouted out for an axe to cut through the
front door. One was brought. A big buck negro struck
with all his might, with the back of the axe, to knock it off
its hinges; but there were at least twenty heads pushed up
against the door, and these were knocked as dead by the
blow as ever you saw a fish under the ice.”

Sawbridge.—“Were they all killed?”

Cave.—“All? No—not all. Most of them came to,
after a while. Indeed, I believe there was only three that
were buried—and a tinner's boy, Tom Tyson, had his skull
fractured; but they put silver plate in the cracks, and he
got over it—a few brains spilt out, or something of the sort
—but his appetite was restored.

“By the way, we had some fun when the trial of Luke
Casey's little case came on. Moseley was on the other side,
and came into court with his head tied up in a bandanna
handkerchief. He smiled when some of Luke's proof was
offered, and Luke, a little nettled, drew out the deposition,
and with an air of triumph said, `Perhaps, Mr. Moseley,
you will laugh at this,' opening the deposition: as he opened
it the wig fell out, and, every body recognizing it as Moseley's,
a laugh arose which was only stopped by old Ramkat's
fining all around the table. Squire Moseley vamosed and
left Luke to get a judgment, and the credit of a joke, of
which he was innocent as Girard's head was of the hair.

“Well, boys, I reckon you would all like to know what
became of my case. You see”—

Here Dick Bowling, smacking his lips, remarked that
the oysters were very fine.

“Oysters!” said Cave. “Have you been eating the
oysters?”

Dick said he had.

Cave jumped to the back door at one bound, and called
to the servant—“Jo, I say, Jo—get mine ready this minute
—a few dozen raw—a half bushel roasted, and all the balance
stewed—with plenty of soup; I'll season them myself;
and put on plenty of crackers, butter and pickles. Be
quick, Jo, old fel.”

Jo made his appearance, hat in hand, and answered:
“Why, Mas Cave, dey's all gone dis hour past; de gem'men
eat ebery one up.”

“The devil they have!” said Cave. “Gentlemen,” he
continued, turning to the crowd, “is this true?”

“Yes,” replied the Judge. “Cave, I thought you were
so interested telling the story, that you would prefer not to
be interrupted.”

The exclamatory imprecation which Cave lavished upon
his soul, his eyes, and the particular persons present, and
humanity generally, would not be befitting these chaste
pages. He left without any valedictory salutations of a
complimentary or courteous tenor. And he did not recover
his composure until he removed a tray full of blood-puddings,

sweetbread, kidneys and the like soporific viands, which had
once graced the landlord's larder.

Speaking of the entertainment afterwards, Cave said he
did not care a dern for the oysters, but it pained him to
think that men he took to be his friends, should have done
him a secret injury.