CAREER OF HIS BROTHERS AND SISTER.

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and moulded the piety of that generation. In company with his three brothers and sister, he showed his fondness for his pastor by regular attendance at the Sabbath-school; at the mission on Cherry Street near Eighth; in the ragged school, Juniper near Locust; in the academy at Hamilton Village, where his father, who believed in lay sermons, gathered two churches. The fruit of this training appeared in the visible union of the entire family as well as his own subsequent union with the Fifth Church on the profession of his faith when he had reached a vigorous manhood. That household were destined to eminent usefulness. The second son, Hon. B. R. Bradford, A. M., became one of the prominent men of Western Pennsylvania. The fourth son, Rev. Thomas Budd Bradford, A. M., was pastor at Neshaminy and Germantown, Pennsylvania, and resident at Dover, Delaware, during a ministry of over thirty years. The only daughter, Eliza Loockerman Bradford, one of the most beautiful and accomplished women of her day, was the wife of Rev. Dr. William T. Dwight, the honored pastor of a prominent church in New England for nearly thirty-five years. Colonel William Bradford, the third son, is well-known as a Director of Girard College and member of City Councils for several years.

This is the key to the whole history of Vincent L. Bradford's life. He was gifted with talents, but these were not merely the passive attributes of mind and heart. He came, at his birth, into close relations with devotedly Christian people, and was trained to feel, that, by affecting the religious interests of others, he could add to their knowledge and promote their happiness. He had great qualities of mind and heart by

16

ADDRESS TO MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE.

nature, but these were so joined with energy and purpose, that great results followed a union of genius with high moral sentiments, the fruit of careful religious training.

During his Junior year at the University, the Marquis de Lafayette, the friend of Washington, and his companion in arms through the American Revolution, visited Philadelphia in 1824. Young Bradford, at the early age of sixteen, was selected by his classmates, and approved by the Faculty, as the orator for the occasion to deliver an address of welcome to their noble guest on behalf of the University. His father and great uncle, the Attorney-General, were distinguished for their brilliancy and eloquence in persuasive address. He had made good use of his privileges as a member of the Philomathean Society in public debate, and was well qualified, by his youthful beauty and his fine scholarship, to make an admirable impression on the nation's guest. Those who heard his welcome and the reply of Lafayette, describe the scene as ever memorable in the history of the University. In his address he showed that moral truth unfolds the deepest mysteries of our nature, and lifts the finite into a living union with the infinite; that it gives character to life, and crowns the last analysis of science, both physical and metaphysical, while it clothes the Deity himself with his sublimest glories. It appeals not alone to reason, but to the strongest motive energies of our being. It penetrates the inner fortress of the will, and stirs the soul to its intensest activity. It forms the very life of philanthropy and patriotism, so well illustrated by the character and career of their honored guest, the Marquis de Lafayette.

A LAW STUDENT.-HIS MARRIAGE.

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The following year, 1825, Vincent L. Bradford received the highest honors of his class. His companion and schoolmate, Henry Reed, afterwards Professor of English Literature in the same university, who perished in the ill-fated Arctic, was also his college classmate, and shared with him these honors. Though rivals in college, they were intimate friends in social life, and subsequent fellow-students in law. While Mr. Reed entered the office of John Sargent, Esq., Mr. Bradford commenced the study of law in the office of his father, Thomas Bradford, LL.D., and was admitted to the bar of Philadelphia, April 5, 1829. In July of the preceding year he received the degree of A. M. from the University of Pennsylvania. Within two years after his admission to the bar, he married Juliet S. Rey, of the Island of St. Martins, West Indies, July 21, 1831.

CHAPTER III.

The Eminent Lawyers of Philadelphia in 1830.-High Standard of its Courts of Justice.-A Cause Célèbre.-The United States vs. Porter and Wilson.-Statement of the Case.-Counsel for Wilson.-Argument in Full.-Success in the Final Release of Wilson.-A Civil Suit.Levering vs. The Germantown and Norristown Railroad Company.-A Contest with a Monopoly.-Eight Years in Court.-His Client Finally Wins.

PHILADELPHIA, during the first quarter of this century, attracted a large portion of the legal talent of this country, because it was near the centre of its population, and the city in which were convened the councils of the several colonies, and the seat, afterwards, of the Federal government. Here such eminent men as William Tilghman, Thomas McKean, Francis Hopkinson, Jared Ingersol and Alexander J. Dallas had elevated the tone of the bench and bar by the ease and dignity with which they conducted the trial of causes during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Their mantle, during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, had fallen upon Horace Binney, Charles Chauncey and John Sergeant, who were the great lights of the forum when Vincent L. Bradford began his legal career.

Among the causes célèbres in the courts of Philadelphia, the case of the "United States against James Porter, alias James May and George Wilson," indicted for robbing the Reading mail and putting in jeopardy the life of its carrier, excited deep interest in the proceedings of the United States Circuit Court. Six bills were found against the prisoners, and a separate trial

TRIAL OF GEORGE WILSON.

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was finally ordered for each. George Wilson was charged with deliberately planning an atrocious crime, coolly preparing deadly weapons for its execution, committing the crime in the dead of night; thereby robbing and plundering the mail, threatening the driver's life with pistols directed at his person, with the intent to execute the crime. Surely such a case might appal the greatest enthusiast of the forum in the cause of philanthropy, but Vincent L. Bradford, at twenty-one years of age, and scarcely of one year's standing at the bar, entered the lists as defendant's counsel with such lawyers as Henry D. Gilpin and George M. Dallas, who were the counsel for the United States. A fair account of this remarkable trial should embrace not only the indictments in full, but the thorough and searching examination of the witnesses, especially the cross-questioning by the defense, in which Mr. Bradford's remarkable powers in reaching the true relation of his client to the crime were displayed and which probably eventually saved his life, while Porter, as principal, was hung; but our limits will allow us only to give his speech in defense of Wilson, which exhibits, for a young lawyer, at his age, marvelous acquisitions in the citation of cases, great thoroughness in dealing with the testimony, which would do honor to any of his cotemporaries, and which at length made him so dangerous an antagonist in civil as well as criminal trials.

ARGUMENT BEFORE JUDGES BALDWIN AND HOPKINSON.

MR. V. L. BRADFORD, for the prisoner, addressed the Court and Jury, and observed:-"It was the saying of Terence, as much distinguished, in the most glorious days of Rome, for the benevolence of his philanthropy,