Butler, Stillman & Hubbard (1874-1896) ith the exit of Barney, 1873 was a crucial year in the evolution of the law partnership that would become Thacher Proffitt & Wood. 1873 was also a year of transition for the American economy. The Panic of 1873 ushered in a long period of deflation and recession that lasted until the end of the century. The nation at large increasingly turned from sectional controversies to economic matters. Less priority was given to the problems of the South, while the rights of labor, the control of the railroads and the "trusts," the agitation of populists and others for a "looser" currency and the coinage of silver became the leading political issues of the day. Much of this new concern about economic matters focused upon the one-square- mile area at the tip of Manhattan Island, now often referred to generically as "Wall Street." The banks and other financial institutions of lower Manhattan dominated the nation's financial affairs as never before. National banks, federally chartered institutions permitted under the Banking Act of 1863, held balances for banks throughout the country and, in the absence of a single central bank, acted as the de facto guardians of the nation's money supply. Private financial markets also came to new prominence at this time. The New York Stock Exchange acquired its first permanent home in 1865. When John D. Rockefeller in 1883 moved the headquarters of Standard Oil from Cleveland, Ohio to 26 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, it was another indication that the city was attracting an unprecedented concentration of corporate and financial power. This increasing economic importance of the city's business required the attention of a growing army of lawyers. Many lawyers now specialized in commercial practice, forsaking highly public courtroom appearances for behind- the-scenes work for business clients. It was at this time that the Wall Street law firm came into its own. Though still minuscule by modern standards, law firms were beginning to increase in size. The Butler firm, which had at most three partners from 1848 to 1873, had seven partners by 1880. This put the Butler firm in the forefront of New York firms. It was one of eleven firms in New York in 1880 with five or more partners. (By 1915 there were fifty-one firms of that size.) It was not merely the size of the firm that was undergoing change. The structure and nature of law firms were transformed as well. Before the Civil War it had not been uncommon for lawyers to maintain extensive legal business outside of the partnership. Lawyers often made separate arrangements, on a case by case basis, with their law partners. New law clerks (what today are called associates) had often been given office space and some legal duties to perform, but no salary. They were expected to benefit from the prestigious association with the senior attorneys and earn a living by picking up work on the side. The larger concerns now provided salaries for their new clerks who, in return, were expected to work full-time for the firm. Furthermore, there was a professionalization of legal education. Law clerks were now expected to be both college and law school graduates (and preferably from elite eastern schools to get clerkships at the more prestigious firms). Previously, new clerks expected relatively short stays at their first legal positions, which they hoped would provide some contacts and final polishing of their legal skills before striking out on their own. Now the more accomplished clerks accepted positions with the understanding that, should their performance be satisfactory, they would one day be made a partner. The Butler firm was among the first to adopt these new procedures. In his autobiography, Butler described the principles of operation at the firm: I early formed the idea that the successful practice of law in our chief metropolitan center required the use, to a certain extent, of commercial methods, foremost among which were the delegation to competent subordinates of all matters not requiring the personal attention of the partners; the separation of moneys belonging to, or collected for, clients from the moneys of the firm; immediate settlement with claimants for moneys received on their account; no accounting between partners, all sums received from any source being turned over to the cashier, by whom all disbursements were made, and dividends declared only out of ascertained profits. In addition to these rules, another followed with almost unvarying regularity, has been the recruiting of the partnership from within and not from without, so that my partners have been almost without exception trained in my own office. Despite all the lawyers in the city of New York in 1870, many wondered whether New York was truly governed by law. New York's population, which nearly doubled in size to almost one million inhabitants between 1850 and 1870, was rapidly expanding beyond the framework of the antebellum city. The mercantile elites that controlled the city's pre-war politics retreated from leadership roles as Tammany Hall, the regular Democratic Party organization (so-called after the name of its political club), a coalition of native Protestants and Irish and German immigrants, increasingly dominated city government. For Butler and many others it was the abuses of Tammany Hall in the late 1860s that brought the issue of the future of municipal government to a head. Tammany Hall was led by the notorious William "Boss" Tweed. Tweed and his cronies set new standards for flagrant and conspicuous graft and corruption. The notorious Tweed Courthouse in Lower Manhattan cost $14 million, $13 million above budget estimates. Many lawyers felt that the major consequences of the Tweed era were lawlessness and legal corruption that sullied the profession. One response to Tweed was the founding of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in February 1870, shortly before the final downfall of the Tweed ring the next year. Butler's prominence as a New York lawyer is reflected in his involvement in the formation of the bar association. He is the third listed on the "Call" of the over two hundred names that led to its founding, and was its first corresponding secretary, serving in that position in 1870 and 1871 and again from 1873 to 1880. He served as president of the New York Bar Association in 1886 and 1887 and was also president of the American Bar Association in 1886. Butler's fear of municipal corruption is reflected in his service on an 1875 state commission investigating the issue. He was chosen for the commission by his longtime friend the Democratic Governor, Samuel J. Tilden. Butler and his fellow commissioners, which included prominent lawyer and family friend William Evarts, as well as journalist E.L. Godkin, the founding editor of The Nation, recommended that only taxpayers be allowed to vote in elections for municipal officials charged with regulating finances. This somewhat impractical proposal was not well received, but it indicates the extent of Butler's distaste for urban politics. His views were summarized in an address before the General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen in 1879 entitled, Our Great Metropolis: Its Growth, Misgovernment and Needs. After Barney and Parsons withdrew from the firm on December 31, 1873 it was reconstituted on January 1, 1874 as Butler, Stillman & Hubbard. Both Stillman and Hubbard joined the firm as clerks during the Civil War. Thomas H. Hubbard, born in Hallowell, Maine in 1838, the son of a future governor of the state, graduated from Bowdoin College in 1857. In 1860, after being admitted to the Maine Bar, he went to the Albany Law School and was the first partner of the firm to attend law school. Hubbard had joined Barney, Butler, & Parsons in 1861 as the managing clerk. When commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Union army in 1862, Hubbard had taken a leave of absence from the firm. Hubbard had a distinguished war career and saw action in Louisiana and in General Philip Sheridan's Shenandoah Valley campaign in 1864. After receiving a field promotion to brigadier general, he left the army after Appomattox and was known thereafter as General Hubbard. He rejoined Barney, Butler & Parsons as a junior partner on January 1, 1867, where his primary duty was supervising the work carried on in the office. Thomas E. Stillman replaced Hubbard in 1862 as chief clerk after Hubbard left for war service. He was born in New York City in 1837 and would eventually become the first native of New York City to become a partner of the firm. He graduated from Colgate College in 1859 and read the law with a local lawyer in Hamilton, New York. At first, Stillman worked closely with Butler on admiralty cases. He worked on a series of cases involving the Circassian, an especially "litigious steamer." (Circassian, 5 F. Cas. 702 (E.D.N.Y. 1867)(no. 2,722), 5 F. Cas. 703 (E.D.N.Y. 1869)(no. 2,724), (Wickes V.), 5 F. Cas. 689 (S.D.N.Y. 1872) (No. 2,720a), 5 F. Cas. 711 (C.C.S.D. N.Y. 1874)(No. 2,726.) The varied problems encountered by the Circassian involved the right of lien for supplies for a domestic vessel and the enforceability of such a lien in state and federal court, the right of a ship's master to give valid bottomry (a form of mortgage with the ship or its freight as security) and other sticky points of admiralty law. After completing the work on the Circassian, Stillman was an accomplished admiralty lawyer. Butler, Stillman & Hubbard had a large general commercial practice. One of the more notable commercial transactions that involved the firm was the founding of the Central Trust Company. In 1873 the directors of the New York Guaranty and Indemnity Company, in the business of lending money against collateral security, wanted to expand into other lines of business, but were prohibited from doing so by their restrictive charter. Until 1887, when New York finally passed a general incorporation law, every corporation had to come before the legislature and argue for the specific provisions they wanted in their charter, a time-consuming and expensive procedure that usually involved a great amount of political dealing with legislators. To avoid this morass, Butler searched for an inactive company that had a broader charter than the New York Guaranty and Indemnity Company. In 1875, Butler and ten other individuals purchased the charter of the inactive Central Trust Company for $10,000. This new company was recapitalized at $1,000,000, with most of the money being advanced by the New York Guaranty and Indemnity Company, which acquired the charter of the old company. The Central Trust Company was one of the largest clients of the Butler firm. In 1887, to facilitate daily contacts with the Central Trust Company, the firm moved to offices at 54 Wall Street, in the same building as the Company. Both Hubbard and Stillman were also involved in a variety of other commercial cases. Stillman was active in the litigation between the Sultan of Turkey and the Providence Tool Company over rifles sold to the Ottoman Empire. At the time, in the late 1870s, the Ottoman Empire was actively involved in the purchase of western armaments with the aim of preserving their increasingly embattled holdings in the Balkans. One of the reasons the Ottoman Empire wanted arms at this time was to suppress an 1875 rebellion in Bosnia and Herzegovina -- an action that led to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. Stillman and Hubbard also became experts on railroad reorganizations. Stillman, for example, handled the reorganization of a $15 million mortgage of the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad. In 1888 Stillman and Hubbard turned their attention to railroad investments full-time when they were hired to manage the holdings of Mary Searles, the widow of Mark Hopkins, one of the leading railroad entrepreneurs in the decades following the Civil War. Though born in New York State -- he was a boyhood chum of Hiram Barney -- Hopkins made his fortune in California. With Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington he was a co-creator of the Central Pacific Railroad. When he died in 1878 his estate, estimated at $20 million, with one of its prizes a huge block of Central Pacific stock, went to his widow. After almost a decade of newspaper articles about "America's Richest Widow," in 1887 she married Edward T. Searles who wanted her to systematize her extensive holdings and hired Hubbard and Stillman for the task. This proved so absorbing of their time and so rewarding financially that they eventually withdrew from the firm, at first informally and then in fact, to manage the estate and related railroad investments full-time. Though they technically remained partners until 1896, they had been inactive in the firm's affairs for several years. Their leaving apparently led to some bitterness on the part of Butler. He allegedly remarked that, "Stillman, Hubbard and I for many years fished together in the same boat, but when they hooked an exceedingly large fish they decided that they alone would land it." Hubbard's career after leaving the firm was quite diverse. At different times he served as president of the Houston & Texas Railroad, first vice president of the Southern Pacific and president of the Pacific Improvement Company which owned the Guatemala Central Railroad. He later turned his attention to the Far East and built railroads in the Philippines and supervised the collection of the indemnification to the United States government in the aftermath of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China. He was also interested in the Far North. Hubbard was a major backer of Captain Robert Peary in his expeditions to reach the North Pole. Peary, in return, named the northernmost extension of Axel Heiberg Island, high in the Canadian Arctic (well over 80š N in latitude), Cape Thomas Hubbard. An overseer and trustee of his alma mater, Bowdoin College, from 1874 to 1915, he donated funds for a new library for the college, Hubbard Hall. Hubbard died on May 19, 1915. His partner, Stillman, had a successful career as a corporate lawyer following his disassociation with the Butler firm and died in Liseiux, France on September 4, 1906 as the result of injuries he suffered in an automobile accident earlier that summer. Through the end of the century, William Allen Butler was the senior partner and dominant figure at the firm. Like his father before him, Butler was a distinguished appellate jurist and was one of the leading Supreme Court lawyers of his time. Between 1868 and 1894 he appeared before the high court thirty-four times, including three cases in an eight-day period when he was sixty-five years old. Almost one-third of the thirty-four cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court were not handled by him previously, an indication of his reputation as an appellate attorney. This connection to the Supreme Court only seems fitting for the son of a former attorney general of the United States. William Allen Butler remembered attending sessions of the Marshall Court as a boy and was befriended in his adolescence by Marshall's successor, Chief Justice Roger Taney. Taney is primarily remembered for the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857 and Butler had little good to say about his jurisprudence. However, in his autobiography he included a charming reminiscence of Taney as a kindly, paternal figure who took interest in the young child of his associate. Despite an increasingly diverse practice, the Butler firm was still primarily known as an admiralty firm. Admiralty law was undergoing a significant transformation in the late nineteenth century, in part because of the efforts of Butler and other lawyers to expand the scope of admiralty jurisprudence. In seventeenth and eighteenth century England, admiralty court jurisdiction was largely limited to disputes arising in the tidewater and on the high seas, including such situations as collisions, salvage and sailors' liens for wages. In the United States Constitution, the federal courts were given power in "cases of admiralty and marine jurisdiction." In a way unique to the concept of federalism, the federal courts fashioned an ever-expanding geographic scope for admiralty jurisdiction, broadening it in a series of decisions through 1860 to cover navigable rivers and inland lakes. In the second half of the century, a series of cases expanded the ambit of the admiralty court to cover a wider range of actionable matters, including marine insurance contracts, bills of lading and charter parties. In effect, these decisions granted the admiralty courts jurisdiction over almost all commercial matters vital to the maritime industry. Butler viewed his role in the expansion of admiralty as his most important achievement. He was proudest of his role in the litigation of The Scotland (105 U.S. 24 [1881]), an English steamer that collided with a British bark carrying a load of guano just outside New York harbor. (Guano is the dried excrement of sea birds, found primarily on several small rainless islands off the coast of Peru. In the nineteenth century guano was widely used as fertilizer and was a major import into the United States.) The collision destroyed both vessels. Butler, representing The Scotland, which was at fault in the collision, argued that, because of the wreck of the vessel, it was exempt from liability damages. Although the district and circuit courts decided against The Scotland, Butler successfully argued their case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Some of Butler's other important cases included The Pennsylvania (19 Wall 125 [1873]), The Lottawanna (21 Wall 558 [1874]) and Liverpool Steam Co. v. Phenix Insurance Co. (129 U.S. 397 [1889]). In this last case, the high court found that a contract made by an American ship owner for a shipment to Liverpool, to be paid for in pound sterling, was covered by American admiralty laws. After Butler, the firm's most prominent admiralty attorney was Wilhelmus Mynderse, who became a partner in 1880. Wilhelmus Mynderse was born in Seneca Falls, New York in 1849, one year after the famous women's rights convention was held in the town. Mynderse succeeded Butler as the firm's foremost litigator and argued sixteen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court between 1881 and 1901. Many of Mynderse's largest cases involved maritime liability claims. One of the most important involved the collision of the British steamers Eagle Point and Biela in heavy fog on the high seas about 150 miles east of Sandy Hook. The Biela sank and her cargo was totally lost. The district court found that the Biela was at fault, having proceeded at excessive speed in dangerous conditions. If the English rule of damages with respect to cargo were used, the owners of the Biela would receive only a small portion of their damages. If the American rule were employed, the owners of the Biela would be entitled to compensation for all of their heavy losses. Mynderse, representing the Eagle Point, argued for the applicability of the English rules. He lost the case in the district court, but the decision was reversed by the circuit court which held that the English rule applied; a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied (114 Fed. 372; 120 Fed. 449; 142 Fed. 453; 189 U.S. 510 [1903]). Another interesting maritime case handled by the firm was Mencke v. A Cargo of Sugar ex British Ship Benlarig et al. (99 F. 298 [1900]), heard in federal district court in 1900. The Benlarig, an unusually high-masted, square-rigged iron ship with a cargo of Java sugar, was attempting to make delivery to a sugar refinery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The mainmast, requiring a total clearance of almost 150 feet (the mast stood 139 feet 10 inches above the deck), could not pass under the Brooklyn Bridge -- which crossed the East River at a height of only 135 feet -- and the Hell Gate passage was seen as too dangerous for such a large vessel. The only way to get the sugar to the wharf was off-loading the cargo and transporting it up the East River by lighterage, and the legal issue concerned who was obliged to pay for the transportation, the shipping company or the sugar importer. Lawyers from the Butler firm successfully argued that despite the words of the charter requiring delivery of the sugar at a site designated by the importer, this site had to be one approachable by the vessel without physical damage to the masts. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ --<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META content=text/html;charset=iso-8859-1 http-equiv=Content-Type><TITLE>The Butler Firm</TITLE><BASE href=http://www.thacherproffitt.com/bfirm.htm> <META content='"MSHTML 4.72.3110.7"' name=GENERATOR> </HEAD> <BODY background=gifs/wpaper.gif bgColor=#ffffff link=#993333> <DIV> </DIV> <P><BR> <P align=right><IMG alt="Thacher Proffitt & Wood" border=0 height=49 src="gifs/tpwlogo.gif" width=383></P><BR> <CENTER><IMG alt="The Butler Firm" border=0 height=21 src="gifs/bfirm.gif" width=185> <P></CENTER> <P><BR>Butler, Stillman & Hubbard<BR>(1874-1896) <P> <P><BR><IMG align=left alt=W border=0 height=38 src="gifs/w.gif" width=51>ith the exit of Barney, 1873 was a crucial year in the evolution of the law partnership that would become Thacher Proffitt & Wood. 1873 was also a year of transition for the American economy. The Panic of 1873 ushered in a long period of deflation and recession that lasted until the end of the century. The nation at large increasingly turned from sectional controversies to economic matters. Less priority was given to the problems of the South, while the rights of labor, the control of the railroads and the "trusts," the agitation of populists and others for a "looser" currency and the coinage of silver became the leading political issues of the day. <P>Much of this new concern about economic matters focused upon the one-square-mile area at the tip of Manhattan Island, now often referred to generically as "Wall Street." The banks and other financial institutions of lower Manhattan dominated the nation's financial affairs as never before. National banks, federally chartered institutions permitted under the Banking Act of 1863, held balances for banks throughout the country and, in the absence of a single central bank, acted as the de facto guardians of the nation's money supply. Private financial markets also came to new prominence at this time. The New York Stock Exchange acquired its first permanent home in 1865. When John D. Rockefeller in 1883 moved the headquarters of Standard Oil from Cleveland, Ohio to 26 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, it was another indication that the city was attracting an unprecedented concentration of corporate and financial power. <P>This increasing economic importance of the city's business required the attention of a growing army of lawyers. Many lawyers now specialized in commercial practice, forsaking highly public courtroom appearances for behind-the-scenes work for business clients. It was at this time that the Wall Street law firm came into its own. Though still minuscule by modern standards, law firms were beginning to increase in size. The Butler firm, which had at most three partners from 1848 to 1873, had seven partners by 1880. This put the Butler firm in the forefront of New York firms. It was one of eleven firms in New York in 1880 with five or more partners. (By 1915 there were fifty-one firms of that size.) <P>It was not merely the size of the firm that was undergoing change. The structure and nature of law firms were transformed as well. Before the Civil War it had not been uncommon for lawyers to maintain extensive legal business outside of the partnership. Lawyers often made separate arrangements, on a case by case basis, with their law partners. New law clerks (what today are called associates) had often been given office space and some legal duties to perform, but no salary. They were expected to benefit from the prestigious association with the senior attorneys and earn a living by picking up work on the side. The larger concerns now provided salaries for their new clerks who, in return, were expected to work full-time for the firm. Furthermore, there was a professionalization of legal education. Law clerks were now expected to be both college and law school graduates (and preferably from elite eastern schools to get clerkships at the more prestigious firms). Previously, new clerks expected relatively short stays at their first legal positions, which they hoped would provide some contacts and final polishing of their legal skills before striking out on their own. Now the more accomplished clerks accepted positions with the understanding that, should their performance be satisfactory, they would one day be made a partner. <P>The Butler firm was among the first to adopt these new procedures. In his autobiography, Butler described the principles of operation at the firm: <P> <BLOCKQUOTE>I early formed the idea that the successful practice of law in our chief metropolitan center required the use, to a certain extent, of commercial methods, foremost among which were the delegation to competent subordinates of all matters not requiring the personal attention of the partners; the separation of moneys belonging to, or collected for, clients from the moneys of the firm; immediate settlement with claimants for moneys received on their account; no accounting between partners, all sums received from any source being turned over to the cashier, by whom all disbursements were made, and dividends declared only out of ascertained profits. In addition to these rules, another followed with almost unvarying regularity, has been the recruiting of the partnership from within and not from without, so that my partners have been almost without exception trained in my own office. <P></P></BLOCKQUOTE>Despite all the lawyers in the city of New York in 1870, many wondered whether New York was truly governed by law. New York's population, which nearly doubled in size to almost one million inhabitants between 1850 and 1870, was rapidly expanding beyond the framework of the antebellum city. The mercantile elites that controlled the city's pre-war politics retreated from leadership roles as Tammany Hall, the regular Democratic Party organization (so-called after the name of its political club), a coalition of native Protestants and Irish and German immigrants, increasingly dominated city government. For Butler and many others it was the abuses of Tammany Hall in the late 1860s that brought the issue of the future of municipal government to a head. Tammany Hall was led by the notorious William "Boss" Tweed. Tweed and his cronies set new standards for flagrant and conspicuous graft and corruption. The notorious Tweed Courthouse in Lower Manhattan cost $14 million, $13 million above budget estimates. Many lawyers felt that the major consequences of the Tweed era were lawlessness and legal corruption that sullied the profession. <P>One response to Tweed was the founding of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in February 1870, shortly before the final downfall of the Tweed ring the next year. Butler's prominence as a New York lawyer is reflected in his involvement in the formation of the bar association. He is the third listed on the "Call" of the over two hundred names that led to its founding, and was its first corresponding secretary, serving in that position in 1870 and 1871 and again from 1873 to 1880. He served as president of the New York Bar Association in 1886 and 1887 and was also president of the American Bar Association in 1886. <P>Butler's fear of municipal corruption is reflected in his service on an 1875 state commission investigating the issue. He was chosen for the commission by his longtime friend the Democratic Governor, Samuel J. Tilden. Butler and his fellow commissioners, which included prominent lawyer and family friend William Evarts, as well as journalist E.L. Godkin, the founding editor of <I>The Nation</I>, recommended that only taxpayers be allowed to vote in elections for municipal officials charged with regulating finances. This somewhat impractical proposal was not well received, but it indicates the extent of Butler's distaste for urban politics. His views were summarized in an address before the General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen in 1879 entitled, <I>Our Great Metropolis: Its Growth, Misgovernment and Needs.</I> <P>After Barney and Parsons withdrew from the firm on December 31, 1873 it was reconstituted on January 1, 1874 as Butler, Stillman & Hubbard. Both Stillman and Hubbard joined the firm as clerks during the Civil War. Thomas H. Hubbard, born in Hallowell, Maine in 1838, the son of a future governor of the state, graduated from Bowdoin College in 1857. In 1860, after being admitted to the Maine Bar, he went to the Albany Law School and was the first partner of the firm to attend law school. Hubbard had joined Barney, Butler, & Parsons in 1861 as the managing clerk. When commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Union army in 1862, Hubbard had taken a leave of absence from the firm. Hubbard had a distinguished war career and saw action in Louisiana and in General Philip Sheridan's Shenandoah Valley campaign in 1864. After receiving a field promotion to brigadier general, he left the army after Appomattox and was known thereafter as General Hubbard. He rejoined Barney, Butler & Parsons as a junior partner on January 1, 1867, where his primary duty was supervising the work carried on in the office. <P>Thomas E. Stillman replaced Hubbard in 1862 as chief clerk after Hubbard left for war service. He was born in New York City in 1837 and would eventually become the first native of New York City to become a partner of the firm. He graduated from Colgate College in 1859 and read the law with a local lawyer in Hamilton, New York. At first, Stillman worked closely with Butler on admiralty cases. He worked on a series of cases involving the <I>Circassian</I>, an especially "litigious steamer." (<I>Circassian</I>, 5 F. Cas. 702 (E.D.N.Y. 1867)(no. 2,722), 5 F. Cas. 703 (E.D.N.Y. 1869)(no. 2,724), (Wickes V.), 5 F. Cas. 689 (S.D.N.Y. 1872) (No. 2,720a), 5 F. Cas. 711 (C.C.S.D. N.Y. 1874)(No. 2,726.) The varied problems encountered by the <I>Circassian</I> involved the right of lien for supplies for a domestic vessel and the enforceability of such a lien in state and federal court, the right of a ship's master to give valid bottomry (a form of mortgage with the ship or its freight as security) and other sticky points of admiralty law. After completing the work on the <I>Circassian</I>, Stillman was an accomplished admiralty lawyer. <P>Butler, Stillman & Hubbard had a large general commercial practice. One of the more notable commercial transactions that involved the firm was the founding of the Central Trust Company. In 1873 the directors of the New York Guaranty and Indemnity Company, in the business of lending money against collateral security, wanted to expand into other lines of business, but were prohibited from doing so by their restrictive charter. Until 1887, when New York finally passed a general incorporation law, every corporation had to come before the legislature and argue for the specific provisions they wanted in their charter, a time-consuming and expensive procedure that usually involved a great amount of political dealing with legislators. To avoid this morass, Butler searched for an inactive company that had a broader charter than the New York Guaranty and Indemnity Company. In 1875, Butler and ten other individuals purchased the charter of the inactive Central Trust Company for $10,000. This new company was recapitalized at $1,000,000, with most of the money being advanced by the New York Guaranty and Indemnity Company, which acquired the charter of the old company. The Central Trust Company was one of the largest clients of the Butler firm. In 1887, to facilitate daily contacts with the Central Trust Company, the firm moved to offices at 54 Wall Street, in the same building as the Company. <P>Both Hubbard and Stillman were also involved in a variety of other commercial cases. Stillman was active in the litigation between the Sultan of Turkey and the Providence Tool Company over rifles sold to the Ottoman Empire. At the time, in the late 1870s, the Ottoman Empire was actively involved in the purchase of western armaments with the aim of preserving their increasingly embattled holdings in the Balkans. One of the reasons the Ottoman Empire wanted arms at this time was to suppress an 1875 rebellion in Bosnia and Herzegovina -- an action that led to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. <P>Stillman and Hubbard also became experts on railroad reorganizations. Stillman, for example, handled the reorganization of a $15 million mortgage of the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad. In 1888 Stillman and Hubbard turned their attention to railroad investments full-time when they were hired to manage the holdings of Mary Searles, the widow of Mark Hopkins, one of the leading railroad entrepreneurs in the decades following the Civil War. Though born in New York State -- he was a boyhood chum of Hiram Barney -- Hopkins made his fortune in California. With Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington he was a co-creator of the Central Pacific Railroad. When he died in 1878 his estate, estimated at $20 million, with one of its prizes a huge block of Central Pacific stock, went to his widow. After almost a decade of newspaper articles about "America's Richest Widow," in 1887 she married Edward T. Searles who wanted her to systematize her extensive holdings and hired Hubbard and Stillman for the task. This proved so absorbing of their time and so rewarding financially that they eventually withdrew from the firm, at first informally and then in fact, to manage the estate and related railroad investments full-time. Though they technically remained partners until 1896, they had been inactive in the firm's affairs for several years. Their leaving apparently led to some bitterness on the part of Butler. He allegedly remarked that, "Stillman, Hubbard and I for many years fished together in the same boat, but when they hooked an exceedingly large fish they decided that they alone would land it." <P>Hubbard's career after leaving the firm was quite diverse. At different times he served as president of the Houston & Texas Railroad, first vice president of the Southern Pacific and president of the Pacific Improvement Company which owned the Guatemala Central Railroad. He later turned his attention to the Far East and built railroads in the Philippines and supervised the collection of the indemnification to the United States government in the aftermath of the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China. He was also interested in the Far North. Hubbard was a major backer of Captain Robert Peary in his expeditions to reach the North Pole. Peary, in return, named the northernmost extension of Axel Heiberg Island, high in the Canadian Arctic (well over 80š N in latitude), Cape Thomas Hubbard. An overseer and trustee of his alma mater, Bowdoin College, from 1874 to 1915, he donated funds for a new library for the college, Hubbard Hall. Hubbard died on May 19, 1915. His partner, Stillman, had a successful career as a corporate lawyer following his disassociation with the Butler firm and died in Liseiux, France on September 4, 1906 as the result of injuries he suffered in an automobile accident earlier that summer. <P>Through the end of the century, William Allen Butler was the senior partner and dominant figure at the firm. Like his father before him, Butler was a distinguished appellate jurist and was one of the leading Supreme Court lawyers of his time. Between 1868 and 1894 he appeared before the high court thirty-four times, including three cases in an eight-day period when he was sixty-five years old. Almost one-third of the thirty-four cases he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court were not handled by him previously, an indication of his reputation as an appellate attorney. This connection to the Supreme Court only seems fitting for the son of a former attorney general of the United States. William Allen Butler remembered attending sessions of the Marshall Court as a boy and was befriended in his adolescence by Marshall's successor, Chief Justice Roger Taney. Taney is primarily remembered for the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857 and Butler had little good to say about his jurisprudence. However, in his autobiography he included a charming reminiscence of Taney as a kindly, paternal figure who took interest in the young child of his associate. <P>Despite an increasingly diverse practice, the Butler firm was still primarily known as an admiralty firm. Admiralty law was undergoing a significant transformation in the late nineteenth century, in part because of the efforts of Butler and other lawyers to expand the scope of admiralty jurisprudence. In seventeenth and eighteenth century England, admiralty court jurisdiction was largely limited to disputes arising in the tidewater and on the high seas, including such situations as collisions, salvage and sailors' liens for wages. In the United States Constitution, the federal courts were given power in "cases of admiralty and marine jurisdiction." In a way unique to the concept of federalism, the federal courts fashioned an ever-expanding geographic scope for admiralty jurisdiction, broadening it in a series of decisions through 1860 to cover navigable rivers and inland lakes. In the second half of the century, a series of cases expanded the ambit of the admiralty court to cover a wider range of actionable matters, including marine insurance contracts, bills of lading and charter parties. In effect, these decisions granted the admiralty courts jurisdiction over almost all commercial matters vital to the maritime industry. <P>Butler viewed his role in the expansion of admiralty as his most important achievement. He was proudest of his role in the litigation of <I>The Scotland</I> (105 U.S. 24 [1881]), an English steamer that collided with a British bark carrying a load of guano just outside New York harbor. (Guano is the dried excrement of sea birds, found primarily on several small rainless islands off the coast of Peru. In the nineteenth century guano was widely used as fertilizer and was a major import into the United States.) The collision destroyed both vessels. Butler, representing <I>The Scotland</I>, which was at fault in the collision, argued that, because of the wreck of the vessel, it was exempt from liability damages. Although the district and circuit courts decided against <I>The Scotland</I>, Butler successfully argued their case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Some of Butler's other important cases included <I>The Pennsylvania</I> (19 Wall 125 [1873]), <I>The Lottawanna</I> (21 Wall 558 [1874]) and <I>Liverpool Steam Co. v. Phenix Insurance Co.</I> (129 U.S. 397 [1889]). In this last case, the high court found that a contract made by an American ship owner for a shipment to Liverpool, to be paid for in pound sterling, was covered by American admiralty laws. <P>After Butler, the firm's most prominent admiralty attorney was Wilhelmus Mynderse, who became a partner in 1880. Wilhelmus Mynderse was born in Seneca Falls, New York in 1849, one year after the famous women's rights convention was held in the town. Mynderse succeeded Butler as the firm's foremost litigator and argued sixteen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court between 1881 and 1901. Many of Mynderse's largest cases involved maritime liability claims. One of the most important involved the collision of the British steamers <I>Eagle Point</I> and <I>Biela</I> in heavy fog on the high seas about 150 miles east of Sandy Hook. The <I>Biela</I> sank and her cargo was totally lost. The district court found that the <I>Biela</I> was at fault, having proceeded at excessive speed in dangerous conditions. If the English rule of damages with respect to cargo were used, the owners of the <I>Biela</I> would receive only a small portion of their damages. If the American rule were employed, the owners of the <I>Biela</I> would be entitled to compensation for all of their heavy losses. Mynderse, representing the <I>Eagle Point</I>, argued for the applicability of the English rules. He lost the case in the district court, but the decision was reversed by the circuit court which held that the English rule applied; a writ of certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied (114 Fed. 372; 120 Fed. 449; 142 Fed. 453; 189 U.S. 510 [1903]). <P>Another interesting maritime case handled by the firm was <I>Mencke v. A Cargo of Sugar ex British Ship Benlarig et al.</I> (99 F. 298 [1900]), heard in federal district court in 1900. The <I>Benlarig</I>, an unusually high-masted, square-rigged iron ship with a cargo of Java sugar, was attempting to make delivery to a sugar refinery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The mainmast, requiring a total clearance of almost 150 feet (the mast stood 139 feet 10 inches above the deck), could not pass under the Brooklyn Bridge -- which crossed the East River at a height of only 135 feet -- and the Hell Gate passage was seen as too dangerous for such a large vessel. The only way to get the sugar to the wharf was off-loading the cargo and transporting it up the East River by lighterage, and the legal issue concerned who was obliged to pay for the transportation, the shipping company or the sugar importer. Lawyers from the Butler firm successfully argued that despite the words of the charter requiring delivery of the sugar at a site designated by the importer, this site had to be one approachable by the vessel without physical damage to the masts. <P> <HR> <CENTER> <TABLE cellPadding=30> <TBODY> <TR> <TD align=middle><A href="welcome.htm"><IMG alt=Home border=0 height=49 src="gifs/home3.gif" width=50><BR><FONT size=-1></FONT></A> <P></P></TD> <TD align=middle><A href="histmenu.htm"><IMG alt=History border=0 height=49 src="gifs/history3.gif" width=64><BR><FONT size=-1></FONT></A> <P></P></TD> <TD align=middle><A href="civilwar.htm"><IMG alt=Previous border=0 height=49 src="gifs/previous.gif" width=72><BR><FONT size=-1></FONT></A> <P></P></TD> <TD align=middle><A href="bnjm.htm"><IMG alt=Next border=0 height=49 src="gifs/next.gif" width=72><BR><FONT size=-1></FONT></A> <P></P></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></CENTER></BODY></HTML>
