-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.thacherproffitt.com/intro.htm <A HREF="http://www.thacherproffitt.com/intro.htm">Introduction</A> ----- The firm was involved in the founding of the Central Trust Company, among other things. Just two of the articles at site. Some interesting and relevant histories. Om K ---- The history of Thacher Proffitt & Wood begins in 1848, when Benjamin Franklin Butler and his son, William Allen Butler, opened a legal practice at 29 Wall Street in New York City. The firm prospered from the beginning and rapidly emerged as one of the leading commercial and admiralty firms in New York City. With almost 150 years of history, Thacher Proffitt & Wood is currently a mid-sized firm with approximately 160 lawyers and remains a leader of the commercial bar. Its story parallels the growth and change of the economy of New York, from the mercantile port city of its early years, to a center of banking and finance in the second half of the twentieth century. Today, Thacher Proffitt & Wood has a global reach and pursues legal and business matters for the modern corporation worldwide. From the outset, great events and figures have touched and shaped the history of Thacher Proffitt & Wood. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ===== from: http://www.thacherproffitt.com/civilwar.htm <A HREF="http://www.thacherproffitt.com/civilwar.htm">The Coming of the Civil War</A> ----- In 1851, as the firm's business expanded, James Humphrey joined the firm. Its name was changed to Barney, Humphrey, & Butler. (Two years later in 1853, the firm moved from 29 Wall Street into larger quarters at 111 Broadway.) Humphrey was born in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1811, moved to Brooklyn in 1838 and became active in political and social affairs there, serving as an alderman of the Fourth Ward in 1848 and 1849. He then served two years as the corporation counsel for the city of Brooklyn. Despite somewhat fragile health, he won election to the House of Representatives from Brooklyn in 1858 as a Republican. After two defeats, in 1860 and 1862, he was re-elected to the House in 1864, but died during his second term in 1866. With the withdrawal of Humphrey, G eorge Parsons was made a partner of the firm in 1859, now called Barney, Butler & Parsons. Parsons was an active litigator and a specialist in fire insurance law. His important cases included Insurance Company v. Boon (95 U.S. 117 [1877]), a protracted case that stemmed from an outbreak of the bitter local guerrilla warfare during the Civil War in Missouri and involved the issue of whether an insurance company was liable for damages due to acts of war. The guerrilla conflict in Missouri, notorious for its cruelty, caused extensive damage to property and killed and injured numerous persons on both sides of the conflict. Benjamin Franklin Butler continued to maintain an office with his son at 29 Wall Street. As an appellate lawyer he remained quite active in the profession. He was the lead attorney along with William Evarts and Charles O'Conor, two of the leading figures in the New York bar, in the complex bankruptcy proceedings of the North American Trust and Banking Company. The Banking Company had been formed in 1840 primarily to attract English investors. When the bank failed, the American stockholders, who stood to lose all their investments, tried to void the rights of the English bondholders to the remaining assets of the bank. (In bankruptcy proceedings bondholders generally have a claim to any remaining assets superior to that of stockholders.) The case took several years to complete, including hearings which took an entire session of the New York Court of Appeals. When it was finally decided in 1857, it covered almost 300 pages in the court reporter (Curtis v. Leavitt, 15 N.Y. [1857]). Butler, successfully representing the English bondholders, received the substantial fee, for the time, of $17,500 for his services. In his last important case, Butler defended Captain Uriah P. Levy (1792-1862) in court-martial proceedings. Levy was an old friend of Butler's and, like him, was a passionate Jeffersonian Democrat. (Perhaps Levy's greatest service to the nation was purchasing Monticello from Jefferson's debt-ridden heirs in 1836, thereby preserving it for posterity.) After looking into the court-martial charges, Butler was convinced that the allegations against Levy were primarily the result of religious prejudice against Jews. Butler's pleadings on Levy's behalf led the Court of Inquiry in December 1857 to restore Levy to the rank of captain with full back pay. By this time, Butler, the life-long Democrat, had joined the new Republican Party organized in 1854. After supporting Van Buren on the Free Soil ticket in 1848, he returned to the Democratic fold for the next election, hoping that Franklin Pierce could contain the North-South schism. It was a vain hope. One of the elder Butler's final public appearances was in City Hall Park in May 1854 to denounce the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened the possibility that these territories, north of the old dividing line between free and slave states, could enter the Union as slave states. In 1856 he supported the first Republican presidential candidate, John Fremont. By this time, Butler, though only sixty years old, was a tired and sick man. Benjamin Franklin Butler died in Paris during his first European vacation on November 8, 1858. Barney was also active politically in the 1850s, supporting the Free Soil candidate in 1852. He was a delegate to the first Republican convention where he supported the militant abolitionist Charles Sumner instead of the eventual candidate, John Fremont. During a trip to Chicago in the summer of 1859, Barney, there representing the mortgage trustees of the Chicago and Northern Railroad, was introduced to another railroad lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, of Springfield, Illinois. He was impressed by Lincoln's courtroom skill and the two men struck up a friendship, finding they shared very similar political views. Barney became Lincoln's legal representative in New York and Lincoln undertook some legal business for Barney in Illinois. Lincoln, occasionally mentioned as a presidential possibility after his debates with Stephen Douglas in the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign, was still largely unknown outside of Illinois. Though Lincoln's oratorical skill had attracted national attention, he had lost the election to Douglas. To increase Lincoln's visibility, Barney invited him to New York City in early 1860 for an address at the Cooper Institute to introduce him to eastern Republican leaders. There was bitter factional fighting in the New York Republican Party between former Free Soil Democrats and former Whigs. Barney, a leader in the former Free Soil Democrat faction, hoped that by boosting Lincoln he would provide another roadblock to the widely advertised presidential ambitions of New York Republican and former Whig, William Seward. Barney's gambit succeeded. Lincoln, who was unfamiliar with New York City, stayed with his new friend and was escorted around by Barney. Lincoln's speech, one of the most memorable and important of his career, made him a national political figure and played a significant role in providing him with the recognition that he needed to obtain the Republican presidential nomination in Chicago that May. Both Hiram Barney and William Allen Butler were active in the election of Lincoln and in the tumultuous post-election period that preceded the outbreak of the Civil War. Barney raised $35,000 for the Lincoln campaign in New York State. Upon Lincoln's election, the Lower South seceded. Lincoln tried to keep the rest of the nation behind him and, to that end, he selected a cabinet that reflected a diversity of Free Soil opinions. In January 1860, Barney and several other New York Republicans were invited to Springfield, Illinois to make suggestions for Lincoln's cabinet. Barney's proposals, carefully balancing former Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats, were almost identical to the cabinet selections later announced by Lincoln. William Allen Butler also had a role in the making of Lincoln's cabinet. After Salmon P. Chase was named treasury secretary, Butler heard from a close friend that Chase had recently lost a great deal of money and could not accept the cabinet position because of his strained financial circumstances. Butler arranged for his father-in-law, Charles Marshall, to provide a $25,000 loan to Chase. Chase accepted the cabinet position and repaid the loan at maturity. As the Civil War unfolded, Barney continued to be a trusted advisor of Lincoln. According to Barney's memoirs, he was about to ask Edwin M. Stanton, a Pittsburgh attorney, to join his law firm when he heard that Lincoln wished to drop secretary of war Simon Cameron from the cabinet. Barney suggested to Lincoln that Stanton would be a fine replacement. Lincoln heeded the advice and Barney, Butler & Parson's loss was the nation's gain. In 1862, during a visit to Washington, Barney evidently became one of the first persons to read the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in the rebel states. Barney recounted his discussion with Lincoln in his memoirs: Now I think we will not be interrupted . . . I have something to show you which I think will please you. He then drew from the left breast pocket of the dress coat which he wore a manuscript and read it to me. It was his first emancipation proclamation. He said he would be very thankful for any suggestion which he said he approved and would adopt. Lincoln named Hiram Barney, on April 8, 1861, the collector of the customs of the Port of New York. Barney did not ask for the job and it is not entirely clear why he was chosen for the position. Whether Lincoln did Barney a favor by this appointment is doubtful. The chief collector position certainly was a powerful and important job. The New York Customs House was the largest federal office in the country, employing over 1,100 men, and chief collector was, after a cabinet post, probably the most prestigious position in the federal government. Before there was a federal income tax, the collection of customs and excise taxes accounted for a substantial portion of the federal revenue and the collector of the customs of the Port of New York collected vast sums of money. Unfortunately for Barney, the Customs House in New York was perennially troubled by scandals. Corruption invariably follows the collection of duties and tariffs. The chief collector had to wade through an ocean of office-seekers soliciting patronage positions. Scandals, fairly or unfairly, tarnished the reputations of many chief collectors. During Barney's tenure, the surreptitious activities of wartime profiteers and the pressure on Barney to maintain the Union blockade of Confederate ship traffic made the position more difficult. Barney had his share of successes in the position. These included help for the Italian government in constructing two armor-plated warships in a New York shipyard. For the most part, however, his tenure was an unhappy one. In a move that was widely criticized, Barney assigned to himself and George Parsons a $21,000 labor contract for the hauling of some of the goods that had passed through customs. The contract, while not illegal, was certainly unseemly. Barney also failed to exercise sufficient control over his subordinates. Henry Stanton, husband of the women's rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was an assistant collector to Barney. Stanton supervised the selling of certification bonds to ship owners that stipulated that their cargo neither originated nor was destined for Confederate ports. Stanton sold some of the certificates surreptitiously. Soon, some of the bonded cargo was discovered on Confederate blockade runners. Much to the consternation of Barney, it became a major scandal. Another assistant collector, Albert Palmer, was arrested in early 1864 for selling Customs House appointments. Though he was not implicated in either scandal, pressure on Barney to resign mounted. His old enemies among New York Republicans, including William Seward, led the chorus calling for his ouster. Though Barney still had the confidence of Lincoln, he resigned in April 1864. Barney never appears to have recovered from the turbulent years of the collectorship and withdrew from both the New York political and legal worlds thereafter. Having long been a speculator, Barney increasingly tended to his own investments after the war. After 1864 his efforts on behalf of his western land investments expanded and -- somewhat strangely for a temperance advocate -- he started planting and cultivating vineyards in Iowa. He spent less and less time on the firm's legal business and withdrew from his law partnership with Butler in 1873. Thereafter, he spent much time in Iowa with his wine business, which he was obliged to sell in 1882 at a considerable loss after Iowa passed a state temperance ordinance. He spent his final years in Westchester and New York City, dying on May 18, 1895. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ===== from: http://www.thacherproffitt.com/bfirm.htm <A HREF="http://www.thacherproffitt.com/bfirm.htm">The Butler Firm</A> ----- Butler, Stillman & Hubbard (1874-1896) With 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 pro fessionalization 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 80 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. ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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