Henry Clay Caldwell

Henry Clay Caldwell (born in Marshall County, West Virginia, 4 September, 1835 - died February 15, 1915) was a jurist and soldier. He was buried in Oakland Cemetery, Little Rock, AR.

Early years

He moved with his parents to Iowa in 1837, where his father, Van Caldwell, once a wealthy Virginia farmer, took land in the "Black Hawk Purchase" at Bentonsport and operated the first licensed ferry on the Des Moines River; his mother was Susan Moffit Caldwell. He was educated in the common schools of Iowa, and began reading law in the offices of Knapp and Wright in Keosauqua, IA, at the age of fifteen. He was admitted to the bar in 1857, according to some sources, and became a junior partner in the firm.

Career

He was prosecuting attorney of Van Buren County, IA from 1856-58, and a member of the legislature from 1859-61. In 1854 he married Harriet Benton.

He enlisted in the 3rd Iowa Volunteer Cavalry, rising to the rank of Colonel, and attained command of the unit. He served with distinction at the Battle of Kirksville, and he led the cavalry forces that captured Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 10, 1863. He resigned his commission June 4, 1864.

Subsequently, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Caldwell a United States District Judge for the Eastern District of Arkansas. He remained a district judge until 1891, when President Benjamin Harrison appointed him to the newly-created United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, where he became that court's first Chief Judge. He retired from the bench in 1903, and died in Los Angeles. At his death, Judge Caldwell was hailed as the most prominent citizen of Little Rock, the city he had once captured.

Analysis

Known as "Clay" to intimates, Caldwell was mildly progressive as a jurist. He once gave law books to Scipio Africanus Jones, a young black man with the (ultimately very successful) ambition to become a lawyer, who dropped in on him one day unannounced. He ordered the release of the radical journalist Moses Harman, who had argued for the abolition of government, religion, and marriage, on a writ of error.

His minority opinion in Hopkins vs. Oxley Stave Company (1897) is cited as an eloquent defense of the right to trial by jury, which, he observed, is always regarded with hostility by wealth and aristocracy, corporations and trusts: "A distrust of the jury is a distrust of the people, and a distrust of the people means the overthrow of the government our fathers founded. Against the exercise of this jurisdiction the Constitution of the United States interposes an insurmountable barrier [...] These mandatory provisions of the Constitution are not to be nullified by mustering against them a little horde of equity maxims and obsolete precedents originating in a monarchical government having no written constitution."

ee also

References

*Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography, 1888
*Harper’s Weekly, January 1864
*Joseph A. Mudd, With Porter in Northeast Missouri (1909)

Further reading

*Caldwell, Henry C. "Trial by Judge and Jury." American Federationist, 17:385-89, May 1910. "Deals with contempt of court cases and censorship by injunction in labor disputes."

*"Railroad Receiverships in the Federal Courts of the United States: Remarks of the Hon. Henry C. Caldwell before the Greenleaf Club." St. Louis, 1896. "concerns creditors' rights"