The barbarous system of "pleadings" was then in full vogue, though soon
to be weeded out even in its parent England, and the law to be made a
trial of facts instead of traverses, demurrers, avoidances, rebutters
and surrebutters, churned out of the skim milk of words. Clayton's
pleadings require a bold, dull mind to read them now, but he tired his
adversaries out, and his cousin, Chief-Justice Clayton, who was jealous
of him, had yet to decide in his favor.
Then, after the lapse of years, the issue came to trial at the old
Dutch-English town of New Castle, and from the magnitude of the damages
claimed, the weight and number of counsel, and the novelty of trying a
great corporation, it interested the lawyers and burdened the
newspapers, and was popularly supposed to belong to the class of French
spoliation claims, or squaring-the-circle problems--something that would
be going on at the final end of the world.
"Never you mind, Bob Frame! Walter Jones is a great advocate, but, Goy!
he don't know a Delaware jury. I'll get my country-seat, up here on the
New Castle hills, out of this case," Clayton said, as he pitched quoits
with his fellow-lawyers from Washington and Philadelphia, on the green
battery where the Philadelphia steamer came in with the Southern
passengers for the little stone-silled railroad.
John Randel, Jr., had ruined a fine engineer, to become a litigious man
all his life.
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