He
desired me to go with him to Stephens's house (where the judge
boarded during the court), as one of the garrison, to help defend
it. The proposition looked absurd to me and it seemed that, if I
went, it might subject me to ridicule. No one likes to be
ridiculed; at least, I do not.

It may be remarked, in passing, that Judge Tourgee had offended
the lawyers, because he boarded with Stephens. They considered it
beneath the dignity of so high an official to make his home with
a man so low in the social scale, and they were all the more
hostile toward the judge because he would do this. They insisted
that they would have treated him with respect, if not with
cordiality, had he not shown these degraded tastes. As it was,
they had no more courtesy for him than for Stephens, believing
the judge to have disgraced his office.

It was the effort of the lawyers of North Carolina, in those
days, to avoid close contact with the populace and to preserve an
esprit de corps. They believed that their only associates, on
terms of equality, should be of their own order, as the clergy or
medical profession, representing an educated aristocracy. The
masses were illiterate, unpolished and, in the estimation of the
lawyers, unfit for companionship with the cultivated classes,
whose policy it was to inspire the plain people with profound
respect for their superiors.

The statements here made of early ideas and feelings, largely
result from conversations with Col. Thomas Ruffin, a man of
aristocratic lineage and unusual powers of mind. He was a son of
the late Chief Justice Ruffin, of the Supreme Court of North
Carolina, and afterward himself was an associate justice of that
eminent tribunal. He informed me of the sentiment among the
lawyers against Tourgee, because of his intimacy with Stephens.
And once, when as a matter of course, with my New York education,
I had offered to make oath to an affidavit, in a Caswell county
lawsuit, wherein I was associated with Col. Ruffin, he advised me
against it, and said it had been the custom, in North Carolina,
for lawyers never to be sworn, in the conduct of their cases, it
being considered that their mere word was sufficient; and so, as
I afterward understood, the judges generally so regarded it.

Any one