l Parker was born at Jaffrey, N. H. After studying in the academy
at Groton, where the late President James Walker was one of his
schoolmates, he entered the Sophomore class at Dartmouth College in
February, 1809, at the early age of thirteen, and graduated in 1811,
not yet seventeen years of age. After his graduation he studied law at
Keene, and with his brother Edmund at Amherst, and entered the bar of
Cheshire County, at the October term in 1817, at the former place,
where he at once engaged in practice.

In the year 1821, contemplating a change of residence, he visited the
West, and was admitted to practice in the Circuit Court of the United
States at Columbus, Ohio, in January, 1822; but, fortunately for his
native State, returned in the latter year, and devoted himself
assiduously to his chosen pursuit.

Free from domestic cares, affianced only to his profession, he early
gained an honorable position by the steady exercise of natural
abilities well adapted to its pursuit. He was industrious, thorough,
minute, painstaking, cautious, persistent, and untiring. "Judge
Parker's mode of practice in the trial of cases," writes an early
professional associate, who still enjoys a ripe and honored age, "to
take down the testimony in full of the witnesses in writing, and to
cross-examine them at great length as to all the circumstances they
might know relative to the case, contributed greatly to change the
previous practice of the witness' first telling his story of what he
knew, followed by a brief cross-examination, with only a few notes,
made by the counsel, of the leading points of the testimony."

Of Judge Parker's judicial life in New Hampshire, Charles Sumner, in
1844, wrote: "It will not be unjust to his associates to distinguish.
Mr. Chief Justice Parker as entitled to peculiar honor for his
services on the bench. He may be justly regarded as one of the ablest
judges of the country."

The event which brought Judge Parker more conspicuously before the
public, and undoubtedly contributed justly and largely to give him a
wide and established reputation for vigor, independence, learning, and
capacity, was his controversy with 14 Mr. Justice Story of the Supreme
Court of the United States in regard to the proper construction of a
clause--it might even be said the meaning of a word [lien]--in the
Bankrupt Law of 1841; a controversy which became political in other
hands, and threatened to reach the magnitude of a confl