Yuba
County
Biographies
STEPHEN
J. FIELD
An
almost continual service, commencing with Alcalde in
Marysville in 1849; legislator, code commissioner, Justice and Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court of California, and for a quarter of a century Associate
Justice of the United States Supreme Court, has give Stephen J. Field the honor
of having done more to mould, formulate and establish our code of law and
jurisprudence than any other one of our distinguished pioneers. He is a native
of Connecticut; a son of a noted minister, and one of the members of a family
of Fields whose achievements and intellectual greatness have given them a
national reputation as men pre-eminently in the front rank in their respective
professions. At the age of thirteen years, Justice Field was sent to Greece and
Rome, to more thoroughly acquire the Latin and Greek languages and study the
classics. His extensive and practical education enabled him to grasp and cope
with the new order of surroundings incident to the settlement of a new country,
where the worst elements of the world in the mad excitement of gold and silver
mining undertook to establish mob rule and clannish aggrandizement. It required
keen intellect, sagacious statesmanship and courage to invent and enact a
system of law to govern and control the cosmopolitan and depraved men who
gathered from the ends of the earth to dig for gold in our gulches, ravines and
mountains. His work as a legislator, while a young man, in aiding in passing a
law that gave to each individual a right and protection under enacted district
and neighborhood laws will remain unto all time in the light of experience a
more honored service as a public servant than all his appreciated labors as an
expounder of Constitutional and territorial law. His early education in foreign
lands and subsequent experience as an Argonaut, has
made him a typical Californian in whom we have the highest admiration and
pride. He has been prominently before the people as a candidate for President.
His judicial work forms a goodly portion of the judicial history of our State,
and his pointed and well-written decisions will be quoted with approbation in
all the years that shall come under our system of government. It seems quite
appropriate that he should have been selected as one of the trustees of the
Leland Stanford, Junior, University.
Transcribed By: Cecelia M. Setty.
Source: “Illustrated Fraternal Directory Including
Educational Institutions on the Pacific Coast”, Page 28, Publ. Bancroft Co.,
San Francisco. Cal. 1889.
© 2012 Cecelia
M. Setty.
Golden Nugget Library's Yuba County Biographies