MISCELLANEOUS PUBLICATIONS.

Moral and religious instruction in public schools. Madison: 1858. 4to. pp. 4.

Pre-historic Wisconsin antiquities. [Madison]: 1881. 8vo. pp. 4.

Sketches of Arthur Campbell and George Rogers Clark. In Appleton's Encyclopædia of American Biography, v. 1, 1888.

IN MANUSCRIPT, UNPUBLISHED.

The Mecklenburg declaration: its origin, history and actors. With a bibliography of its literature, and explanatory documents. pp. 474, folio. (Joint author, with C. W. Butterfield.) Border forays and adventures: being romantic passages in American history, embracing the most striking episodes and incidents from the first settlement of the country to the close of the Revolution. From the frontiers of New York and Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. About 400 pp., folio.

ASAHEL FINCH.

[Memorial sketch by A. M. Thomson, presented at the Thirty-ninth annual meeting of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 10, 1891.]

Asahel Finch was born in Genoa, Cayuga county, New York, February 14, 1803; died at Milwaukee, April 4, 1883. His paternal grandfather was one of the first settlers in the Wyoming valley, Pennsylvania, and one of the unfortunate victims of the bloody Indian massacre that took place there in 1778. The subject of this sketch received his education in the common schools and in Middlebury academy, located at Genesee, now Wyoming county, New York. In 1830, being then but twenty-two years of age, he was united in wedlock with Miss Mary De Forest Bristol, by whom he had five children, only one of whom survives — Mrs. Mary Papendick, of Milwaukee, who is also childless, and is the last of the line.

In the same year that Mr. Finch married, he removed to the state of Michigan, where he engaged in the mercantile business. That pursuit not being congenial to his taste he abandoned it after a trial of three years, and began the study of law in the office of Orange Butler, of Adrian, Michigan. In 1837, as a member of the Michigan legislature, he aided in settling the boundary dispute between Ohio and Michigan, which at one time threatened to provoke bloodshed. In 1839, he settled in Milwaukee, where he resided until his death. His first law partnership was with H. N. Wells and Hans Crocker, under the firm name of Wells, Crocker & Finch, which continued three years. In 1842, he formed a partnership with the late W. P. Lynde, under the name of Finch & Lynde. In 1857, B. K. Miller and Matt H. Finch were admitted to the company, and the firm was thereafter known

for over forty years, as Finches, Lynde & Miller. It is no disparagement to other eminent lawyers to say that during the life-time of the two senior partners it was the strongest law firm in the northwest. Mr. Finch left it the oldest firm of the kind in the United States. At the time of Mr. Finch's death the record showed that the company had been interested in more than ten thousand cases in the various courts of record in the city and state, many of them railroad suits, involving the title to property of immense value.

For over forty years Mr. Finch was in constant and successful practice, meeting not only all the able lawyers in the west as opponents at the bar, but some of the most distinguished members of the legal profession from the east, who had been sent to Wisconsin to look after the interests of non-resident clients. He seldom found himself overmatched. He was always regarded as an able and upright lawyer, with such a sense of justice, such a conscientious regard for the right, and such a strict fidelity to the highest ideals, that it was said of him that no amount of money could secure his services for the wrong side. His professional habit gave the lie to the oft-repeated assertion that a lawyer can be hired to undertake any kind of a case, provided the fee is large enough. He had no sliding scale of morality that excused a member of the legal profession for doing what was considered dishonorable in other men. If the law made it a crime to secrete stolen goods, he held it to be wrong to aid the real thief to escape by the technicalities and loop-holes of the statute. He was one of the kind that could not be hired to defend a confessed criminal to defeat the ends of justice. His conception of the proper function of jurisprudence in modern civilization was, to secure the highest good attainable by organized society. Had he been elevated to the bench he would not have held the scales of justice blindfold, but with a clear and steady look for what was right between man and man.

He had such an extensive practice that his clients were not impoverished by his charges after he had won their suits. He often refused to prosecute poor men. He aided in the settlement of more disputes by arbitration outside of

the courts, than any other man ever in practice in Milwaukee. He often put aside large prospective fees for himself and his firm by advising belligerent litigants to keep out of court. Had Diogenes gone among the members of the bar with his lantern, in search of an honest lawyer, he would have put out his light and returned home satisfied, after meeting Asahel Finch!

Although Mr. Finch was long recognized as the head of the most important law firm west of the great lakes, and was familiarly called the father of the Wisconsin bar, he was not so much engrossed with the responsible duties of his profession that he did not promptly discharge every obligation that was laid upon him as a citizen of the city and state. When he came to Milwaukee in 1839, the population of the territory was no more than is now contained by one of a dozen Wisconsin towns outside of Milwaukee; and the villages of Juneau and Kilbourntown combined did not number as many souls as now find their homes in any one of the eighteen wards in the city. Everything pertaining to a civilized community and statehood was in embryo. Wisconsin was not admitted into the Union until nine years later. In politics he was a whig, being once the whig candidate for congress, and he always adhered to that party until it was dissolved after the disastrous defeat of Gen. Winfield Scott in the well-remembered campaign of 1852. He aided in the formation of the republican party when the attempt was made to carry slavery into the new territories of the west, under the Dred-Scott decision of the supreme court, and the repeal of the Missouri compromise act, and supported John C. Fremont for president in 1856. And when the south finally rebelled and attempted to dissolve the Union by an appeal to the bloody arbitrament of the sword, Mr. Finch supported the government with voice, pen and purse to the best of his ability.

When Mr. Finch settled in Milwaukee, religious societies were to be organized out of the discordant elements that are always present in new countries; churches were to be built with the scanty funds gathered by the contributionbox; preachers were sent out by home missionary societies

at the east, and the slow and tedious process of laying the foundations of a great commonwealth was commenced. In all this grand work Asahel Finch took an active and prominent part. Probably it is safe to say that no layman ever set foot on the soil of Wisconsin, who helped the churches of all denominations, in proportion to his means, as liberally as he. In the church he was quite as conspicuous as at the bar. He was an early communicant of the present popular and prosperous Plymouth church of Milwaukee; and for forty years was its steadfast friend through all its vicissitudes and trials, supporting it cheerfully with voice and material aid. Although a strict Congregationalist and a stanch defender of its democratic form of church government, he was neither bigot nor partisan in religion, but recognized the upright man as his brother, no matter how much his creed differed from his own. His donations for the support of religion were scattered freely among all evangelical denominations that needed help, and many an impoverished society was indebted to his generosity for assistance in time of keen distress. His public benefactions did not divert his attention from the claims of the destitute in the humblest walks of life. He delighted in relieving the wants of the poor without letting one hand know what the other did. His good deeds are not all known except to the God whom he tried to serve; and like Abou Ben Adhem he served Him best by "loving his fellow men." He never asked "Who is my neighbor?" nor, "Am I my brother's keeper?" but tried "the luxury of doing good." In the dark and cruel days of slavery, his ear was ever open to the cry of the black man in bondage, and he became an active director in the underground railway, whose terminus was on Mason and Dixon's line in the south, and in Canada on the north. Many a trembling fugitive, fleeing from his cruel taskmaster, was aided on his hazardous journey toward the north star by a friend on the shore of Lake Michigan whose name he had never heard. He remembered those in bonds as bound with them. In short, he followed in the footsteps of his Master as nearly as he could.