The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 45, July 1941 - April, 1942 Page: 235
409 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Jonas Harrison, Legendary and Historical
language wrote the motion to quash the indictment. With this
document filed and before him, in quiet cultivated tones and
purest English, he addressed the court upon its merits. He had
now become a totally different being, as it were, his very vest-
ments and whole appearance of person taking on a new sem-
blance and character. Within a few minutes, in the dead quiet
of the room, the court, the lawyers, and the laymen knew that
a great lawyer and scholar was addressing the court. Every
sentence was not only ornamented with the purity and dignity
of broad scholarship but was a shrewd and penetrating lance
of legal learning. With easy readiness he invoked, whenever
needed, the dead as well as the living languages. He spoke
without dramatics, but with the consummate skill and mastery
of one who spoke with authority, and in his congenial element.
The case, however, went to the jury and Mr. Harrison, a
moment ago an uncouth, unlettered and slouchy backwoodsman,
gave a new lesson in the art and function of cross-examination;
devoid of all baser craftiness and cunning, of crude brow-
beating and bulldozing, he introduced the loftier skill in cross-
examination that penetrates and searches, exposing the lie and
revealing the truth.
The evidence in, the first argument of the state's counsel
closed, Mr. Harrison arose and began his address to the jury.
With the great anonymous intellect-exhibiting high culture
and scholarship with every period, long brooding and inactive,
now blazing forth in action, grand in dignity and superiority,
he likewise established a new ethical standard in forensic debate
and in the trial of criminal causes in the raw jurisprudence
of the new republic.
Immediately upon the conclusion of the state's closing argu-
ment. and the reading of the court's charge to the jury, Mr.
Harrison, unobtrusively and without a word to anybody, left
the court room and without waiting for the jury's verdict
mounted his horse and started on his journey for home, leaving
all behind in a state of mind compounded of consternation,
bewilderment and exalted fascination.
Major West sometime later discovering his departure, at once
set off in pursuit, and toward nightfall overtook Mr. Harrison
astride his nag, homeward bound, his body slumped forward in
the saddle, head bent, again taciturn, again the slouchy, uncouth235
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 45, July 1941 - April, 1942, periodical, 1942; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth146053/m1/259/: accessed May 5, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.