Life and Politics in Michigan
After over a month of traveling by wagon and steamboat, the Ransoms arrived in Michigan Territory on November 14, 1834 in the small town of Bronson, which is now Kalamazoo, Michigan. There he gained admittance to the bar and began practicing law. He took up farming and other business ventures and soon became active in politics. He served in the state legislature and became that area's first circuit court judge, riding horseback through the wilderness to hear cases.
Ransom was appointed by Governor Stevens T. Mason as an associate justice of the state Supreme Court in 1837 and served as chief justice from 1843 to 1848. In one notable issue, he issued a declaration in 1840 that prevented the removal of the Catholic Potawatomi from their lands in southwestern Michigan.
Read more about this topic: Epaphroditus Ransom
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or politics:
“The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate end. We move between these points:
From that ever-early candor to its late plural....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)