Early Life and Legal Career
Henry Brush was born in Dutchess County, New York, the youngest son of Lemuel and Mary (Per Lee) Brush. Henry completed preparatory studies and then studied law. He was admitted to the bar in 1803 and commenced practice in Chillicothe, Ohio. For a time, he was in partnership with his brother, Platt Brush. He married Frances and seems to have had several daughters. Another source says he never married. Henry was described by contemporaries as a tall, thin man with a Roman nose and a highly nervous temperament.
In December 1805, Henry Brush testified with other lawyers before the Ohio Senate in the impeachment trial of Judge William Irwin, a circuit rider who had missed a number of courts held within his circuit. Irwin was removed from office. In December 1807, Henry Brush represented Nathaniel Massie who was contesting the election of Return J. Meigs, Jr., as governor of Ohio. Brush appeared as counsel before the Ohio House of Representatives and then in joint session with the Ohio Senate. Meigs, who was at the time serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio, was ruled ineligible to hold the office of governor due to residency requirements.
In August 1807, the Supreme Court of Ohio ruled in Rutherford v. M'Faddon that the law passed by the legislature was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Samuel H. Huntington and Judge George Tod had written the opinions supporting the ruling, essentially a restatement of the federal holding of Marbury v. Madison. The Ohio house impeached Judge Tod on the grounds that he was usurping the power of the legislature. (Huntington, who had run for governor, was spared impeachment out of respect for his office.) At his Senate trial, Judge Tod was defended by William Creighton, Jr., Henry Brush and two others. The vote for conviction was one shy of the two-thirds required. One of those voting for conviction was impeached Judge William Irwin, now elected a member of the Senate.
Henry Brush served as the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons in the State of Ohio from 1813 to 1817, having previously served as Grand Secretary.
Read more about this topic: Henry Brush
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, legal and/or career:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“All that a pacifist can undertake—but it is a very great deal—is to refuse to kill, injure or otherwise cause suffering to another human creature, and untiringly to order his life by the rule of love though others may be captured by hate.”
—Vera Brittain (1896–1970)
“Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman’s natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are all too expensive.”
—Ann Oakley (b. 1944)