Gray, Horace

Life Span
to
    Full name
    Horace Gray
    Place of Birth
    Birth Date Certainty
    Exact
    Death Date Certainty
    Exact
    Gender
    Male
    Race
    White
    Sectional choice
    North
    Origins
    Free State
    No. of Spouses
    1
    Family
    Jane Matthews (wife)
    Education
    Harvard
    Occupation
    Attorney or Judge
    Relation to Slavery
    White non-slaveholder
    Political Parties
    Whig
    Free Soil
    Republican
    Government
    Supreme Court
    State supreme court

    Horace Gray (American National Biography)

    Scholarship
    Besides his clerkship, Gray honed his skill as an advocate with the elite of the highly regarded Boston bar, which included Benjamin R. Curtis after Curtis's resignation from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857. Gray's partners included Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, future supreme judicial court justice and attorney general under President Ulysses S. Grant. Fully devoted to the law, Gray had little time for politics. Like his partner Hoar, however, he gravitated from "Conscience" Whig to Free Soiler to Republican. His opposition to slavery is further indicated in an attack, coauthored with John Lowell, Jr., on Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's Dred Scott opinion. Typically, the critique was solidly based on legal rather than political grounds. With the outbreak of the Civil War, Gray rendered significant legal advice to Republican governor John A. Andrew, although his support for the war was tempered by constitutional scruples over Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.
    Donald M. Roper, "Gray, Horace," American National Biography Online, February 2000, http://www.anb.org/articles/11/11-00347.html.
    How to Cite This Page: "Gray, Horace," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/5772.