“Whereas my late father, by his last will, bequeathed to me his farm called Bishop’s or Chickering’s farm, I do give the said farm to my five sons, to be equally divided among them.”

The will of his father had been declared invalid on that point, and others.  The whole thing had been conclusively settled for years; but he never would recognize the fact.  It is a singular instance of an obstinacy of will completely superseding and suppressing the reason and the judgment.  He lost the perception of the actual and real, in clinging to what he felt to be the right.

Every association and sentiment of his soul had been shocked by the wrongs he had suffered.  He could not walk over his fields, or look from his windows, without feeling that a property which his father had given to his brother had, in a manner that he knew would have been as odious to that father as it was to him, passed into the hands of strangers, and been used as a wedge on which everybody had conspired to deal blows, driving it into the centre of his patrimonial acres, splitting and rending them through and through.  He brooded over the thought, until, whenever his mind was turned to it, his reason was dethroned, his heart broken, and under its weight he fell into his grave.

An argument addressed by him to the court and jury, in one of the innumerable trials of the Bishop-farm case, is among the papers on file.  It appears to be a verbatim report of the speech as it was delivered at the time, and proves him to have been a man of talents.  It is courteous, gentlemanly, and, I might say, scholarly in its diction and style, skilful in its statements, and forcible in its arguments.

In all the earlier trials, the juries uniformly gave verdicts in favor of Endicott; but Allen carried the cases up to the General Court, which exercised a final and unrestrained jurisdiction in all matters referred to it.  It usually appointed committees or commissioners to examine such questions, accepted their reports, and made them binding.  Lands were thus disposed of without the agency, and against the decisions, of juries.  In his arguments addressed to the General Court, Zerubabel Endicott protested against this jurisdiction, by which his lands were taken from him “by a committee, in an arbitrary way, being neither bound nor sworn by law or evidence.”  He boldly denounced it.

“To be disseized of my inheritance; to be judged by three or four committee-men, who are neither bound to law nor evidence,—­who are, or may be, mutable in their apprehensions, doing one thing to-day, and soon again undoing what they did,—­I conceive, to be judged in such an arbitrary way is repugnant to the fundamental law of England contained in Magna Charta, chap. 29, which says no freeman shall be disseized of his freehold but by the lawful judgment of his peers,—­that is to say, by due process of law; which was also confirmed by the Petition of Right, by Act of Parliament, tertio Caroli