(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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Edward Henry Durell was born on July 14, 1810 at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, United States. His father, Daniel Meserve Durell, a prominent New Hampshire lawyer and chief justice of the court of common pleas, married on June 1, 1800, Elizabeth Wentworth, a descendant of Elder William Wentworth, and Edward Durell was their third son.
Durrell attended Phillips Exeter Academy and proceeded in 1827 to Harvard College. Graduating in 1831, he read law in his father’s office at Dover, New Hampshire, and was admitted to the bar in 1834.
For a short time thereafter Durrell practised law at Pittsburg (Grenada), Mississippi, but finally settled at New Orleans on March 27, 1837. His outstanding achievement in this line was the statute whereby the Louisiana law that on the death of a father, mother, husband, or wife, the children immediately obtained possession of one-half of the acquits and gains of the matrimonial partnership, was changed so as to give the surviving parent, etc. , the usufruct of such half.
Elected a member of the New Orleans common council in 1854, he drafted the city charter which became law in 1856.
When the Federal troops took possession of New Orleans in 1862, at the request of the military governor he drafted the bureau system of municipal government which was then inaugurated, and he was appointed president of the bureau of finance.
In 1863 he became mayor of the city by military appointment and the same year was appointed by President Lincoln United States judge of the eastern district of Louisiana, his jurisdiction being extended in 1866 to cover the entire state.
While at Washington on this mission he was offered by Seward and declined the post of minister to Austria as he had two years previously similarly declined an appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States tendered to him by Lincoln. Pie contemplated retiring from the bench, but a “respectful remonstrance” of the Louisiana bar, wherein he was referred to as “a tried, faithful, able, learned and incorruptible judge, ” induced him to reconsider his decision. He had, throughout the embittered reconstruction conflict, avoided open participation or partisanship up to 1872, but the incidents of the state election of that year procured for him an unenviable notoriety. Following the voting a serious situation had arisen owing to the fact that three distinct election boards claimed the right to canvass the returns. Since it appeared that the Governor’s board, which in a sense represented the Democratic interests, had completed its canvass and would function prior to its opponents, Durell, out of court at his house on December 5, at nine o’clock at night, issued an unsealed order to the United States marshal to take possession of the state- house and to give entrance only to certain authorized persons. This “midnight order” was, with the aid of Federal troops, immediately carried into effect. On the following day in court Durell declared the Democratic board illegal and ordered the returns delivered to the “legal” board, thus enabling the Republicans to obtain control of the legislature and state government. To what extent, if any, he acted with the connivance or tacit approval of the Federal administration is not known, but the matter was taken up in Congress, and the proceedings were investigated by the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections, whose reports condemned his action unreservedly, characterizing the interference of a Federal judge in a state election as “without parallel in judicial proceedings”. A move to institute impeachment proceedings against him was terminated by his res ignation in 1874.
His later years were passed in literary pursuits, including the preparation of a “History of Seventeen Years; from 1860 to the Retiring of the Federal Army from Louisiana and South Carolina, ” which he did not complete.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Durrell was a pronounced Unionist, strenuously opposed the ordinance of secession, and on its adoption in 1860 retired for a time from public life.
Taking up his residence at Newburgh, New York, on June 8, 1875 Durrell married Mary Seitz Gebhart of Schoharie, New York, to which latter place he subsequently removed and lived until his death.
