Background
Matthew Paul Deady was born on May 12, 1824 near Easton, Talbot County, Maryland, United States. He was the son of Daniel and Mary Ann (McSweeney) Deady. His father and his mother’s father came from County Cork, Ireland.
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Matthew Paul Deady was born on May 12, 1824 near Easton, Talbot County, Maryland, United States. He was the son of Daniel and Mary Ann (McSweeney) Deady. His father and his mother’s father came from County Cork, Ireland.
Matthew acquired a taste for good literature by access to his father's well-stocked library, where as a boy he read such books as Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey and Hume’s History of England.
He attended schools taught by his father until he was twelve years of age, spent four years on the latter’s farm in Ohio, and left home at the age of sixteen to attend the Barnesville (Ohio) Academy.
At the same time he was apprenticed to the blacksmith’s trade for four years.
He then taught school and studied law until admitted to the Ohio bar in 1847.
Matthew Paul Deady worked his way to Oregon, taught school at Lafayette during the winter that followed, and began the practise of law at the same place the next spring. He was elected to the territorial House of Representatives in 1850.
In 1853 he was appointed an associate justice of the territorial supreme court. As his circuit was made up of the five southern counties, he made the Umpqua Valley his home until 1860. He presided over the convention assembled in 1857 to form a state constitution and exercised a conservative influence over that body.
Elected a justice of the state supreme court, he accepted, instead, in 1859, appointment as United States district judge for Oregon. Portland, the seat of his court, thenceforth became his home until his death.
Some three hundred and fifty of Judge Deady s decisions, prepared by him for publication, show that he gave most exhaustive study to every issue that came before his court. While generally reverential toward the common law and established precedent, he dared at times, when moved by a strong common sense, a spirit of justice, or conceptions of a sound morality, to make new rules of interpretation. He was lawgiver as well as judge.
He twice, 1864 and 1872, codified all the general laws of the state.
He often acted, in his own words, as “judge and advocate for the judicial committees of both houses of the legislature and drafted much important legislation; such as the corporation act of 1862 and the Portland charter act of 1864, a measure that became the model for other city charters. His salary as judge, paid in paper currency and at times worth as little as $800 in coin and never much in excess of $3, 000, proved inadequate to the needs of a growing family.
He wrote weekly letters for the San Francisco Bulletin, accepted fees for drawing legal papers or for opinions given clients, received pay from the state for making codes and compilations ($2, 500 for the four years ending with 1864), and in other ways supplemented a meager salary.
Deady contributed much to the cultural progress of his community and the state. He was founder of the Multnomah County Library and long its managing director, raising its endowment and selecting its books; he wrote editorials for the Oregonian he was much in demand as a public speaker and delivered lectures on a variety of subjects that show study and erudition; he was a devoted churchman; and, having modified his earlier opinion, for twenty years as president of the board of regents of the State University (during its formative period, 1873-93), he dominated its policies, secured for it necessary financial support, and was the most important single influence in assuring its survival and progress.
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Matthew Paul Deady favored the viva voce method of voting, unsuccessfully opposed a provision giving married women exclusive control of their own property, and succeeded in having struck out a provision for a state university on the ground that experience had demonstrated it to be of little use to anybody.
On June 24, 1852 Deady married Lucy A. Henderson.