Iowa
Old Press
Lyons Mirror
Lyon, Clinton County, Iowa
November 5, 1857
LAWYERS CAGED
Judge Claggett, at the late session of Court held at Fort
Madison, passed an order that attorneys should ask permission
when they wished to retire from the court room. Thereupon the
lawyers, one after another, would rise up, and with long faces
and juvenile accents, say “Please sir, may I go out?”
His Honor, for this contempt, ordered the whole bunch off to
jail. And the Burlington Hawkeye suggests that no public
edifice, not excepting the penitentiary, ever contained so much
latent rascality as the Fort Madison jail when filled with the
lawyers of the district.
[transcribed by K.W., August 2009]