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Charles O'Conor in Nantucket by Robert F. Mooney ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, the entire public debt of the Town of Nantucket was paid off by one man, the eminent retired lawyer, Charles O'Conor of New York, who spent his last years and his last public activities on the Island. A century later, the name of Charles O'Conor is all but forgotten and his famous home and library have disappeared, but the story of this illustrious man and his connection with Nantucket are worth remembering. Charles O'Conor was born in New York in 1804, the son of Irish parents who had immigrated to America to find religious and political freedom following the Act of Union with Great Britain. From his father, Thomas, a noted Irish patriot and scholar, Charles received most of his education at home. With only six months of formal school ing, he became a master of the classics, foreign languages, and the traditions of Irish and American history. His father's brilliance could not relieve the family from poverty, and Charles found that the poor Irish in America needed their own legal advocates to secure the benefits of American justice. Living through an era when Irish Catholics were victims of pre judice in the society and professions of New York, he began the study of law as an apprentice in various law offices where he worked by day and studied by night in the law libraries. He developed a prodigious memory, and it was claimed he read the entire span of Blackstone's Commentaries not once, but twice. He was admitted to the Bar at the age of twenty and although the rule required three years' service as at torney before attaining the privileged title of counsellor, he achieved that distinction in three months. At the New York Bar, he rapidly gain ed an immense reputation as a legal scholar, while upholding the highest degree of public responsibility in handling unpopular causes and representing the public interest. One judge remarked of O'Conor, "I have often heard him state the case of his adversary with greater clearness and force than the adversary was able to state it himself". The turbulent political times drew the eminent attorney into the public affairs of the day. He was a member of the convention to revise the New York Constitution and was often mentioned as a candidate for Attorney General of the United States, a post he declined. In 1872, he was nominated by a splinter group of the Democratic Party known as the American Party or "Straight-Out Democrats", to run for the Presidency against U. S. Grant and Horace Greeley. O'Conor made no
