MEDALLIONS AND INSCRIPTIONS

Horace Binney (1780-1875)
Prominent Philadelphia Lawyer, 19th Century

Horace Binney was born in Philadephia in 1780 and received his early education at the Friends Almshouse School and the Grammar School of the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1797 with high honors and studied law in the Philadelphia office of Jared Ingersoll (1749-1822), who had been a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and was the attorney general of Pennsylvania (1791-1800 and 1811-1816). He was a member of the Pennsylvania legislature (1806-07) and a Whig member of the National House of Representatives (1833-35), where he defended the United States Bank and opposed the policy of President Andrew Jackson. As a prominent Philadelphia lawyer for over half a century, he was known for his expertise in banking and insurance law. His most famous case, in which he successfully opposed Daniel Webster, was Vidal v. Girard's Executors, 43 U.S. 127, 2 How. 127, 11 L. Ed. 205 (1844), a case which influenced the law of charities. Binney argued on behalf of the City of Philadelphia as trustee of the estate of Stephen Girard, who had left his fortune to establish a college for poor orphans. His legal reasoning and oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court were considered among the best the Court had ever heard. In 1844 he showed leadership in helping to restore order during the anti-Catholic riots in Philadelphia. Although his eyes started to trouble him in 1850 and he decided to give up practicing law, he gave many public speeches and published several important works during the period leading up to and including the Civil War. As one of America's most eminent and long-lived lawyers, his distinguished career spanned the period of the Founding Fathers and the Civil War.

Additional Biographical Sources

"Horace Binney (1780-1875)," in Robert R. Bell, The Philadelphia Lawyer: A History, 1735-1945 (1992), pp. 145-156.  [LOLA record for Biddle's copy]

In Memoriam H. Binney (1875)[extract from minutes of the Philadelphia Contributorship for Insurance of Houses].

C.J.F. Binney, Genealogy of the Binney Family in the U.S.(1886).

Charles Chauncey Binney, The Life of Horace Binney, with Selections from his Letters (1904) [by his grandson].

William Strong, An Eulogium on the Life and Character of Horace Binney (1876). [LOLA record for Biddle's copy]

Hampton L. Carson, A Sketch of Horace Binney (1907).

Charles Chauncey Binney, A Horace Binney,@ in William Draper Lewis, Great American Lawyers, Vol. 4 (1908), pp. 197-238. [LOLA record for Biddle's copy]

Major Works

An Eulogium upon the Hon. William Tilghman, Late Chief Justice of Pennsylvania (1827).

An Eulogy on the Life and Character of John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1835).

Horace Binney Wallace (1853).

Bushrod Washington (1858).

Leaders of the Old Bar of Philadelphia (1858).

An Inquiry into the Formation of Washington's Farewell Address (1859).

The Privileges of the Writ of Habeas Corpus under the Constitution (1862) [One of three pamphlets (1861, 1862, and 1865) which argued for President Lincoln's suspension of the writ.]

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