GEORGE WASHINGTON FIELDS
32 more plausible.
5. Return to Hampton: 1891-1932 The family had stayed close, with Martha Ann always at its heart. The 1880 Census had shown his siblings John (laborer), James (teacher), and Catherine (teacher) to be living with their mother in their original home on Wine Street in Hampton, Virginia. Down the street lived brother Robert (farm laborer) and his family. (On June 14, 1880, the census taker had found George working for the summer as a waiter in a hotel and living with his younger sister Maria, who had married and moved with her husband to Andover, Massachusetts.) So after Cornell Law School, in the fall of 1890, George returned to Hampton to practice law. In those days, a law school graduate needed to apprentice for a period and take the bar exam. George did both. His older brother James was now a married lawyer. George read law in James’s law office, and he took an oral examination before three judges. He was admitted to the Virginia bar in April 1891. By this time, the detail in George’s autobiography is really thinning out. A big, albeit unmentioned, event was the 1891 death of his beloved mother.41
of the Jury System (1893) (defending the modern jury system, while suggesting modest reforms); Addison Berton Reed, Former Jeopardy in Cases of Discharged Juries (1895) (arguing against a strict approach to double jeopardy); and Clarence Rich Sperry, Province of the Jury (1893) (arguing against the jury’s right to disregard law). In the late nineteenth century, views on the jury were widely split. See Renée Lettow Lerner, The Rise of Directed Verdict: Jury Power in Civil Cases Before the Federal Rules of 1938, 81 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 448 (2013). 41
The photograph of Martha Ann’s gravestone is by Dawn Stewart in 2007 on www.findagrave.com, as are the later-presented photographs of the gravestones of Washington Fields and George Washington Fields.