PRESENTATION OF PORTRAIT
CHIEF JUSTICE LEONARD HENDERSON
BY
HON. R. W. WINSTON
Mr. Chief Justice and Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of
North Carolina:
‘‘When Cellini’s statue of Perseus was first exhibited on the Piazza at
Florence, it was surrounded for days by an admiring throng, and hun¬
dreds of tributary sonnets were placed upon its pedestal.” We are as¬
sembled today in this hall whose walls are adorned with portraits of
our State’s great jurists, and in the presence of worthy successors to
those judges whose “dignity, wisdom and ability have made North
Carolina’s proudest possession her courts of justice,” to hang in its
proper place, between Taylor and Ruffin, a portrait of Chief Justice
Henderson. In the name of the living kinsfolk of him, of whom Judge
Pearson, in the leading ease of State v. Deal, 64 N. C., 273, declared,
“His powers of reflection exceeded that of any man who ever had a seat
on this bench, unless Judge Haywood be considered his equal in this re¬
spect,” I present to you this portrait of Leonard Henderson, one of the
first justices of this Court upon its organization in its present
(596) form in 1818, and Chief Justice of this Court from 1829 to
the date of his death in 1833.
The Chief Justice’s grandfather was Colonel Samuel Henderson, who
was the first high sheriff of Granville County. The Henderson family
removed from Hanover County, Virginia, to Granville County, North
Carolina, about 1740, and here Colonel and afterwards Judge Richard
Henderson, son of Samuel Henderson, married Elizabeth Keeling, from
which marriage sprang the jurist, Leonard Henderson. A man’s educa¬
tion begins, they say, hundreds of years before he is born, and hence it is
not difficult to trace to their source certain characteristics of the Chief
Justice — his originality, his independence, his rugged personality. How
could he have been otherwise? Samuel Henderson, the grandfather,
strong and rugged, hkd executed his writs, subpeenas, and other pro¬
cesses, afoot through the forest primeval, traversing a territory from Vir¬
ginia on the north to Johnston on the south, and from the mountains
on the west to Northampton on the east. “The father, Richard Hender¬
son, holding the minor office of constable, and fired by a noble ambition,
determined to enter the profession of the law.” He accordingly read
such books as were to be had, and after a short time presented himself
436
