Source:William Garrott Brown. Life of Oliver Ellsworth

Citation

Brown, William Garrott. The Life of Oliver Ellsworth. New York: Macmillan Co, 1905

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Excerpt

Page 2: "But I think no other in the whole list of revolutionists and founders is at present in quite such danger of losing his right place and rank as Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut. Historians apart, and a few lawyers with a historical turn of mind, the chances are that not one in a hundred of his countrymen knows today a single fact about him , save that he was once, for a little while, Chief Justice of our highest court. Two accounts of him were published about the middle of the last century, but both belong to series of lives of the chief justices, now but little read.

"Yet the truth is that if any one man can be called the founder, not of that court only, but of the whole system of federal courts, which many think the most successful of the three departments of our government, Ellsworth is the man. In the famous Convention which determined the entire framework of the government, he was one of the members whose names should always be associated both the general character of the Constitution and with important specific clauses."