THE GREAT LEGAL HISTORY OF BOSTON (cont.)

11. Harrison Gray Otis Harrison Gray Otis (1765 - 1848), eminent lawyer, U.S. congressman, senator and third mayor of Boston, lived at 85 Mt. Vernon Street. Designed by Bulfinch, the building is still considered, after almost 200 years, the most handsome house in Boston. 12. George Parkman Number 8 Walnut Street was the Parkman residence from which George Parkman disappeared one morning in the 1840s. He was identified somewhat later among the ashes from the furnace of the Harvard Medical School, workplace of Professor John W. Webster. Webster was later convicted of murdering Parkman, who had been hounding him about a long-standing debt. Rufus Choate, eminent criminal defense attorney, declined to represent Webster. Lemuel Shaw presided at the trial in which Chief Justice Shaw's charge to the jury on circumstantial evidence is still cited by the courts. See Commonwealth v. Webster, 59 Mass. (5 Cush.) 295 at 303 (1850). Judge Robert Sullivan offers some contrary hypotheses in The Disappearance of Dr. Parkman (1971). Simon Schama's Dead Certainties (1991) also reflects on the case.   13. Wendell Phillips Wendell Phillips, lawyer and abolitionist, was born on the corner of Beacon and Walnut Streets. He sought equality for women in the antislavery movement. Convinced by the Fugitive Slave Law that the U.S. Constitution was a "proslavery document," Phillips refused to vote or practice law in the Union. The rest of his life he spent as propagandist and agitator. "It was said of of Wendell . . . he was always one step behind the latest fashion." (Swift, Literary Landmarks of Boston, iv, 1903) 14. Hancock House John Hancock, whose elegant calligraphy has lent his name to the common signature, lived in stately Hancock House, built by one of the wealthy uncles from whom he inherited most of his fortune. A plaque on the State House gate marks the spot where the house stood, overlooking Boston Common. John Hancock was one of the first signers of the Declaration of Independence, the first governor of Massachusetts, a president of the Continental Congress and reputedly the richest man in New England. His ships, bearing the treasures of the West Indies, did not receive British customs agents with hospitality. 15. The State House For over one hundred years, until the 1960s, when skyscrapers rose to block it out, the golden dome of the State House defined the political center of the state and the high point of the city. Charles Bulfinch, the Bernini of Boston, designed the State House, and Governor Samuel Adams, assisted by Paul Revere, laid the cornerstone. Over the years, the dome has been shingled, faced with copper, painted gray and finally in 1872, covered with gold leaf.