The man with the unique name of Arphaxed (or Arphaxad) Loomis was an important constitutional law reformer in New York State. His biblical name is from Arphacshad, the grandson of Noah. It means healer or releaser. Arphaxed Loomis was a healer not of individual people, but of an entire state’s legal code.
Loomis was born in Winchester Connecticut in 1798 to Thaddeus Loomis, a devout Presbyterian and Lois Griswold. The family then moved to the town of Salisbury in Herkimer County, New York about 1801.
Arphaxed attended Fairfield Academy, then studied law and was admitted to the New York bar in 1822, after which he established his law practice in Little Falls. He also served as a Herkimer County and Surrogate judge, one of his duties being signing certificates for Revolutionary War pensions during the 1830s.
In 1836 he became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1836-1839), and then the New York State Assembly, in which he served in 1841 and 1842.
Although he suffered from some deafness for much of his adult life, it never kept him from being a successful lawyer, radical Democrat, and reformer of New York’s legal system.
The Reformer
During his years as a Congressman, Loomis was mentioned frequently in the online diary of John Quincy Adams who kept detailed records of Congressional activities. In November 1837 the diary noted that Arpaxed Loomis gave a speech about a contested election in Mississippi. This dispute between the Whigs and Democrats had caused excitement and confusion in the House for many weeks.
His talent as a reformer became evident during 1841 when he proposed a state constitutional amendment related to state debt, initially referring to the New York State canals. According to Noble Whitford’s 1908 History of the Canal System of the State of New York “the proposition is significant as an attempt to vest in the people control over all legislation creating state debts. It is known in history as the ‘people’s resolution’.”
According to Robert Ward’s New York State Government, Loomis as one of Herkimer County’s liberal Democratic leaders along with Michael Hoffman. They were both involved
in the successful drive for constitutional limits on borrowing. Loomis was a member of Friends of Law Reform in 1839 and he and Hoffman were influential members of New York’s Constitutional Convention in 1846.
“Michael Hoffman was the sworn enemy of State debt,” according to an August 1846 article in North American Review. “He was obstinate and upright… chairman of the committee… Arphaxed Loomis, cynical and croaking, deaf and almost voiceless, had nevertheless absolute deference of his fellows. What Hoffman proposed he seconded and what he proposed Hoffman sustained. They were nick-named ‘Castor and Pollux’.”
Loomis was returned to the State Assembly in 1853 and 1854 and served as a delegate to the Democratic State conventions in 1861 and 1863, during dramatic upheavals that split the party of slavery and the Civil War.
During the 1850s Loomis worked with other reformers, including David Dudley Field II, a lawyer and contributor to American civil procedure. Field had studied law with Hermanus Bleecker in Albany, then practiced in the city of New York. He believed that common law needed radical changes to unify and simplify procedure, and in 1846 he published a pamphlet – Reorganization of the Judiciary which influenced the New York constitutional convention.
Bleecker and Loomis were appointed to a state commission to work on the reorganization, which became known as the Field Code. This was essentially a set of rules for civil procedure, and later adopted by many other states and countries. Several letters between Field and Loomis are available online from the Union College archives.
Loomis was also a friend of John Bigelow (1817 – 1911), co-editor of the New York Evening Post, a supporter of the anti-slavery movement and manager of Samuel J. Tilden‘s failed candidacy for President in 1876. Bigelow is well known in he the history community for his biographies of Tilden and Benjamin Franklin and as a founder and first president of the New York Public Library. Several letters from Loomis to Bigelow between 1850-1855 are also online in the Union College John Bigelow Papers collection.
Leading up to the Civil War, Loomis was also known as a barnburner and gave a patriotic speech at a union meeting in Little Falls on April 15 1861. Barnburners were the radical wing of the Democratic party at that time, opposed to expanding public debt and the extension of slavery into the Westwen United States.
In the last two decades of his life, Loomis experienced increasing deafness. He published Historic Sketch of the New York System of Law Reform in Practice and Pleading (Little Falls, 1879) and remained a lawyer into the 1880s. By then he was widowed, living with son Watts (a lawyer) and daughter Adelaide.
Arpaxed Loomis died at home in September 1885 and was buried in Church Street Cemetery in Little Falls. An obituary in the Rome Daily Sentinel said he was a man of rare judgment and the highest integrity.
Illustrations, from above; Honorable Arphaxed Loomis, from Descendants of Joseph Loomis in America: And his Antecedents in the Old World (1875); the Loomis-Burrell-Fisher Mansion in Little Falls, home of Congressman Arphaxed Loomis (Little Falls Historical Society); and “Smoking Him Out,” an 1848 cartoon satirizing the Barnburners and Free Soil Party, referencing the Wilmot Proviso, an unsuccessful attempt to ban slavery in territory seized during Mexican–American War.
Recent Comments