There are complexities in the record which make it difficult for even a lawyer to determine just how much of the opinions filed by a majority of the Court is decision and how much is _dictum_. The Chief Justice withheld from the files the so-called "Opinion of the Court," and made additions and alterations to the extent of eighteen pages, in evident answer to the filed dissenting opinion of Judge Curtis, and instructed the clerk not to furnish a copy of the "Opinion of the Court" to anyone without the permission of the Chief Justice before it was published in Howard's "Reports," so that Judge Curtis, on application to the clerk, was unable to obtain the amplified opinion. There ensued a correspondence between Judge Curtis and the Chief Justice in which Judge Curtis kept his temper admirably and the Chief Justice nearly, if not quite, lost his, and did so, I think, because he felt that he was in the wrong.
Judge Curtis, by leaving office in 1857, at the age of forty-seven, surprised his friends and the country. There were two reasons for it. The state of the Court was such that he did not feel comfortable in it. This does not refer to his controversy with the Chief Justice, to whose memory he afterwards paid a cordial tribute. Indeed, it may be doubted whether he would have felt much more comfortable as a member of the Court under the reign of Lincoln than he was under the reign of Buchanan. He was no party man and did not belong in either camp. His all-sufficient and avowed reason for resigning was that he could not live on a salary of $8,000, and felt bound to secure for himself and his family what Burns calls "the glorious privilege of being independent." This purpose was amply realized. He went at once and inevitably to the front rank of the American Bar and remained there for seventeen years, during which time his professional earnings amounted to about $650,000. This was not in our day of big business, when members of the Bar, who are great men of affairs, but not necessarily great lawyers, receive, or are supposed to receive, rich rewards for services in the organization, manipulation and combination of colossal corporate interests. The annual income of Judge Curtis was not much over $38,000, but, like Mercutio's wound, it was enough, it would serve, and it was fairly earned in the regular practice of his profession, at his office desk, in the trial of cases, and in writing opinions on important questions submitted to him from all parts of the country. He stood so high that his written opinion would often be accepted by both sides of a controversy as the veritable voice of the Law itself.