The occasion brought forward one of the most extraordinary men of the day, Luther Martin, Chase's friend and the leader of his counsel. Born at New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1744, Martin graduated from Princeton in 1766, the first of a class of thirty-five, among whom was Oliver Ellsworth. Five years later he began to practice law on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and in the adjoining counties of Virginia, where he won an immediate success, especially in criminal cases. At a single term of court, out of thirty defendants he procured the acquittal of twenty-nine, while the thirtieth, indicted for murder, was convicted of manslaughter. In 1805 Martin was the acknowledged head of the American Bar, but at the same time he was undoubtedly a drunkard and a spendthrift. With an income of $10,000 a year, he was always in need. His mediocre stature, thinning locks, and undistinguished features created an impression which was confirmed by his slovenly attire and ungrammatical speech, which seemed "shackled by a preternatural secretion of saliva." Here, indeed, for ugliness and caustic tongue was "the Thersites of the law." Yet once he was roused to action, his great resources made themselves apparent: a memory amounting to genius, a boyish delight in the rough-and-tumble of combat, a wealth of passion, kept in perfect curb till the enemy was already in rout before solid argument and then let loose with destroying effect. This child of nature was governed in his practice of the law less by retainers than by his personal loves and hatreds. Samuel Chase he loved and Thomas Jefferson he hated, and though his acquaintance with criminals had furnished him with a vituperative vocabulary of some amplitude, he considered no other damnation quite so scathing as to call a man "as great a scoundrel as Tom Jefferson."