After my second session in the Legislature, I applied myself with unremitting application to the practice of the law. My practice in Lancaster and some of the adjoining counties was extensive, laborious, and lucrative. It increased rapidly in value from the time I ceased to be a member of the Legislature. During the year ending on the 1st of April, 1819, I received in cash for professional services $7,915.92, which was, down to that time, the best year I ever experienced.[3] Among his professional employments at this period, I find the following modest allusion to a cause in which he gained great distinction: During the session of the Legislature of 1816–17 I alone defended the Hon. Walter Franklin and his associates on articles of impeachment against them before the Senate; and during the session of 1817–18, I defended the same judges on other articles, and had for associates Mr. Condy and Mr. Hopkins. I never felt the responsibility of my position more sensibly than, when a young man between 25 and 26 years of age, I undertook alone to defend Judge Franklin; and although he was anxious I should, again the next year, undertake his cause without assistance, yet I insisted upon the employment of older and more experienced counsel. As the impeachment case referred to in the close of this sketch was the occasion of Mr. Buchanan’s early distinction at the bar, a brief account of it may be here given. It was a prosecution instituted from political motives, and was a lamentable exhibition of party asperity. Judge Franklin was the president judge of the court of common pleas for a judicial district composed of the counties of Lancaster, Lebanon, and York. His associates were not lawyers. At a period of great political excitement, which had continued since the close of the war with Great Britain, there arose a litigation in Judge Franklin’s court which grew out of one of the occurrences of the war. In July, 1814, the President had made a requisition on the Governor of Pennsylvania for the services of certain regiments of militia. The troops were called and mustered into the Federal service. Houston, a citizen of Lancaster, refused to serve; he was tried by a court-martial, held under the authority of the State, convicted, and sentenced to pay a fine. For this he brought an action in the common pleas against the members of the court-martial and its officer who had collected the fine. On the trial, Judge Franklin ruled that when the militia had been mustered into the service of the United States, the control of the State and its power to punish were ended. The plaintiff, therefore, recovered a verdict. Judge Franklin was subjected to this impeachment for ruling a point of law on which the Judges of the Supreme Court of the United States afterwards differed. In a diary kept by a gentleman who watched this impeachment with the deepest interest, I find the following allusion to Mr. Buchanan’s argument: