In 1873 I was appointed County Attorney for Pulaski, and after a few months' service resigned to assume the office of Municipal Judge of the City of Little Rock, to which I had been elected. I highly appreciated this, as exceedingly complimentary from a population of 16,000, a large majority of which were not of my race. I entered upon and performed the duties of the office until some time after the culmination of the Brooks and Baxter war in the State. It having been announced that I was the first of my race elected to such an office in the United States, it was not without trepidation that I assumed the duties that the confidence of my fellow citizens had imposed upon me for the novelty of such an administration attracted attention. A judge who has to deal with and inflict penalties for violation of law consequent upon the frailties and vices of mankind encounters much to soften or harden his humanity, which may have remained normal but for such contact. His sworn duty to administer the law as he finds it often conflicts with a sense of justice implanted in the human soul, of which the law, imperfect man has devised is often the imperfect vehicle for his guidance; but nevertheless to which his allegiance must be paramount, even when attempting to temper justice with mercy. Nowhere is so plainly presented as many of the various lights and shadows of human character. Love and faithlessness, sincerity and deceit, nobility and dishonor, kindness and ingratitude, morality and vice--all the virtues and their antitheses take their place at the bar of the court of justice and await the verdict, while truth and deception strive for conquest; an honest son of toil arrested in a den of infamy whither he has been decoyed and his week's earnings filched; his wife in tears before you; the clash of prejudice when the parties litigant were of opposite races; the favorable expectation of the rich, prominent, and influential when confronted by the poor and lowly; humble and conscientious innocence appalled when rigid law would mulct them in fine and imprisonment; the high and the haughty incensed at discharge of the obscure and indigent. In cases slight, where the justice of leniency was apparent and yet the mandates of the law had to be enforced, I would pronounce the penalty and suspend the fine during good behavior. But if the culprit returned, mercy was absent.