Justice Jesse W. Carter, An American Individualist

Abstract

WHEN Jesse Washington Carter's name appeared in the newspapers, as it frequently did, he was usually cast in the role of a fighter. When he was a public prosecutor in California's frontier Shasta County and a plaintiff's attorney for outraged northern California farmers battling the inroads of power companies, he won the nickname Wild Ass of the Desert.' As Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court, where his dissents were frequent and outspoken, he was called Great Dissenter.' People remembered his militant side as the judge whose stay of execution made it possible for kidnapper Caryl Chessman live on at San Quentin long after he was scheduled die;' who wrote the famous Cahan decision which in effect reinforced the civil liberties of narcotics suspects;' and who late in his life threatened to shoot the first s. o. b. of a county official who interfered with his property. The newspapers, however, did not tell the whole story. Jesse Carter's childhood heritage was one of antislavery Republicanism, frontier individualism, hard work and sparse living, and closeness the soil which gave him a lifelong love of the land and a deep feeling for the prescriptive rights of dirt farmers. His grandfather, who was of English ancestry, was born in Virginia and became a farmer in Kentucky. His father, Asa, ran away from his family of mixed sympathies on the slavery question fight in the Civil War on the Union side. At the end of the war, Asa Carter was assigned a regiment sent out west fight Indians, and when he left the army, he went into hydraulic mining in the mountains of Trinity and Siskiyou counties in California. When he married, he acquired by homestead and purchase 2oo acres of farm land on the Trinity River (across the river from the old Oregon Trail), built