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PATRICK LEE DEAN
Streets in Macon and soon opened his law office
there.
Men of Mark in Georgia recounts that Prince
was "a brilliant and strong lawyer," and, according
to Ms. Nirenstein, Prince's law practice "was very
successful"
In 1828, the General Assembly by a one-vote
majority elected Prince to fill the unexpired term
of U.S. Senator Thomas W. Cobb, who had
resigned. Prince served in the Twentieth Congress
as one of Georgia's two Senators from November
1828 until March 1829.
After residing in Bibb county for nine years, in
early 1832 at the age of 49 Prince closed his law
office and gave up the practice of law, moving to
Milledgeville, then the state capital, where he
purchased and edited an influential newspaper,
the Georgia Journal. In late 1835 he sold the
newspaper and retired. In early 1836 Prince
moved to Athens, where he had recently bought a
450-acre farm.
Prince arrived in Athens on Feb. 1, 1836. He
left Athens on May 25, 1837, departing on a fatal
journey to the North which ended abruptly when
on their way back he and his wife were lost at sea
in a maritime disaster that was the Titanic of its
time. Thus. Prince resided in Athens for only 16
months.
The actual location of Prince's Athens farm is
in dispute, but it appears that he owned almost
all the land between Hill Street and Prince
Avenue, as well as land on the north side of
Prince Avenue. The historic Franklin-Upson house, *
1022 Prince Avenue, which was erected in 1847
and now houses SunTrust Bank, was built on land
once part of Prince's farm.
The location of Prince's residence is also dis
puted. It is believed by some historians to have
been in the vicinity of what is now the Navy
School* other historians think Prince's residence
was on the site of the Georgia Power building at
the intersection of Prince Avenue and Chase Street.
At the time Prince arrived in Athens the city's
streets had no official names. The street leading
to Prince's farm was then unofficially known as
th? Federal road because it was the main road
leading through Jefferson and Gainesville to the
Cherokee Indian Nation. In 1859 the segment of
the Federal road in Athens west of downtown was
officially named Prince Avenue. It seems likely
that decades before 1859 the portion of the
Federal road leading to Prince's farm had already,
unofficially, become known as Prince Avenue.
LEGAL LANDMARK
Prince's greatest single achievement was his
authorship of a landmark compilation of Georgia
laws dating back to the colonial era. In 1819
Prince was commissioned by the General Assembly
to compile a digest of all Georgia statutory laws
then in force in this state. In 1822, after nearty
two years of exhaustive and painstaking legal
research and writing, Prince published 4 Digest of
the Lows of the State of Georgia. Consisting of 576
pages of text and a 94 page index, the Digest set
forth the text of all non-local statutes then in
effect in Georgia, with the various statutory provi
sions grouped together under 64 titles alphabeti
cally arranged, beginning with "Affirmation" and
ending with "Western Territory."
The Digest also contained explanatory notes, a
list of repealed statutes and an authoritative dis
cussion of the writ of habeas corpus. The Digest,
as stated by Georgia Gov. John Clark, was "fin
ished in a style of great accuracy and perspicuity."
It was, in short, the first great law book authored
by a'Georgian.
Prince's Digest instantly became indispensable
to Georgia judges and lawyers. Many years later a
19th Century Georgia judge, Richard Clark, remem
bered being a 14-year old spectator at a trial
where all the lawyers repeatedly quoted horn the
Prince's Digest, and thinking at the time that
whoever this man Prince was, he must be the
greatest man in the state! The second edition of
Prince's Digest was published in 1837; it was sim
ilar to the first edition, except that it was even
more voluminous, comprising 929 pages of text
and 116 pages of index. It was while he was en
route back to Athens from a trip to the North
where he had arranged for the publication of the
second edition that Prince perished in wiiat a
newspaper of the time called "a calamitou: and
heart rending disaster." This was why Josephine
Mellichamp, in her biographical entry for Oliver
Prince in her book Senators From Georgio (1976),
curiously wrote: "A book led to his death."
To distinguish it from the second edition, after
1837 the first edition of the Digest acquired the
affectionate nickname of "Little Prince." The
second edition served as the most important col
lection of Georgia laws until 1851, when it was
superseded by a law digest written by an Athens
attorney, the legendary Thomas R. R. Cobb. For 30
years Prince's Digest had been an absolute neces
sity for lawyers and judges in this state. Today
Prince's Digest remains an authoritative source for
anyone who wishes to study pre-Civil War Georgia
law, and no respectable Georgia legal library is
really complete without a copy of eitner the first
or the second edition.
“PALPABLE PLAGIARISM"
Prince's greatest claim to literary fame, how
ever, is not his Digest, but a witty short story he
wrote which, in a case of what has quite correctly
been called "palpable plagiarism " was later
"lifted" by the writer Thomas Hardy for inclusion
in one of his novels.
In the early 1800's, while living in Wilkes
county. Prince wrote many humorous articles pub
lished in The Monitor, the local newspaper. The
articles confirm the observation of Kenneth
Coleman and Charles Gurrin in their Dictionary of
Georgia Biography (1983), that Prince was
"[rjemarkably gifted with the literary instinct
which he possessed with the most delicious sense
of humor."
"He [Oliver Prince) possessed," Lucian Lamar
Knight has written, "a keen sense of humor, asso
ciated with rare literary gifts."
One of Prince's articles, untitled and published
anonymously, appeared in The Monitor on June 6,
1807. This amusing sketch, the best of all his
witty pieces, was a satirical account of the vain,
clumsy efforts of a certain Captain Clodpole to
drill an unruly, inept detachment of the Georgia
militia. The sketch was wildly popular and
reprinted many times by '*arious newspapers and
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