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Frederick Trevor Hill

Lawyer/Author

Centurion, 1907–1930

Born 5 May 1866 in New York (Brooklyn), New York

Died 17 March 1930 in Yonkers, New York

Buried Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Sleepy Hollow, New York

Proposed by Frederick S. Dellenbaugh and Theron G. Strong

Elected 2 February 1907 at age forty

Proposer of:

Seconder of:

Century Memorial

By way of avocation during three or four decades of legal practice at New York, Frederick Trevor Hill also applied himself to Lincoln’s history. His own knowledge of the law had already found expression in a treatise on “The Care of Estates” and in a descriptive booklet, somewhat less technical, on “Decisive Battles of the Law.” But when he approached the Lincoln puzzle with careful examination of the earlier episodes in the record of “Lincoln, the Lawyer,” he too entered the ranks of best-selling historians. In this little book and in those which followed it, Hill’s own legal acumen, backed by painstaking research, throws a light on the War President’s early professional achievement, long before the Douglas debates, such as neither Nicolay and Hay nor Herndon gave. Of Lincoln’s lucidity of reasoning, even in those days, he drew a picture more compact and convincing than even Beveridge has drawn.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1931 Century Association Yearbook