Edward Lowden Parris

The record of the law practice of Edward Lowden Parris carries the mind back to old New York; not perhaps to the New York of the fifties and the sixties (though Parris was United States District Attorney here in 1867) but to the New York of the days when Tammany, while not perhaps any more unscrupulous than it is to-day with the figurehead which the City insisted on retaining last November, was at any rate more openly shameless in its plunder of the City. Parris was associate counsel in the persecution of William M. Tweed. Drawn as he was to the public man of Tweed’s own party who had the sense and courage to attack the Tammany thieves’ den of that day, he became later one of Samuel J. Tilden’s counsel in the contest over the disputed election of 1876. So much water has passed under the political mill since that extraordinary controversy—whose merits the present generation would find it hard to state, yet which forty-five years ago was sometimes thought to threaten civil war—that even its active participants seem men of past history. But Parris was an active practitioner up to very recent days, and a man of social activities in the New York of a much later generation.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1922 Century Association Yearbook