brother-in-law the firm of Cyrus W. Field & Co., and in 1853 had accumulated $250,000, paid off the debts of the Root company and retired from active business, leaving his name and $100,000 with the concern. In the same year he travelled with Frederick E. Church, the artist, through South America. In 1854 he became interested, through his brother Matthew, a civil engineer, in the project of Frederick Newton Gisborne (1824–1892) for a telegraph across Newfoundland; and he was attracted by the idea of a trans-Atlantic telegraphic cable, as to which he consulted S. F. B. Morse and Matthew F. Maury, head of the National Observatory at Washington. With Peter Cooper, Moses Taylor (1806–1882), Marshall Owen Roberts (1814–1880) and Chandler White, he formed the New York, Newfoundland & London Telegraph Company, which procured a more favourable charter than Gisborne’s, and had a capital of $1,500,000. Having secured all the practicable landing rights on the American side of the ocean, he and John W. Brett, who was now his principal colleague, approached Sir Charles Bright (q.v.) in London, and in December 1856 the Atlantic Telegraph Company was organized by them in Great Britain, a government grant being secured of £14,000 annually for government messages, to be reduced to £10,000 annually when the cable should pay a 6% yearly dividend; similar grants were made by the United States government. Unsuccessful attempts to lay the cable were made in August 1857 and in June 1858, but the complete cable was laid between the 7th of July and the 5th of August 1858; for a time messages were transmitted, but in October the cable became useless, owing to the failure of its electrical insulation. Field, however, did not abandon the enterprise, and finally in July 1866, after a futile attempt in the previous year, a cable was laid and brought successfully into use. From the Congress of the United States he received a gold medal and a vote of thanks, and he received many other honours both at home and abroad. In 1877 he bought a controlling interest in the New York Elevated Railroad Company, controlling the Third and Ninth Avenue lines, of which he was president in 1877–1880. He worked with Jay Gould for the completion of the Wabash railway, and at the time of his greatest stock activity bought The New York Evening Express and The Mail and combined them as The Mail and Express, which he controlled for six years. In 1879 Field suffered financially by Samuel J. Tilden’s heavy sales (during Field’s absence in Europe) of “Elevated” stock, which forced the price down from 200 to 164; but Field lost much more in the great “Manhattan squeeze” of the 24th of June 1887, when Jay Gould and Russell Sage, who had been supposed to be his backers in an attempt to bring the Elevated stock to 200, forsook him, and the price fell from 15612 to 114 in half an hour. Field died in New York on the 12th of July 1892.
See the biography by his daughter, Isabella (Field) Judson, Cyrus W. Field, His Life and Work (New York, 1896); H. M. Field, History of the Atlantic Telegraph (New York, 1866); and Charles Bright, The Story of the Atlantic Cable (New York, 1903).
FIELD, DAVID DUDLEY (1805–1894), American lawyer and
law reformer, was born in Haddam, Connecticut, on the 13th
of February 1805. He was the oldest of the four sons of the
Rev. David Dudley Field (1781–1867), a well-known American
clergyman and author. He graduated at Williams College in
1825, and settled in New York City, where he studied law, was
admitted to the bar in 1828, and rapidly won a high position in
his profession. Becoming convinced that the common law in
America, and particularly in New York state, needed radical
changes in respect to the unification and simplification of its
procedure, he visited Europe in 1836 and thoroughly investigated
the courts, procedure and codes of England, France and other
countries, and then applied himself to the task of bringing about
in the United States a codification of the common law procedure.
For more than forty years every moment that he could spare from
his extensive practice was devoted to this end. He entered upon
his great work by a systematic publication of pamphlets and
articles in journals and magazines in behalf of his reform, but
for some years he met with a discouraging lack of interest. He
appeared personally before successive legislative committees, and
in 1846 published a pamphlet, “The Reorganization of the
Judiciary,” which had its influence in persuading the New York
State Constitutional Convention of that year to report in favour of
a codification of the laws. Finally in 1847 he was appointed as the
head of a state commission to revise the practice and procedure.
The first part of the commission’s work, consisting of a code of
civil procedure, was reported and enacted in 1848, and by the 1st
of January 1850 the complete code of civil and criminal procedure
was completed, and was subsequently enacted by the legislature.
The basis of the new system, which was almost entirely Field’s
work, was the abolition of the existing distinction in forms of procedure
between suits in law and equity requiring separate actions,
and their unification and simplification in a single action. Eventually
the civil code with some changes was adopted in twenty-four
states, and the criminal code in eighteen, and the whole formed
a basis of the reform in procedure in England and several of her
colonies. In 1857 Field became chairman of a state commission
for the reduction into a written and systematic code of the
whole body of law of the state, excepting those portions already
reported upon by the Commissioners of Practice and Pleadings.
In this work he personally prepared almost the whole of the
political and civil codes. The codification, which was completed
in February 1865, was adopted only in small part by the state,
but it has served as a model after which most of the law codes of
the United States have been constructed. In 1866 he proposed
to the British National Association for the Promotion of Social
Science a revision and codification of the laws of all nations. For
an international commission of lawyers he prepared Draft Outlines
of an International Code (1872), the submission of which
resulted in the organization of the international Association for
the Reform and Codification of the Laws of Nations, of which he
became president. In politics Field was originally an anti-slavery
Democrat, and he supported Van Buren in the Free Soil campaign
of 1848. He gave his support to the Republican party in 1856 and
to the Lincoln administration throughout the Civil War. After
1876, however, he returned to the Democratic party, and from
January to March 1877 served out in Congress the unexpired term
of Smith Ely, elected mayor of New York City. During his
brief Congressional career he delivered six speeches, all of which
attracted attention, introduced a bill in regard to the presidential
succession, and appeared before the Electoral Commission in
Tilden’s interest. He died in New York City on the 13th of
April 1894.
Part of his numerous pamphlets and addresses were collected in his Speeches, Arguments and Miscellaneous Papers (3 vols., 1884–1890). See also the Life of David Dudley Field (New York, 1898), by Rev. Henry Martyn Field.
FIELD, EUGENE (1850–1895), American poet, was born at
St Louis, Missouri, on the 2nd of September 1850. He spent
his boyhood in Vermont and Massachusetts; studied for short
periods at Williams and Knox Colleges and the University of
Missouri, but without taking a degree; and worked as a journalist
on various papers, finally becoming connected with the
Chicago News. A Little Book of Profitable Tales appeared in
Chicago in 1889 and in New York the next year; but Field’s
place in later American literature chiefly depends upon his poems
of Christmas-time and childhood (of which “Little Boy Blue”
and “A Dutch Lullaby” are most widely known), because of
their union of obvious sentiment with fluent lyrical form. His
principal collections of poems are: A Little Book of Western
Verse (1889); A Second Book of Verse (1892); With Trumpet
and Drum (1892); and Love Songs of Childhood (1894). Field
died at Chicago on the 4th of November 1895.
His works were collected in ten volumes (1896), at New York. His prose Love-affairs of a Bibliomaniac (1896) contains a Memoir by his brother Roswell Martin Field (b. 1851). See also Slason Thompson, Eugene Field: a study in heredity and contradictions (2 vols., New York, 1901).
FIELD, FREDERICK (1801–1885), English divine and biblical
scholar, was born in London and educated at Christ’s hospital
and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship
in 1824. He took orders in 1828, and began a close study of
patristic theology. Eventually he published an emended and
