Judge Roger Sherman Greene

Named for his great-grandfather Roger Sherman, who co-signed the Declaration of Independence, he was assigned to the Colored Infantry during the Civil War and later tried to single-handedly prevent a lynching in Seattle. Roger Sherman Greene was a deeply religious man who read his Bible that was written in Greek. While attending Dartmouth College, he largely supported himself by teaching school during winter breaks. After graduating in 1859, he began studying law and was admitted into practice on May 21, 1862, but abandoned his new career that September to volunteer for the Union Army. On May 22, 1863, during the general assault on Vicksburg, Greene received a gun-shot wound through his right arm while in command of his company. In August of that year, he was assigned Captain of Company C, 51st U.S. Colored Infantry Volunteers, where he served as judge advocate until his resignation from the military in November 1865. Two months later, he was practicing law in Chicago, where he remained for the next five years. He married Grace Wooster on August 17, 1866. In 1870, Greene and his young family moved to Olympia because President Ulysses S. Grant had appointed the 30-year-old associate justice on the Supreme Court of Washington Territory. Ten years later, he was commissioned chief justice, whereby he settled in Seattle. In January 1882, he alone tried to prevent the lynching of two men in Occidental Square, but was restrained by force. During the anti-Chinese riots in 1885, he pleaded with the White mob and assured the Chinese that they would be protected by the full force of the law. A newspaper article once described Judge Greene as "tall and slender and as erect as a pine tree," then added, "He was as upright in his moral and spiritual fibre (sic) as in his physical body." At one point during his career, the U.S. Attorney General wired Judge Greene and asked that a certain case be dismissed, at which point the judge wrote back, "I belong to the judicial, not the executive, branch. The case will be heard ...and decided as the rights of the parties require." Judge Greene presided over the case and nothing more was heard of the matter.