Glover, Samuel Taylor (1813–84), practiced law in his native Kentucky before moving to Palmyra, Missouri. He was well known in Hannibal as the defense counsel in three highly publicized trials of the 1840s. In 1841 he helped defend three Illinois abolitionists accused of urging slaves to escape to Canada; John Marshall Clemens [begin page 321] and other jurymen found them guilty—a verdict applauded in the courtroom—and they were sentenced to twelve years in the penitentiary. In 1846 Glover successfully defended Hannibal merchant William Perry Owsley when he was tried for the murder of Sam Smarr. He also was one of two lawyers appointed to defend Ben, a slave, who in October 1849 was accused of murdering a young white girl and her brother. Glover served as John Marshall Clemens’s lawyer in 1843, when Clemens successfully sued William B. Beebe to recover a debt of $484.41. Glover was active in the Whig party, and in the early 1850s he became acquainted with Orion Clemens, who, as editor of the Hannibal Journal, was an ardent Whig supporter. Although Glover stammered, he was praised as a masterful courtroom advocate and an accomplished public speaker. After moving to St. Louis in 1849, and particularly after the Civil War, he was considered to be the West’s most brilliant constitutional lawyer, but as Clemens indicates in “Villagers” (102), Hannibal residents were unimpressed. During Clemens’s 1882 visit to Hannibal an old resident of the town informed him that a “perfect chucklehead,” evidently Glover, had become the “first lawyer in the State of Missouri” (Life on the Mississippi, chapter 53). Glover’s history somewhat resembles that of the protagonist of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), who struggles for nearly twenty years against the public’s misperception of him as a fool (Holcombe, 251, 258, 276, 299; Clemens v. Beebe; NCAB, 25:370–71; Scharf, 2:1494; Conard, 3:66; Orion Clemens to SLC, 7 Jan 61, CU-MARK; Orion Clemens to Samuel T. Glover, 9 Oct 78, CU-MARK).
