This Yankee youth was Sargent S. Prentiss.  Prentiss remained in the office of Walker for one year, and was a close student.  When admitted to the Bar, he went to Vicksburg and opened an office.  At that time Vicksburg was a new place, and presented peculiar inducements to young professional men.  The country upon the Yazoo River—­and indeed the entire northern portion of the State—­had but recently been quit of its Indian population, and was rapidly filling up with an active and enterprising people.  The soil was fertile, and the production of cotton, to which it is so eminently suited, was daily growing in importance.  Vicksburg was the market-point.  Trade was increasing daily, and rapidly filling up the town with mercantile men.  The young and enterprising were hurrying thither, and in a few years there was met here more talent and more enterprise than at any other point in the State.  The Bar had Prentiss, John Guion, McNutt, Sharkey, the three Yergers, Anderson, Lake, Brook, Burwell, and many others of distinction, including the erratic H.S.  Foote.

The entire population was a live one, and every branch of business was pushed with a vim commensurate with the abilities and enterprise of the population.  The planters of the immediately adjacent country were men of intelligence and character, and were animated with the spirit of the people of the town, forming on the whole a community of almost reckless enterprise.  It was at such a time and in the midst of such a people that young Prentiss had made his selection of a home, and a field for the future exercise of his professional abilities.

Young, ardent, and ambitious, he sought to rival his seniors at the Bar.  Unwilling to wait on time, he aspired to leap at once to this equality.  It was the daring of genius, and of a genius which counted as only a stimulant the obstacles intervening.  To grapple with giants, such as he found in Guion, Yerger, Sharkey, McNutt, and Lake, would have intimidated a less bold and daring mind; but Prentiss courted the conflict con amore, and applying all his herculean powers with the vigor of youth and the ardency of enterprise, he soon found himself quite equal to any competitor.

When an infant, a fever settled in his leg, causing it to wither from the knee to the foot, and doomed him through life to lameness.  Like Byron, he was sensitive upon the subject of this physical defect.  It was a serious obstacle to his locomotion, and in speaking compelled a sameness of position injurious to the effect of his oratory.  Scarcely had two years elapsed from the time of his admission to the Bar before his fame as a lawyer and advocate was filling the State.  His business had increased to such an extent as to require his undivided attention, as he was employed in almost every important suit in that section of the State.  His qualities of heart were as conspicuous as those of his brain, which had endeared him to the people of Vicksburg perhaps more than any other citizen.  This social and professional popularity caused him to be elected to the Legislature of the State.  He belonged to the Whig party, which was largely in the minority in the Legislature, but was powerful in talent.