Henry Cassidy, attorney and real-estate investor, was appointed a justice of the peace in the Cape Girardeau district of the Louisiana Territory in 1806, a deputy surveyor in 1807, a judge of the Arkansas District courts in 1811, and a township justice in the newly created Missouri Territory in 1813. He was given a full four-year term as township justice in 1814, and he briefly represented Arkansas County in the Missouri legislature. In addition, Cassidy was named attorney of the second judicial circuit of the new Arkansas Territory in August 1819, lost a bid to become Arkansas’s first delegate to Congress that November, and was clerk of the Arkansas House of Representatives in the autumn of 1820. Thirteen members of the territorial legislature unsuccessfully recommended him for a seat on the superior court the same year. According to Arkansas’s executive register, Cassidy “decamped in the dark” from his position as public attorney during the spring of 1821 (Terr. Papers description begins Clarence E. Carter and John Porter Bloom, eds., The Territorial Papers of the United States, 1934–75, 28 vols. description ends , 13:546, 14:150–1, 650, 795, 19:118–9, 170–1, 789; Lynn Foster, “Courts and Lawyers on the Arkansas Frontier: The First Years of American Justice,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 62 [2003]: 307, 311–7; Arkansas Gazette, 1 Jan., 7 Oct. 1820).

On 6 Aug. 1811 Cassidy swore before Justice of the Peace Thomas F. Riddick to an affidavit of which the opening paragraph was substantially the same as the above certificate, with an added assertion that James wilkinson had indicated that Rufus Easton’s work for Cassidy “would not be in any manner inconsistent with the station of the said Easton as a judge of the Territory.” The concluding paragraph affirmed that Wilkinson had recommended his namesake son to transact Cassidy’s legal business even though he was “attached to the army.” Cassidy sent the affidavit to Postmaster General Gideon Granger late in December 1811 (Terr. Papers description begins Clarence E. Carter and John Porter Bloom, eds., The Territorial Papers of the United States, 1934–75, 28 vols. description ends , 14:463–4). He seems to have been accusing General Wilkinson of encouraging Easton and the younger Wilkinson to engage in conflicts of interest.