A Native American leader who enlisted in the Union Army has been posthumously admitted to the New York bar after 176 years

By Ray Sanchez, CNN (CNN) — Ely S. Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca from western New York, never took no for an answer. At the start of the Civil War, Parker’s offer to enlist was rejected outright by another New Yorker, Secretary of State William H. Seward, who – according to historians – told the Seneca