The National Magazine, Vol. XV, No. 1, November 1891

by Various

EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Seventy-odd years ago the Rev. Sydney Smith wrote in the Edinburg Review as follows: “Literature, the Americans have none—no native literature, we mean. It is all imported. They had a Franklin, indeed, and may afford to live for half a century on his fame. There is, or was, a Mr. Dwight, who wrote some poems, and his baptismal name was Timothy. There is also a small account of Virginia, by Jefferson, an epic by Joel Barlow, and some pieces of pleasantry by Mr. Irving. But why should the Americans write books, when a six weeks’ passage brings them, in their own tongue, our sense, science and genius in bales and hogsheads?”

Times have changed since Mr. Smith wrote this somewhat sarcastic summary of our native literature; for, while it is true that we still import British “sense, science, and genius in bales and hogsheads,” it is done now on principles of reciprocity, and we return quite as good and perhaps nearly as much as we receive.

Americans do not instance Mr. Dwight, whose “baptismal name was Timothy,” or Mr. Barlow, the author of the epic so sneeringly referred to, as the chiefs of American poesy; yet we need not blush for either of them; for the first was a distinguished scholar the President of Yale College, and the author of the hymn so dear to many pious hearts:

“I love thy kingdom, Lord!

The house of Thine abode;

The church our blest Redeemer saved

With His own precious blood.”

The other, Mr. Barlow, was a well-known man of letters and politician in his day, author of the “Columbiad,” the epic referred to by Mr. Smith, and minister plenipotentiary of the United States to the coast of France at a critical period of our history. As to the “Columbiad,” it has been pronounced by competent critics to be equal in merit to Addison’s “Campaign,” and surely it is no disgrace to have equalled Addison.

It was the fashion in those days for Englishmen to sneer at Americans; and so we find in another review, written by the same gentleman in 1820, this language: “During the thirty or forty years of their independence, they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences, for the arts, for literature, or even for the statesmanlike studies of politics or political economy.... In the four quarters of the globe who reads an American book? or looks at an American picture or statue? What does the world yet owe to American physicians or surgeons? What new substances have their chemists discovered? or what old ones have they analyzed? What new constellations have been discovered by the telescopes of Americans? What have they done in mathematics? Who drinks out of American glasses? or eats from American plates? or wears American coats or gowns? or sleeps in American blankets?” In the very same year that this array of rather insolent queries was propounded by Sydney Smith, the genial Washington Irving, in the advertisement to the first English edition of his Sketch Book, remarks: “The author is aware of the austerity with which the writings of his countrymen have been treated by British critics.” We have not a particle of doubt as to the “austerity” in question. The salvos of Old Ironsides and the roar of Jackson’s guns at New Orleans, were unpleasant facts not yet forgotten by Englishmen.

But Sydney Smith was not quite fair towards our countrymen. It was “during the thirty or forty years of their independence” referred to that Fulton’s steamboat revolutionized navigation, that Rittenhouse developed a mathematical skill second only to that of Newton; that West delighted even royalty itself with the creations of his pencil; while in “the statesmanlike studies of politics or political economy,” it was during this very period that Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and their coadjutors did more to develop the true principles of government and politics than had ever been done before in the history of the world. True, we had not much to boast of, but it would have been only just to give us credit for what we were worth. Moreover, in a small way, but to the extent it was possible under the circumstances, the English colonists in America had cultivated letters from the beginning. In 1685, Cotton Mather wrote his Memorable Providences; in 1732, Franklin began to issue his Poor Richard’s Almanac; in 1749, Jonathan Edwards published his Life of David Brainerd, and in 1754, his famous treatise on The Freedom of the Will and Moral Agency. Besides these, which perhaps stand out most conspicuously, there were many minor works of more or less excellence, over most of which the iniquity of oblivion, to use the fine phrase of Sir Thomas Browne, hath scattered her poppy.

The moment that the Edinburg Review was thus dealing our fathers these heavy blows seemed to be the real starting point in our career of literary greatness. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James K. Paulding, Richard H. Dana, James Fenimore Cooper, Mrs. Sigourney and a host of others were giving direction to that stream of literature that has since flowed broad and free over our land, imparting life and vigor and beauty to our society and institutions. It is, however, anterior to the year 1820, the thirty or forty years of our national independence, during which Mr. Smith says we have done “absolutely nothing” in literature, science or art, to which we must more particularly advert. The literary product of those years was scanty enough, it is true. The student of this period will not find much, and not all of that of the first order, to reward his labor—not much, at least, as compared with other nations at the same time. But may there not have been some sufficient reason for this, outside of any downright intellectual deficiencies on the part of our fathers? Let us for a moment consider the condition of things at that time in this country.

In the first place, at the time referred to, the citizens of the United States were in a daily struggle with the material difficulties of their situation. The country was new. The region west and north of the Ohio and Mississippi was yet an almost unbroken wilderness, while the country east and south of those rivers was but sparsely populated. At the same time the tide of immigration was sweeping into the country, and with it all the rush and turmoil incident to life in a new country was going on. Forests were to be cut down; farms were to be cleared up; houses were to be built; roads were to be made; bridges were to be thrown across the rivers; while a livelihood was to be compelled from the forests, the streams, and the fields. The conditions of a new country are not favorable to the cultivation of the arts, of sciences, or of literature. Why do not Englishmen twit the people of Australia because during the past forty or fifty years in which they have prospered so greatly in material things, they have not produced a Macaulay, a Tennyson, a Gladstone, a Tyndall, or a Huxley? It would be just as fair to do it.

Not only was there this hand to hand contest with their physical environment, but the political conditions were also unfavorable to any general dalliance with the Muses. Only in times of tranquility and ease is it possible.

“To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair.”

The country at the period referred to, had just emerged from a long and exhausting war. Society was almost broken up; the arts of peace were well nigh forgotten; the finances were in almost hopeless confusion; the form of government was unsettled, and scarcely yet determined upon. The first thing to do was to evolve some system and some security out of this chaos. Politics alone occupied the moments of leisure. When, finally, authority had crystallized into definite government the people were not allowed to be at rest. Murderous wars with the Indians on the frontiers; the machinations of French emissaries; British oppression of American commerce, and at length another long and bloody war with England, harassed the minds of the people, and prevented them from giving themselves up more generally to the kindly and refining influences of literature and art. When we consider all the circumstances in the case, there seems a degree of severity in Sydney Smith’s sneers and taunts.

But though circumstances were thus unfavorable to the cultivation of letters, yet something was done in this direction nevertheless. Smith refers flippantly enough to Dwight, Jefferson, Barlow and Irving. But besides these there were others, not brilliant luminaries perhaps, yet stars shining in the darkness according to their orders and degrees. We do not design here to enter upon any discussion of their respective merits, but we may mention as a writer of that period no less a character than George Washington, whose greatness in other spheres of life has entirely eclipsed any fame of which he may be worthy as an author, yet whose Farewell Address alone would entitle him to a place among the most accurate writers of English. Among others we may name John Adams, whose pen was scarcely less eloquent than his tongue; Francis Hopkinson, author of The Battle of the Kegs and many other pieces, of which it has been said, that “while they are fully equal to any of Swift’s writings for wit, they have nothing at all in them of Swift’s vulgarity;” Dr. Benjamin Rush, a distinguished writer on medical and social topics; John Trumbull, the author of McFingal and The Progress of Dullness; James Madison, afterward President of the United States, one of the ablest writers in The Federalist; Philip Freneau, a poet of the Revolution and the period immediately following; Alexander Hamilton, a contributor to The Federalist, and one of the clearest of political writers; Joseph Dennie, the author of The Lay Preacher, and editor of The Portfolio; Joseph Hopkinson, author of Hail, Columbia; Charles Brockden Brown, author of Wieland, Arthur Mervyn, and other works, and who was perhaps the first American who wholly devoted his life to literary pursuits; William Wirt, author of the British Spy, the Life of Patrick Henry, and other works; and Lyman Beecher, the author of a work on Political Atheism, anti several volumes of sermons and public addresses. This list might easily be extended, but its length as it now stands, as well as the merits of the writers adduced, is sufficient to contradict effectually the statement that America had “no native literature,” and that during the thirty or forty years immediately subsequent to the Revolution she had done “absolutely nothing” for polite letters. Much of this early literature still remains, and is read; many of these authors are still familiar to this generation, and it is generally admitted that the writer whose fame survives a century is assured of a literary immortality. Sydney Smith was an acute man, a learned man, a great wit, a ready and elegant writer, a trenchant critic, but the names of some of these humble Americans whom he did not deign to mention, or mentioned only to scoff, bid fair to stand as long in the annals of literature as his own.

On the eastern slope of the Andes are a thousand springs from which the slender rills, half hidden at times by the grass, scarcely at any time seen or heard, trickle down the side of the immense mountain range, here and there falling into each other and swelling in volume as they flow, until at length is formed the mighty Amazon, that drains the plateaus and valleys of half a continent. So the beginnings of our literature, like the beginnings of every literature, are small, indistinct, half hidden; but as they proceed, these little rills of thought and expression grow and expand, until the mighty stream is formed that irrigates the whole world of intellectual activity.

This stream, as we have said, first began to assume definite form and direction about the time that Sydney Smith was uttering his tirades against the genius and achievements of our countrymen. In 1817, appeared in the North American Review a remarkable poem called “Thanatopsis.” The author was a young man named William Cullen Bryant, only twenty-three years of age; yet the poem had been written four years before. The annals of literature do not furnish another example of such excellence at so early an age. The poem yet stands as one of the most exquisite in the language. A recent critic has characterized it as “lofty in conception, beautiful in execution, full of chaste language and delicate and striking imagery, and, above all, pervaded by a noble and cheerful religious philosophy.” This first effort on the part of Bryant was succeeded by a long career of eminence in the field of literature. In 1818 appeared a volume of miscellanies called “The Sketch Book,” by Washington Irving, a young man who had already acquired some slight reputation as a dabbler in literature of a trifling or humorous kind. The Sketch Book was almost immediately honored by republication in England. This initial volume was followed by a second series of miscellanies called “Bracebridge Hall,” which was published in London in 1822. In the preliminary chapter the author pleasantly adverts to the general feeling with which American authorship was regarded in England. “It has been a matter of marvel to my European readers,” says he, “that a man from the wilds of America should express himself in tolerable English. I was looked upon as something new and strange in literature; a kind of demi-savage, with a feather in his hand instead of on his head; and there was a curiosity to hear what such a being had to say about civilized society.” In the same year with Irving’s Sketch Book appeared Drake’s Culprit Fay, a poem that has not been surpassed in its kind since Milton’s Comus. In 1821 Percival issued his first volume of poems, Dana his Idle Man, and Cooper, his Precaution. His last named volume was at once followed by a long list of works including such famous titles as The Spy, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer. It marked the advent of our most distinguished novelist—a man who has been styled the Walter Scott of America. He justly stands in the same rank with the mighty Wizard of the North, and has no other equal. Thus the stream of American literature rolled on its course, and was swelled as it flowed by the contributions of Everett, Prescott, Bancroft, Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, Willis, Holmes, Whittier, Lowell, and a host of others, whose names the world will not willingly let die.

America has not yet produced a Shakespere or a Milton; but it must be remembered that England has produced but one, each of these in a period of a thousand years. Anywhere below these two great names, American literature of the last seventy years is able to parallel the best work that has been produced by our kinsmen on the other side of the Atlantic. In wealth and elegance of diction, in depth of thought or feeling, in brightness and grace of expression, in any of the thousand forms and flights in which genius seeks to express himself, the current literature of America stands on a level with the current literature of England; and Sydney Smith’s sneers, which must have touched our fathers to the quick, find no response now except the smile of contempt which alone they ever deserved.

T. J. Chapman.

THE OHIO SOCIETY, AND OHIO IN NEW YORK.
I.

There are many things that link the capital city of financial and commercial America, to the State of Ohio, that New England enterprise, and New York encouragement, and Virginian patriotism, did so much to build beyond the Alleghenies. It is not merely in the associations and connections of to-day that New York and Ohio are bound together. A pregnant era of the early past, was disposed toward good results forever, by the patriotic generosity of the Empire State, at a time when Ohio was but a name in the far off wilderness; a promise that many things must nurture, before it could be realized.

Historians will recall, when this much has been said, the events that were pressed close upon each other, before the soil upon which Ohio now stands, was declared the property of the nation, disentangled from the conflicting claims of jealous States, and how New York by her self-renunciation, led the way to harmony. For a century had Virginia and Connecticut made their claims to the vast westward territory; vaster than the imagination of any living man then conceived. When the French were driven from the lands west of the bounds of Pennsylvania, the contention commenced, and claims were urged from time to time, until both voices of dispute were temporarily silenced by the war in which the rivals fought side by side for the freedom of both. When that conflict was ended, the question again arose; not, this time, with the English Crown as the greater power, but with the loose jointed Confederation, under which America endeavored to work out a national salvation. Virginia, made her demand under the grant of James, in 1609, which gave her: “All those lands, countries and territories, situated, lying, and being in that part of America called Virginia, from the point of the eastern land called Cape or Point Comfort, all that space and circuit of land lying, from the seacoast of the precinct aforesaid, up into the land, throughout, from sea to sea, west and northwest, and also all the islands lying within one hundred miles along the coast of the both seas of the precinct aforesaid.”

This generous King, who was giving away so much that did not belong to him, was really giving more than he dreamed of; for the writer of the grant evidently believed that the South Sea, or Pacific Ocean, was but little westward of the Atlantic, and never dreamed that he was extending his line so as to take in the magnificent Western and Northwestern empire of to-day.

Connecticut made her claim under Charles the II, who in 1662, gave to the colony “All that part of our dominion in New England, in America, bounded on the east by the Narragansett River, commonly called Narragansett Bay, where the said river falleth into the sea, and on the north by the line of the Massachusetts plantation, and on the south by the sea, and in longitude as the line of the Massachusetts colony, running from east to west; that is to say, from the said Narragansett Bay, on the east to the South Sea on the west part, with the islands thereto adjoining.”

It was under this very vague, but very extensive grant, that Connecticut laid claim to, and maintained that claim, for that part of Ohio known the world over, as the “Connecticut Western Reserve.”

While Virginia, Connecticut and Pennsylvania were warring in the courts, in the legislatures, and before the people over their various claims, there were many others who virtually assumed that the whole unoccupied and unorganized land to the west, belonged to the nation at large, and that no state had a right to exclusive jurisdiction. This discussion threatened all sorts of difficulties, at a time when peace and prosperity could only come through a mutual helpfulness and internal harmony, and the wisest and most patriotic declared themselves willing to waive all personal claims, and allow the national government to administer the general estate for the general good. Congress so viewed it, and appealed to the States to yield their claims. The first response came from New York, which conceded all her possible ownership to western territory, to the general government, and the other States followed in her wake. Virginia followed New York; and Massachusetts Virginia; and eventually Connecticut came into line.

In the appeal of Congress to the States there was no ambiguity as to the purpose to which these lands were to be devoted. The act of October 10, 1780, resolved that “the unappropriated lands that may be ceded or relinquished to the United States by any particular State,” should be disposed of “for the common benefit of the United States, and shall be settled and formed into distinct republican States, which shall become members of the Federal Union, and have the same right of sovereignty, freedom and independence as the other States; that each which shall be so formed shall contain a suitable extent of territory not less than one hundred nor more than one hundred and fifty miles square, or as near thereto as circumstances will admit, that the necessary and reasonable expense which any particular State shall have incurred since the commencement of the present war, in subduing any part of the territory that may be ceded or relinquished to the United States, shall be reimbursed.” It was further agreed that said lands should be “granted or settled at such times and under such regulations” as should be thereafter agreed upon by the United States, or any nine or more of them.

In less than six months after the issuing of this broad invitation, New York set an example of generosity to her young sister States, which had so much yet to learn in the way of mutual concessions for the general good. And she made no conditions in her surrender. She simply said that she would draw a line across the western end of Lake Ontario, north and south, and that while all east of it should be hers, all west would be forever quit-claimed to the nation. It took Virginia three years to make up her mind, and when she waived her claim in March, 1784, she yet reserved nearly four million acres to the south and east of the Ohio. The year following, Massachusetts came in with no conditions, while Connecticut followed, in the fall of 1786, conditioning that she should retain the magnificent Western Reserve, upon which a New Connecticut was eventually built in the wilderness—that Reserve that has played so important a part in the history, and the moral development of the republic. South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia, at last straggled, one by one, into the path of manifest destiny; although the century had turned the point of time by two notches, before the last hand was lessened, and the Nation became in law what she had already been in fact—the architect and master of the splendid empire that stretched from the western edge of the civilization of that day, to where the Spaniard and the Frenchman still held a nominal right to the westward of the Mississippi.

With these cessions, the territorial system of our government came into existence. That which Georgia gave, became the Mississippi Territory; that from the Carolinas, the Southwest Territory; and all that north of the Ohio River, the Northwest Territory; and this brings us to a point where New York again had a part in creating the State of Ohio, and in dedicating the soil upon which she was reared, forever to the cause of human liberty.

It was within the limits of her chief city that the very foundation stones, not only of the one State but of many, were laid with a far-seeing wisdom and prophetic foresight that mark the men of that early Congress as among the sages of legislative wisdom. In the old hall, that stood at the corner of Wall and Broad streets, where the restless oceans of a financial world roll in a flood that never rests, and to which the lines of monetary interest center from all the far-off corners of the land, upon the spot now hallowed to the memory of Washington by a colossal statue of bronze, there was enacted, in the midsummer of 1787, an ordinance that has well been called[10] “The most important legislative act in American History”—there came into existence a law that gave Ohio and Indiana, and that galaxy of northwestern states to the Union; those free states, without which that Union never could have been saved in the day of its imminent peril.

Many States have been created, many important acts have been passed by the various Congresses that have sat in New York, in Philadelphia, and in Washington, but there was in this measure something that saved the nation from being sometime all slave; that reserved for freedom an empire that by mere stress of moral example if in nothing else, was a menace forever before the slaveholder. In that ordinance was one little clause that made Ohio and Wisconsin and Illinois what they afterwards became.

“There shall be,” it recited, “neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude in said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes.” Simple enough these words sound now, when human bondage upon American soil is but the echo of a dead past, but for the day in which they were uttered, they were the clarion call of a new era—the death knell of a monster wrong; and the voice was none the less that of God speaking in human legislation, because many of the men who had become His instrument, had no dream of the great things to which they had put their hands, and to which they had given their votes.

So, in one sense, Ohio may be said to have had her beginning in New York. From the days of her earliest childhood, she has been a willing neighbor, willing to give and take of friendly offices with her elder sister to the East. Two of her chief magistrates were the sons of the Empire State; she has borrowed not a little of her legislation from the experience of the older State; she patterned her canals after those which DeWitt Clinton had so largely aided to bring into being; she has developed many of her native resources by New York’s financial aid; she has sought to build her railways so that they should lead direct to the metropolis; she has in a thousand ways acknowledged the commercial and financial supremacy of the greater city and State; and last, but not the least, she has sent scores of her sons to the East, to prove that the Buckeye is capable of gaining and holding his own among the best, in any lines of human labor or human thought—and it is with this subject largely, that we have at present to deal.

There hangs in certain cheerful rooms at No. 236 Fifth avenue, a modestly framed document that is more significant in that which it suggests, than in what it declares. It is a call for a meeting, and a pledge of certain gentlemen whose names are attached, that they will do what lies within their power to create in this great metropolis, a hearthstone around which those who claimed Ohio for a mother or a foster-mother, might congregate now and then, for such mutual help or association as would keep the memory of the old home alive in the new. The beginning was modest and quiet, and yet out of it has grown an organization that is in many ways a model of its kind, and that certainly has fulfilled the intentions of its originators.

“We the undersigned,” to quote from the language of the call, “hereby agree to unite with each to form an association to be known as The Ohio Association in New York, and to that end will meet at any place designated, for the purpose of completing such organization upon notice given to us whenever twelve persons shall have signed this agreement. There is to be no expense incurred until the organization is completed, and assented to by each member.”

“New York, October 7th, 1885.”

Attached to this document were names that would have carried weight in many of the walks of the business and professional life of the metropolis. General Thomas Ewing, an honored member of the New York Bar, Samuel Thomas and Calvin S. Brice, of the more active fields of Wall Street and the railway world, C. W. Moulton, Col. W. L. Strong, one of the leading merchants of the city, Hugh J. Jewett, Wallace C. Andrews, Homer Lee, J. W. Harman, Warren Higley, Milton Sayler, Anson G. McCook, Col. Fogg, Mahlon Chance, J. Q. Howard, General Henry L. Burnett, and others who had acquired reputation at home, before making New York the scene of later operations and more recent successes. There was more than mere formal agreement in this compact; it was understood by all that such a society should come into being, and all were in one mind that then was the time for beginning.

Other attempts looking in the same direction had been made in times past, but had come to naught. Early in the days of the great war, many of the sons and daughters of Ohio, residing in this city, met at the Murray Hill Hotel, and took steps to give active aid to the soldiers in the field; but these weekly gatherings ended with the noble purpose that called them into being. In the first annual report of the Ohio Society, its first secretary, Homer Lee, gives a brief sketch of this effort, and of the things that followed in its wake. “The object,” says Mr. Lee, “was to send supplies, clothing, medicines, etc., to the soldiers at the front. A handsome silk and satin banner was made at a cost of some $500, upon which was a beautifully embroidered Coat of Arms of the State of Ohio, to be presented to the bravest Ohio regiment. As might have been expected there was much rivalry for the possession of this prize, as glowing descriptions of the beautiful souvenir were given by the newspapers at that time. The commanding officers were appealed to, but could not be prevailed upon to decide the question, because, as one officer put it ‘It could not easily be decided which was the bravest, where all the regiments by their valor and heroism had covered themselves with glory.’ At the close of the war the 7th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, of Cleveland, secured the prize.”

Another organization, somewhat similar in character and purpose, was called into being about the same time. It was the Ohio Soldier’s Aid Society, and Theron R. Butler, was its president, and Mr. John R. Cecil the treasurer. Its members made it their duty to call upon the Ohio soldiers in the New York hospitals, and to minister to their wants. In various forms of help, this society expended over fifteen thousand dollars, and performed many eminent services for the wounded and the sick, and like its companion organization above described, its days ended with the close of the war.

In 1877, the subject of an association of Ohio men was again discussed, when a number of gentlemen had been called together by the death of Chief Justice Chase, but it came to naught. Again, in 1874, some of the younger sons of the Buckeye State in this city, held various meetings and talked organization, but nothing came of the movement beyond talk. It was reserved for the call above quoted to produce enduring results, and to bring into being the flourishing society that has bound the Ohioans of New York together with bonds of enduring union.

When the twelve, and more, had signed the call and thus made it operative, a meeting was held in the office of General Ewing, No. 155 Broadway, on November 13, 1885. There was then no question of success, and the gentlemen present went to work in a mood to make that success of the most pronounced character. General Ewing was elected president pro tem., and Mr. David F. Harbaugh secretary pro tem. A committee of ten upon permanent organization were appointed, and consisted of the following gentlemen: C. W. Moulton, William Perry Fogg, Cyrus Butler, J. Q. Howard, Mahlon Chance, M. I. Southard, David F. Harbaugh, Warren Higley, Calvin S. Brice, and Joseph Pool. When an adjourned meeting was held, on the 20th of the same month, additions were made to this foundation committee, in the persons of Messrs. Carson Lake, John W. Harman, and Homer Lee.

The committee were already prepared with a report. They had drafted a provisional constitution, and prepared by-laws, and proposed that these should be printed and sent to the Ohio men in New York, to discover how many would favor the movement, and agree to support it. Such action was ordered, the new fundamental law of a society not yet organized was sent broadcast, and responses invited. One hundred subscribing names were made the requisite; they were furnished, and twenty-five in addition. Thus encouraged, there was a call from the President, and on the evening of January 13, 1886, over one hundred of the sons of Ohio were found together in the parlors of the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

The meeting was prolific of results. The Ohio Society of New York, was called into being. Officers were elected; arrangements made for the preparation of a constitution that would be in exact accord with the purposes there declared. The first officers there chosen constituted a corps which was of itself a guarantee of successful results. General Thomas Ewing was elected president; Whitelaw Reid, General Wager Swayne, Col. William L. Strong, Hon. Hugh J. Jewett, and Algernon S. Sullivan were chosen vice-presidents. Homer Lee was made recording secretary and Carson Lake, corresponding secretary; while Col. William Perry Fogg was assigned to the responsible position of treasurer. A governing committee consisting of Henry L. Burnett, chairman, Calvin S. Brice, Andrew J. C. Foye, A. D. Juilliard, George Follett, Stephen B. Elkins, Jerome D. Gillett, C. W. Moulton, Joseph Pool, were selected. The president and vice-president were directed to prepare the constitution; the invitations of certain hotels managed by Ohio men to use their parlors for gatherings until permanent quarters could be secured, were accepted; and the president-elect delivered a striking address upon assuming office, that throws so strong a light upon the purpose and spirit of the gathering, that the writer is tempted to quote somewhat freely therefrom.

“We have met to-night” said General Ewing, “as sons and foster sons of Ohio resident in New York City to complete the foundation of a new society in our National Metropolis. Full as this city is of organizations of men, she has, I think, none such as this. The ties of religion, charity, politics, science, art, literature and common occupation draw and hold people together in numberless associations which have filled Manhattan Island with splendid edifices. So, too, the sympathies of a common race and history have founded Societies of St. Patrick, St. Andrew, St. George and many others, at whose annual reunion, the wit, song and sentiment of the fatherlands warm the hearts of their sons in this land beyond the sea. And here, also, is an American society which has at several crises in the last fifty years exerted a considerable influence on public opinion, and the annual reunions of which are watched with eagerness everywhere throughout our land where the sons of New England, from their distant homes, look proudly and fondly back on their grand old mother.

“But the New England Society is composed of the sons of six States. This is a society of the natives or former residents of a single State—Ohio, the State first born of the American Republic. I do not say she was the first received into the Union, for Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee all preceded her. Vermont was admitted in 1791, Kentucky in ’92, Tennessee in ’96 and Ohio not until the 29th day of November, 1802. But these three older States begun life as Colonies of Colonies, each exclusively owned by and settled from its parent colony—Vermont from New York, Kentucky from Virginia, and Tennessee from North Carolina. ‘The territory northwest of the Ohio river’ was the first land ever owned by the United States. It was a vast and pathless wilderness—an Empire in embryo—when, in 1784, Virginia, with magnificent generosity, presented it to the Union. It was not until ten years later, when the savages, who had been allies of Great Britain throughout the War of the Revolution, were routed and subdued by Mad Anthony Wayne, that agricultural settlements, except under the shadow of block-houses, first became possible. Then the veteran soldiers of the Revolution, broken in fortune, but aflame with the love of liberty and triumphant from the long struggle for independence, flocked there from every one of the glorious thirteen; hewed out homes in the primeval forest, paid for lands in the long-dishonored certificates of indebtedness given for their service in the Revolutionary War, and thus founded the first State which sprung from the womb of the Republic.

“We are proud of Ohio,” continued the General, “for her heroic birth, her honorable achievements, and her glorious destiny. She ‘sits in the centre,’ belongs to no section, and is a bond of all. Her sons who meet here to-night are at home in New York. We do not come together as strangers in a strange land to seek relief from the depression of inhospitable influence. No; New York is not inhospitable. She is merely too big and too busy to note who comes or goes. Her gates landward and seaward, are thrown open to the world. She is a focus of all the great forces of American life. Much that is best and worst in it is developed here; and the struggle of a new comer for a footing is always severe, and generally unsuccessful. But New York is more truly cosmopolitan than any other city in the United States, or, perhaps, in the world; and there is little of race or sectional prejudice to bar the path of merit from whatever quarter it may come.

“We found this Society because we love Ohio, and would cherish her history, her traditions, her recollections of home and camp and forum. How often do we look back to the days and scenes of our life there to revive the sweetest influence and the dearest memories of existence.

“But we have aims for our Society beyond the culture of the memories and affections of other days. We hope to make it felt in this great field of thought and action as a generator of wholesome intellectual and moral forces. When this meeting was called for permanent organization there were one hundred and fifteen signers of our Constitution. Under the direction of a judicious Governing Committee, the number will doubtless be increased to several hundred. Our membership of non-residents will perhaps be equally large. We should make something more of such good and abundant material than a mere social club. I am far from insensible to the pleasures of convivial reunions, and hope our society may have many of them, and that I may long be of the number present. But we can have some good work out of it as well as plenty of recreation. For instance, with the aid of our western and southwestern brethern, who, like ourselves, have drifted into this fence corner of the Republic, we might help it to throw off its colonial subserviency to English politics and manners, and gradually Americanize it. We can thus repay in kind the debt of gratitude we owe the East for its missionary efforts a generation ago, when it was the seat of power in the Union, and the now imperial West was but a half subdued wilderness.

“Ere long we can command means, I hope, to fit up and maintain an accessible, commodious and permanent club house, the halls of which will be a pleasant rendezvous for members and their friends, where the ideas and policies of East and West may meet in intelligent and friendly encounter, and where sectional prejudice may be worn off in the attrition of social intercourse; where we may see files of the Ohio newspapers, and note the current of life at our old homes; where our brethern who come East may meet, or learn where to find their friends, and get information and help in their business; where Ohio men and women who are eminent or rising in any worthy field of effort may have cordial recognition and a helping hand, if needed; and where those who have unfortunately fallen in the struggle for a foothold here will not be forgotten. In conclusion, gentlemen, I venture to express the hope that our Society may be from the outset, and continue to the end, so aristocratic that wealth can not buy a membership for vice, and so democratic that none will be excluded by needless cost of membership from an association which their virtues and talents would adorn.”

The foundation was thus laid; the story of the superstructure will be deferred for the present.

General Thomas Ewing—First President of the Ohio Society.

The connection of General Thomas Ewing with the founding of the Ohio Society of New York has been already shown. At this point some mention may profitably be made of the chief points in his public and professional career; as others of the same Buckeye group will be considered from time to time.

General Ewing came into the busy life of the world at a time, and under auspices, calculated not only to develop the best that was in him, but to call into active play the strongest elements of his nature. Ohio was in its youthful days; schools and culture had not yet reached that point where a finished education was the rule and expectation of the great mass of the youth as now. The freedom of pioneer life was around him, and while he learned the lessons of refinement and culture within his parental home, he was learning the lessons of self-reliance, courage and personal responsibility, from the outdoor environments of his day and neighborhood.

It was, also, a time when the great public questions of the day were debated from the stump, in the home circle, and at the caucus, and not left to the newspapers as at present. The young man was not merely a reader—he was compelled to think, and often talk for himself. He must know something of public life, and he usually had a personal acquaintance with the public men of his day and neighborhood. In the case of General Ewing, one of the chief men of Ohio history was a member of his own household—his father, Thomas Ewing, the Senator from Ohio, and Secretary of the Treasury in the cabinets of the elder Harrison and Tyler, and Secretary of the Interior under Taylor.

Thomas Ewing, the son, was born at Lancaster, Ohio, August 7, 1829. Not only was he the natural heir to the qualities that had made his father one of the great statesmen and lawyers of his day, but he could find back among the family names that of Findley Ewing, who distinguished himself under William of Orange, in the famous war of 1688, and was presented with a flag by that monarch, for gallant service at the siege of Londonderry; George Ewing, his grandfather, an ensign and lieutenant of the Revolutionary War; Neil Gillespie—a man of mark, in the early days of the Monongahela, and great-grandfather to James G. Blaine and himself; and his mother’s father, Hugh Boyle, who, in youth was driven from Ireland because of the part he had taken in the Emmet rebellion, and afterward served the State of Ohio for forty years, as clerk of the Supreme Court for Fairfield county.

The public life of young Ewing commenced at an early age. When but nineteen, he was appointed secretary of the commission to settle the still vexed question as to whether the boundary between Virginia and Ohio was the high water mark or the low water mark, on the north side of the Ohio River. A year later, he became one of the private secretaries of President Taylor, and after Taylor’s sudden death, entered Brown University at Providence, Rhode Island, from which he was graduated in 1854.

He had already chosen the profession of the law, as the work of his life, and immediately entered the Cincinnati Law School, from which he was graduated in 1855. The next year he married Ellen E. Cox, a daughter of Rev. Wm. Cox, a Presbyterian minister of Piqua, Ohio, celebrated for his eloquence and zeal, and in the fall of ’56 removed to Leavenworth, Kansas, which he had chosen as the opening point of his professional career. His partners in the first firm whose sign-board bore his name, were two gentlemen afterwards to win great distinction in a war then farther off in the minds of men than in the dread certainties of fact—General Dan McCook, who afterwards fell at Kenesaw, and William T. Sherman, whose recent death the world is yet lamenting. The name of the firm was Sherman, Ewing & McCook.

The success of Mr. Ewing was brilliant from the start. He had not only the magnetic presence by which friends are made, but the “natural genius for law” that made him a safe counsellor, a brilliant pleader, and a wary contestant in the varied fields of litigation. He was soon one of the recognized leaders of the bar of Kansas, and it was inevitable that he should soon be called to a commanding place in the field of politics as well. It was a time and place where no man could be silent, and when the most sluggish was compelled to become partisan. The young advocate from Ohio left no one in doubt as to which side he took in the struggle to make Kansas a free State. He bore an active and conspicuous part in the struggle on the side of freedom, and was one of the Republican leaders of the West. He represented Kansas in the Peace Conference, which assembled in Washington on the call of Virginia in 1860, and at the early age of twenty-nine was elected the first chief justice of the Supreme Court of his State—a position he ably held for two years, until the great rebellion swept him from the bench into the ranks of the Union army.

Some more detailed mention of General Ewing’s part in that great historic struggle to make Kansas a free State is needed, to fully explain the public service he rendered in those days of danger. In the fall of 1857, the Pro-Slavery constitutional convention of Kansas, formed the Lecompton constitution, of which only the slavery cause was submitted to popular vote. The question thus left to the people was whether they would accept a fundamental law with slavery, or without. Thus the voter was compelled to favor the Lecompton constitution if he voted at all—a constitution hateful to the Free State majority, as it had been framed by a fraudulently chosen convention, composed largely of residents of Missouri.

It was also provided in this document, that if the majority voted for it and rejected slavery, then the slaves already held in Kansas, should remain such for life.

At the same election, a separate vote was ordered for legislative and executive officers under the constitution. The hope of the pro slavery party was that the Free State men, who were in a great majority in the territory, would refuse to vote at all, because of their indignation at the tricky manner of the submission, and that therefore, the Democratic Congress would admit Kansas as a slave State completely officered by pro slavery men.

“It was an artful trap,” says one historian of those stirring times, “and the Free State Convention was caught in it by resolving that the party would wholly refrain from voting at that election. Thereupon Mr. Ewing bolted the convention, but only eight out of over a hundred delegates followed him. The bolters nominated a full State ticket and tickets in every county for all the offices, canvassed the Territory, and in spite of the bitterest opposition of the radical leaders and press, succeeded in bringing a large majority of the Free State party to the polls. They thus completely officered the proposed pro-slavery Government with tried and true Free State men—publicly pledged, if the State should be admitted, to immediately call another convention, form a Free State Constitution, and destroy the Lecompton Constitution and Government, root and branch. The pro-slavery leaders, finding themselves outnumbered at the polls, resorted to the most enormous and astounding frauds in the returns, and then officially proclaimed the election of the pro-slavery candidates. Thereupon Ewing went to the Territorial Legislature then in session at Lawrence, a majority of which were Free State men, and got a commission appointed to investigate and expose the election frauds. He was a member of the Board and conducted its proceedings with startling boldness and energy, resulting within a week in the discovery and seizure of the forged returns, which had been buried in a candle box under a wood pile at Lecompton on the premises of the United States Surveyor General, John Calhoun—the exposure of the forgeries—the indictment of the chief conspirators, Calhoun, McLean and others—their flight from Kansas never to return—and the abandonment by Buchanan’s administration, and his party in Congress of the Lecompton Constitution, which fell covered with execrations and infamy. This closed the long struggle to force slavery on Kansas, and the new State was thereupon admitted under a Free Constitution made by her own people.”

To pass from this struggle for freedom to the greater struggle in the wider field of the war that followed, was but a logical step to the young advocate who had devoted so much of his time to the cause that had won his heart. He first appears in that struggle as Colonel of the Eleventh Regiment of Kansas Volunteer Infantry, recruited and organized by him in the summer of 1862. He led his command in several severe engagements in Arkansas—at Cane Hill, Van Buren and Prairie Grove; and for gallant conduct in the last named battle, which was one of the fiercest of the war, was promoted to be a Brigadier-General on the 11th of March, 1863. He was soon after assigned to the command of the “District of the Border,” comprising the State of Kansas and the western portion of Missouri—a command of extreme administrative difficulty and great personal danger, which he held from June, 1863, to February, 1864, and in which he won the emphatic approval of President Lincoln and General Schofield, the Department Commander. His “Order No. 11,” issued while he held this command, directing the inhabitants of large portions of three border counties of southern Missouri to remove to the military posts or out of the border, was and still is severely criticised. It was the result of a peculiarly difficult situation, solvable in no other way.

Those counties had become the impregnable base of operations of about a thousand guerrillas, under Quantrell, the James brothers, and Yeager, who were incessantly making incursions into southern Kansas, to rob and kill the defenceless people, and who had just burned Lawrence, and in cold blood murdered nearly three hundred unarmed and unresisting citizens. After two years of strenuous effort by other Union commanders, it had proved to be impossible to protect Kansas people from these dreadful incursions, and equally impossible to run the guerillas to earth in their fastness on the Missouri side of the border. These counties had been desolated early in the war by Jennison, Hoyt and their lawless bands of Kansas “Red Legs”—burned to the subsoil, nineteen farms out of twenty having been absolutely abandoned, and the houses and fences destroyed or left rotting. The condition of this district can be imagined from the fact that when this “Order No. 11” was issued, Nevada, the county seat of Vernon County, having at least a hundred houses standing and in good order, had not a single inhabitant, and the Court House without door or window-pane, had become a shelter for hogs and cattle running wild, with its records of titles and court proceedings scattered over the floors, and covered with filth. There were not at that time a hundred families left in the entire district affected by the order, outside of the military posts. They were the friends and kinsfolk of the guerillas, who were constantly hanging about the garrisoned towns, buying arms, ammunition and provisions for the guerillas, and carrying news to them of every movement of our troops. It was impossible to kill the guerillas or drive them out of the border while these country people stayed there as their spies and purveyors. Therefore, after full conference with General Schofield, then commanding the Department of the Missouri, and now the honored head of the army, General Ewing ordered the few remaining inhabitants in these desolated districts to remove to the nearest military post, or back to the second tier of counties from the State border, and the order was subsequently ratified by President Lincoln.

In a letter published since the war, General Schofield said: “The responsibility for that order rests with President Lincoln, myself, and General Ewing, in the proportion of our respective rank and authority.” About half of the people affected by the order removed to the posts under the protection of our troops, and the remainder further back in Missouri. They moved in summer—were subjected to no physical force or hardship, and were generally glad to get out of reach of the wild storm which was about to burst on them from Kansas, in revenge for the Lawrence massacre, and which the Government had not troops enough there to quell. Within two or three months after the issuance of this order, Quantrell having lost his spies and purveyors, and finding it impossible therefore to continue the vendetta, led all his guerillas south, and the border war was thus forever ended.

General Ewing’s most distinguished service during the war was in fighting the battle of Pilot Knob on the 27th and 28th of September, 1864. The Confederate General, Sterling Price, having effected an unlooked for and unresisted crossing of the Arkansas above Little Rock, with his army of over twenty thousand men, marched on St. Louis, where General Rosecrans was in command of the Department of the Missouri, and General Ewing of the District of Southeast Missouri. All the Federal troops of the department were scattered in small detachments, with bases in earthworks or stockades in or near the chief towns of Missouri, which were the places of refuge of the Union men and neutrals from the savage warfare of the guerillas. These scattered troops could not be withdrawn from their posts without enormous sacrifice of the people and property they were protecting, and it was, moreover, impossible to assemble them at St. Louis in time and numbers sufficient to defeat Price’s large army, which was increasing rapidly by accessions of guerillas from all parts of Southern Missouri. There was but one possible means of preventing the capture of St. Louis and the vast loss of prestige and resources which would follow. That was to delay Price a few days until re-enforcements could arrive from Little Rock, by occupying and holding fast to Fort Davidson, a small hexagonal work capable of being manned by about one thousand men, situated ninety miles south of St. Louis, at the village of Pilot Knob, which was then the southern terminus of the Iron Mountain Railroad. In this little fort were stored immense amounts of ordnance, commissary and quartermasters’ supplies, which Price greatly needed, and which lay directly between him and the great city, by capturing which he expected to bring Missouri over to the Confederacy. General Rosecrans, at the urgent request of General Ewing, reluctantly consented that he should lead this forlorn hope. He reached Pilot Knob in the nick of time—but four hours ahead of Price’s advance—and with but one thousand and eighty men he held Fort Davidson against two of the three divisions of Price’s army—those of Marmaduke and Cabell—numbering about fourteen thousand men—Shelpy’s division of about seven thousand men having been sent to Ewing’s rear at Mineral Point, twenty miles north of Pilot Knob, to cut the railroad and insure the destruction or capture of his entire command. After repulsing two assaults with great loss to the enemy, General Ewing, under cover of the night, evacuated and then blew up his untenable fort, and, favored by broken ground, though pressed on flank and rear, held his force in hand, and by dogged fighting for two days and nights, brought them to a fortified camp at Rolla, a hundred miles west of Pilot Knob. Price was thus delayed for a week, and drawn so far westward from his march on St. Louis, that reinforcements reached St. Louis and the great objective of his invasion was lost. He turned west and south and was soon driven from Missouri without striking an effective blow. General Rosecrans, in a special order issued October 6, 1864, said of this brilliant episode: “With pride and pleasure the commanding General notices the gallant conduct of Brigadier-General Thomas Ewing, Jr., and his command in the defence of Pilot Knob, and in the subsequent retreat to Rolla. With scarcely one thousand effective men, they repulsed the attacks of Price’s invading army, and successfully retreated with their battery a distance of one hundred miles, in the face of a pursuing and assailing cavalry force of five times their number. General Ewing and his subordinates have deserved well of their country. Under such commanders, the Federal troops should always march to victory.”

At the conclusion of the war, General Ewing once more made his home in his native State. He was soon prominent in political affairs, giving his voice and vote to such measures as in his opinion were for the best interests of his country. He was a member of the Ohio constitutional convention of 1873-4, where his legal attainments and admirable powers of debate gave him a foremost place. As a member of the Democratic majority in the Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Congresses, he was one of the leaders of his party in resisting and stopping the employment of Federal troops and supervisors at elections conducted under State laws, and also in the successful movement for the preservation of the Greenback currency, the remonetization of silver, and the issue of silver certificates, but for which measures of finance the currency would have been greatly contracted, to the infinite and protracted distress of the industrial and debtor classes. In 1879, he was the Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio, and made an able canvass of the State, but the Republican majority was too large to be overcome.

In 1882, that magnetic attraction that draws so many men to New York city, made General Ewing a member of the bar of the metropolis, where the enlarged opportunities of his profession have been met by a mental equipment and training equal to their most exacting requirements, and where his success has been of a marked character. To this legal ability is added a ripe scholarship, unusual grace as a speaker, and a personal magnetism that charms all with whom he comes in contact. His published speeches in Congress and on the stump have been numerous, and marked by their information, ability, liberality of thought and patriotism. Although his purely literary efforts have been less numerous, because of the active professional life that has been thrust upon him, the work he has done in that direction shows how much he might have accomplished, had his life been given to letters; for example, an address delivered at the Centennial celebration of the settlement of the Northwest territory at Marietta, Ohio, July, 16, 1889, and his address before the Kansas State Bar Association, on January 7, 1890, favoring the abolition of the requirement of unanimity, of juries in civil cases, and urging the codification of the “private law”—both of which speeches have attracted wide attention, and most favorable comment.

While General Ewing has accomplished so much, he is still in his prime, and is one of the moral forces in his profession in New York city, a strong, well-balanced and successful man. As has been said, he takes a deep interest in the affairs of the Society he did so much to create, and with him, an “Ohio man,” whether known or unknown, is always sure of a cordial welcome; while he enjoys life in his new home, his love for the State that gave him birth, and which his honored father so long served, is as deep as that of a son for a mother whose face he does not see, but whose memory is forever carried in his heart.

Col. William L. Strong—One of the First Vice-Presidents of the Ohio Society.

In the sketches of the two distinguished Ohioans which accompany this, the law has been so well represented that one might imagine that the chief purpose of Ohio in the metropolis was to interpret the law, and see that equal justice was done between man and man; but from that which follows, it will be seen that the mission of the Buckeye in New York, is as varied as his numbers are many, and that in the walks of business and financial operation, he has won honor for his mother-state, and the evidences of deserved success for himself. And while engaged in the cares of business, he has not forgotten to fulfill all the demands of good citizenship, nor to preserve the memory of the State he has left, by doing all that lies in his power to perpetuate her memory loyally and lovingly in the one of his adoption.

Those who have attended the meetings of the Ohio Society with any degree of regularity, have not failed to notice that the genial presiding officer, Gen. Swayne, whose genius for his position is universally recognized is never so well satisfied as when he can so twist or change the current of business as to bring upon the floor a gentleman who always talks entertainingly, and whose appearance and speech justify the efforts of the presiding officer to “draw him out.” Col. William L. Strong has been so many years in New York, that people generally suppose him to be of New York origin; he has travelled the world so much, that at times it is hard to tell from what section he does hail; but when he has been brought before the Society upon one of the occasions above referred to, it takes no skill and no endeavor to tell that he was an Ohio man in the beginning, and that many of the tendrils of his affection still cling to the State in which his youth was spent, and to which he turns with a loyal devotion, whenever the occasion renews the scenes of memory, and the other sons of Ohio about him are recalling with varied emotions the things of the vanished past.

Mr. Strong came to New York when quite young in years, but equipped with all the elements needed for business success. He was born in Richland County, Ohio, on the 22d of March, 1827, and spent his boyhood among the Loudinville hills. At the age of sixteen he went to Wooster, Ohio, and spent two years with the firm of Lake & Jones, a large retail dry goods house, and from thence to Mansfield, Ohio, where he continued in the dry goods business until he came to this city, arriving here on the 31st of December, 1853.

When the young Buckeye reached the great city, he came with a purpose of making the best use of all the possibilities which might present themselves. He commenced life here as a salesman in the well-known dry goods house of L. O. Wilson & Co., at that time one of the largest and most prominent of the wholesale houses of the United States. In the panic of 1857 the firm suspended, but Mr. Strong continued in its service until 1858, when he went into the dry goods commission business, entering the firm of Farnham, Dale & Co., which was one of the prominent firms of New York at that time. In the subsequent changes of affairs, it was succeeded by Farnham, Sutton & Co., and afterwards by Sutton, Smith & Co. This last named firm was dissolved and retired from business in December, 1869, and on January 1, 1870, the firm of W. L. Strong & Co. was organized, and succeeded to the business.

The advance of Mr. Strong in his chosen line, had been as rapid as his wonderful success in these later years, has been deserved. He had entered upon the work with a determination to succeed, and nothing in the line of hard work or close application was allowed to stand in the way. He had made the interests of his employers his own; he had studied all the needs and possibilities of the situation, and had laid a sure foundation for future success. He had learned the country from one end to the other, and his business acquaintances were to be found in every quarter. It hardly needs to be added that when the new firm of which he was the head, opened its doors for business, it had already a clientage of the most valuable sort, and that its prominent place among the great dry goods houses of America, was already assured.

Col. Strong has been a faithful servant of the house from the beginning; he has done his work as if the whole load fell upon him, and he has never asked anyone to carry any share that properly belonged to himself. The house has ever been recognized as one of the solid institutions of New York. It has made but one removal since its organization, beginning business on the corner of Church and Leonard streets, and moving several years later to the spacious double store which it still occupies, in the center of the dry goods district at Nos. 75 and 77 Worth street.

Some of the qualities that have made his firm what it is to-day, are suggested in the above. Mr. Strong is a man of decided views, and great force of character, and at the same time one of the most approachable and genial men in the business. His good nature and open-handed liberality are widely felt and known, and no man has a wider circle of personal and business friends. His abilities as a business man and financier are of the highest order, and although strongly marked by conservatism and caution, are nevertheless, sufficiently progressive for even this day of commercial activity.

But while Col. Strong has given the greater share of his time and care to the interests of the firm of which he is the head, he has found time to make his energy and capital effective in various other directions. He was for years a director of the Central National Bank, and for three years past has been its president; is president of the Homer Lee Bank Note Company; was president of the Brush Electric Light Company of New York for several years; is president of the Griswold Worsted Company, a large corporation engaged in the manufacture of silk and worsted materials. He is also a director in the Erie Railroad Company; a director in the New York Life Insurance Company, Mercantile Trust Company, and Hanover Fire Insurance Company. He is also vice-president of the New York Security and Trust Company; is a director in the newly formed Plaza Bank, and has been closely connected with other important commercial and financial enterprises not necessary to mention in detail here.

In the lines of political duty, social demands, and especially in connection with such enterprises as have had some object of public benefit in view, Col. Strong has ever been an active factor. He is of the Republican faith, and has long been recognized as one of the Republican leaders of New York. He has been importuned many times to be a candidate for public office, but has been too closely interested in his business to take a hand in the practical manipulation of politics upon his own account, content to do a citizen’s duty, and to remain in private life. But he has done that duty whenever occasion offered. He is a member of the Union League, and president of the Business Men’s Republican Association, and has done much to make that one of the most efficient and useful political associations of the country. He has ever taken a deep interest in the Ohio Society, and is at present its first vice-president, and has held that office from the date of its organization.

No words can too strongly describe the high repute in which is held the business house of which Col. Strong is the head. It is among the most prominent, popular and successful in the trade. It represents some of the largest mills in this country engaged in the manufacture of dress goods, flannels, blankets and other woolens and worsteds, also important accounts in cotton goods. It has branch houses in Boston and Philadelphia for the supply of the trade in those markets. The firm was organized January 1, 1870, as above stated, and has continued in uninterrupted and successful operation ever since. Through all the panics and business disturbances that have visited this country at various periods since 1870, the house passed in safety with increased business prestige and financial strength. The able business management of this large commission house is proverbial in mercantile circles.

All that has been said in the above, in commendation of the house of which Col. Strong is the visible head, may be truthfully repeated of himself in his personal relations. His connection with many enterprises of importance in the business community and his prominent position in the same, are evidences of the business ability which he possesses and which his associates have so practically recognized. Modest and unassuming, his clear and analytical mind grasps the problems of business with such skill that fortune has smiled upon every enterprise with which he is or has been associated. His connection with so many financial institutions as director or president, further attests the confidence of the public in his integrity and marked ability.

While his business qualifications are of very high order, there are other traits in the character of Col. Strong that are no less marked. He is a man of the people, and his sympathies are wholly with the people. No worthy object to relieve or to make the struggling masses happy, ever fails to receive from him the substantial sympathy which his broad mind and liberal heart so freely give. He is an American, in every sense of the term. Plain and simple in his habits, he frowns upon everything that seeks to make one man higher than another, except as merit or exceptional service, have elevated him. He is, as one has well said, “One of the few men equal to the occasion, wherever placed, and deservedly possesses the entire confidence of the people.”

Hon. George Hoadly, Ex-Governor of Ohio.

George Hoadly, who has won at the bar of New York, a position of eminence equal to that he for years maintained in Ohio, is, in all the essentials of affection and personal loyalty, yet an “Ohio man,” for he remembers the home of his youth, the scene of his early labors and professional advancement, and the State that chose him to the highest position within her gift. Like General Ewing and Col. Strong, he is already a well-known figure in the metropolis, and is one of the men by whose labors the Ohio Society has been made what it is.

If a man is aided by the “sort of grandfathers” he has inherited, Judge Hoadly had as fair a start as is given anyone. The older lawyers of Ohio speak with tender remembrance of “Squire Hoadly,” who for years was one of the imposing figures of the bar of Cleveland, and whose purity of character was matched only by his legal knowledge, and the justice with which, in his magisterial character, he arbitrated the affairs of his fellowmen. He made Cleveland his home in 1830; served one term as Mayor, and for fifteen years as justice of the peace, then an office of greater honor and responsibility than in these days of multiplied minor and municipal courts.

The son, George Hoadly, was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 31, 1826, of a mother (Mary Anne Woolsey), who counted Jonathan Edwards among her direct ancestors, President Dwight her uncle, President Woolsey her younger brother, Theodore Winthrop, Sarah Woolsey, (“Susan Coolidge,”) her nephew and niece. Carried to Ohio when but four years of age, his primary education was received in the private school, conducted by the late Franklin T. Backus, afterwards the leader of the Cleveland bar, and Judge William Strong of Oregon. When fourteen years of age he entered Western Reserve College, at Hudson, Ohio, from which he was graduated in 1844. It had already been impressed upon him by natural bent of mind and inclination, and by the advice of those who had studied his character and watched his growth, that the law was his proper profession, and he accordingly spent a year in study at the famous law school at Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was under the instruction of Judge Story and Prof. Greenleaf. One more year of close study was passed in the office of Judge Charles C. Convers, at Zanesville, Ohio, and then young Hoadly went to Cincinnati, and in the fall of 1846 entered the law office of Chase & Ball, where he completed his studies, and was admitted to the bar in August of the following year. An incident of more than passing moment in his personal and professional life grew out of this connection. “Young Hoadly,” says one of the governor’s biographers, “at once attracted the attention and secured the warm and lasting friendship of his preceptor, Salmon P. Chase, afterwards Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, who was well aware of the importance of attaching to himself young men of ability, and, after a period of service as a clerk, Mr. Hoadly was admitted, in 1849, as a junior partner into the firm, which took the name of Chase, Ball & Hoadly. Mr. Chase was soon thereafter elected United States Senator, and withdrew from professional activity in Cincinnati, and this led to Hoadly’s appearing in important cases very early in his career.”

Strong and able in his profession, and popular with the people, the young lawyer’s way to official distinction was soon opened. In 1851, the State Legislature elected him Judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati, for the residue of the term to which that court had been limited by the constitutional convention. He ably served in this position until 1853, when the court ceased its functions, and he then formed a co-partnership with Edward Mills. He was city solicitor of Cincinnati in 1855, and 1856, and became a member of the present Superior Court in 1859. Twice was he offered a seat upon the Supreme Bench of Ohio, but each time he declined. In 1856, the proffer came from Governor Chase, and in 1862 from Governor Tod. In 1864 he was re-elected to the bench, but resigned in 1866, at which time the firm of Hoadly, Jackson & Johnson was formed. The late Judge Alphonse Taft was his successor upon the bench. The new combination was soon ranked among the great law firms of the country, and Judge Hoadly was classed as one of the ablest and soundest of American jurists. Of this period of his life, an historian of Ohio has said: “They (the above mentioned law firm), have successfully tried some of the great railroad cases of the day, and are as noted in these cases in Ohio as was Samuel J. Tilden in New York ten years ago in litigation of the same kind. Judge Hoadly has also appeared as counsel in the most important litigations of other kinds tried in Ohio of late years, having among others conducted victoriously the cases involving the use of the Bible in the common schools of Cincinnati, the constitutionality of the Pond and Scott laws, and in the United States Supreme Court overthrown the Federal trade-mark system, and compelled the State of Tennessee to redeem the issues of the Bank of Tennessee.”

A position where his peculiar legal powers were called into play, and his knowledge of constitutional law and readiness in debate made him a leader, was his membership in the Ohio constitutional convention of 1873-4, to which he was elected without opposition from Hamilton County. Yet while engaged in the manifold duties of his profession, he found time to engage in other fields of usefulness, serving as professor in the Cincinnati Law School, a chair of which he held for over twenty years; a trustee of the University of Cincinnati, and of the Cincinnati Museum; member of the Committee of the School of Design; and was in other ways the patron of the arts and sciences, and a promoter of their development in his home city. Among other self-imposed tasks, he made himself acquainted with the Spanish and German languages, and became as he calls himself “a poor stenographer.”

While Judge Hoadly had thus far allowed his name to be used only in connection with official positions directly in the line of his profession, and while he had little taste and less time for the practical part of politics, he still held pronounced views upon public questions, and carefully watched the drift of events. He was from the first a Democrat—as his father had been before him—a believer in democratic principles as enunciated by the founders of the party who were among the greatest of the founders of our government. And being a Democrat to the logical conclusions of democracy, he took issue with his party upon the question of human slavery. During the war, he acted politically with the Union elements; when peace was restored and the slave freed, he took part in the Liberal Republican movement of 1872, and was a member of the Cincinnati convention, and of its Committee on Resolutions, but disapproved of the nomination of Mr. Greeley with whom he had no political principles in common except hatred of slavery and belief in hard money. He withdrew from the convention immediately after the nomination was made, and entered into correspondence with leading Democrats, endeavoring to bring about the nomination of a Democratic candidate whom he stood ready to support. Failing in this, he reluctantly voted for Grant’s second election.

In 1876, Judge Hoadly earnestly entered into the movement known to contemporary history as “Tilden and Reform,” believing that the interests of the country would be best subserved by the election of Tilden and Hendricks. In the memorable legal contest that ensued, before the electoral commission, the Democratic Committee invited Judge Hoadly to argue the Oregon and Florida cases before that body, which he did in such manner as to make national a reputation for legal ability that had heretofore been largely confined to his own portion of the West. This probably caused his call to the (temporary) presidency of the Democratic National Convention of 1880.

One of the immediate but unpremeditated fruits of this political activity came in 1883, when Judge Hoadly was named by the Democrats of Ohio as their candidate for governor. He entered upon the canvas with activity, and his speeches at Hamilton and Piqua, were reported and eagerly circulated by the Democratic State Committee as campaign documents. After making some ten speeches, he was unfortunately stricken with malarial fever, which prevented his continuing upon the stump until the last week of the campaign. Although not yet entirely recovered, he was able to appear in Cleveland, Sandusky, Toledo and Dayton, addressing immense audiences with marked effect. A campaign that had of necessity lagged because of the absence of its chief, took on a new vigor, the Democratic heart was fired anew, and George Hoadly became Governor of the State by the emphatic majority of 12,529 over Judge Foraker, the Republican nominee. Not only this, but the close counties went Democratic, a legislature was secured, and Henry B. Payne, the life-long friend of Governor Hoadly’s father, was sent to represent Ohio in the United States Senate.

It is a matter of settled historical opinion, that the Buckeye State, with all its famous governors, was never possessed of a better chief magistrate than the one whose administration opened under such favoring influences. A knowledge of the needs of the state, gained from long acquaintance, a wisdom that could be made effective in practical affairs, calm judgment, and an eye that could look higher than the levels of mere partisanship, were among the things that aided him; and “the greatest good to the greatest number” was the principle that inspired all his acts.

A renomination was, of course, a foregone conclusion. In 1885, the Democratic State Convention proclaimed by acclamation that George Hoadly should again become its candidate for governor. He accepted, although knowing that Ohio was then practically a Republican State, and that one man could hardly expect to accomplish the miracle of permanent Democracy. Judge Foraker was once more the Republican choice, and in the fall election was chosen by a vote of 359,281 to 341,830 for Hoadly; the Rev. A. B. Leonard, the Prohibition candidate receiving 28,081, and John W. Northrup, the Greenback candidate 2,001 votes. Although the defeat was decisive, it was sweetened to Governor Hoadly by the fact that in 1885, as in 1883, he ran ahead of his ticket, being defeated by the smallest, and, in 1883 elected by the largest plurality given against or for any of the gentlemen upon the same ticket.

When Governor Hoadly saw his successor duly inaugurated, he cheerfully returned to the active labors of his profession, in Cincinnati, where he remained until March, 1887, when the call to the chief city of the Union came in such shape that it could not be ignored. His practice had extended into such fields that the removal was almost a necessity, and his health demanded a change of climate. He located in New York, and became a partner in the firm of Hoadly, Lauterbach & Johnson—a firm that stands in the front rank, and that has an immense clientage, not only in New York, but all through the country. His chief thought and ambition since then has been in his profession. In the spring of 1890, Governor David B. Hill appointed him a member of the commission to revise the judiciary article of the constitution of New York, but because of professional engagements which detained him in the trial of a case in Detroit, Michigan, during the entire spring and summer months of that year, he was compelled to decline the appointment.

In recent years, Judge Hoadly has been honored by the degree of Doctor of Laws, conferred by Yale College in 1885, by Dartmouth College in 1889, while his own college, once Hudson but now Adelbert, gave him the same title some years ago. He is a Free Mason, a Knight Templar, and has taken the 33rd degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish rite, and has always performed anything in his power to advance the interests of the order.

Of Judge Hoadly’s professional life in New York, much might be said, were this the place to say it. Outside of that, little can be said, for he has had time for little else. As “an Ohio man” he is always at home to any Buckeye neighbor, or impression, or memory that connect him with the days and scenes of his youth and early manhood. He may be seen occasionally in the gatherings of the Ohio Society, and when there, he is not allowed to remain in his seat unheard. Few men are as approachable in any walk of life; few men more companionable when he can command leisure for companionship. His friendships are strong, his decisions intuitive, his principles those of his honored ancestors, and Jonathan Edwards’ severe theology has had little reflection in his generous religious views. A single phrase might sum up his whole life and character: A typical American jurist and gentlemen.

James Harrison Kennedy.

FOOTNOTES

[10] “The founding of Ohio,” an address of Senator George F. Hoar, at Marietta, Ohio, April 7, 1888.