Besides all this, the whigs, anxious to give as great a stagger as possible to “the regular nominee” of the democratic party, lent support to Judge Martin. Thus the campaign became suddenly stormy. Excitement ran high, passion superseded reason, and clamor filled the air. Up to the closing of the polls on election day, the question was so complicated by the interlacing vote of the state, that no one could venture a prediction of the result. But Judge Martin led his opponent by at least five hundred votes. This was the first defeat ever sustained by a nominated democrat in the state, for a state office, and, as usual under similar conditions, there were dire predictions of the utter demolition of the democratic party in the state of Alabama!
Be it said to the perpetual credit of Judge Martin that he bore himself with singular equanimity throughout the prevalence of the strenuous campaign. His was an atmosphere high above the clatter of the demagogue, and it was understood that the place was undesired by him unless it should come purely in recognition of his merit and fitness. In observing this principle in politics, Governor Martin was never defeated for a public office.
Governor Martin was by birth a Tennessean. Denied an advanced education, he turned to the best account that which he had in the common schools, which limited training he solidified by teaching during his younger years. He reached Alabama in 1819, the same year of its admission into the Union, finished his law studies, which had been begun in Tennessee, and settled at Athens to practice. The political stations held by Governor Martin have already been indicated, and by reason of these he took with him into the gubernatorial office a thorough knowledge of public affairs. It was during his administration that the Mexican war occurred, the demands growing out of which he met with official fidelity. His term of office having closed, he resumed the practice of the law, and, save when elected to the legislature in 1853, he never filled another official station. For thirty years, almost, he was in the public service, and a more faithful officer the state never had. He died at Tuscaloosa on November 2, 1866, being sixty-seven years old.
ISAAC SMITH
No man in the early annals of the state had a more varied or romantic career than the Rev. Isaac Smith, a courageous missionary of the Methodist Church. His life and labors do not find recognition on the page of secular history, but the contribution which he made to the state in its early formation wins for him a meritorious place in the state’s chronicles. It is doubtful that his name and labors are familiar to the present generation of the great body of Christians of which he was an early ornament, but they are none the less worthy of becoming record.
Mr. Smith enlisted from Virginia in the army of Washington while yet a youth. Bright and alert, he was chosen an orderly by Washington, and served in that capacity under both Washington and LaFayette. When the new nation started on its independent career and when the region toward the west began to be opened, Mr. Smith migrated toward the south, became a minister of the Methodist Church, and offered his services as a missionary to the Indian tribes. Hated because of their ferocity, the prevailing idea in the initial years of the nineteenth century was that of the destruction of the red man, but Mr. Smith felt impelled to take to him the gospel of salvation.
His labors were not confined to any particular region and he trudged the country over, imperiling his life among the wild tribes, who came to love him because he was one pale face who sought to do them good. He founded an Indian school near the Chattahoochee and taught the Indians the elements of the English language. When Bishop Asbury, the most indomitable of all the Methodist bishops, came to the South, Mr. Smith was his close friend and adviser, and most valuable were his services to the bishop in planting Methodism in the lower South.
All real teachers are greater learners than instructors, for in their zeal to impart they must first come to acquire. Mr. Smith was an assiduous student and with the growth of his years was an accumulated stock of both wisdom and learning. As he passed the meridian of life he became a power in his denomination and his counsel was freely sought in the high circles of his church. When, in 1825, General LaFayette visited Alabama in his tour of the South, he passed through the Creek Nation, in Georgia, and was escorted by a body of Georgians to the Chattahoochee River and consigned to the care of fifty painted Indian warriors, who vied with the pale faces in doing honor to the distinguished visitor. Rowing LaFayette across the river to the Alabama side, he was met by Rev. Isaac Smith. The great Frenchman instantly recognized Mr. Smith as one of his boy orderlies during the campaigns in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. There was a cordial demonstration of mutual affection between the old French veteran and the younger man, now a Methodist preacher. The painted Indian warriors looked on the exchange of greeting with evident pleasure. It so happened that LaFayette reached the Alabama side just at the point where stood the humble school building of the intrepid missionary.