Pine to Potomac

by E. K. Cressey

It is a remarkable fact, that inspired penmen have sketched the infancy of most of the great men whose lives they have portrayed. This is beautifully true of Moses, the great emancipator and leader, a law-giver of the ancient Hebrew people. How they glorify the childhood of this great man, and make us love him at the start! So, also, are the infancy and childhood of Samuel, great among the prophets of Israel, disclosed. The voice of his heroic mother is heard as she gives him to the Lord. The infancy of John, the mighty man at the Jordan, and of Jesus, are most impressively revealed. No lovelier pictures hang on the walls of memory; no sweeter sunshine fills the home than the little ones with their joy and prattle, and with the sublime possibilities to be unfolded as they fill up the ranks in humanity’s march, or take the lead of the myriad host.

As we go back to study the beginnings of a world, so may we well look back to behold the dawning of that life, great in the nation’s love and purpose to-day.

We shall find there a child of nature, born in no mansion or city, but on “Indian farm,” upon the Washington side of the Monongahela River, opposite the village of Brownsville, and about sixty miles below Pittsburgh, in the old Quaker State of Pennsylvania.

It was at the foot-hills of the Alleghanies, a region wild, romantic, and grand, well fitted to photograph omnipotence upon the fresh young mind, and impress it with the greatness of the world. It was a section of country whose early history is marked with all that is thrilling in the details of Indian warfare, which constituted the chief staple of childhood stories.

Daniel Boone and the Wetzells had been there. The startled air had echoed with the crack of their rifles; the artillery of the nation had resounded through these mountains; the black clouds of war had blown across the skies, and the smoke of battle had drifted down those valleys.

All that is terrible in nature had its birth and home in that section of our country, which is most like the great ocean petrified in its angriest mood and mightiest upheavals. The bears and wolves, in their numbers, ferocity, and might commanded in early days the respect even of savages, while elk and deer, antelope and fowl, and fish in endless variety, birds and flowers of every hue, and foliage of countless species, won the admiration of these rude children of nature.

Here in this Scotland of America, born of a sturdy ancestry whose muscle and brain, courage and mighty wills, had made them masters of mountain and glen,—here in the heart of the continent,—James G. Blaine was born. Eternal vigilance had not only been the price of liberty in that bold mountain home for generations, but the price of life itself.

It was in a large stone house, built by his great-grandfather Gillespie, that James Gillespie Blaine was born, January 31, 1830, one of eight strong, robust, and hearty children, five of whom survive. It was midway between the war of 1812 and the Mexican war of 1848, and in a country settled nearly fifty years before by soldiers of the Revolution. Few are born in circumstances of better promise for the full unfolding of the faculties of body and mind than was this child of four and fifty years ago, cradled in the old stone house on the ancestral farm. The house itself tells of the Old World; and those mountains whose heights are in the blue, tell of Scottish and Irish clans that never lose the old fire and the old love, and that marched from the conquest of the Old to the conquering of the New World.

The father, Ephraim Lyon Blaine, was of Scottish origin, and Presbyterian of truest blood, with sign and seal and signet stamp of the old Scotch Covenanters upon life and character. His ancestors came to this country in 1720,—one hundred and ten years before the birth of James.

His mother, Maria Gillespie, was of an Irish-Catholic family from Donegal in Ireland. They belonged to the Clan Campbell, Scotch-Irish Catholics, and descended from the Argyles of Scotland. They came to America in 1764, and were Catholics through and through. They were large land-owners in America, and resided wholly in old colonial Pennsylvania.