The great-grandfather of Ephraim Lyon Blaine, father of James G., was born in 1741, and died at Carlisle, Penn., in March, 1804. He was a colonel in the Revolutionary war from its commencement, and the last four years of the war was the Commissary General. He was with Washington amid the most trying scenes, and enjoyed his entire confidence. During the dark winter at Valley Forge, he was by the side of the Commander-in-Chief, and it is a matter of history that the army was saved from starvation by his vigilant and tireless activity. It is not difficult to see how stupendous was the task of subsisting broken and shattered forces in the dead of an awful winter, upon an exhausted country. It required skill and courage, tact and force of personal power, not surpassed even in the daring march of Napoleon across the Alps. But he did it, brave, determined spirit that he was. Others might falter, but not he; others might break down from sheer exhaustion or dismay, but not General Blaine, so long as the fires of the unbroken spirit of the old Covenanters heated the furnace of his heart, and their high resolve for liberty was enthroned in his affections.
From such parent stock what shall the bloom and blossom be? What the fruitage and harvesting of other years from the seed-sowing of such splendid living? Not what the height of stature, but what the stature of soul,—not what the breadth of back, nor bigness of brawn, but what the breadth of mind and bigness of brain?
Let the history of our day and generation make reply.
Eight years before the old patriot General died, at Carlisle, his grandson, Ephraim Lyon Blaine, the father of James, was born in the same quaint old Scottish town. At Dickinson College he received his education, and settled as a lawyer in Washington County, Penn., where for years he lived an honored and useful life as Prothonotary of the Courts; and here, amid the lull in the storm of battle-years, the boy, James G. Blaine, was born.
His cradle-songs were the old songs of the New Republic. It is pleasant to think of such a personage coming to consciousness, clear and strong, among such hallowed scenes of a land redeemed, a nation born, a people free. All about our youthful hero were the scarred faces and shattered forms of those who had come back from the fields of strife.
The stories of Monmouth and Brandywine, of Concord and Lexington, of New Orleans and Yorktown, were lived over and dreamed about. Living epistles, walking histories, were all about him. Instead of reading about them, they read to him, poured out the dearly-bought treasures of a life, painted scenes that were forever impressed upon their minds; with all the shades of life and death, unrolled the panorama of the great campaigns, through those long, dread battle-years. What education this, in home and street, in shop and store, on farm and everywhere, for patriot youth! It gave a love and zest for historic reading, which must be traced when we enter more largely upon his literary and educational career.
At five years of age the systematic work of an education began by sending James to a common country school near by. The old United States spelling-book was the chief textbook. Webster’s spelling-book was not then in vogue. Nothing remarkable transpired, except to note the proficiency and steady progress he made in mastering the language he has learned so well to use.
The intensity of his life was that within, rather than the outer life. He was observing, drinking in with eyes and ears. Robinson Crusoe was his first book, as it has been with many another boy, and from this beginning he became a most omnivorous reader.
His first two teachers were ladies, and are still living. The first, a Quakeress, Miss Mary Ann Graves, now Mrs. Johnson, living near Canton, Ohio, eighty-four years of age; the other was Mrs. Matilda Dorsey, still living at Brownsville, just across the Monongahela River from Washington County, where Mr. Blaine was born. While speaking in Ohio, five years ago, during Governor Foster’s campaign, his old teacher, Mrs. Johnson, came forward at the close of his speech to congratulate her old scholar. How little these two women dreamed of the splendid future of the young mind they helped start up the hill of knowledge; how little they thought of the tremendous power with which he would one day use the words, great and small, he spelled out of that old book; the great occasions upon which he would marshal them, as a general marshals his men for effective warfare; of the great speeches, orations, debates, papers, pamphlets, and books into which he would put a power of thought that would move nations.
It was merely a country school-house, and the old frame-building has been torn down, and a new and more modern brick house substituted. It was not simply to spell words, but also to read and write, and, indeed, gain the rudiments of a thorough English education.