Benjamin Harrison, one of the five presidents whom Ohio has given the country within thirty years, was born at North Bend in Hamilton County, where his grandfather General William Henry Harrison lived until chosen President in 1840. He remained in Ohio until he was twenty-one; then he went to Indianapolis, and it was from Indiana that he went to the war, where he achieved rank and distinction by his talent and courage.
He is a great lawyer, as well as a soldier and politician, and a speaker of almost unsurpassed gifts.
Salmon P. Chase, governor of Ohio and United States senator, Lincoln’s first Secretary of the Treasury, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, was an Ohioan by grace of New Hampshire, where he was born, and where he lived till he was a well-grown boy. In 1830, when he was twenty-two years old, he began the practice of law in Cincinnati, and prospered in spite of his bold sympathy with the slave and the friends of the slave. The Kentuckians called him the attorney-general of the negroes, and the negroes gave him a silver pitcher, in gratitude for his “public services in behalf of the oppressed.” He was first an abolitionist, but later became a leader of the anti-slavery party, and was one of the first and foremost Republicans. As Secretary of the Treasury his mastery in finance was as essential to our success in the war as the statesmanship of Lincoln or the generalship of Grant. He was followed in the office of Chief Justice by another Ohioan of New England birth, who, like Chase, had passed all the years of his public life in our state. Morrison R. Waite, of Toledo, was perhaps even more Ohioan in those traits of plainness and simplicity in greatness which we like to claim for Ohio, only upon sober second thought to acknowledge that they are the distinctive American traits.
An Ohio Secretary of the Treasury assured to the nation the means of meeting the expenses of the Civil War, Ohio generals fought it to a victorious close, and an Ohio Secretary of War knew how to deal best with both the men and the money, so as to turn the struggle from its doubtful course. Without Edwin M. Stanton neither Chase nor Grant, with Sherman and Sheridan, could have availed. He was born at Steubenville in 1814, of a family of North Carolina Quakers, and as a boy his tastes were as peaceful as those of his ancestors. He had pets of all kinds, and he made collections of birds and insects. He was pretty diligent at school, but his studies there were not of the severer kind. He loved poetry; he founded a circulating library; and both before and after he went to Kenyon College, he was clerk in a bookstore. But deep within this quiet outside was the hot nature which fused the forces of the great war, and shaped them according to his relentless will. He became a successful lawyer, and had been President Buchanan’s Attorney-General when Lincoln made him Secretary of War. He left that office worn out with the duties to which he gave mind and body, and died soon after Grant had appointed him, in 1869, to the bench of the Supreme Court No man in office ever deserved more friends, or made more enemies. He was tender and kindly with the friendless and hapless, but with the strong and the fortunate, when they crossed his mood, he was rude to savagery.
The chief citizen of Richland County is John Sherman, who is also one of the chief citizens of Ohio, and of the United States. He has been in Congress ever since 1855, and ever since 1861 he has been in the Senate, except for the four years when he was Secretary of the Treasury under President Hayes. If any man in our public life during this long period merits more than he the name of statesman, it would be hard to say who he may be. But in his boyhood he gave promise of anything but the sort of career which he has dignified. He had all the impulsiveness of his famous brother, General Sherman, and something more than his turbulence. He himself, with that charming frankness which seems peculiarly a Sherman trait, tells in his autobiography what reckless things he did, even to coming to blows with his teacher; but all this heat seems later to have gone to temper a most manly and courageous character for a career of the greatest public usefulness.