Great Lives In History

June 27: William Pepperrell, 1st Baronet of America

2011-06-27T09:15:00.000-07:00

He was relatively uneducated, but brilliant; a merchant and a soldier; was a colonial leader as well as the “Hero of Louisberg”; and was the first native-born baronet in colonial America.

William Pepperrell was born on June 27, 1696 in Kittery – which is today in Maine, but during the colonial era was part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His father, William Pepperrell, was an English settler who began his career in the colonies as a fisherman’s apprentice, and would advance to a shipbuilder and fishing boat owner. His father had married well, for Margery Bray was the daughter of a well-to-do Kittery merchant. Young Pepperrell was the sixth of seven children.

Young Pepperrell studied surveying and navigation, and later joined his father in the shipbuilding business where he worked in the counting house. He was seventeen when his older brother died, and he had to assume much of the responsibility of the family business. By 1730 Mssrs. Wm. Pepperrells was largely managed by young Pepperrell.

He expanded his father’s business with energy and vigor, creating one of the most prosperous mercantile houses in New England. By 1730 Pepperrell’s firm was managing 30 to 35 vessels which – for the most part – shuttled back and forth from Newfoundland to Virginia and Maryland, and as far as the sugar islands in the Caribbean. They also crossed the Atlantic to Portugal, Spain, and England.

His company ships carried products native to the region - lumber, fish - and brought back sugar, textiles, and other marketable commodities. With the profits Pepperrell purchased land in New England as well as investing in property and business interests in England.

In New England, shipping was a source of wealth but land-ownership represented gentility and status. This new status brought with it the communal responsibility of public office and military command. The Pepperrell’s were one of the nine families in Kittery that had the wealth and status deemed necessary to hold public office – and these political offices were often rotated between the families, being passed down from father to son.

By 1720 – at the age of twenty-four – young Pepperrell represented Kittery in the provincial assembly. In 1725 he became a judge on the York County court, and within five years became the chief justice. By 1727 he was appointed to the Massachusetts Council board – the legislative body of the colony.

Another public responsibility was service in the militia. By the time he was twenty-one Pepperrell was elected as captain of the local militia, then major, lieutenant-colonel, and at the age of thirty was a colonel of the York County militia –the latter position having been held by his father, passing to young Pepperrell as part of the estate. As colonel, he was in command of the entire region from the Piscataqua River to the Canadian border.

Pepperrell married well, being wed on March 16, 1724 to Mary Hirst. Hirst was the daughter of Grove Hirst and Elizabeth Sewell of Boston, and was the granddaughter of the famous colonial judge Samuel Sewell. The couple had four children – 3 girls and a boy – but only the eldest daughter, Elizabeth, would survive the couple. Pepperrell would adopt his grandson, William Pepperrell Sparhawk, as his heir in order to pass on a hereditary title.

The frontiers were relatively peaceful until the spring of 1744. Pepperrell was warned in late 1743 that relations between France and England were close to the breaking point, and to warn and secure the frontier settlements in his jurisdiction against any sudden assault by the French Candadians. On May 12, 1744, word reached Boston of a declaration of war on England by the French, and soon after the French became active against the English New England colonies. The war became known as King George’s War, and was part of the War of Austrian Succession. Increased naval pressure and a series of attacks by the French and their Indian allies convinced the Royal Governor of Massachusetts, William Shirley, that the defense of New England required the reduction of the French stronghold at Louisbourg.

Pepperrell was the logical choice to command the forces. He had been among the early advocates of an attack on Louisb0urg – though these advocates envisioned it as a largely English affair, with minor colonial support. He was also familiar, thanks to his tenure as colonel, with the frontier. He also was respected by the citizenry that made up the militia, and maintained a respectable standard of discipline. He also knew many of the Royal Navy officers – men responsible for transporting and supporting his army.

Governor Shirley proposed a colonial undertaking, with limited English support – and provided a plan for the assault. Pepperrell agreed and was an influential supporter of the idea in the political environment of Massachusetts.

Pepperrell set sail on March 24, 1745, from Boston. Arriving at the British outpost of Canso, Nova Scotia, on April 4, the Massachusetts militia was joined by militias from New Hampshire and Connecticut, and by a naval squadron from the West Indies. It is estimated that Pepperrell had up to 4,300 men under his command – although the effective strength at any one time would amount to around 2,100.

By April 30, the force arrived at Louisburg. Pepperrell, realizing that Shirley’s original (based on surprise) would not work, opted to commence a formal siege. However, the New Englanders surprised the French by – instead of stopping to dig defensive trenches right away – hauling their heavy cannon during the night of their arrival through a marsh the French considered impassable, and then occupying a key French defensive position that had been abandoned. By the second morning of the landing, Pepperrell’s cannon were firing into Louisburg from this position.

The siege lasted seven weeks, but in the end the French asked for surrender terms. On June 17, 1745, the French officially capitulated.

The surrender of the French stronghold brought fame and honor to Pepperrell. King George II commissioned him as colonel in command of a regular army regiment – the 66^th Regiment of Foot – and he received a baronetcy. He was now “Sir” William Pepperrell.

Pepperrell would, as many colonists, be bitter at the 1748 return of Louisburg to the French in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, but he would live to see it recaptured in another war with France in 1758 – this time by a British-led force under the command of General James Wolfe.

In 1755 Pepperrell was promoted to Major General, and in 1759 became the only native-born American to receive a commission as lieutenant-general in the British army – honoring the Lion of Louisburg. Pepperrell passed away on July 6, 1759 – recognized by his generation as the foremost military figure in the colonies.

Web Resources:

1911 Encyclopedia

Dictionary of Canadian Biography

The Great Fortress (Gutenberg Project)

The Life of Sir William Pepperrell (Googlebooks)

Massachusetts Historical Society

Nova Scotia’s Electric Scrapbook

Nova Scotian Biographies

Sir William Pepperrell by Nathanial Hawthorne

Wikipedia

Photo Resources:

Portrait of Pepperrell by John Smibert, 1746 (Wikipedia)

1670 map of New England (Wikipedia)

Landing troops at Louisburg (Wikipedia)

¾ view portrait of William Pepperrell (black and white), 1747, Library of Congress LC-USZ62-75604, Nova Scotian Biographies

July 14: Dr. Florence Bascom, Rock Star

2010-07-13T02:40:00.000-07:00

The late nineteenth century was an exciting time for women in the United States as they saw their opportunities for professional careers expanding further than they ever had before in this nation. One of those women became among first to earn a PhD in Geology (the second woman to do so); the first woman geologist hired by the U.S. Geological Survey; as well as the first woman elected to the Council of the Geological Society of America. However, none of these significant ‘firsts’ in women’s history occurred with out struggle, persistence, and dedication.

Florence Bascom was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts on July 14, 1862. She would be the last of six children. Her parents were John and Emma Curtis Bascom. John Bascom was a professor of oratory and rhetoric at Williams College, and in 1874 he became the president of the University of Wisconsin – a post he held until 1887. He and his wife actively supported the temperance and suffrage movements and he advocated coeducation. A year after he became president of the University of Wisconsin that school opened its doors to women students – a radical and progressive move for the era. Florence’s mother was a suffragist as well as a school teacher. The progressive attitudes of her parents encouraged Bascom to not fear any challenge to attain what she desired.

While not much is known of Bascom’s early education, she did graduate at the age of fifteen from high school in Madison, Wisconsin. Immediately after her high school graduation in 1877 Florence Bascom enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. While admitted to the university, women were limited in what they could do. For instance, they had limited access to the library and the gymnasium. Women were not allowed to be in classrooms that were filled with men. But, she listened, took notes, and read widely – graduating by the time she was twenty with two Bachelor’s degrees in 1882 - and adding a Bachelor of Science degree in 1884. She went on to graduate school, earning her Master’s degree in Geology in 1887.

Bascom applied to John Hopkins University for admission to the Geology Department in September 1890 – and seven months later she was given permission to take graduate classes at John Hopkins University – even though John Hopkins had not officially opened its doors for women to earn a degree. An executive committee voted to allow Bascom to attend classes without being officially enrolled. In 1892 she formally applied to enter the doctoral program, and was be accepted secretly into the program.

While at John Hopkins she had to sit, isolated, behind a screen that blocked her view of the men, the teacher, and the blackboard. Why? The reason was simple in the perspective of the male-dominated school: she was isolated in order not to “disrupt” male students who were not used to seeing a female student, especially in graduate courses. This isolation continued in the field studies – which women were not encouraged to attend, but Bascom did. Since she could not accompany the class, she would travel with her mentor, Professor George Williams, to conduct studies on rock formations and structures in Pennsylvania and Maryland. The end result of her experience was a doctoral dissertation that was classified as ‘brilliant’, and put her in the foremost rank of young, budding geologists. In 1893 Bascom became the first woman to earn a PhD at John Hopkins University.

Bascom’s interest in geology was due to a driving tour she made with her father and a geology professor at Ohio State, Edward Orton. Orton was an early supporter of allowing women to study the science of geology. This early interest led to her studying geology at the University of Wisconsin and making it her career.

From 1893 to 1895 Bascom would work as an instructor at Ohio State University. Then her big break came in 1895 when M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, invited Bascom to establish a Department of Geology for women in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Since geology was not yet considered important enough for its own building, she worked at first in a storage space that was in a building housing the ‘major’ sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics. She spent the next two years gathering the resources she would need to educate a new generation of women in the field of geology – collections of mineral, rock, and fossils. She would achieve full professorship at Bryn Mawr in 1906, where she not only created the undergraduate Geology course, but a national recognized graduate course in geology as well.

A number of students would come under Bascom’s influence during her teaching career, and would later become university instructors, work on state and federal geologic surveys, and serve in the Military Geology Unit in World War II. Bascom was described as rigorous, incisive, and consistent. She was also proud of her students, writing to Professor Herman Fairchild in 1931:

“I have always claimed that there was no merit in being the only one of a kind… I have considerable pride in the fact that some of the best work done in geology today by omen, ranking with that done by men, has been done by my students…. These are all notable young women and will be a credit to the science of geology.”

In 1896 Bascom became the first woman geologist employed by the U.S. Geological Survey. She would combine her teaching position at Bryn Mawr College with field studies on the eastern seaboard for the Geological Survey where her work on mapping crystalline rock formations became the basis of many later studies. In 1906 the first edition of American Men and Women of Science listed her as a four-starred geologist – which placed her among the nation’s hundred leading geologists. Her accomplishments were described in the Geological Society of America's magazine, GSA Today, July 1997 as follows: "Bascom was the first woman hired by the U.S. Geological Survey (1896), the first woman to present a paper before the Geological Society of Washington (1901), the first woman elected to the Council of the Geological Society of America (elected in 1924; no other woman was elected until after 1945), and the first woman officer of the GSA (vice president in 1930). She was an associate editor of the American Geologist (1896-1905) and a four-starred geologist in the first edition of American Men and Women of Science (1906), which meant that her colleagues regarded her as among the country's hundred leading geologists. After joining the Bryn Mawr College faculty, Bascom founded the college's geology department. This site became the locus of training for the most accomplished female geologists of the early 20th century."

Bascom retired from her professorship at Bryn Mawer in 1928 but continued working for the U.S. Geological Survey, moving to Washington, D.C. in order to prepare her final series of Survey reports. She would retire from the Geological Survey in 1936 at the age of 74.

Bascom passed away from a cerebral hemorrage in the city of her birth, Williamstown, on June 18, 1945, leaving a remembrance, according to former student Eleanora Bliss Knopf writing in American Mineralogist, "to her colleagues, her students, and her friends the inspiring memory of a scholarly and brilliant mind combined with a forceful and vigorous personality." As Ida Ogilvie, one of Bascom’s students who herself became a geology professor, wrote in 1945 about Bascom:

“Probably no one will ever know all the difficulties that she encountered, but little by little she achieved her purpose of making her department one of the best in the country.”

WEB RESOURCES:

Associated Content
Bookrags
Geological Society of America
Memorial to Florence Bascom
Today in Science
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Portrait of Dr. Bascom/Mineralogical Society of America
John Bascom, University of Wisconsin
Emma C. Bascom, University of Wisconsin
Younger Florence Bascom/Wikipedia
Bascom Standing with a Compass/GSA
Bascom at the Grand Canyon/GSA
The elder Dr. Bascom
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June 28: Clara Maass, Heroine the Fight Against Yellow Fever

2010-06-29T19:16:00.000-07:00

Clara Louise Maass was born on June 28, 1876 in East Orange, New Jersey. She was the first of ten children, and was the daughter of Robert E. and Hedwig A. Maass, recent German immigrants to the United States.

Maass was kept busy during her childhood years, attending public school and accepting the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings. As she reached her adolescent years she became a “mother’s helper” to another family. A mother’s helper was employed help care for the house and children. In return for her work in the home, she was rewarded with room and board, and given time to attend school.

She completed three years of school at East Orange High School before leaving school at the age of fifteen to work at the Newark Orphan Asylum for $10 a month. This local orphanage accepted orphans from age two to ten. Maass would send half of her monthly wages home to help her family. She was compassionate and caring for her charges, striving to help them emotionally and physically.

Many women were entering the nursing profession in the late 19th century, following the footsteps of early woman professional nurses, Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton. They were symbols of compassionate womanhood and served as a guiding light to those who followed them. Both were legends and still alive in the 1890s – and were an inspiration to Maass..

Even though the minimum age for training to become a nurse was supposed to be twenty, Maass was only seventeen years old when she entered the recently created Christina Trefz Training School of Nurses in 1893. A nursing program had been institute in 1892 when two Red Cross nurses from Germany were recruited as teachers. Mrs.Christina Trefz, the wife of a local brewer, purchased lots and built Trefz Hall, which was designated as the “The School of Nursing”. The school was dedicated on November 30, 1893. The school was operated by the German Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, and was only the fourth such nursing school at that time in New Jersey – and the first in Newark. She would graduate among the first students to complete the course of study in 1895 after two years of intensive training, and went to work as a duty nurse at the German Hospital. In 1898 she was named as the head nurse of the institution, and was known as a hard worker and a person dedicated to the nursing profession. She was only twenty-one years old.

In 1898 the Spanish American War began. There was no Army Nurses Corps in existence at the time, so Maass volunteered as a contract nurse for the Army on October 1, 1898. She would serve in field hospitals with the Seventh Army Corps in several locations during the war – Jacksonville, Florida; Savannah, Georgia; and finally Santiago, Cuba. More soldiers would become ill or would die from disease during the Spanish American War than were wounded – and it was Maass’s job, along with the other contract nurses, to care for them. She dealt with malaria, typhoid fever, and dysentery until she was discharged from Army service on February 5, 1899.

In November 1899 Maass again responded to a call for contract nurses and was sent to the Philippines – newly freed from Spanish control during the war and now a part of a new fledgling American empire. There she served as a nurse with the Eighth U.S. Army Corps. As the Philippine Insurrection against American control grew, more American troops had to be sent to the region – and again faced the deadly danger of disease. While in the Philippines she cared for soldiers suffering from smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever.

Maass had to leave the Philippines before the end of her contract – not because she contracted yellow fever, but because she contracted another tropical disease, dengue fever. She was shipped back to the United States to recover in May 1900. She would soon be attracted to work again in Cuba.

Yellow fever had become a huge problem with the American troops occupying Cuba. Dr. Gorgas, who held the post in Cuba of Havana Sanitary Officer, originally thought that yellow fever was spread through unsanitary conditions, and conducted a city-wide sanitation effort – which failed to stem the spread of yellow fever. The disease became so rampant that the U.S. Surgeon General organized the Yellow Fever Commission – chaired by Dr. Walter Reed - to investigate how the disease was spread. Their findings revealed that the disease was spread through the bite of the female Stegomyia mosquito which, after taking blood from an infected person, would infect others by biting them as well. Gorgas was given the task of clearing the mosquitoes out of Havana. However, he pursued a different line of approach: developing an injection to prevent the disease from occurring.

In the fall of 1900 Gorgas sent out a call for volunteer nurses to help deal with yellow fever cases. Maass was well aware of the symptoms and suffering that went with this dreaded disease. Having seen the effects of the disease first-hand in the Philippines, Maass had developed a special interest in yellow fever, and a special desire to see the disease eradicated.

In October 1900 she had sufficiently recovered from the effects of her case of dengue fever that she could volunteer to serve in Cuba. Because the quality of her work with yellow fever victims in the Philippines, Maass was accepted as a nurse with the Yellow Fever Commission. After she arrived in Cuba she saw – and was hopeful of – the experiments being conducted to develop the medicine necessary to stop the disease. In 1901 she volunteered to be a part of a plan to develop immunization serum by allowing the volunteers to be bitten by infected mosquitoes, have a mild form of yellow fever, which would then create immunity for the volunteer. While the volunteers were told that they might die in the course of the experiment, they were offered an incentive of $100 for being subjects of the test. $100 was a considerable sum in 1900 dollars. An additional $100 was paid if the volunteer became ill.

In March 1901 Maass submitted to being bitten by infected mosquitoes, and developed a mild case of yellow fever. However, though the scientists and doctors involved were convinced that the mosquito was the primary means of transmitting the disease, there was still some doubt. Not all of the subjects who had been bitten by the infected mosquitoes developed yellow fever.

On August 14, 1901, Maass again submitted to being bitten by infected mosquitoes. The doctors hoped that her earlier mild case of yellow fever would immunize her against the disease. Unfortunately, they were soon to be disillusioned in their hopes.

Maass became severely ill with yellow fever on August 18th. She would die from the disease that had no cure on August 24th at the age of twenty-five. She was buried with military honors in Colon Cemetery, Havana, and in 1902 her remains would be reinterred at Fairmount Cemetery in Newark, New Jersey.

While a number of the test volunteers did die as a result of the experiments, Maass was the only American, the only woman, and the only nurse to succumb to the disease. A public outcry soon put an end to human experiments.

Clara Maass and her heroic sacrifice might have remained as a little known sidelight of history except for Leopoldine Guinther. Guinther, who was a superintendent of Newark Memorial Hospital and a fighter in the war against yellow fever, saw a portrait of Maass and felt the need to be an advocate of recognition of her sacrifice. Through her efforts Maass’ original gravestone was replaced with a pink granite gravestone with a bronze plaque. In addition, the Newark German Hospital would be renamed the Clara Maass Hospital in 1952 to honor its former graduate. Finally, in 1976 a stamp would be issued honoring her, with the words “She gave her life” at the bottom. Clara Maass would be recognized and remembered for the heroine she was.

WEB RESOURCES:

American Association for the History of Nursing
Clara Maass Medical Center
Find A Grave
Google Books: Past and Promise
Old Newark
St. Matthews
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Photo of Clara Maass, Office of Medical History, U.S. Army
Orphans Asylum, Old Newark Web
German Hospital, Old Newark Web
Side view of Clara Maass, Find A Grave
1976 First Day Cover Envelope with Stamp Honoring Clara Maass, American Association for the History of Nursing
Clara Maass gravesite, Find A Grave

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June 22: John Dillinger, Public Enemy #1

2010-06-22T17:33:00.000-07:00

John Dillinger, Johnnie Dillinger
The G-Men will chop you down
Some of the things that you've done done
Have been makin' the government frown.
Your numbers up, the words gone round
You won't be goin back to jail
You'll be a bull's eye for the police
And they'll throw the lead like hail.

This first stanza of a song refers to a man that America loved or hated, viewed as a killer or a Robin Hood, and who even today stirs controversy on whether he really died on that night of July 28, 1935, in a hail of bullets that reportedly struck him down in an alley next to the Biograph Theater in Chicago, Illinois.

John Herbert Dillinger, Jr., was born at 2 P.M. on Monday, June 22, 1903, in a middle-class residential neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was the younger of two children – his sister, Mildred, was fourteen years his senior – whose parents were John Wilson Dillinger and Mary Ellen “Mollie” Lancaster.

As a child, Dillinger was beset by a litany of social issues that combined to – in the eyes of some – force him into a life of a rebel and criminal. His father earned his living as a grocer and was inconsistent in his application of discipline. His father went from being harsh, repressive, and physical at times to being generous and permissive at other times. Dillinger’s mother, Mary, died when he was three, and he would show resentment and rebellion when his father remarried seven years later. Basically he was raised by his older teenage sister until his father remarried.

His father would have three more children by his second wife, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Fields.

Dillinger often found himself in trouble as an adolescent. He was a bully in school and had his own group of followers when he was ten years old. Impatient, intelligent with no interest in academics, he finally quit school and went to work in a machine shop in Indianapolis. However, Dillinger – who was very intelligent and a good worker – became bored with his job and often stayed out all night. In a desperate attempt to provide a healthier atmosphere for his children, Dillinger’s father sold his property in Indianapolis and moved to a farm near Mooresville, Indiana. Seventeen-year old Dillinger would commute to work in Indianapolis – and never grew to enjoy farm life.

In 1923 Dillinger got into trouble with the law because of auto theft (he was caught by police officers, but escaped before being booked) and did what many young men in his situation did - enlisted in the Navy. After his basic training was complete, he was assigned to the battleship Utah as a Fireman, Third Class – which meant his spent his work shift shoveling coal in the bowels of the ship – and went AWOL when the ship docked in Boston. He returned a day later, was fined and sentenced to the brig by a court marshal, and four months later deserted.

When he returned to Mooresville he claimed that he had received an honorable discharge because of a heart murmur, then wooed and married sixteen-year-old Beryl Ethel Hovious on April 12, 1924. They ultimately settled in Indianapolis, where Dillinger had worked briefly at a variety of jobs. He joined Ed Singleton in a bid for ‘easy money’ and tried to rob a grocer. They were apprehended and Dillinger was sentenced to prison for up to 30 years. Beryl would divorce Dillinger in 1929 – and a month after the divorce Dillinger requested to be transferred from the Indiana State Reformatory to the Indiana State Prison, where he could associate with a

On May 10, 1933, Dillinger was paroled because his step-mother was dying, only to discover that she had died by the time he got home. Although at first his relations with her had been strained, he had grown to respect and love her. After the various emotional upheavals in his life, with the Great Depression at its depths, with little prospect or inclination for steady employment, he began his rise to infamy.

John Dillinger, Johnnie Dillinger
The finger will be laid on you
And the G-Man watchin' with his gun
Is goin to get you too.
When he stops you Johnnie
He's gonna stop you dead
And head you out for the golden gate
Packin a load of lead.

He started a crime spree of robbing several banks in Ohio that lasted from June 10, 1933 until his arrest Sept. 22, 1933. When the authorities searched Dillinger they found plans for what looked like a prison break. While Dillinger denied any knowledge of it, a number of his Indiana State Prison cellmates broke out of prison, shooting two guards with guns that had been previously smuggled in by Dillinger - and using plans very similiar to those found on Dillinger. On October 12, 1933, they arrived at Lima, Ohio, and broke Dillinger out of the county jail, killing Sheriff Jessie Sarber. Dillinger had his “gang”.

The Dillinger gang travelled through Indiana, robbing several banks and plundering two police arsenals – equipping themselves with rifles, Thompson submachine guns, pistols, bulletproof vests, and ammunition. They also killed several police officers in Indiana and Illinois.

Deciding to let things ‘cool off’, they vacationed in Florida, and then travelled to Tucson Arizona. On January 23, 1934 a fire broke out in the hotel the men were staying in while in Tucson – and the police arrested four of the men, including Dillinger, after firemen recognized them from their photographs.

Dillinger was sent to the ‘escape proof’ county jail at Crown Point, Indiana to await trial for robbery and murder. While there Dillinger was interviewed by several reporters who were impressed with his charisma and sense of humor. They added his escapades by relating the mortgages he destroyed while robbing banks, and even contributions his gang made to the poor. He even had his picture taken with prosecutor Robert Estill – a picture that would ruin Estill’s career.

On March 3, 1934, he tricked his guards with a wooden gun he had whittled and painted black with shoe polish. After forcing his guards to open his cell door, he grabbed two Thompson submachine guns, locked up the guards and several trustees, and left the jail. He stole Sheriff Lillian Holley’s car, and crossed the Indiana-Illinois state line as he headed to Chicago.

The act of transporting a stolen vehicle across state lines brought the precursor of the FBI - the United States Bureau of Investigation - into the case.

Dillinger formed a new gang and began robbing banks again, and hide out in Little Bohemia, Wisconsin. By this time Dillinger is front-page news, and locals in the area report an unusually high number of tourists to the United States Bureau of Investigation. United States Bureau of Investigation agents surround the Little Bohemia Lodge, only to discover that Dillinger and five of his gang members fled out of a back window to freedom.

The heat was on. Dillinger now made Chicago his hideout, and on May 27, 1934, had minor plastic surgery to alter his features. He spent several weeks recovering from the surgery in the home of a local bar owner, Jimmy Probasco.

Dillinger was able to celebrate his 31st birthday by reading U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings’ declaration that Dillinger was Public Enemy #1. Dillinger took his current sweetheart, Polly Hamilton, out to dinner. A few days later the Justice Department offered a $10,000 reward the arrest of Dillinger. A week later, on June 30, 1934, Dillinger showed his lack of concern by robbing a bank in South Bend, Indiana.

Back in Chicago, Dillinger moved into an apartment owned by Anna Sage – an illegal immigrant who owned several brothels, and was Polly Hamilton’s landlady. In order to broker a deal to stay in the country, Sage promises to turn over Dillinger to the federal agents.

On July 22, 1934, Dillinger had dinner at Seminary Restaurant, went to a Cubs game, and then took Sage and Hamilton to a movie at the Biograph Theater – which offered an “air-cooled” environment that was especially appealing on a hot summer day in Chicago.

Sage made a quick phone call to the federal agents, telling them of Dillinger’s movie plans. When Dillinger and the two women left the movie theater at 10:30 PM over twenty federal agents were waiting for them.

O Billy the Kid and the Dalton Boys
And others of their kin
Were bad gun
men outside the law
But they were brave gun men within
Now you know the
old time story
How Billy met his end
It's too late to change you now
So long, old friend.

Dillinger sensed the ambush, turned, and fled into an alley. A hail of bullets followed, four hitting him, and one of these entering Dillinger’s neck and exiting through his right eye, instantly killing him.

Three days later the remains of John Dillinger were laid to rest at the Crown Hill Cemetery, Mason County, Indiana. He had come home.

WEB RESOURCES:

Chicago Tribune
FBI
Find A Grave
Google books: John Dillinger
John Dillinger
John Dillinger Museum
Northwestern
Tru Crime Library
Wikipedia

Library of Congress: John Dillinger (song title)

PHOTO SOURCES:

John Dillinger, FBI
Dillinger and Estill, True TV
Dillinger’s Wooden Gun, Examiner
Arrest Warrant for Dillinger, National Archives
Wanted Poster, National Archives
The Biograph Theater, Chicago Tribune
The Dillinger Grave Site, Find A Grave
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June 21: Joseph Rainey, First African American US Congressman

2010-06-21T16:09:00.000-07:00

He was born a slave, freed, raised in the South, fled during the Civil War, and became the first black American to be a United States Congressman, serving in the U.S. House of Representatives for eight years.

Joseph Hayne Rainey was born a slave in Georgetown, South Carolina on June 21, 1832. His father, Edward, was a barber who shrewdly managed his monies, allowing him to purchase freedom for himself, his wife Gracia, and his children in the 1840s. After buying their freedom, the Rainey’s moved in 1846 to Charleston, South Carolina, where George provided a comfortable living through his skills as a barber by working at one of the top hotels in South Carolina, the Mills Hotel. The Mills Hotel had opened its doors in 1853 and soon achieved a reputation for excellence – and is still in existence today. In an unusual turn of events, George Rainey became prosperous enough by 1860 that he could afford two slaves of his own.

While not much is known about Joseph Rainey’s youth, it is known that he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps by becoming a barber himself. He did receive limited schooling. In the late-1850s, Rainey moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he met and married Susan – who was originally from the West Indies. They moved back to Charleston in 1859.

Rainey was twenty-eight years old when the American Civil War erupted in April 1861, with the shelling of Fort Sumter, Charleston, South Carolina – where Joseph Rainey lived and worked. Rainey was soon drafted by the Confederate government to work on the network of fortifications around Charleston Harbor. He soon moved from that labor into being a steward on a blockade-runner.

In 1862 Rainey and his wife secretly fled from their home, escaping to Bermuda for the duration of the war on a blockade-runner that traveled from Charleston to Bermuda. They settled for three years in St. George, Bermuda, where they earned a living – Rainey as a barber and his wife as a successful dressmaker. When a yellow fever epidemic struck St. George, the Rainey’s moved to Hamilton where Rainey worked as a barber and a bartender at the Hamilton Hotel.

Rainey and his wife returned to Charleston after the end of the Civil War. He soon became involved in Reconstruction politics.

In 1865 Rainey – accompanied by his older brother Edward – attended the Colored People’s Convention at Zion Presbyterian Church. The church was pastured by a missionary, Jonathan Gibbs, who has started a school for freed Blacks, and was a ten-year veteran of the abolitionist movement. Gibbs had been sent by the Presbyterian Board of Missions for Freed-men, and he would annoy white South Carolinians by hosting a convention that advocated rights for the newly freed slaves. As a result, he would be exiled to pastor a church in a more remote South Carolina county. Gibbs soon left South Carolina. Moving to Florida, he began a political career there that would enable him to become that state’s first Black Secretary of State.

The convention sought ways to advance “the interests of our people”, seeking educational benefits, jobs, and political influence. The effect of the convention was felt by Rainey when he became a member of the executive committee of the state Republican Party, and was elected in 1868 to represent Georgetown at the 1868 constitutional convention. That convention wrote a new constitution for South Carolina. During this time Rainey favored a poll tax – if the monies gathered were used for exclusively for public education. He also supported an effort to legalize the collection of debts contracted before the Civil War including debts incurred in the purchase of slaves. Neither of these ideas were approved in the new constitution. However, he successfully supported an amnesty bill which allowed former Confederate soldiers to regain their civil rights.

As a symbol of the growing power of Reconstruction in the South, Rainey was appointed as a brigadier general in the state militia and served as an agent in the State Land Commission. He also attended the 1869 State Labor Convention, which lobbied the General Assembly for pro-labor legislation to protect black workers.

In 1870 Rainey was elected to the state Senate of South Carolina, where he was soon appointed as the chairman of the senate Finance Committee.

Later that year – on December 12, 1870 - he was elected to fill a vacancy that opened in the U.S. House of Representatives when the House refused to seat Benjamin F. Whittemore. Whittemore had been censured by the House for corruption, and was re-elected by the people of South Carolina – after which the House refused to seat him.

Rainey would be re-elected to Congress several times, serving until March 3, 1879. He was the longest-serving Black Congressman until the 1950s when William L. Dawson broke Rainey’s record.

While in Congress during Reconstruction, Rainey consistently supported legislation designed to protect the civil rights of black Americans – especially those living in the post-Civil War South. He advocated passage of the 1872 Ku Klux Klan Act to rid the south of the organization. The act was signed into law by President Grant. Concerning the need for this act, Rainey stated:

“When myself and my colleagues shall leave these Halls and turn our footsteps toward our southern homes, we know not that the assassin may await our coming, as marked for his vengeance.”

He also supported a civil rights bill that was sponsored by Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, which outlawed racial discrimination on juries, in schools, on transportation, and in public accommodations. The amnesty bill passed in 1874 and the civil rights bill was enacted in 1875. He also was an advocate in Congress for Chinese and American Indian rights.

In May 1874 he would become the first black American to preside as Speaker pro tempore over the House. He also received seats on three standing committees: Freedmen’s Affairs (41st–43rd Congresses), Indian Affairs (43rd Congress), and Invalid Pensions (44th–45th Congresses, 1875–1879).

He would win reelection in 1876 against the Democratic candidate, John Smythe Richardson. Richardson would challenge the results of the election based on the grounds of intimidation of white voters by the federal soldiers and black militia that guarded the voting booths around the state. The challenge was rejected.

But Richardson ran again against Rainey two years later – this time as Reconstruction was coming to a slow and painful ending. This time he won, replacing Rainey in Congress on March 3, 1879. Reconstruction was over, and the whites regained political control of South Carolina.

Rainey returned to his home in Georgetown, South Carolina. He was appointed as an Internal Revenue agent in South Carolina on May 22, 1879, serving until July 15, 1881. Moving back to Washington, D.C., he was involved in banking and a railroad. He retired due to illness in 1886, moving back to Georgetown.

Rainey died in Georgetown on August 1, 1887, at the age of fifty-five. He was buried in the Baptist Cemetery in Georgetown.

He was a unique mixture of compassion and hard-headed reality. A successful businessman, he conducted himself with honor during a time when many in politics were solely seeking personal gain. He would be honored 118 years after his death when a portrait of him was unveiled and displayed in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., becoming the first portrait of a black legislator to be displayed in the Capitol. Perhaps his words, spoken to the Congress, best sums up Rainey’s post-Civil War efforts and beliefs:

“We are earnest in our support of the Government. We were earnest in the house of the nation’s perils and dangers; and now, in our country’s comparative peace and tranquility, we are earnest for our rights.”

WEB RESOURCES:

Bella Online
Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress
Black Americans in Congress
Black Past
Find-A-Grave
News In History
Online 1911 Encyclopedia
South Carolina Department of Archives and History
South Carolina Encyclopedia
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCE:

Photo of Rainey, Library of Congress
Photo of Rainey seated, Library of Congress
Rainey Home, SC Dept. of Archives and History
Portrait as a Congressman, House of Representatives
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May 3: Emmett Dalton, Bank Robber, Building Contractor, and Author

2010-05-04T05:21:00.000-07:00

Emmett Dalton was born near Belton Missouri on May 3, 1871 – the eleventh of fifteen children in the family of Lewis Dalton and Adeline Younger Dalton. Not much is known about the early history of Emmett – but he did learn to read, write, and cipher, and as a teenager he had a good reputation among the townspeople who knew him.

When Emmett was around nine the Dalton family moved to Coffeyville, Kansas – which was later the site of a famed failed-robbery by the infamous Dalton Gang. In 1883, the Dalton’s moved near Vinita – then in Indian Territory, now part of the state of Oklahoma.

By 1887 the sixteen-year-old Emmett was working as a cowboy on at the Bar-X-Bar ranch, located near Vinita and the elder Dalton’s homestead. Several of his brothers – Frank, Grat, and Bob Dalton – became deputy U.S. Marshals, charged with upholding the law of the land. By and large they were reputed to be good officers of the law – brave, friendly, and polite. Emmett was able to join the posse’s occasionally formed to hunt down the outlaws and renegades that ran rampant in the Indian Territory during the late 19th Century. Frank Dalton would be killed by whiskey runners in 1887 while he was serving as a Deputy U.S. Marshal.

Emmett had formed a close attachment to his older brother, Bob – joining him both as a member of posses as well as serving with him as a guard. But, Bob was on the wild side, and in 1890 Emmett and his brother were arrested for “introducing intoxicating liquor into the Osage Nation on Dec. 25, 1889.” The 19-year-old Emmett was acquitted after a court hearing – he had accompanied Bob, but had stayed on the road and was not involved with the actual sale of liquor to the Indians. Bob was bound over for trial, but was released on bail and then did not show up for the trial in late 1890. During the time Bob was out on bail, Bob, Emmett and Grat Dalton sold some stolen horses – and after Grat was arrested, the other two Dalton’s left for California.

Staying with older brother Bill Dalton while in California, Emmett continued to follow Bob in illegal acts. Suspicion fell on the brothers after an attempted train robbery on February 6, 1891. While Bob and Emmett could not be positively identified by witnesses, they were hidden by their brother Bill, and when he was questioned they realized that the sheriff considered them as his chief suspects, and they headed to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. Emmett would later state that they were wrongly accused, and this false accusation – and reputation - had led them to really become train robbers.

As word spread on the Dalton’s, they decided that it was time to leave the country – but needed ready cash to do so. They came up with a daring plan – and would be the first to attempt to rob two banks simultaneously. The robbery was to take place in Coffeyville – their old hometown.

Five riders – Bob, Grat, and Emmett Dalton, along with Dick Broadwell and Bill Power – would ride into Coffeyville, Kansas, on the morning of October 5, 1892. They split into two groups – one for each of the town’s two banks, the C.M. Condon Bank and the First National Bank.

The raid was a failure, and with armed townsmen firing at them the bank robbers tried to flee. Four townsmen and four of the bank robbers were killed by a hail of bullets during a fifteen minute battle. 21-year-old Emmett, carrying a grain sack filled with $21,000 of money from the First National Bank in one hand and a Winchester rifle in the other, was wounded and captured. He had been hit in the right arm (crushing the bone), the left hip, and had almost 20 pieces of buckshot in his back.

Emmett stood trial in Independence, Kansas, in March, 1893. He pled guilty, and was convicted of robbery and murder of a townsman during the gun battle in Coffeyville. He was sentenced to life in prison, and would serve fourteen and a half years at the Kansas State Penitentiary, Lansing, Kansas. In 1907 he was pardoned by E. W. Hoch, the governor of Kansas.

The pardon was granted, in part, because a number of affidavits had been sworn to by the townsmen who had shot down the gang of robbers that Emmett could not have killed anyone – he was carrying the bag of money in one hand, and a rifle in the other, while trying to mount a horse for a get-away. Governor Hoch commented in his pardon:

“Believing that Emmett Dalton's youthfulness is an extenuation of his great offense, and believing that he has thoroughly repented of it and given evidence of this repentance in every possible way, and believing that a government without mercy is not strong but weak, and believing that Emmett Dalton will make a good citizen and live a good, clean, useful life, I have concluded to give him the opportunity.”

As he gave the pardon to Emmett, the governor reputedly told him,

“I do not believe that good government will suffer because of the fact that you are a free man.”

Emmett went back to Oklahoma and on September 1, 1908, married Julia Johnson Gilstrap in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The newlyweds would settle in Tulsa where Emmett found work as a police officer. A few years later Emmett and Julia would move to California where he worked as a building contractor.

Emmett wrote two books – Beyond the Law in 1918 and, with the assistance of a Los Angeles newspaperman named Jack Jungmeyer, When the Daltons Rode in 1931. He would appear as himself in a silent movie produced in 1918 that was based on – and titled after – his first book.

Dalton passed away at the age of sixty-six at his home in Long Beach, California, on July 13, 1937. His body was cremated, and his ashes were buried at Kingfisher Cemetary, Kingfisher, Oklahoma. He was survived by his wife, Julia.

WEB RESOURCES:

Beyond the Law book
Coffeyville Raid
Find A Grave
HistoryNet
Kansas State Historical Society
Kaye Presland
Legends of America
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

After release from prison: Find A Grave

Newspaper sketch of Emmett Dalton: Kaye Presland
Emmett Dalton with his prison number: Kansas Memory
Beyond the Law: Google books
Emmett’s gravestone: Find A Grave
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April 26: Esek Hopkins, First Commander of the Fleet

2010-04-26T19:18:00.000-07:00

He came from a strong Puritan line, raised on the concept of duty and the benefits of hard work. He would become the first commander of the American Navy, and another of his family - his brother - was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

Esek Hopkins was born on April 26, 1718, in the territory claimed by Providence, Rhode Island – which is today the town of Scituate. His parents were William and Ruth Hopkins, and he was the sixth of nine children.

He grew up on the Hopkins farm, which was named Chopomisk. The countryside in the early 18th century was wild and sparsely settled, and working on the farm and hunting provided the rawboned strength that would characterize Hopkins.

When his father died in 1738, Hopkins, a tall and handsome twenty-year-old, went to Providence where he signed on to work on a vessel that was preparing to sail to Surinam. With this event, Hopkins began a lifetime on the sea. Four of the brothers would become capable captains who made their livings on the sea.

Hopkins proved to be a quick study and an able seaman, soon rising to the command of a vessel in his own right. By the time he was twenty-three he felt secure enough in his trade to marry – and on November 28, 1741 he married Desire Burroughs, the daughter of a Newport, Rhode Island merchant and shipmaster. The marriage would yield six children. He would make Newport his homeport until 1748 when he relocated back to Providence.

The years of the French and Indian Wars provided colonial sailors with the opportunity to become privateers – private vessels sailing with permission of a government and being granted the right to seize enemy ships, and to share in the profit of the sail of that ship and its cargo. Hopkins apparently did very well as a privateer, seizing French (and occasionally Spanish) merchant ships.

Moses Brown, a Providence merchant, wrote on February 23, 1757:

"Capt. Esek Hopkins has Taken and sent in here a snow of about 150 tons, Laden with wine, oil, Dry goods &c to ye amount of about L6000 ye greater part of which will be Exposed to publick Vendue ye Tuesday next.”

During this time he bought a farm that he would add more property to over time until it eventually consisted of over two hundred acres. It was located just north of Providence. Between voyages he would supervise the tending of the farm and engage in local politics. His efforts largely contributed to the election of his brother Stephen Hopkins as the governor of Rhode Island in 1763. Hopkins himself was elected as a Deputy to the Rhode Island General Assembly.

At the outbreak of the American War for Independence, Hopkins was appointed a brigadier general and given command of the Rhode Island military forces. Later, on December 22, 1775, he was given the designation of Commander-In-Chief of the Continental Navy by the Continental Congress. One major factor in his achieving this position was the fact that during the French and Indian war he had commanded a veritable fleet of ten privateers in the war against the French, and hence had experience in commanding a number of ships.

In January 1776 he took command of the eight converted merchant ships that constituted the bulk of the Continental Navy. The flag he hoisted on the flagship of his small fleet, the Alfred (30-guns), was the Gadsden Flag - which had been designed by Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina. The Alfred would later be captained by young officer named Lieutenant John Paul Jones. The other ships in this first American fleet were the Columbus (28 guns); the brig Andrea Doria (14 guns); the brig Cabot (14 guns); the sloop Providence (12 guns); the sloop Hornet (10 guns); the schooner Wasp (8 guns); and the schooner Fly (6 guns).

Hopkins sailed from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on February 18, 1776, with orders to scout and if possible to attack British maritime forces in Chesapeake Bay, Charleston harbor (South Carolina), and those near Rhode Island. He believed he was given the option of forming plans of his own if he felt that the orders sent by the Maritime Committee of the Continental Congress proved to be unfeasible.

He quickly realized that the enemy naval strength was superior to his in the Chesapeake Bay area, so he exercised his command prerogative and led his squadron southward, to New Providence Island in the Bahamas. He landed there on March 3, 1776, and seized a large stock of supplies and equipment that were badly needed for the fledgling American army.

A month later, on route back to the colonies, the American fleet encountered and captured two small British warships – and two days later had an inconclusive engagement with the 20-gun HMS Glasgow. The Glasgow, heavily outnumbered, skillfully evaded the Americans and was able to escape. Also during this time he captured two British merchant vessels.

The American squadron would arrive back at New London, Connecticut, on April 8, 1776, and were at first welcomed as heroes. The President of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, wrote Hopkins:

"Your letter of the 9th of March, with the enclosure, was duly received and laid before Congress; in whose Name I beg leave to congratulate you on the Success of your Expedition. Your Account of the Spirit and Bravery shown by the men affords them [Congress] the greatest satisfaction; and encourages them to expect similar Exertions and Courage on every future Occasion. Though it is to be regretted, that the ‘Glascow’ Man of War made her Escape, yet as it was not thro any Misconduct, the Praise due to you and the other officers is undoubtedly the same."

However, soon Hopkins’ decision to change his orders was surrounded by controversy. Many of the officers who sailed with him had disagreed with his policies and decisions. On top of that, the small American fleet stayed at New London, not being used aggressively against the English. The reasons for this were twofold. One was a lack of men and supplies – with many of the qualified sailors and most of the supplies being used by American privateers, who paid better than the Navy did. The other was a loose British blockade of the American port.

The Continental Congress would censure him and two of his captains for breach of orders and, in 1777 – because of continuing complaints from his officers - he would lose his command. A year later – on January 2, 1778, he would be dismissed from his position as commander-in-chief of the Navy.

Hopkins maintained his popularity in Rhode Island. He was elected to the state legislature during the 1780s, and was involved in state politics until his death in 1802.

WEB RESOURCES:

1911 Encyclopedia
Cruise of Commodore Esak Hopkins
Esak Hopkins, Google books
Gadsden Flag
Military
Naval Historical Center
Novel Guide
Quarterman Family
Virtualology
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Ezek Hopkins, Commander in Chief of the Fleet: Wikipedia
A French Engraving of Hopkins: Navy History
The flagship of Esek Hopkins, the Alfred: Aeragon
The Gadsden Flag: Wikipedia
A 19th Century engraving of Commodore Hopkins: Navy History

April 22: Lewis Thornton Powell, Angry Attempted Assassin

2010-04-21T19:21:00.000-07:00

He was young, strong, handsome, and the son of a preacher. Yet – hardened by four years of civil war, he would attempt to assassinate the U.S. Secretary of State in a plot hatched by John Wilkes Booth.

Lewis Thornton Powell was born on April 22, 1844, in Randolph County, Alabama. His parents were George Cader, a farmer, tax assessor, and later a Baptist minister, and Patience Caroline Powell.

Powell would be the sixth surviving child of the first eight children born to the Powells, who eventually had ten children. In 1847 his father was ordained into the ministry and moved the Powell family to Steward County, Georgia. All of the children were educated by their father, who served as the teacher at the local school.

As a child, Powell was quiet and introverted, a young boy who loved to read and study. He earned the nickname “Doc’ because he cared for sick animals. A change occurred, however when he was twelve. He was kicked in the face by the family’s mule. His jaw was broken, and when it healed, his jaw was more prominent on the left side of his face.

Around the age of fourteen, young Powell was heavily involved in Sunday School, prayer meetings, and other religious activities. He would conduct prayer meetings, was popular, liked to sing, and was a favorite of the ladies in the community.

In 1860 the Powell family moved to the outskirts of Live Oak, Florida. The sixteen-year-old Lewis worked supervising his father’s farm there, cognizant of the increasing tensions between the North and the South that would ultimately lead to the Civil War. On January 10, 1861, Florida seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy, and on May 30th the seventeen-year-old Powell enlisted in the Jasper Blues (Hamilton County), which later became Company I of the Second Florida Infantry.

Powell would see action in several major battles during the war. He served in the Army of Northern Virginia and was at the battles of Seven Pines, Second Manassas, Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg. On July 2, 1863, he was wounded in the right wrist at Gettysburg, and captured by the Union forces. At the Gettysburg hospital, Powell would become a male nurse, aiding the doctors in treating the wounded of both sides, and becoming so involved in his work that he began calling himself ‘Doctor Powell’. He was reported to be good at his work, and kind to the sick and wounded.

In September 1863 the prisoner-orderly was transferred to the West Buildings Hospital in Baltimore. At this hospital, aided by a female nurse he had met at Gettysburg who now worked at the hospital in Baltimore, Powell escaped, walking out of the hospital in a Union uniform provided by his female friend.

Making his way back to Virginia, Powell gave up trying to find his old unit, and joined with Colonel John Mosby’s Rangers, a partisan guerrilla organization. While with the Rangers, Powell began spying operations for the Confederate Secret Service. It was during one of these missions that he met John Surratt – who would be one of the conspirators in the Lincoln assassination.

By 1865, the war was obviously moving toward a conclusion, with victory in sight for the North.
Powell was brought into a plan by John Wilkes Booth to kidnap President Lincoln while the President was attending a play at the Seventh Street Hospital on the outskirts of Washington. The kidnapped President was to be spirited to Richmond, and used as a bargaining chip in an exchange plan for Confederate soldiers. The planned kidnapping was called off when Lincoln cancelled his visit to the play.

After the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on April 9, 1865 – and the revealing of plans by President Lincoln to let former slaves have the right to vote – a more deadly plan was hatched – this time to assassinate several top officials of the Union – Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward. Powell was again brought into the plan by Booth, and on April 13, 1865, Powell, John Wilkes Booth, George Atzerodt, and David Herold met in Powell’s room in a boarding house in Washington. It was there that almost 21-year-old Powell was given the assignment to assassinate Seward.

Seward had been injured in a carriage accident in early April, and was still recuperating at his home in Washington. During the evening of April 14th, Powell broke into Seward’s bedroom, stabbing at him repeatedly. The bandages on Seward’s injuries – a broken jaw and broken arm – saved his life by deflecting several knife blows. Powell also attacked those trying to rescue Seward – two of Seward’s children and Seward’s nurse, Sergeant George F. Robinson. Powell – outnumbered and in an alerted household, escaped, wounding a messenger who had arrived while Powell was escaping. After the trial, Sergeant Robinson, credited with actually forcing Powell to flee, asked for and was given the knife used by Powell in the attack.

Fleeing the city, Powell was thrown from his horse near a cemetery. He hid in the cemetery for three days, and then went to Mary Surratt’s boarding house - arriving just as she was arrested. Even though she denied knowing him, Powell found himself in chains and taken aboard a Navy monitor, the USS Saugus.

A military commission was formed to try Powell – foregoing the civilian trial by jury. Powell was tried under the name of “Payne” – a name he had used months earlier when he was arrested for spying by the Union and signed a loyalty oath to get released. He was defended by William E. Doster. Thirty two witnesses testified against Powell, and the evidence against him was overwhelming. Doster tried to claim that Powell was insane – which was rejected on the stand by Government witnesses. He then tried to claim that Powell was a soldier acting under orders – an argument that was rejected out of hand by the court.

Powell was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and treason.

Powell was executed on July 7, 1865, along with three other convicted conspirators – Mary Surratt, David Herold, and George Atzerodt. His body was buried in the penitentiary courtyard near the gallows where he was hanged. His body was re-interred several times over the years, and its present location is unknown. However, in January 1992 his skull discovered and identified in the Smithsonian Anthropology Department where it lay among mostly Indian remains that were being identified for return to their appropriate tribes. The skull, which had been tagged at some point in the past, was claimed by the nearest living Powell relative, and on November 12, 1994, was buried next to his mothers grave in Geneva, Florida.

WEB RESOURCES:

Abraham Lincoln Research Site
Alias Payne
Geneva History
Spartacus Educational
University of Missouri – Kansas City
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Picture of Powell, Indiana History Digital Image Library
The assassination attempt on Seward, Wikipedia
Powell under Guard, Harpers Weekly, May 27, 1865: Son of the South
Booth and his Associates, Indiana Digital Image Library
Alexander Gardner’s picture of conspirators arriving at the gallows – Powell is second from the right, next to Mary Surratt, Indiana Digital Image Library
Powell’s gravesite, Waymarking

Blog Entry: April 19: Eliot Ness and the Untouchables

2010-04-19T15:10:00.000-07:00

Over the years he has become a name recognized by the group of incorruptible Federal agents he managed during a time of intense political corruption – the Untouchables. A book, television series, and – more recently a movie - have all documented the courageous acts of this group of men against one of the most renown of all gangsters during an era of gangsters: Al Capone. Yet, he also was a businessman, and an (unsuccessful) candidate for mayor of a major city.

Eliot Ness was the youngest of five children born to Norwegian immigrants Peter and Emma King Ness. Born on April 19, 1903, in Chicago, Illinois, Ness would attend public school - graduating from Christian Fenger High School. He would show an early dedication to the work ethic – maintaining his grades at school, a paper route, and working at his father’s bakery. He then attended the University of Chicago, graduating in 1925 with a degree in business and political science.

After a brief career as an investigator of the Retail Credit Company of Atlanta, Georgia – where he was assigned to work in Chicago conducting background investigations gathering credit information – Ness returned to the University of Chicago, earning a Master’s Degree in criminology.

In 1927 Ness joined the U.S. Treasury Department as a member of the Bureau of Prohibition. The Bureau had been created as an enforcement arm for the 18th Amendment – which prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol, and ushered in an era known as Prohibition. Ness was encouraged to enter Federal law enforcement by his brother-in-law, Alexander Jamie – who was a Federal agent himself.

Prohibition encouraged the rise of organizations to illegally produce and sell the illicit alcohol. Because of the profit involved, this became the era of gangsters – who made big money in booze, illegal gambling, and more. At the top of the criminal food chain in Chicago was Al Capone.

Starting in 1929, the Federal government decided to make a concerted effort to bring down Capone – whose tentacles of influence included ‘bought’ politicians, police, and civic leaders. Ness was chosen to head the operations that targeted the illegal breweries and the supply routes of Capone’s business empire. Ness’s goal was to reduced Capone’s ability to pay bribe money to public officials by eliminating his main source of income – bootlegged alcohol.

Chicago’s law-enforcement agencies – city, state, and federal representatives – were rife with corruption, and Ness searched through the records of hundreds of Prohibition agents to create a reliable team of eleven men that could not be bought or bribed – the famous “Untouchables”.

"When they were settled, and while the newsreels were setting up their cameras, I told them of the attempted briberies. I related in detail how an emissary of Capone'shad tried to buy me off for two thousand dollars a week and how Marty and Sam had thrown back their flying bribe. [...] It was a long, wearisome process but well worth the effort. Possibly it wasn't too important for the world to know that we couldn't be bought, but I did want Al Capone and every gangster in the city to realize there were still a few law enforcement agents who couldn't be swerved from their duty." --from The Untouchables by Eliot Ness

Within six months Ness had seized breweries worth over a million dollars, which put a crimp in Capone’s operations. After bribery attempts failed, several assassination attempts were made by the Capone organization against Ness – all of which failed.

While Ness was keeping Capone’s attention focused on the loss of income through raids on the breweries, other Treasury Department agents were focusing on Capone’s tax evasion. In 1931, Capone was charged with 22 counts of income tax evasion and 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act. As a result of this, Capone was sentenced to 11 years in prison, winding up at Alcatraz.

Soon after the end of Capone came the end of Prohibition. The 1933 passage of the 21st Amendment provided an end of a great social experiment – and a revamping of Ness’s career.

After Prohibition, Ness was reassigned to the “Moonshine Mountains” in Kentucky, Tennessee, and southern Ohio. A year later he was transferred to Cleveland, Ohio, and in 1935 – at the age of 32 - was hired by the mayor Cleveland, Harold Burton, as Cleveland’s Safety Director. Ness campaigned to clean out corruption in the police department and to modernize the fire department. He formed a new “Untouchable” unit of six men, who took on gambling, racketeers, and organized crime in Cleveland in an attempt to clean up the city. Two hundred Cleveland officers were forced to resign from the force, and over a dozen police officials went on trial for various criminal acts. His concentration on his work was one of the reasons he was divorced by his first wife, Edna Staley Ness, in 1938. He would marry Evaline Michelow, and illustrator of children’s books, in 1939.

Ness showed his far-reaching vision while in Cleveland. He created the Emergency Patrol, which was a special unit of vehicles manned by police officers with first aid training. He also established a central communications center to take and dispatch all emergency calls. Ness also established a juvenile crime unit, and obtained city funds for gyms, bowling alleys, and playgrounds in areas where gangs were prevalent. He also worked with the Works Program Administration to provide employment for the youths of Cleveland’s inner city. Juvenile crime dropped 80% while Ness was Safety Director in Cleveland.

Ness had a number of accomplishments as the Safety Director of Cleveland, but he had one significant failure that would give his critics ammunition against him. Ness was unsuccessful in solving a series of twelve murders were known as the “Torso Murders”, and occurred between 1935 and 1938. These serial murders, committed by the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run” were never solved. This - combined with his extensive ‘social’ drinking and a scandal involved when he drove away after car accident in 1942 - would create the conditions for Ness to leave Cleveland in 1942.

America entered World War II in December 1941. In 1942 Ness left Cleveland and moved to Washington, D.C., again in the employ of the Federal government to control prostitution and the spread of venereal disease at the military bases in the area.

In 1944 he left his job and moved back to Ohio to become the chairman of the Diebold Corporation, a security safe company. A year later he would be divorced by his second wife, Evaline, and in 1946 he married artist Elisabeth Anderson Seaver. It was in this third and final marriage that Ness adopted his only child, Robert.

In 1947 he would campaign unsuccessfully for the position of mayor of Cleveland – losing by what one source called an ‘embarrassingly large margin’. He was also removed as the CEO of Diebold after the election. Ness would become involved with several other businesses, but had difficulty providing for his family – until he met Oscar Fraley, an author who worked with Ness and ultimately published a book chronicling Ness’s Chicago years. The “Untouchables” would be published in 1957, just six months after Ness’s May 16th death from a heart attack.

Ness’s remains were cremated and kept by family members until 1997. Then his ashes – along with those of his last wife and his son - were scattered on the waters of Wade Lake in the Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland. A marker was erected to honor the man who revolutionized and revitalized Cleveland’s police force, and had captured America's imagination with his honesty and his war against crime.

WEB RESOURCES:

About Cleveland
Crime Library
FBI Files
FBI Freedom of Information Act Records
Find A Grave
Finding Dulcinea
Google Books: Eliot Ness and the Untouchables
Historical Biographies
Ness Returns to Cleveland
NNDB
Ohio History Central
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Portrait of Eliot Ness, Wikipedia
Ness as a Child, Cleveland Memory
Cleveland Safety Director, Cleveland Memory
Campaign poster for Mayor of Cleveland, Photo collection (Cleveland years)
Elisabeth and Bobby Ness, Cleveland Memory
Ness’s burial marker, Find-a-Grave
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April 3: David Kenney, "Father of the Vacuum Cleaner Industry"

2010-04-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

Note: Great Lives is honored to present our first guest blogger, Mary Robinson Sive, who contributed this life story to the Great Lives blog. Mary is the author of Lost villages: historic driving tours in the Catskills as well as other works.

An almost forgotten New Jersey inventor was a pioneer in the vacuum cleaner industry long before this appliance became a standard piece of equipment in most households. Historical accounts often do not give this self-taught and self-made man credit, some dismissing him as a “New Jersey plumber;” others not mentioning him at all. Yet the patents he received between 1903 and 1913 placed him at the center of the American vacuum cleaner industry in the first two decades of the 20th century. In 1910 the New York Times called him the “father of the vacuum cleaner industry.”

The son of Irish immigrants, Kenney at age 15 was apprenticed to a plumber and soon had his own business with offices in New Jersey and New York City. In the 1890s he received patents for a “Flushometer” (to flush toilets) and other plumbing devices that proved quite profitable. Soon he joined the many other inventors who sought to improve housecleaning by mechanical means. By 1902 he installed a steam engine in Pittsburgh that could suck dust out of all parts of a large building.

(Frick Building 1902 installation)
An English engineer, H. Cecil Booth, coined the term “vacuum cleaner” for his truck-mounted invention. He applied for a US patent during the time that Kenney also had several patent applications pending. Kenney received his most significant patent in 1907 after a six-year wait. The Englishman’s application for a US patent was now moot.

According to a 1906 ad Kenney's firm counted the White House and the New York Times building among its customers for stationary central vacuum systems. Two years later it was chosen to install such a system in New York's Singer Building, at the time the world’s tallest office structure, and later provided such service in the US Treasury building.

In a highly competitive environment Kenney was aggressive in pursuing his business interests. He was successful in several lawsuits alleging patent infringement and eventually gave up manufacturing in favor of licensing other companies.

Portable vacuum cleaners came into their own after James Spangler received a patent in 1909 for one powered by electricity and sold it to William Henry Hoover, a name still recognized. But electric power was far from universally available, and a market existed for hand-operated cleaners. Sears Roebuck began offering three versions of such machines the same year.

Anyone living on a farm or in a small town who hoped to clean floors in a modern manner had to use a vacuum cleaner operated by hand. And that vacuum most likely used the nozzle patented by Kenney.

Most of the manual vacuums that survive are of a plunger type (shown in the middle above) that functioned somewhat like a bicycle pump in reverse, with the operator pushing the handle down a tube, then pulling it back up and depositing dust in a container. Other models required operation by two individuals. Sears offered a money-back guarantee on the three models advertised, but within eight years the manually operated cleaners were gone from the catalog and only electric ones were shown. Perhaps word got around that they weren’t really “labor-saving devices.” Women who grew up in farm homes in the 1920s and 1930s remember seeing manual cleaners, but they don’t actually remember their mothers ever using them much.
Manual vacuum cleaners are described in few books dealing with home life or homemaking during the pre-World War I period. Women’s history institutions have no photographs. More examples are found in small local history collections than in major museums. The Hoover Company’s Historical Center in Canton, OH has a number of these appliances, but the largest number is held by a private collector (vachunter.com)

In 1920 1,024,167 vacuum cleaners were sold for a total of $35 million, most undoubtedly electric. The industry for whose growth he was given so much credit by his contemporaries was well-established. Kenney now turned his inventive skills to yet another field and received his last patent in 1920, this for a heating system designed to improve the distribution of heat from a wood-burning fireplace.

The income from his various patents enabled Kenney to pursue other business interests, including real estate transactions beginning early in his career. During the long wait for the 1907 patent Kenney asked the Sisters of Mercy, an order of Catholic nuns who were his daughter’s teachers, to pray for him. His donations beginning in 1905 and continuing to the end of his life totaled over 70 acres and enabled Mt. St. Mary’s College, founded by the order in 1873, to move to a site near his manufacturing operations. He took an active part in the planning of the buildings for the school, which opened in 1908 with elementary and secondary classes and included seven girls in a college department. The school continues as a girls’ prep school with several hundred students. Kenney’s generosity resulted in his being made a Papal Chamberlain by Pope Pius X in 1906. Other civic activities included service on the board of a hospital and of a reform school.

Booth’s name appears in the British Dictionary of National Biography and in biographical reference works dealing with technology. The vacuum cleaners he invented and manufactured are held in London’s Science Museum. Kenney’s name cannot be found in corresponding American reference books, the Library of Congress’ “American Memory” or its Prints and Photographs Collection, nor in the Smithsonian Institution. While the courts uniformly held his patents applicable to portable household cleaners as well as to central installations, the industry largely shifted away from the systems serving entire buildings that he had pioneered in this country. His vacuum cleaner patents survived David Kenney by a few years. He committed suicide in May 1922. His body was found near Beacon, NY, after he had been missing about ten days. He had been in ill health for some years and had recently lost his wife and a sister. He was long forgotten by the 1980s, when the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame was inaugurated with names like Edison and Einstein.

March 24: Rufus King – First Senator from New York

2010-03-22T09:40:00.000-07:00

He would sign the new United States Constitution for Massachusetts, be the first U.S. Senator from New York, twice be a candidate for Vice President - and once for President. His views on slavery preceeded the Civil War by half a century, and he was our Ambassador to Great Britain during a time of great contention between the two sovereign nations.

Rufus King was born on March 24, 1755, at Scarboro, Massachusetts. After Maine achieved statehood in 1820, King’s hometown became Scarborough, Maine. He was the eldest son. His parents were Richard King and Sabilla Blagden King, and his father was a prosperous farmer-merchant. His father – who had fought in the French and Indian War in the successful assault on the French Fortress at Louisbourg, Canada, was a staunch Loyalist. He supported the unpopular Stamp Act – and had his home ransacked by local Sons of Liberty in 1766. In 1774 a force of local militia visited the King home, demanding the elder King recant publically his support for the Crown. The elder King died soon after, and his death instilled in his son a true passion for law and order – and a society controlled by rational men.

He received an elementary education at local schools, and at the age of 12 received a classical education at Dummer Academy in South Byfield, Massachusetts. In 1777 he would graduate from Harvard.

During the American Revolution, King would serve briefly in the Massachusetts militia as an aide to Brigadier General John Glover – whose Massachusetts “Marbleheaders” had ferried Washington and his troops across the Delaware to the Battle of Trenton two years earlier. King would serve as a Major in the militia, and participated in the siege of Newport, Rhode Island.

While his military career was short-lived, it did broaden King’s political horizons. Instead of viewing the war and the world from simply a New England perspective, his view was now more encompassing and national in outlook. It also illustrated to King the need for a strong central government that could protect interstate commerce to help the nation grow.

After his experiences in the military, he decided to pursue a legal career – studying under noted lawyer and legal philosopher, Theophilus Parsons – and entered the legal practice in 1780 in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

King had an oratorical gift, and a personal presence and bearing that soon led him into a political career. He was a member of the Massachusetts legislature from 1783 to 1785, and was sent to the Continental Congress from 1784 to 1786. He gained a reputation in the Continental Congress both as a brilliant speaker and an early opponent of the institution of slavery.

He married Mary Alsop, the daughter of a wealthy New York merchant, on March 30, 1786 during the close of his tour in the Continental Congress. She was described at the time as a great beauty, and between her appearance and her father’s prestige, she found herself a much sought-after lady of society.

“her face was oval, with finely formed nose, mouth, and chin, blue eyes, a clear brunette complexion, black hair, and fine teeth. Her movements were at once graceful and gracious, and her voice musical”

King performed his final duties to his home state of Massachusetts by representing her at the Constitutional Convention. King was – at the age of 32 – one of the youngest of the delegates at the Philadelphia Convention – but was also one of the most capable orators there. He attended every session, and became – along with James Madison – one of the leading figures in promoting a true national concept of government. He took numerous notes during the proceedings – which have been studied and analyzed by historians since then.

After these duties were discharged in 1789, he moved permanently to New York to pursue his legal and political career.

In New York he was elected to the state legislature in 1789 and, just prior to the opening of the state’s legislative session, was appointed to the U.S. Senate as one of New York’s first Senators. King represented New York as a U.S. Senator for two terms.

During that time he was one of the Senate’s Federalist leaders and demonstrated a keen and insightful understanding of military issues. He became one of the key proponents for the permanent establishment of a U.S. Navy. He also supported Alexander Hamilton’s fiscal program, as well as being a strong proponent of the unpopular Jay’s Treaty. In 1791 he also became one of the directors of the First Bank of the United States.

King declined President Washington’s offer of a Cabinet post, but after his reappointment as Senator in 1796 did accept the offer to become the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain. He would hold this position during the administration of three Presidents, and was a key figure in Britain during a difficult time of relationships between the two countries. He was instrumental in negotiating a settlement of Revolutionary War issues with the British, as well as initiating discussions on European interests in Latin America that would ultimately be expressed in the Monroe Doctrine.

King returned to the United States in 1803 – returning to his career in politics. In 1804 and 1808 he was the Federalist Vice Presidential candidate – with fellow Constitution signer Charles Cotesworth Pinckney as the Presidential candidate. He was defeated. He would run as the Federalist candidate for President in 1816 – losing to another signer of the Constitution, James Madison.

In 1805 he purchased a farm on Long Island and built a home there known as King Manor, which is a museum today. He enjoyed the peace – as well as the occasional political discussions with guests invited to dinner – during his years out of political office.

He was reappointed to the U.S. Senate by New York, where he served from 1813 – 1825. An early critic of the War of 1812, he changed his view after the British burned Washington, D.C. in 1814, because he became convinced that the U.S. was fighting a defensive war. He lent his considerable support to the war effort during the final part of the conflict.

In 1820 King expressed his views on slavery by denouncing the Missouri Compromise. In 1817 he had voted to end the slave trade. Now, three years later, he believed that there should be no compromise on the issue of slavery, but that the issue must be settled immediately and forever by the establishment of a system of compensated emancipation and resettlement of the former slaves in a colony in Africa.

King retired from the Senate n 1825 because of ill health. However, his country called on his services again in the form of President John Quincy Adams, who persuaded him to once again be the U.S. Minister to Great Britain. However, illness forced him to resign from that task a year later, and on , 1827, he died at the age of 72.

He was buried near his beloved King Manor in the cemetery of Grace Episcopal Church, Jamaica, Long Island, New York.

King was a realist, and therefore willing to change his views when the practical outweighed the philosophical. His changing view from sectional to national politics; increased power of a central government; and his dealing with Great Britain allowed him to serve his country faithfully, honorably and well.

WEB RESOURCES:

Colonial Hall
National Archives: America’s Founding Fathers
National Park Service
Soldier-Statesmen of the Constitution
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Oil Portrait of Rufus King by Charles Wilson Peale: Soldier-Statesmen of the Constitution
Portrait of Mary Alsop King: Women of the Republican Court
Portrait of King: Public Domain blog
King Manor: King Manor Museum
Rufus King grave: Find A Grave
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March 2: Susanna Salter, First Woman Mayor

2010-03-03T05:00:00.000-08:00

Susanna Madora Kinsey (nee Salter) was born on March 2, 1860, in near Lamira, Ohio. Her parents were Oliver Kinsey and Terissa Ann White Kinsey, whose Quakers ancestors were colonists in William Penn’s colony.

In 1872, when she was 12, her family moved to an 80-acre farm near Silver Lake in northeastern Kansas, where Salter attended public schools. Then, in 1880, she entered the Kansas State Agricultural College as a sophomore, being able to skip her freshman year because of college-level courses she took while in high school. She was forced to drop out of college just six weeks prior to graduate because of an illness.

While at college she met – and married – Lewis Allison Salter, the son of a former Kansas Lt. Governor, Melville J. Salter. Lewis graduated from college in 1879, and the couple were married on September 1, 1880. Two years later, after the birth of the first of their nine children, the Salter’s moved to Argonia, where Lewis would manage a hardware store. Argonia is in southern Kansas, and would be a city where Susanna would be involved in making history.

The first child born in Argonia was the Salter’s’ second child, Francis Argonia Salter, who was born in the spring of 1883. In 1884, Mrs. Salter’s parents moved to Argonia, where they bought the store in a partnership with Lewis so that Lewis could study the law with a local attorney and prepare for the bar exam.

In 1885 the town of Argonia was incorporated, and again history was made. Susanna’s father became the first mayor, and her husband, Lewis, became the city clerk. As city clerk, Lewis was responsible for writing the ordinances of the newly incorporated town.

In 1885 a bill was introduced in the Kansas state legislature to grant women the right of voting in municipal elections. Two years later the Kansas legislature passed the legislation, and governor John A. Martin signed it into law on February 15, 1887.

In Argonia, Susanna had become an active member and officer in the local W.C.T.U. (Women’s Christian Temperance Union), which had been organized in Argonia in 1883. With the passage of legislation allowing women the right to vote in Kansas municipalities, the Argonia chapter of the W.C.T.U. decided to make the enforcement of a state prohibition of liquor law a priority in the city election, which was to be held in 1887. Due to the absence of their president, Susanna presided at a meeting which selected a ticket of men whom the W.C.T.U. considered eligible for the city’s political offices – and who supported the W.C.T.U. agenda.

Some of the ‘wets’ in town – those men who opposed the ideas of the W.C.T.U. and favored the open sale of alcohol – held a secret meeting that developed a plan of Machiavellian proportions designed to defeat the W.C.T.U. and lessen the influence of that organization.

They decided to draw up a list of candidates identical with that of the W.C.T.U. – only with Susanna Salter’s name in the mayoral slot. Their thought was that the men in the community would not vote for a woman – nor would many of the W.C.T.U. members. In the end, the W.C.T.U. would, so the plan proposed, be politically embarrassed and would lose some of its influence as a political organization. Susanna Slater’s name was chosen because she was the only W.C.T.U. officer living within the city limits, and therefore eligible to run for mayor.

The election laws at the time did not require advance notice of candidacy, so the plotters ran off their copies of the ballot just before the April 4th election. Because of this, neither Susanna nor her family knew that she was on the ballot.

Surprise and shock greeted the early voters on election day when they saw a woman’s name as candidate for mayor. Word soon spread, and the chairman of the Republican Party in Argonia quickly determined what had been done and organized a delegation to visit Susanna. They found her in her yard, hanging up the laundry. They explained what had happened, asking her if she would accept the post if she won. She agreed.

The delegation spent the day explaining the situation to voters, and worked in the city to get out the vote. Lewis Salter – who was one of the early voters – was reported perturbed when he discovered that his wife was on the ballot, and more so when he returned home and found out that she had consented to be the mayor if she won the election. He eventually consoled himself with the event, even calling himself “the husband of the Mayor”.

Accompanied by her parents, Susanna went to the polls around 4 PM. As was customary for the day, she did not vote for herself – leaving the position of mayor on the ballot unmarked.

Showing that the ‘best laid plans’ can go astray, Susanna Salter was elected mayor of Argonia – and the first woman mayor in the United States. The official notice of the election stated:

ARGONIA 4/6/87
DORA SALTER, Argonia

Madam

You are hereby notified that at an election held in the city of Argonia on Monday April 4/87, for the purpose of electing city officers, you were duly elected to the office of Mayor of said city. You will take due notice thereof and govern yourself accordingly.

WM. H WATSON MAYOR

F.A. RUSE Clerk Pro. tem.

There were also five members of the town council elected – three of whom had been in on the plot to embarrass the women of the W.C.T.U.. Reportedly the new mayor had no trouble with the council during her yearlong term. She stated at the first meeting:

“Gentlemen, what is your pleasure? You are the duly elected officials of this town, I am merely your presiding officer."

The council and the mayor got along during their yearlong term. No new ordinances were passed – though it was a time of continued adjustment and application of the city ordinances that were created a mere two years earlier. One sad note during the term of Susanna: one of her children was born during her term as mayor, and died in infancy.

There was quite a bit of press coverage of the election of a woman mayor – both national and foreign newspapers came to the small Kansas town, interviewed the people, attended council meetings – each reflecting the view of their editors as to whether a woman mayor was a good or a bad thing. One item of continued interest was that Susanna was only 27 years old when elected to office. Another was that the position paid one dollar annually.

When asked about her future ambitions in politics by one of the eastern newspapers, Susanna replied:

"No, indeed, I shall be very glad when my term of office expires, and shall be only too happy to thereafter devote myself entirely, as I always have done heretofore, to the care of my family."

Susanna did not run for office again after her year in office expired. She and her family would leave Argonia when the Cherokee Strip was oned in 1893 where Lewis filed a claim on land near Alva, Oklahoma. In 1903 he sold the farm and moved to Augusta where he practiced law and established a newspaper.

Lewis died in 1916, and Susanna moved her family to Norman, Oklahoma, so her youngest child could attend the state university there. She would pass away at the age of 101 on March 17, 1961, and is buried in Argonia, Kansas.

A political ploy had backfired, electing the first woman mayor in the United States. She accepted the job she had not applied for, and made history.

WEB RESOURCES:

Kansas Historical Quarterly
Kansas State Historical Society
KTWU interview transcript
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Portrait of Suzanna Salter, age 27: Kansas Historical Society
Portrait of Suzanna and her husband: Kansas Historical Society
Map of Sumner County, 1887: David Rumsey Collection
Salter home in Argonia: Salter House Museum
Letter notifying Suzanna of her election as mayor: Kansas Memory

Portrait of Suzanna Salter at 94: Kansas Historical Society

February 26: John Harvey Kellogg, Crown Prince of Cereal

2010-02-26T15:39:00.000-08:00

Very likely most Americans recognize the name – it’s seen every time one visits the breakfast cereal section of the grocery store. But the man behind the development of a new style of food for breakfast cereals was a pioneer in the wellness movement - but not a partner in the company that made corn flake cereal famous.

John Harvey Kellogg was born on February 26, 1852, in Tyrone, New York. He would move to Battle Creek, Michigan at an early age with his parents, John Preston and Ann Jeanette Stanley Kellogg. His parents were devout Seventh-day Adventists, and this would have a bearing on John Kellogg’s life, occupation, and fame. His father operated a broom factory there where Kellogg would work with his father. He also served as a ‘printer’s devil’ in various publishing houses in Battle Creek.

He had a public education, working his way through the public schools of Battle Creek, then attending Russell T. Trall’s Hygeio-Therapeutic College for five months, then Michigan State Normal School (now Eastern Michigan University), and finally receiving a M.D. degree from the New York University Medical College at Bellevue Hospital – where Kellogg graduated at the age of 23 in 1875. Some credit the beginning of biomedicine to Kellogg, based on his graduation thesis What Is Disease? – which reflected the natural hygiene beliefs of his mentor, Russell Trall.

He would continue his education by studying in Europe at various times between 1883 and 1911. His movement into the medical profession was promoted and provided for by two people he had worked for as a teenager: James and Ellen White, two of the founding members of the Seventh day Adventist church. As a physician, Kellogg would become an advocate of the views of the Adventist Church, especially those considering the dietary approach to healthy living.

He would start editing the Adventist’s Health Reformer newsletter in 1872, and after graduation from medical school he began working at the Adventist’s Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek. He was twenty-four years old when he became the superintendent of it in 1876, and would rename it the Battle Creek Sanitarium in 1878, designing it as a place where people could learn how to stay well. Eventually the ‘Sans’ would become a center for the rich and famous to visit. He also renamed the Health Reformer, which became the Good Health magazine.

He married Ella Eaton of Alfred Center, New York, on February 22, 1879. While the couple was childless, they made a goal of providing funds for the education of deserving children, and would virtually raise about forty children in their fifty-room home before Ella died in 1920. Over the years the Kellogg’s would adopt seven of the children.

At ‘Sans’ Kellogg would advocate a health program consisting mainly of a gain-based vegetarian diet. He also advocated things that we hear about today: diet, exercise, fresh air, sunshine, good posture, and dress, along with hydrotherapy. He was an early holistic doctor – practicing a plan for wellness in a time when antibiotics were largely unheard of. He took an early stand against caffeine, meat, alcohol, and tobacco. Some of his ideas can be found in the forward to a booklet titled “The Simple Life In A Nutshell”:

“Biologic living means health, comfort, efficiency, long life.

It means good digestion, sound sleep, a clear head, a placid mind, content and joy to be alive.

Live out of doors. Do your work under the trees instead of behind doors and opaque walls. Dig in the garden, explore the woods and hills. Follow the brooks, watch the squirrels in their gambols and learn the songs of the birds.

Fix up a sleeping porch or balcony and so take an outing all night long and every night, and don't move inside when frost comes. Outdoor sleeping is the best life-preserver known.

And live on the "fat of the land." Forget breakfast foods and culinary delicacies. Abjure flesh pots and "sea food." Find your whole bill of fare in the garden,—peaches, apples, luscious grapes, plums and pears, lettuce, green corn, celery, greens, tomatoes, melons, nuts, and all the rest of the luxuries which Mother Earth supplies. Revel in salads and berries, and green stuffs untouched by fire. These dainty foods abound in vitamins, and vitamins are the real elixir of life discovered at last in this twentieth century.”

Concerning the importance of grains in a vegetarian diet, Kellogg wrote that natural "foods abound in vitamins, and vitamins are the real elixir of life discovered at last in this twentieth century."

Kellogg’s medical and philosophical background – as well as a timely accident - created the momentum for him and his brother, Will, to form the Sanitas Food Company in 1897. The invention of flaked grain-based cereal occurred through an accident. The two brothers had invented several foods made from grains. The grains were forced through rollers to make long sheets of dough. One day they were called away while cooking wheat and when they returned, the wheat seemed over cooked. However, they decided to put the wheat through the rollers anyway – and each wheat berry was flattened into a thin flake. They had discovered ‘flaked’ cereals.

The typical breakfast of the wealthy in the late 19th century was eggs and meat (while the poor had porridge, gruel, and other boiled grains), the Kellogg’s would advocate whole grain cereals as the major breakfast diet. They were not the first to produce a dry cereal – that honor goes to Dr. James Caleb Jackson who created the first dry breakfast cereal, which he called Granula, in 1863. But they did bring corn flakes and wheat flakes to the dry breakfast cereal market.

Unfortunately, older John Kellogg treated his less-educated and younger brother Will more as an employee than a partner. That, combined with Will wanting to add sugar to the corn flakes, led to a split between the two brothers. In 1906, Will started his own company, the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which eventually became the Kellogg Company, triggering a decades-long feud over the rights to cereal recipes. John then formed the Battle Creek Food Company to develop and market soy products.

Kellogg was also an inventor, receiving over thirty patents for his various inventions. These inventions included the electric blanket, the universal dynamometer (for testing the strength of muscles), and the electric light bath – as well as some improved medical instruments for the surgeons to use.

He also was a prodigious author, writing over fifty books concerning health advocacy, as well as numerous magazine articles. He also promoted what he believed in, becoming one of the primary founders in Battle Creek of the American Medical Missionary College and the Battle Creek College. He also organized a School of Home Economics and a School of Physical Education – carrying his beliefs into the classroom.

He continued his practice as a skilled surgeon into his seventies, and often operated with no fee on those who could not afford surgery. He warned that smoking caused cancer – decades before the link was discovered.

While he had been highly involved with the Seventh Day Adventist Church for 2/3rds of his life, the church would expel him in 1907 due to his divergent views on the Bible and his belief in pantheism, the belief that there is a divine presence in all living things. As the twentieth century got underway, he had split from his family, forsaken the use of the Kellogg name on cereal products, and split from his church.

With the coming of the Great Depression, the ‘Sans’ would fall on hard times, and go into receivership, and Kellogg’s Battle Creek Food Company would fall on hard times. Also, many of his more extreme ideas would be increasingly criticized by the public and the press.

Kellogg was on his deathbed when he tried to reconcile with his brother – even writing a letter admitting that he had been wrong in his earlier treatment of Will, and in fighting Will in court for the cereal rights. However, his secretary - entrusted to mail the letter - never did, and John Kellogg died without being reconciled with his brother.

After suffering through three days of pneumonia, John Harvey Kellogg died on December 14, 1943, at the age of 91. His wife, Ella, had passed away in 1920. They are buried at the Oak Hill Cemetery, Battle Creek, Michigan.

William Shurtleff would write perhaps the best overall description of John Harvey Kellogg:

"Kellogg was a dynamo of human energy, a personification of the work ethic, who needed only 4 to 5 hours of sleep a night, went cycling or jogging every morning, dictated 25 to 50 letters a day, adopted and reared 42 children, wrote nearly 50 books, edited a major magazine, performed more than 22,000 operations, gave virtually all of his money to charitable organizations, loved human service, generally accomplished the work of ten active people, and lived in good health to age 91."

WEB RESOURCES:

Faqs.org
Find A Grave
Natural Health Perspective
New York Times obituary
NNDB
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Woodcut print of John Kellogg, Wikipedia
Photo portrait of John Kellogg, Natural Health Perspective
1910 Corn Flakes Advertisement, Wikipedia
Picture of Kellogg in the early 20th century, NNDB
Kellogg family gravestone, Find A Grave picture by Scott Michaels
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February 22: Marguerite Clark, Film Fantasy Queen

2010-02-22T16:19:00.000-08:00

She had a beautiful, waiflike quality that came across well in the silent films of the early 20th century. She was a contemporary of actors and actresses still recognized today, such as Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Lillian Gish. Despite the competition, or perhaps because of it, she was voted America’s top female star in 1916, and again in 1920. Her film career would voluntarily end in 1921 when she married a Louisiana plantation owner.

Marguerite Clark was born on an Ohio farm on February 22, 1883, near Avondale in the southwest corner of Ohio. Not much is known about her childhood, early education, or parents, but it is known that she was sent to the Brown County Convent, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Cincinnati, when she was about twelve. Her father died when she was around eleven, leaving the family in financial difficulties. She would eventually be watched over, and later have her career managed, by her older sister, Cora.

She finished school when she was sixteen, already having decided to pursue a career in the theater. The 4’10”, 90 pound actress would quickly show herself to be a talented actress..

Clark could sing, dance, and act at a young age. She would start her stage career as a chorus girl in Baltimore in 1899, and within a year, when she was seventeen, she was discovered by DeWolf Hopper Sr. and taken to New York. Clark made her Broadway debut in The Belle of Bohemia. She would receive positive reviews for her work in Mr. Pickwick in 1903, The Wishing Ring and Baby Mine in 1910, and starred opposite of theater legend John Barrymore in the 1912 production The Affairs of Anatol.

Clark’s popularity led to into a new venue for her talent: she signed a contract in 1914 with the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, with whom she made all of her movies during the next seven years except for the last one – which she made with her own production company. Thirty-one was then, as it is now, relatively late in life to start a film career. However, Clark had a waif-like, little girl quality that made her look much younger than her actual age, and she would specialize in playing young girls and fantasy roles. Her film debut would be in a movie short titled Wildfire, and the reviews would claim that her debut was “the best screen performance to date.”

Edward S. O’Reilly interviewed Clark in 1918 for Photoplay magazine. He stated about her:

“My impression of Miss Clark, formed by viewing her pictures, was that she was a happy hearted little elf smiling her way through the sour old world. She is all of that and something more. She is a serious minded little person intent on doing her work well. Even the directors say that she is less trouble than anyone in the cast, and obeys orders like a little soldier.”

She would work on forty films during her seven-year movie career, starting with Wildfire, and ending with Scrambled Wives in 1921. She was ready to give up the hustle and bustle of movie life, and settle for the quiet and serenity of living in the country in Louisiana. Also, her ambition had been to end her career when she was at the top, which she achieved in 1920 when she was recognized as America’s top female star.

Clark met Harry Palmerson Williams during a War Bond Drive in 1917, and married him in 1918. She would take up residence in his home in Patterson, Louisiana. She divided her time between her Louisiana home and New York – where she made most of her movies. Clark did have a new rule to follow in her movies: her husband forbade her to kiss any of her leading men, a demand that she met willingly.

Harry Williams grew up in Louisiana, owned and managed a lumber yard (one of the largest in the world), plantation, and other interests there, and in the late 1920s entered the budding aviation industry, using his managerial skill and business know-how, combined with skilled aeronautical engineers, to develop a series of racing aircraft. Williams would eventually die in when an airplane he was piloting crashed in 1936.

Clark returned to New York after the death of her husband in 1936 to reunite with her sister Cora – who had been her manager during her stage and film career. She would be the model for the cartoon image of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney’s 1937 masterpiece. Disney had seen Clark in the 1916 silent film version of Snow White and, he later confessed, the film made a lasting impression on him. A brief film clip of that film is here.

She would die in New York on September 25, 1940, after a brief bout with pneumonia. Her ashes are buried with her husband’s in the Williams mausoleum at Metairie Cemetery, New Orleans.

Most of Marguerite Clark’s films have disappeared, yet the legend of the little girl in the fantasy films still continues.

WEB RESOURCES:

All Movie
Find A Grave
Golden Silents
Google books
IMDB
Interviews with Marguerite Clark
Louisiana State Museum
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Frontal view of Marguerite Clark, Louisiana State Archives
1916 Publicity Photo, Wikipedia
1919 Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch publicity photo, New York Public Library

Harry Williams, husband to Marguerite, Louisiana State Archives
Gravesite, FindAGrave photo by Rob Leverett
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February 9: Samuel J. Tilden, The Man Who Should Have Been President

2010-02-09T16:29:00.000-08:00

Controversial elections occur periodically in any democracy, but few have been as controversial as the election of 1876. The winner in popular votes, but the loser in electoral votes, was New York born Samuel Jones Tilden.

Tilden was born at New Lebanon, New York, on February 9, 1814 - a descendent of a family that could trace its roots back to the founding of the New England colonies.

His lineage included Nathaniel Tilden, one of the leaders of Plymouth colony and a founder of the town of Scituate, Massachusetts; as well as William Jones, a lieutenant-governor of New haven colony. His parents were Elam Tilden and Polly Youngblood Jones. His father, a farmer and a merchant in New Lebanon, was known for his judgment and practical common sense, and was a respected power in the New Lebanon area. Among those who visited the elder Tilden while young Samuel was growing to maturity were such noted personalities as Albert Gallatin, Martin Van Buren, and Edward Livingston.

Tilden’s interest in politics, economics, law, and civics came from his parents and the multitude of politically significant visitors. As early as 1832, when young Tilden was 18, he submitted a paper to his father analyzing the political conditions that existed in the 1832 election. He father was so impressed that he took his son to see the vice presidential candidate, Martin Van Buren, who was visiting Lebanon Springs. The article was later published and – though Van Buren vigorously denied authorship – was attributed to Van Buren. The two men – a political leader and a young man – became lifelong friends..

Tilden would attend Yale, and then transferred to the University of New York to study law. He graduated in 1837. He would be admitted to the bar in 1841, and would become one of the most noted and skilled corporate lawyers of the nation. Many of his clients would be from the fledgling railroad industry. It is said that over half of the railroad companies between the Hudson and Missouri Rivers were his clients at one time or another during the 1850’s – 1860s.

Tilden continued to maintain and broaden the interest in politics he had since his youth. A strong supporter of Martin Van Buren, he would later be classified as a Free Soil Democrat – one of the few free soil supporters who did not move into the new Republican party in the 1850s. While he supported the efforts of unity during the Civil War, he did not support all of the Lincoln Administrations various measures during that war.

Tilden’s political career really began as a result of his life-long interest in politics. In 1855 he was named as a nominee for state attorney general.

In 1866 Tilden was appointed the state chairman of the Democratic Party. There his reformist spirit took on the corrupt Tweed Ring. He entered the New York Assembly in 1872 under the reformist banner, and proceeded to impeach the judges that had been ‘bought’ by the Tweed Ring, and were busy protecting them from the law. He would gather much of the evidence that eventually broke up this notorious political group. In 1874 he was elected governor of New York, and took on the infamous Canal Ring – which had made its millions from illegal bribes concerning the maintenance, repair, and extension of the state’s extensive canal network.

The battle against corruption led Tilden to the high-water mark of his political career – the campaign for the Presidency against Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. This campaign – on the heels of the revelations of corruption that dogged the Ulysses S. Grant presidency – would result in one of the most famous election disputes in American History – only, perhaps, to be eclipsed by the 2000 Bush/Gore campaign.

Tilden received a small majority of the overall popular vote – however, American presidents are chosen through an electoral college system, where whichever party receives the most popular votes in a state receives all of that state’s electoral votes. As it turned out, the electoral votes in three of the newly ‘reconstructed’ southern states – Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina – as well as one electoral vote from Oregon were disputed. The U.S. Constitution did not address the issue, so Congress created an electoral commission made up of five U.S. Senators, five members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and five Supreme Court Justices. Seven of the commission were Republicans, seven were Democrats, and there was one Independent.

However, the Independent was appointed to be the U.S. Senator from Illinois, he was replaced by a Republican to take his spot on the commission. The commission would vote solely along party lines, and on March 2, 1877, just two days before the new president was to be sworn in, would give Hayes all of the disputed electoral votes – giving him a majority of one (185 to 184) and the presidency.

Tilden discouraged opposition from his party to the decision of the Electoral Commission. An offshoot of this was what became known as the Hayes-Tilden Compromise - or the compromise of 1877: Hayes became President, and the military occupation of the southern states was ended. The end of the military occupation of the south had been a major campaign issue for the Democrats during the election campaign.

Tilden, 63 years old when the disputed election was decided, retired from public office. He would die in 1884 in Yonkers, New York. He left three million dollars in a trust toward the establishment of a free public library in York City – a trust what would be combined with the Astor and Lenox Libraries and would eventually become the New York Public Library.

He is buried at Cemetery of the Evergreens, New Lebanon, New York.

WEB RESOURCES:

1911 Encyclopedia
Biographical Sketch, 1878
Find A Grave, Tilden
Harpers Weekly Cartoons 1876
Life of Samuel J. Tilden
NPS
NY Times Obituary
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Portrait of Samuel J. Tilden, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SamuelJTilden.png
1876 Campaign Poster, Library of Congress, rbpe 23702200
Members of the Electoral Commission, Harpers Weekly
The Inauguration, Harpers Weekly
Tilden Gravesite, Find-A-Grave
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January 14: Benedict Arnold, Hero Becomes Traitor

2010-01-18T06:04:00.000-08:00

He was a descendent from a distinguished family, a hero of the battle that is known as the ‘Turning Point of the American Revolution’; a man who lost a leg in battle in service to his country; yet a man who let jealously, pride, and greed turn him against the nation he served and into a notoriety that continues today.

Benedict Arnold was born on January 14, 1741, in Norwich, Connecticut. He was the second of six children born to Benedict Arnold III and Hannah Waterman King, and was named after his great-grandfather who was an early, three-time governor of Rhode Island, as well as his brother, who died in infancy. Only two of the Arnold children would survive to adulthood – Benedict and his sister Hannah.

Arnold had several character traits that would follow him throughout his life, hindering his opportunities for advancement and the recognition he desired. Arnold was enrolled in a private school when he was ten with the expectation that he would attend Yale. However, he wasn’t studious and persistent in his studies. A yellow fever epidemic struck a devastating blow to the Connecticut family in 1753 – taking the lives of three of Arnold’s siblings. Soon after that the family fortune began to decline, and by the time Arnold was fourteen there was no more money for a private education – or for Yale.

The outbreak of the French and Indian War when Arnold was fifteen proved to be a lure to the young man, but he was refused enlistment in the provincial militia when his mother would not give her permission. Undaunted, Arnold would enlist when he turned sixteen. His enlistment came when the militia was ready to march toward Albany, New York and Lake George to oppose a French invasion. After hearing about the French massacre of the British and colonial forces at Fort William Henry, the Connecticut militia turned around and marched home. Arnold’s enlistment lasted thirteen days. It became popular after the Revolution to write that Arnold would run away from home to join the militia and had deserted from his militia company.

Because of the financial situation of his family, Arnold was apprenticed to Daniel and Joshua Lathrop, cousins of his mother. They ran an apothecary and general merchandise store in Norwich, Connecticut, where Arnold spent seven years learning the principals of pharmacy and business.

In 1762, the Lanthrop brothers provided financial backing for the 21-year-old Arnold to start his own pharmacy business in New Haven, Connecticut. A year later he had repaid the money borrowed from the Lanthrops. By 1764 he had expanded his business interests through a partnership with Adam Babcock, and purchasing three trading ships in order to engage in the lucrative West Indies trade. Arnold would bring his sister Hannah to New Haven to help manage his apothecary shop while he was sailing on one of his ships. Often he would captain the ship, engaging in trade from the West Indies to Canada.

The British Sugar Act (1764) and Stamp Act (1765) limited the mercantile trade in the American colonies – and many voiced their opposition. Arnold would join the Sons of Liberty as well as engage in smuggling to avoid the customs agents and the taxes that he felt was stifling colonial enterprise and prosperity. His thoughts are perhaps best shown in a comment made after Arnold heard of the Boston Massacre: “good God; are the Americans all asleep and tamely giving up their liberties, or are they all turned philosophers, that they don’t take immediate vengeance on such miscreants.”

He also was concerned because he had a family to support. He married Margaret Mansfield, daughter of the sheriff of New Haven, in 1767. They would have three children prior to her early death in 1775 – while Arnold was at Fort Ticonderoga during the opening year of the Revolution.

Arnold would move swiftly up the military ladder – but not swiftly enough for him. He was elected as a captain in Connecticut’s militia in March 1775. He proposed an audacious attack on Fort Ticonderoga – which he knew to be lightly defended – and was promoted to Colonel. He arrived in time to participate in an attack on the Fort by Ethan Allen and his ‘Green Mountain Boys’. The fort fell, but Arnold – who had followed the procedures and the chain of command of the fledgling American military structure - felt that the full glory of the idea and the victory should have gone to him.

He was, however, given command of the American forces in the Lake Champlain area, and would use that region as a launching point for an American overland march on Quebec. Arnold had proposed the overland march, which took place during the winter of 1775. He was given the rank of Colonel in the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress, and in the end would be wounded, and be forced to lay siege of Quebec until relieved. The Continental Congress promoted him to Brigadier General for his efforts.

The American army was forced to retreat in 1776 when British reinforcements arrived in Canada. Arnold presided over the American rear-guard actions during the Continental Army’s retreat. He then directed the construction of an impromptu fleet to defend Lake Champlain, New York. The Americans were defeated after a grueling 7-hour battle, but had succeeded in slowing the British advance into New York. As a result of the October 1776 battle, Arnold was called the ‘Father of the American Navy’.

Arnold made a number of enemies in Congress and in the hierarchy of the Continental Army during these first years of the war. He began to feel slighted, not receiving the promotions or the leadership opportunities that he felt he deserved, and for not being given credit for his military ideas. While his accomplishments were notable, others often took credit away from him. He was even charged with stealing military supplies, and was on the verge of being arrested when General Horatio Gates stopped the arrest because he needed Arnold in the field. British General Burgoyne was marching south through New York in the spring of 1777.

Arnold would distinguish himself at Saratoga – and would also see his hopes of command in the American army dashed. On his own initiative he brought his reserve troops into the battle at just the right moment to save the Americans from defeat, and to give them a victory over the British, a victory that became the turning point of the war. He also lost the use of a leg to wounds incurred during the battle. Gates claimed the victory, Arnold was passed over for promotion and the glory he felt he deserved; and – ultimately – would be investigated by Congress for corruption.

While recovering he met and fell in love with Peggy Shippen, daughter of a prominent Loyalist. They married on April 8, 1779. One of her former suitors was British Major Andre – who would become involved with Arnold’s plan to turn West Point over to the British.

Arnold toyed with the idea of supporting the British in this war the colonists had started against the Crown. After some negotiations, he would be given command of West Point, a crucial defense point on the Hudson River. Ultimately, the plans to turn the fort over to the British were discovered – with the final proof being found with the capture of Arnold’s contact, Major Andre.

Arnold fled, would be given the position of Brigadier General by the British, and would lead several raids on colonial cities – briefly capturing Richmond, Virginia and attacking New London, Connecticut. He had a far-reaching goal – to destroy the economic basis of the rebels, driving them to submission or starvation.

As the war ended, Arnold and his family would move to England, then after the war to New Brunswick, Canada. There he reentered the business world and established a thriving trade route with the West Indies. However, his remaining years were bitter ones. Maligned by the Americans, distrusted by the British, he found that many military, political, and economic doors were not open to him.

Arnold died on June 14, 1801, after returning to England.

The name Benedict Arnold has become synonymous with the word traitor to Americans. He was immediately demonized by American writers as soon as his actions became know. All of the contributions to the revolution that he had made – and the injuries he had sistained in that revolution, both physical, economic, and mental, were quickly forgotten. Benjamin Franklin wrote that "Judas sold only one man, Arnold three millions", and that became a common theme through the rest of American history writings up to today.

WEB RESOURCES:

1911 Encyclopedia
Archiving Early America
Clements Library
Colonial Williamsburg
National Park Service
NNDB
Virtuology
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

A pen and ink portrait of Arnold, NNDB
Portrait of Arnold in military uniform, National Archives
1780 French map of West Point, Boston Public Library
Peggy Shippen, National Archives
Capture of Major Andre, Library of Congress
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Dec. 9: Br'er Rabbit and Joel Chandler Harris

2009-12-09T16:09:00.000-08:00

He was one of America’s earliest folklore authors, using the dialect and stories from the land he grew up on. His stories – while not widely circulated today – have characters who are still know and loved by Americans of all ages.

Joel Chandler Harris was born on December 9, 1848, at Eatonton – a small town that is the county seat of Putnam County, and is located near the middle of Georgia. His father was an itinerant Irish laborer who disappeared just before Harris was born. His mother – Mary Harris – was unwed, and could barely make a living as a seamstress to support herself and her son.

While his early education was spotty, Harris was an avid reader of American, English, and world literary works. Reportedly his favorite author and book while growing up was Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield.

Harris had to end his formal education at the age of thirteen so he could go to work in order to help the family finances. He was hired in March 1862 as an apprentice and typesetter, spending four years working for a weekly newspaper, The Countryman. The Countryman was published by Joseph Addison Turner at Turner’s Turnwold Plantation during the Civil War, and would issue its last publication in May 1866. The plantation was about nine miles north of Eatonton.

Harris would live on the Turnwold Plantation during this time, and several of the slaves who worked there would eventually became models for Uncle Remus, Aunt Tempy, and other characters of his Uncle Remus series of stories that he would start to write twenty years after he left the plantation. This work for Turner during his formative years influenced Harris by directing him to a long and successful career in the newspaper world.

Harris would work for a variety of newspapers – including the Macon Telegraph, the New Orleans Crescent Monthly, the Monroe Advertiser, and the Savannah Morning News – where he was an assistant editor when he married Esther LaRose in 1873. The Harris’s would have nine children, although three would die due to childhood illnesses.

In 1876 he took a position as assistant editor with the Atlanta Constitution, which would be his employer for the next quarter century. Harris had moved to Atlanta because of an epidemic of yellow fever in Savannah and was able to land the job with the Constitution. It was his time with the Atlanta Constitution that Harris introduced his Uncle Remus stories. In 1881 he would buy a Queen Anne Victorian style home in Atlanta – the Wren’s Nest – where he would live until his death in 1908. His great-great-great grandson works in the house today as it’s executive director.

The idea for the Uncle Remus stories have their roots in Harris’ formative years while he was growing up in the Antebellum South. Slavery was the norm in the South during this period of American history, and even after the Civil War the role of superiority for Southern whites and subservience for Southern African-Americans was the norm rather than the exception in the rural regions of the South.

Harris spent quite a bit of his time with the African-American slaves living and working the land of Turnwold Plantation and it is thought that Uncle Remus is patterned after one slave – Uncle Bob Capers – who told fantastic stories to entertain and delight his audience after a hard days work in the fields. Harris would preserve the stories – most of whom had their roots in Africa – as well as the dialect, thus becoming one of the first folklore authors in American history. The Uncle Remus stories were full of the wit and wisdom of the era that Harris had heard many years before. Harris stated that he began writing the stories of Uncle Remus to “preserve in permanent shape those curious mementoes of a period that will no doubt be sadly misrepresented by historians of the future." Some examples of wisdom from the Uncle Remus stories would include:

“Lazy fokes’s stummucks don’t git tired.”
From Plantation Proverbs
“Jay-bird don’t rob his own nes’.”
From Plantation Proverbs
“Licker talks mighty loud w’en it gits loose from de jug.”
From Plantation Proverbs
“Hungry rooster don’t cackle w’en he fine a wum.”
From Plantation Proverbs.
“Youk’n hide de fier, but w’at you gwine do wid de smoke?”
From Plantation Proverbs

In the books, Uncle Remus is a kindly old slave who is telling the stories to the children sitting around him. The story characters are animals, with the main character being Br’er (Brother) Rabbit, a likeable – though troublesome – trickster. Other major characters include Br'er Fox and Br'er Bear. The first Uncle Remus story, The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mrs Fox as Told by Uncle Remus, was published in the Atlanta Constitution on July 20, 1879. Eventually the Uncle Remus stories would be compiled into three Uncle Remus books - Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880); Nights with Uncle Remus (1883); and Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905). The books achieved immense popularity in the United States and abroad.

In 1946 Disney created an animated production called Song of the South based on Uncle Remus. Disney was quoted as saying "The first books I ever read were the Uncle Remus stories. Ever since then, these stories have been my special favorites. I've just been waiting until I could develop the proper medium to bring them to the screen."

Within a decade of its release the civil rights movement of the 1950s – 1960s matured, and the portrayal of the heavy dialect used in the movie that was so evident in the South during the 19th century was viewed as a racist stance that was portraying subservience of the African Americans of the 20th century.

While Harris is best known for his Uncle Remus stories, he did publish other works. He published six children’s books, short stories, and novels – most of which were based on plantation life or life in antebellum Georgia.

Harris died of acute nephritis and cirrhosis of the liver on July 3, 1908, in the Westview Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia.

WEB RESOURCES:

Documenting the American South
Find A Grave
National Park Service
New Georgia Encyclopedia
The Wren’s Nest
University of North Carolina
University of Virginia
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Portrait of Joel Chandler Harris, Wikipedia
Portrait of Joel Chandler Harris in 1873, Wikipedia
The Wren’s Nest, Inside Access
Uncle Remus from cover of 1881 Harris book, Wikipedia
Joel Chandler Harris standing, Find A Grave
Gravesite of Joel Chandler Harris, Find A Grave
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December 4: Lillian Russell, Master of the Comic Opera

2009-12-05T16:52:00.000-08:00

She was known as one of the most beautiful of American women, had a tremendous personality that ruled the stage she played on, and was a flamboyant master of the popular comic opera stage plays that played in theaters throughout the nation. She dominated the American theater in the late 19th century.

Helen Louise Leonard was the fifth daughter of newspaper publisher Charles E. Leonard and his wife Cynthia Rowland Leonard. Both parents would exert an extensive influence on their daughter – her father through his background in reading and understanding of news and events, and her mother through her feminist views. Helen was born on December 4, 1861, in Clinton, Iowa, but would move to and grow up in Chicago, Illinois, where the family moved in 1864.

She would be remembered to history not as Helen Louise Leonard, but as Lillian Russell.

Lillian would receive her education from the age of seven to fifteen the Convent of the Sacred Heart, and the Park Institute, both in Chicago. It was during these years that she learned to play the tambourine and to dance, showing a natural talent in the school plays that foretold of her stage career. While in school she studied music under Miss. Scheremburg and was an active participant in the school choir. Her first stage appearance was in December 1877, when she was a participant in an amateur production of Time Tries All at Chickering Hall in Chicago.

In 1879, Mrs. Leonard left her husband and moved to New York with the children.

In New York Lillian studied singing under a German émigré, composer, and orchestra conductor – Leopold Damrosch. Her dreams were to have an operatic career. In 1879 she joined the chorus of a Brooklyn theatrical company that was presenting the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera, HMS Pinafore. Two weeks after joining the troupe, she married the orchestra leader, Harry Braham. She had a baby boy by Braham, but he died in a tragic accident while still an infant.

The official transformation of Helen Leonard into Lillian Russell would take place on November 22, 1880, when she made her first appearance on Broadway at Tony Pastor’s Theater. She was billed as Lillian Russell, the English Ballad Singer, and would tour with Pastor’s company through the summer of 1881. Pastor paid her $40 a week and gave her the stage name Lillian Russell.

In June 1883, Lillian left her husband and went to England with composer Edward Solomon. Solomon, an English émigré who was the musical director of Pastor’s theater, would write Lillian into several of his compositions, including Billee Taylor, Polly, and Pocahontas. Lillian sailed with Solomon for England and a series of theatrical engagements. There two major personal events occurred: she became pregnant, giving birth to Lillian Dorothy on May 10, 1884; and the scandal of Lillian leaving her husband behind and living with Solomon “as his wife” reached the press – and turned theater managers against her. In 1885 they returned to the United States – and were informally boycotted by theater managers. Work finally appeared, and Lillian’s ability in comedic operettas and her singing voice carried the day. She began a comeback.

She worked hard to pacify the press and to keep scandals out of the press. When her husband won his divorce case, the newspapers were not informed for a week and a half – and by then Lillian had formally married Solomon. Soon, however, more scandal erupted. Lily Gray, a London actress, claimed that Solomon had married her in 1873 – and never divorced. Eventually, Lillian divorced Solomon. By the time she was twenty-five, Lillian had had two husbands, two children, and had performed on hundreds of stages in the United States and England.

By 1891 Lillian had overcome the earlier public disapproval of her life, and had made a comeback in the theater. She organized the Lillian Russell Opera Company, opening at the Garden Theater in New York. In 1894 she married a third time, to John Haly Augustin Chatterton – a tenor in her opera company. The separated in six months, and were divorced in 1898.

Lillian’s talent, singing voice, and stage success continued – and her popularity continue to rise as well. It was her voice that was first heard during the first long-distance telephone call on Alexander Graham Bell’s invention when she sang from New York, and was heard in Washington, D.C. and in Boston. The song was The Sabre Song.

In June 1912, Lillian – now fifty years old – married for the fourth and final time. Her husband was the publisher of the Pittsburgh Leader, Alexander P. Moore. That same year she made her last appearance on Broadway in a play titled Hokey Pokey. In 1915 she would appear in a motion picture with Lionel Barrymore which was titled Wildfire, and she would occasionally sing in vaudeville until 1919 when ill health made it necessary for her to stop.

Lillian would remain active – and in the public eye. She wrote newspaper columns, gave lectures, supported women’s suffrage, helped recruit for the Marines in World War I, and in 1921 was sent by President Warren G. Harding on a fact-finding tour of Europe to help formulate a new immigration policy in the United States. She came out in favor of restricting immigration and isolationism. Shortly after she submitted her report, she injured herself in a fall, and died ten days later – June 6, 1922 - of complications associated with the fall. She was interred in the Allegheny Cemetery, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Perhaps Lillian’s own words provide the best memorial of her life and tell why she strove to be successful in the theater:

“I only want to play the roles allotted to me in comic opera better than anyone else who ever sang them, or better than anyone who was in the line with me.”

WEB RESOURCES:

Find A Grave
Lillian Russell: A Biography of America’s Beauty

New York Times Obituary
University of Rochester
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Russell advertisement (color), Library of Congress, ncdeaa D0005-14
Russell in Costume, 1882, University of Rochester

Playbill, Library of Congress,
Russell in Costume, Library of Congress, ncdeaa D0040
Russell and husband, Alexander Moore, Library of Congress, ichicdn n074416
Russell at her desk, 1922, Library of Congress, ichicdn n074414

Dec. 1: Oliver Wolcott: Soldier Statesman

2009-12-01T01:37:00.000-08:00

His fore bearers had been leaders in their colony, and his children would continue that heritage. He was a man who provided political and military leadership during a time of international warfare and civil war. He risked his property and livelihood in politically backing American Independence while he risked his life in leading men in battle for that independence.

Oliver Wolcott was born on December 1, 1726, as the youngest son (and of fifteen children) of Roger and Sarah Wolcott. Wolcott’s father was a leading political figure in the colony of Connecticut, holding the post of governor from 1751 - 1754. The Wolcott family had been involved in the politics of New England since their arrival in 1630.

Young Wolcott attended Yale College, graduating at the top of his class at the age of twenty-one in 1747. He was appointed a captain in the Connecticut militia during King George’s War, and recruited a company to serve in the British expedition against the French in New France – an expedition that, as it turned out, was unsuccessful. His company then guarded against incursions into the northern parts of the British colonies.

After King George’s War ended in 1748, Wolcott returned home – to first study medicine with Dr. Alexander Wolcott - his brother. However, he never had the opportunity to practice medicine. He turned to the study of law when he was appointed the sheriff of newly created Litchfield county in 1751. Wolcott held the position of county sheriff for twenty years while simultaneously being a member of the lower house of the Connecticut colonial legislature in 1764, 1767-68, and 1770. He was a member of the upper house of the colonial and, later, state legislature from 1771 – 1786. He also held the job of both probate judge (1772 - 1781) and county judge (1774 - 1778).

In January 1759 Wolcott married Laura Collins, whose ancestors were among the first settlers of New England and Connecticut. The National Cyclopedia of American Biography stated that...

"She was a woman of almost masculine strength of mind, energetic and thrifty; and while Governor Wolcott was away from home, attended to the management of their farm, educated their younger children, and made it possible for her husband to devote his energies to his country."

Their marriage would last until her death in 1794, which was followed by his three years later. They had five children – three boys and two girls – though one of the boys died in infancy.

Wolcott found that having Laura as his wife freed him for his public interests. Yet he was compassionate enough to express concern for her. He would write to her from Philadelphia in 1776:

"MY DEAR--I feel much concerned for the Burden which necessarily devolves upon you. I hope you will make it as light as possible.... You may easily believe that the situation of publick Affairs is such that the critical Moment is near which will perhaps decide the Fate of the Country; and that the business of Congress is very interesting. Yet if any excuse can reasonably be allowed for my returning, I shall think myself justified in doing so. The circumstances of my affairs demand it."

Wolcott remained involved in the state militia, rising to the rank of colonel by 1774. It was, in part, because of this that the Connecticut legislature named him as a commissary for Connecticut troops and in 1775 the Continental Congress designated him as a commissioner of Indian affairs for the northern department. He worked with the Iroquois in New York to try and gain their neutrality in the escalating conflict with England. He also dealt with arbitrating land disputes between Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York and Vermont.

In 1775 Wolcott was sent as a representative of Connecticut to the Continental Congress. Wolcott, a strong supporter for independence, would be absent at both the voting for independence and the formal signing of the Declaration in August. However, he added his signature sometime after his return to Congress in October 1776.

Wolcott devoted part of each year to militia duty, being promoted to Brigadier General in the New York campaigns of 1776-1777, which culminated with the surrender of British general John Burgoyne at Saratoga to Continental general Horatio Gates. In 1779 Major General Wolcott defended the Connecticut seacoast against raids led by the Royal Governor of New York, William Tryon.

After the war was over, Wolcott remained active on the national and state level. He helped to negotiate the Second Treaty of Fort Stanwix, New York, in 1784. In that treaty the Iroquois ceded to the new United States some of the New York and Pennsylvania lands. He also negotiated a treaty where the Wyandottes gave up their lands in Ohio. On the state level Wolcott was elected annually as Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut from 1787 to 1796. In 1796 he was elected to the office of Governor. He would die prior to completing his term as governor.

He died on December 1, 1797 - his 71st birthday - and was buried in East Cemetery, Litchfield.

WEB RESOURCES:

Colonial Hall
Connecticut Magazine
Connecticut Society SAR
Find A Grave
National Park Service
Virtualology
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Portrait: Wikipedia
Portrait of Laura Collins Wolcott, by Ralph Earl

Portrait as Governor, Connecticut Sons of the Revolutionary War

Gravesite, Find A Grave, by Eric Landers
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November 26: Mary Edwards Walker and the Medal of Honor

2009-11-26T23:00:00.000-08:00

She was a controversial figure her entire adult life – often living up to her nickname of ‘Contrary Mary’. She was the second licensed woman doctor in the United States, graduating four and one half years after Elizabeth Blackwell achieved her degree.

Mary Edwards Walker was born on November 26, 1832, in Oswego, New York. Her parents were Alvah Walker and his wife Vesta, who owned a farm in the community. She was the youngest of the five Walker daughters, and had one younger brother. The Walker children - Mary, Aurora, Luna, Vesta, Cynthia and one son, Alvah Jr. – grew up in a household which held lively discussions on the issues of the day.

Because farming was labor-intensive, Walker worked in the fields, plowing, planting, and harvesting – along with the myriad of other farm duties that fell on the shoulders of a small farming family. All of the Walker girls wore men’s clothing – pants and shirt – while working in the fields of the thirty-three acre farm because their father felt that the traditional women’s dress was too restrictive and confining for work. Their father was a carpenter as well as a farmer, and was involved in many of the reform movements that sprung up in the nation during the 1830s. He also became a self-taught country doctor in a frontier region that had few doctors. He was an abolitionist as that movement was established – his farm was a ‘station’ on the underground railroad - as well as a supporter of education and equality for his daughters. He wanted all of his children to have a profession to support themselves with.

Walker attended the local elementary school that her father built and where her mother was the teacher. She also attended Falley Seminary in Fulton, New York – where she received additional instruction in grammar, mathematics, philosophy, and hygiene. After graduation in 1852 she entered the work force as a teacher in the village of Minetto, New York.

However, Walker had developed a desire for an unusual career for a mid-19th century American woman. After watching and assisting her father as he ‘doctored’ injured farmers and farm hands, she decided that she wanted to become a trained doctor.

In December 1853, Walker enrolled in the Syracuse Medical College – an institution that was the first medical college in the U.S. to equally accept men and women as students. She spent three thirteen-week semesters involved in medical training, paying $55 for each semester. She graduated – the only woman in her class and the second licensed woman doctor in the United States - in June 1853.

She married a fellow medical student, Albert Miller in 1856. Miller was a free thinker in the mode of Walker’s father. They married in Oswego with Walker wearing trousers, a frock coat, and cutting any reference from the ceremony of the bride’s obligations to obey her spouse. She rejected the idea that a woman was mandated to have a man’s protection. As she later said: “You are not our protectors. If you were, who would there be to protect us from?” She begrudgingly changed her name – to Dr. Mary Miller-Walker. As she commented:

“A woman’s name is as dear to her as a man’s is to him, and custom ought, and will prevail, where each will keep their own names when they marry, and allow the children at a certain age to decide which name they will prefer.”

They set up a joint practice in Rome, New York, but the practice was not overly successful. Women physicians were not generally trusted or respected in the mid-nineteenth century. By March 1861, Walker found out that her husband was an adulterer, and had separated from him. The final divorce would be granted five years later.

When the American Civil War broke out, Walker went to Washington, D.C. to join the army as a surgeon and medical officer for the Union forces. Her request was denied, so she volunteered her services, being accepted as an acting assistant surgeon at the hospital set up at the U.S. Patent Office. The hospital was nicknamed the Indiana Hospital because of the number of patients there who were from Indiana. At one point, her superior, Dr. J.N. Green, recommended that she receive a commission in the Army as a doctor, but it was never granted.

Her duties were varied: serving in the operating room, accompanying badly wounded soldiers home, and, when she saw the need, organizing the Women’s Relief Association which provided temporary lodging for the mothers, wives, and children of soldiers who were in Washington.

By 1862 she had gained a second medical degree (from Hygeia Therapeutic College in New York), and November found her with the Union Army of the Potomac, serving as a civilian surgeon at the battle of Fredericksburg.

By September 1863 she had been appointed as the assistant surgeon in the 52nd Ohio Infantry, Army of the Cumberland, by General George Thomas – an appointment which was protested by the other (male) doctors in the army. She designed and wore a modified officers uniform, and always carried two pistols. Besides serving the Union forces, Walker also often went into Confederate territory to help civilians – leading some to think that she was also acting as a spy.

On one of her excursions into Confederate territory Walker was captured by the Confederates and imprisoned at Castle Thunder, near Richmond, Virginia. While there she was able talk the Confederates into providing more wheat and cabbage into the rations for the prisoners. Taken prisoner in April 1864, she was exchanged in August 1864, returning to the 52nd Ohio as a surgeon.

On October 5, 1864, Walker was commissioned as an acting assistant surgeon, becoming the first female commissioned surgeon in the Army. She would be discharged on June 15, 1865.

Walker became the only woman to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor when, upon the recommendation of both Generals William Sherman and George Thomas, President Andrew Johnson signed the bill authorizing the medal. The citation read in part:

“Whereas it appears from official reports that Dr. Mary E. Walker, a graduate of medicine, "has rendered valuable service to the Government, and her efforts have been earnest and untiring in a variety of ways," and that she was assigned to duty and served as an assistant surgeon in charge of female prisoners at Louisville, Ky., upon the recommendation of Major-Generals Sherman and Thomas, and faithfully served as contract surgeon in the service of the United States, and has devoted herself with much patriotic zeal to the sick and wounded soldiers, both in the field and hospitals, to the detriment of her own health, and has also endured hardships as a prisoner of war four months in a Southern prison while acting as contract surgeon; and Whereas by reason of her not being a commissioned officer in the military service, a brevet or honorary rank cannot, under existing laws, be conferred upon her; and
Whereas in the opinion of the President an honorable recognition of her services and sufferings should be made:
It is ordered, That a testimonial thereof shall be hereby made and given to the said Dr. Mary E. Walker, and that the usual medal of honor for meritorious services be given her.”

Even the giving of the medal would be a controversy in Walker’s life. In 1917 Congress revised the standards for receiving the medal to be based on “actual combat with an enemy”, taking away the medals from 911 individuals. Walker refused to give back her medal, wearing it until she died two years later. After a long battle by her great-grandniece Ann Walker, President Jimmy Carter restored the medal in 1977.

Walker continued her medical practice after the war. She also travelled as a lecturer and wrote several books dealing with women’s rights and women’s dress. Concerning women’s suffrage, she stated: “You imprison women for crimes you have forbidden women to legislate upon.”

After her father died in 1880 Walker moved back to her girlhood home, the farm in Oswego. She lived there until she died in 1919 at the age of 86, and was buried in trousers and a topcoat in the Rural Cemetery, Oswego County, New York.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

Walker, Dale L., Mary Edwards Walker: Above and Beyond
Doherty, Karen, Congressional Medal of Honor Recipients

WEB RESOURCES:

About North Georgia
Above and Beyond
American Association of University Women
American Civil War
Find A Grave
Medal of Honor Citations
National Library of Medicine
Oswego Library
Wikipedia
Women in History

PHOTO SOURCES:

Walker Portrait of Mary Walker: Wikipedia
Walker Bloomer Dress of 1860s: National Library of Medicine
Walker Portrait of Mary Walker sitting: Library of Congress
Walker Picture of Mary Walker standing: National Library of Medicine
Gravesite of Mary Edwards Walker: Find A Grave

Nov. 23: Edward Rutledge, Youngest Man to Sign the Declaration of Independence

2009-11-23T05:28:00.000-08:00

He was the youngest man to sign the U.S. Declaration of Independence in 1776, and would wind up in a British prison as a result. A political conservative, he was able to postpone the first vote on independence before reversing himself and joining a month later in voting for independence.

Edward Rutledge was born on November 23, 1749, to Dr. John Rutledge, an Irish immigrant and physician, and Sarah Hext Rutledge, who was “lady of respectable family, and large fortune.” The Rutledge family lived near Charleston, South Carolina, and Edward was the fifth son, and the youngest of seven children. He would never know his father, who died on December 25, 1750.

Not much is known about Rutledge’s youth. With his father deceased, when young Rutledge was old enough for an education, he was placed under the care of David Smith who instructed him in language, reading, and mathematics. Rutledge soon desired to enter the same profession as his older brother, John – that of lawyer.

Like many of the wealthy in South Carolina – including fellow Declaration of Independence signers Middleton, Lynch, and Heyward – Rutledge was sent to England in 1769 as a young man to study law. He would study law at Temple, be admitted to the English bar, and returned to Charleston in 1773 where he set up a legal practice.

With the ever-increasing agitation over British taxation and reduction of colonial rights, Charleston in 1773 was becoming concerned about losing its inherent English liberties and right of self-government. It was during this time – Rutledge’s first year after returning to Charleston from England - that Rutledge won acclaim and became a popular local hero by winning the release of a newspaper publisher named Thomas Powell. Powell had been imprisoned by the Crown for printing an article critical of the upper house of the South Carolina colonial legislature – a house that was dominated during this tumultuous time by Loyalists to the Crown.

In 1774 the Whigs of South Carolina named Rutledge as one of their five delegates to the First Continental Congress. Rutledge (who was only 25 at the time) would serve his first congressional term along side of his older brother, John, and his father-in-law, Henry Middleton. Rutledge did not make a significant impression when he first arrived at the Congress. Rutledge was was nearly bald despite his age and "inclining toward corpulency" as he entered public life. As John Adams (who wasn’t overly fond of South Carolinians in the first place) wrote:

"Young Ned Rutledge is a perfect Bob-o-Lincoln—a swallow, a sparrow, a peacock; excessively vain, excessively weak, and excessively variable and unsteady; jejeune, inane, and puerile."

However, as he served his associates took more and more notice of his abilities, clear thinking, and logical judgment. By June 1776 Rutledge had become one of the more influential members of the Congress. Rutledge was in favor of colonial rights, but at first was not in favor of independence, and many think that he was responsible for delaying the vote on Richard Henry Lee’s proposal for independence on June 7, 1776. However, when he realized that the resolution for independence would carry and that unaminity was needed if independence was to succeed, he led the South Carolina delegation in voting for independence, becoming the youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence.

In September Rutledge would accompany John Adams and Benjamin Franklin on a peace mission to Staten Island, where they were to negotiate with the British Admiral, Lord Richard Howe. Lord Richard Howe, and is brother General William Howe, were trying to resolve the differences between the colonies and the Mother country. However, the peace mission failed, and two months later – in November 1776 – Rutledge would leave Congress to return to Charleston and his law practice.

In 1778 Rutledge would accept a seat in the State legislature. The next year he was reelected to the Continental Congress, but his military duties prevented his attending. In February 1779, as a captain of artillery in the South Carolina militia, he took part in the defeat of the British at Port Royal Island (South Carolina). The following year found him in Charleston, a city besieged by the British. The siege lasted from April 1 to May 12, 1780, and resulted in the capture of over 5,000 colonial troops – and three of the signers of the Declaration of Independence: Arthur Middleton, Thomas Heyward, Jr., and Edward Rutledge.

Rutledge was imprisoned by the British at St. Augustine, Florida. He was exchanged in July, 1781, when he returned to Charleston. Returning to his law practice, he was reelected to the State legislature from 1782 to 1798. Being conservative in nature he joined the Federalist Party.

His private life flourished, and he became wealthy through his law practice and investments. In 1792 his wife of 18 years – Henrietta - died, and he remarried. He had married Henrietta Middleton (sister to fellow Declaration of Independence signer Arthur Middleton) on March 1, 1774, and the couple had three children. His second wife was Mary Shubrick Eveleigh, who was the widow of Nicholas Eveleigh, comptroller of the treasury of the United States during Washington's administration.

In 1798 Rutledge was chosen a governor of South Carolina. However, due to poor health, he died before the end of his term. Rutledge died on January 23, 1800. He was buried in St. Philip’s Church Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:
There are no biographies of Edward Rutledge available at our local library.

WEB RESOURCES:

Colonial Hall
Find A Grave
Focus on the Founding Fathers
Forgotten Founders
John and Edward Rutledge
National Park Service
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Portrait of Edward Rutledge

Rutledge House
Burial Site photo by Janet Greentree
Signature, Founding Father Quotes

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August 10: Jay Cooke, Financier of the Civil War

2009-08-09T13:45:00.000-07:00

His early work career involved one failure after another, yet he persevered and became known as the financier of the American Civil War – and later the collapse of his company would cause the Panic of 1873.

Jay Cooke was born on August 10, 1821, in the then-frontier town of Sandusky, located in North-Central Ohio on the coast of Lake Erie. Eleutheros Cooke, his father, was a pioneer Ohio lawyer as well as a representing Ohio in Congress from 1831-1833 as a member of the Whig Party. He also was one of the early railroad investors, and was a real estate speculator. The new child was named after John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

It seemed as though Cooke was predestined for the world of business and finance. His early school experience was at the local schools in Sandusky, and at the age of fourteen he became a clerk in a local store. A year later he moved to take a position in a wholesale business in St. Louis, Missouri. The following year he lost his job due to the Panic of 1837 and would return to Ohio – settling in

At the age of fourteen, Cooke became a clerk in a local store. When he was fifteen, he moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and took a position in a wholesale business. He lost his job the following year due to the Panic of 1837 when he was sixteen, and returned to Ohio, where he settled in Bloomingville, just outside of Sandusky.

Cooke decided that his future lay in the East, and he moved to Philadelphia Pennsylvania in 1838. He began working with a packet company, becoming involved with shipping and receiving goods on steamboats. The company failed with the year, and Cook became a bookkeeper in a local hotel. In 1839, the E.W. Clark & Company – which was a brokerage and banking company (and one of the largest private banking firms in the nation) – hired Cooke. He found his niche, quickly advancing through the ranks of the company and becoming a partner by 1842. The company was a successful one, providing financing for the newest boom in transportation – the railroads – as well as arranging to loan the federal government money to finance the Mexican War. By the time Cooke was thirty he was also a partner in Calrk & Company’s New York and St. Louis branches.

The Panic of 1857 would cause Clark & Company to suffer, but Cook – through a finely developed business acumen and wise management of his investments - emerged from that Panic a wealthy man. He retired from the firm in 1858, and would spend his time reorganizing abandoned railways and canals in Pennsylvania, putting them back in operation.

The Civil War was beginning to brew when the private banking house of Jay Cooke & Company opened in Philadelphia on January 1, 1861. It quickly established itself as an economic force to be reckoned with when it quickly floated a war loan of three million dollars for the state of Pennsylvania. The nations leaders, facing what they knew would become a costly civil war, quickly approached Cooke. Union Secretary of State Salmon P. Chase met with Cook in the early months of the war to discuss loans. Cooke quickly arranged loans from the leading bankers in the Northern states, and his own firm was extremely successful in distributing Union Treasury notes. Cooke was rewarded for his efforts by being engaged as a special agent for the sale of $500,000,000 of “five-twenty” government bonds that were authorized for sale in February 1862.

Cooke was so successful at arranging the sale of these bonds – which had not done well before Cooke came on the scene – that he actually sold eleven million dollars more than he was authorized. The Congress quickly sanctioned the sales. Thanks to Cooke’s efforts on this and other loan drives, Union soldiers were supplied and paid regularly.

As the Civil War moved toward its conclusion, Cooke became interested in the development of the American Northwest. In 1870 Cooke & Company financed the construction of the Northern Pacific Railway, hoping to create a transportation route that would bring the raw materials and produce from the West to Duluth, Minnesota – then shipped through the Great Lakes to markets in Europe. Unfortunately, the project was not as successful as Cooke had hoped. Competition with the Union Pacific drove shipping rates down so far that the railroads lost money. Since many investors – including Cooke - speculated on railroad stocks, the market lost faith in railroads. When Cook & Company closed its doors on September 18, 1873, it started the Panic of 1873.

The man who had financed the Union in the Civil War soon found his company foundering. The company did collapse, but thanks to investments in a silver mine in Utah, Cooke was able to pay off all of his creditors and regain his wealth by 1880.

Cooke died at the age of 83 on February 8, 1905, and is buried in the St. Paul's Episcopal Church Cemetery, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.

Cooke was noted for his piety and as an Episcopalian regularly gave a tenth of his income for religious and charitable purposes. He overcame difficulties throughout his life, including bankruptcy, in order to become one of the noted financiers of the day.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

Our local library has no biography on Jay Cooke

WEB RESOURCES:

1911 Encyclopedia
Biography from Answers
Find A Grave
Ohio History Central
Ohio State University
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

01. Portrait, Tax History Museum
02. Portrait as a young man, Ohio State University, Cooke Collection
03. Portrait of Jay Cooke, Ohio State University, Cooke Collection
04. Cooke tomb, Find A Grave by Thomas Fisher
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August 3: Ernie Pyle, The Consummate War Correspondent

2009-08-04T17:35:00.000-07:00

"ALGERIA, JANUARY, 1943: Men who bring our convoys from America, some of whom have just recently arrived, tell me the people at home don't have a correct impression of things over here."

Ernie Pyle looked at his job as a war correspondent during World War II as one in which he told the unflinching truth, not based on political agendas or political correctness, and

As a result, Pyle was one of the most respected journalists of his era, beloved by the men – the common soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines – that he worked with because he wrote their stories, their lives, their truth, and he shared their dangers.

He had that rarity among men – the ability to look at where he was emotionally and professionally, and where he needed to be. He wrote September 11, 1943 in an article titled “Fed Up and Bogged Down”:

“Perhaps you who read this column wonder why I came home just at this special time, when events are boiling over in Italy.

Well, I might as well tell you truthfully. I knew, of course, that the Italian invasion was coming up, but I chose to skip it. I made that decision because I realized, in the middle of Sicily, that I had been too close to the war for too long.

I was fed up, and bogged down. Of course you say other people are too, and they keep going on. But if your job is to write about the war, you’re very apt to begin writing unconscious distortions and unwarranted pessimisms when you get too tired.”

Ernie Pyle – always called Ernest by he parents – was born on August 3, 1900, on a tenant farm near Dana, Indiana. He was the only child of William and Maria Taylor Pyle. A shy youth, he worked his way through school more or less as a loner, sitting alone during recess in elementary school, and seeking the quiet and solitude of long walks in high school and during his college years.

He was not an exceptional student, nor a motivated one. He got by grade-wise, with no real ambitions. He took journalism at Indiana State University not because he had a real, sincere desire to become a journalist, but because it was an easy grade.

Pyle would quit Indiana University the semester prior to graduation in order to accept a job at the LaPorte, Indiana newspaper. He worked there three months, then moved to Washington, D.C. to accept the job of reporter, then managing editor, of the Washington Daily News. He survived, desk-bound, for three years. He married Geraldine Siebolds in 1925, then quit his job in 1926 so he could see America with his new wife and Ford roadster.

After travelling more than 9,000 miles, Pyle went to work at the Evening Herald in New York for a year, and then returned to the Daily News. In 1928 Pyle became the nation’s first aviation columnist at a time when aviation was beginning to boom. It was during his stint as an aviation columnist that Pyle honed his story-telling ability that would provide the format for his columns during World War II.

In 1932 Pyle became the managing editor of the Daily News, but would leave the paper in 1935, hired away by the opportunity to write a national travel column for the Scripps-Howard syndicate. It was the era of the Great Depression in America, and Pyle travelled America to write nationally syndicated columns about the places he visited and the people he met. The column was very popular, and would continue until 1942.

Pyle began to achieve national fame during a trip to war-ravaged London in 1940 – a trip exercising his writing ability and setting the course for the rest of his life. His stories of the bombing of London gave Americans a glimpse of the war that they had not recognized before. Using word pictures, Pyle painted a portrait that struck at the heart of America while reporting on one of the biggest Nazi raids on London of the war:

"It was a night when London was ringed with fire…"

Returning to London as a war correspondent during the summer of 1942, Pyle would start the process that made him man loved by those who came in contact with him. He seldom took notes – with the exception of names and addresses – instead preferring to take the images he saw and the stories that came with those images, store them in his mind, then leave the front lines to write his story. He was treated as an autonomous reporter by his bosses, who allowed him the latitude that he needed to get the story.

Pyle had the gift of using his feelings and emotions to accurately, humanely, and compassionately interpret the scene for the soldiers. He wrote about the common solder, never portraying war as glamorous – but portraying it truthfully, digging beneath the surface of the men he met to find out why they did what they did, and risked what they risked, day-after-day.

And he was able to share those findings with the American public, and the public took pride in the men that he wrote about. Pyle wrote about privates, ambulance drivers, front line infantry, Captains and Generals – but not about the politics of war. He won a Pulitzer Prize with his column on the honor that the men serving under Captain Waskow paid to him when his lifeless body was brought down from a mountain in Italy – a column showing the death that occurred in war, but also the comradeship that often goes beyond the understanding of those who have not experienced it.

Pyle served in North Africa, the invasion of Sicily and later Anzio, and in Normandy. He returned back to the United States briefly in late 1944, tired and dispirited. He had written in one column:

“When you get to Anzio you waste no time getting off the boat, for you have been feeling pretty much like a clay pigeon in a shooting gallery. But after a few hours in Anzio you wish you were back on the boat, for you could hardly describe being ashore as any haven of peacefulness.”

He didn’t want to go back to the world of combat, but he felt he had to – to do otherwise would, in his mind, be unpatriotic to the country he loved. After a brief respite he went to the Pacific to write the story of the invasion of Okinawa.

He landed on Okinawa with the Marines and Army units, landing on a portion of the beach where there was practically no Japanese resistance. A few days later he went to a small island near Okinawa called Ie Shima. It had been captured by the Americans, but there were still pockets of resistance on the island.

On April 18, 1945, Pyle was riding in a jeep with the commander of the 77th Infantry Division when the vehicle came under fire by a Japanese machine gun. Everyone hit the dirt by the side of the road, and when Pyle raised his head to check on the others he was hit in the head by a bulled, dying instantly.

He was buried at first on Ie Shima, and then reinterred in 1949 at the Punchbowl Cemetery in Honolulu.

America had lost a unique man. Pyle’s columns, compiled into books such as Here Is Your War and Brave Men, bring the story of the 'Greatest Generation' to those today who know virtually nothing of the men who fought - and died - in World War II - if they will read it. It is my privilege to have early editions of both of these books as a treasured possession.

Click here to read a collection of stories by Ernie Pyle from Indiana University, and click here to view YouTube Tribute to Ernie Pyle.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

Ernie Pyle, Here Is Your War
James Tobin, Ernie Pyle: America’s Eyewitness to World War II

WEB RESOURCES:

Article by Pyle in Stars and Stripes
Ernie Pyle
Indiana School of Journalism
Indiana School of Journalism: Biography
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
NBC
New York Times Obituary
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

Ernie Pyle, Find A Grave, by T. Houston
Pyle's Corona typewriter

Pyle at Anzio http://journalism.indiana.edu/archive/news/041505pyle/
With Marines on the way to Okinawa
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July 24: Alexander Jackson Davis, The Artist Architect

2009-07-24T11:44:00.000-07:00

“I have designed the most buildings of any living American architect.”

Alexander Jackson Davis was born in New York City on July 24, 1803, to Cornelius and Julia Jackson Davis. His father was not wealthy, but did support his family though his work as a bookseller and as a publisher of religious tracts. His father was frequently away from home, travelling through the northeastern states to sell his tracts and to arrange the sale of books.

While the family home was based in Newark, New Jersey during Davis’s early years, his family would move to upstate New York, where he would attend elementary school in the rapidly growing towns of Auburn and Utica. In 1818, when he was almost fifteen years old, he would move to Alexandria, Virginia, where he was apprenticed to learn the printing trade at his half-brother’s printing office. However, young Davis was bored by the repetitious work involved in the printing process, so he spent much of his time reading romantic novels and acting in the amateur theater productions in the area. Perhaps it was here that he developed the romantic ideal that became the vision of much of his future work.

When his apprenticeship was completed in 1823, the twenty-year-old Davis moved to New York City to seek his fortune and work. He studied there at the American Academy of Fine Arts, the New-York Drawing Association, and the Antique School of the National Academy of Design. During this time he met, worked with, and was befriended by men like John Trumbull, Samuel Morse, and Rembrandt Peale, who were among some of the most important artists of the day. Peale and Trumbull directed Davis’s life passion when they advised Davis to concentrate on architecture and architectural illustrations.

Davis, a talented and skilled artist, focused on learning the skills of an architectural illustrator – and would have many of his works printed by some of the prominent publishers of the era. In 1826 he had another career-advancing focus presented to him. He began working as a draftsman for the architectural firm of Martin E. Thompson, and Ithiel Town. There he met some key figures in his life, such as Josiah R. Brady, a New York architect and an early advocate of a style of architecture titled Greek Revival, and Ithiel Town – an innovative architectural design leader in the Greek Revival style of architecture, whose extensive library on architecture was rivaled by none, and was at the disposal of Davis. The firm provided a well-grounded, friendly atmosphere that provided a huge impetus for the growth of Davis in his chosen profession.

It is hard to deny the effect that Davis’ talent and passion as an architectural illustrator weighed significantly on his career as an architect. His chief interest and strength was in design, and – being a highly talented watercolorist, he did almost all of his own drafting and drawings.

In 1829 Davis joined in partnership with Town, a partnership that would last until 1835, when Davis would form his own architectural firm. The partnership designed many of the ‘Greek Revival’ buildings of the era, including the Executive Department offices and the Patent Building in the nation’s capital – as well as the Custom House in New York City. Davis also designed (or was consulted in the design) of a number of state capitols – such a the Indiana State House in Indianapolis, the Illinois State Capitol, the Ohio Statehouse, and the North Carolina State Capitol. While none of the state capitols were built exactly as Davis planned and advised, his influence can still be seen in their design.

The partnership with Town ended in 1835. Davis had developed his vision of design to a become the cutting edge of architecture design in the country. Under Town’s tutelage, Davis had developed a sound knowledge of the theory and structure behind architectural design. Because he approached architectural design first through a pictorial method rather than structural, he referred to his preferences with the phrase “I am but an architectural composer.” A master of the Greek Revival form of architecture, Davis is perhaps better known for his Gothic Revival, Italianate, and other ‘picturesque’ styles that were used in building residential villas.

Using his strength in design, he began to move the development of residential villas from its cubist appearance into buildings that reflected and resided in their physical surroundings. Davis was a pioneer in the American design of merging buildings to their surroundings. He became the leading architect of country houses in a variety of styles for the wealthy merchants and industrialists, many of whom were in New York. He also was in demand in North Carolina, working for the state government, especially in helping to design buildings for universities. He also did extensive design work for the Virginia Military Institute – which the final construction of was not completed until after his death.

The Civil War brought a halt to non-essential building in America, and Davis fell on economic hard times. To top it off, after the war was over the architectural tastes of the country changed – embracing the High Victorian Gothic and Second Empire styles. Davis refused to work in either style, and was commissioned to design only a few buildings. He continued to design large projects – but they were never built. He retired to New Jersey in the 1870s.

Marriage came late in Davis’ life. On July 14, 1853 he married Margaret Beale, and would have two children – Flora and Joseph.

Davis died on January 14, 1892 at the age of eighty-eight, and would be buried at the Bloomfield Cemetery, Bloomfield, New Jersey.

After his death much of his work was collected and would be shared between four New York institutions, including the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His contributions, which are largely unknown today, shaped American architectural design for a generation.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

No biographies of Alexander Jackson Davis are available at our local library.

WEB RESOURCES:

Blandwood
Find A Grave
Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History
Newburgh Restoration
Virginia Military Institute
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

01. Portrait of Davis: Preservation Greensboro
02. The State Capitol at Raleigh, North Carolina: Preservation Greensboro
03. 1845 Sketch of Davis: Newburgh Preservation Association
04. New York Customs House, now Federal Hall: Wikipedia
05. Lyndhurst in New York: Wikipedia
06. Virginia Military Institute: Wikipedia
07. Gravesite, Find A Grave by Nikita Barlow
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July 22: Daniel Carroll – Established the District of Columbia

2009-07-21T17:19:00.001-07:00

He was a prominent member of one of America’s great colonial families – a family that included his younger brother - the first Catholic bishop in the United States – as well as a cousin who signed the the Declaration of Independence. The family also included a variety of barristers, merchants, planters, and political leaders. The guiding light of his extended family was their ancient family motto: “Strong in Faith and War”.

Daniel Carroll was born in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, on July 22, 1730 at his family home – Darnall’s Chance. His parents Daniel and Eleanor Darnall Carroll were wealthy planters who owned 27 000 acres of land in the colony of Maryland.

Carroll’s early education would be both at home, and through the Jesuit school at Bohemia Manor, Maryland. As was typical of wealthy planters in colonial America, he went overseas for his advanced education, studying under the Jesuits at the College of St. Omer in Flanders, from 1742 – 1748.

After his education ended, Carroll – again in the tradition of wealthy colonial families – toured Europe. After returning home, he married Eleanor Carroll, first cousin of Charles Carroll of Carrollton – who in turn was a cousin of Daniel Carroll. From 1750 until 1776, Carroll lived the life of a gentleman planter, remaining out of the public eye.

However, just because he was out of the public eye did not mean that Carroll was immune from the thoughts of rebellion and independence from England that increased in America after 1763. He was a large landholder, and was concerned over economic repercussions, the threat of mob rule, and the type of government that might be installed. However, as the clock ticked inexplicable toward revolution, Carroll found himself siding with the Patriots – albet reluctantly at first.

However, he could not politically act on his thoughts, as the laws of Maryland forbid Catholics from holding political office. After that law was nullified by the Maryland Consitution in 1776, Carroll felt the pull of his family’s heritage and public duty. He was elected to the upper house of the Maryland legislature, serving there from 1777 – 1781, and then in 1781 he was elected to the Continental Congress. As he travelled to Philadelphia to join the Congress he carried with him Maryland’s consent to sign the Articles of Confederation. That same year he would sign that document. Carroll would serve in the Congress from 1781 – 1784.

As he saw the problems arising from the confederation of states formed by the Articles of Confederation, Carroll became convinced that a stronger central government was needed. He spoke out on several weaknesses of the Articles, and would be a member of the Constitutional Convention. At the convention he would join James Madison in stating the need for the central government to regulate interstate and international commerce; as well as the need for the central government to pay members of Congress, not the states. When some members of the Convention suggested that the President should be elected by Congress, Carroll moved that the words “by the legislature” be replaced with “by the people”.

While Carroll arrived late to the Convention due to illness – arriving on July 9, 1787 - he would attend the remaining sessions regularly. He spoke about twenty times during the various debates that took place, and served on the Committee on Postponed matters.

Carroll would be one of two Catholics to sign the Constitution – showing the advances that religious freedom was making in America during this revolutionary era. He would also be one of five men to sign both the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution.

After the Convention ended, Carroll returned to Maryland to actively campaign for ratification of the document. While he was not a delegate to the state convention that accepted the new constitution, Carroll’s voice had been heard.

In 1789 Carroll was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. During his term he voted for locating the national capitol on the banks of the Potomac River, as well as for Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton’s program for the national government’s assumption of state debts from the Revolution.

In 1791, President Washington named Carroll as one of the three commissioners who were to survey and define the borders of the District of Columbia. Four farms would be deeded to the national government to make up the District of Columbia, and part of Carroll’s farm would become the land that the Capitol was built on. Carroll would also serve on the first Board of Commissioners for the District of Columbia.

Ill health would force Carroll to resign this post in 1795, and the next year he would pass away at his home. He was buried at St. John’s Catholic Cemetery, Rock Creek (now Forest Glen), Maryland.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

There are no biographies of Daniel Carroll at our local library.

WEB RESOURCES:

Archontology
Jamison’s of South Carolina
Catholic Encyclopedia
Laughter Genealogy
National Archives
National Park Service
Soldier-Statesmen of the Constitution
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

01. Portrait of Daniel Carroll. Drawing: Oil (ca. 1758) by John Wollaston, Maryland Historical Society, copyright by John Hopkins University
02. Portrait of Eleanor Carroll and Daniel III, by John Wollaston, Maryland Historical Society, copyright by John Hopkins University
03. A map showing tracts of land deeded for the District of Columbia, United States Capitol Historic Society
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July 15: Clement Moore’s “Trifle” That Became A Masterpiece

2009-07-14T16:48:00.000-07:00

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse…”

With these words an obscure scholar from penned a work for his children that became a classic piece of literature read to children generation after generation.

Clement Clarke Moore was born on July 15, 1779, the only son of Benjamin and Charity Clarke Moore. The Moore family was a family of wealth and education. His father was a professor, then president, of Columbia College as well as an Episcopal bishop in New York City and the rector of Trinity Church.

Moore was home schooled during his early years, with his father tutoring him and both of his parents encouraging his natural tendency toward languages and music. Later he would attend Columbia College, and would graduate first in his class in 1798. At Columbia he would earn a BA and in 1801 a M.A.

He was thirty-four when he married nineteen-year-old Catharine Elizabeth Taylor in 1813, settling at Chelsea, in a country estate in Manhattan. They would have 9 children. Catharine would pass away in 1830 and leaving Moore with seven children between the ages of three and fifteen. Moore would not remarry, and would be solely responsible for his children’s upbringing and education.

The Moore family owned extensive land in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Moore’s gift of sixty acres of land in 1819 made possible the establishment of the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1819. In 1821 Moore was made a professor at the Seminary, a position he would hold until 1850. While at the Seminary he taught Oriental languages, biblical learning, and the interpretation of scripture. Ten years before his helping to establish the Seminary, he would compile a two-volume Hebrew dictionary in 1809 to assist in the translation and understanding of the Old Testament titled “A Compendious Lexicon of the Hebrew Language”. Volume I contained "an explanation of every word which occurs in the Psalms"; while volume 2 was "a lexicon and grammar of the whole language." The Preface offers a mode of study which will enable "any person acquainted with the general principles of language, without the aid of a teacher, to read and understand the Holy Scriptures in the original Hebrew."

Moore is also considered as the savior of Greenwich Village in New York. When the state government was planning to extend a grid of streets into the Village, Moore anonymously authored a sixty-page pamphlet that contained such persuasive arguments against the plan that the street network never entered the Village, preserving its unique culture and atmosphere.

In 1822 Moore penned a story as a Christmas gift for his children. “A Visit From Saint Nicholas”, which later became recognized and popularly known from its first line “Twas The Night Before Christmas”, was intended for his family, and might never had been shared with the world if not for one of Moore’s relatives, a Miss Butler, who copied the poem and who would take the copy to the Troy Sentinel. There it would be published anonymously in the Sentinel on December 23, 1823, with Moore accepting credit of authorship in 1837. He did not want the poem published because he felt, as an academician, that the poem was a mere trifle, and it was beneath his professional dignity to have it published. Yet, the poem when published anonymously a year later, it was an overnight sensation. The Troy Sentinel would hint that Moore was the author in 1829. Moore would reluctantly include his poem in a book of poetry that he wrote in 1844.

An anecdote on the origin of the poem goes as follows:

“On Christmas Eve 1822, Reverend Clement Moore’s wife was roasting turkeys for distribution to the poor of the local parish, a yearly tradition discovered that she was short one turkey, she asked Moore to venture into the snowy streets to obtain another. He called for his sleigh and coachman, and drove “downtown” to Jefferson Market, which is now the Bowery section of New York City, to buy the needed turkey. Moore composed the poem while riding in his sleigh; his ears obviously full of the jingle of sleigh bells. He returned with the turkey and the new Christmas poem. After dinner that evening, Moore read the new verses to his family, to the evident delight of his children.”

As often happens, claims arose that Moore was not the author of the famous poem. In 2000 – nearly 180 years after the fact, Vassar professor Don Foster published a book claiming that “The Night Before Christmas” was actually written by a different New Yorker, Major Henry Livingston Jr. For details you can read the article here and arrive at your own conclusion. Despite the rise of other claimants, scholars in general still attribute the poem to Moore.

Moore would pass away at his summer residence in Newport, Rhode Island, on July 10, 1863 – just five days before his eighty-fourth birthday. He was buried at the Trinity Church Cemetery, Manhattan. Oddly enough, as much as he regarded his poem as a trifle, it is his poem that he is remembered – not for his academic works.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

There are no Clement Moore biographies at our local library.

WEB RESOURCES:

Jewish Virtual Library
New York Institute for Special Education
The Night Before Christmas
Urban Legends
Virtualogy
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

01. Handwritten copy of Twas the Night
02. Portrait of a young Moore
03. Portrait, Wikipedia

04. Cover by Mary Clement Ogden, Moore’s daughter
05. Gravestone, Find-a-Grave by Erik Lander

July 13: The Wizard of the Saddle: Nathan Bedford Forrest

2009-07-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

"War means fighting and fighting means killing." -Nathan Bedford Forrest

He was the eldest of eleven children born to Chapel Hill, Tennessee, who – upon the death of his father – became the head of the family when he was sixteen years old. He would become a businessman, a planter, and a feared Confederate Civil War general.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was born in a rough-hewn frontier cabin on July 13, 1821 to William and Mariam Beck Forrest. When Forrest was thirteen, his parents moved the family to the edge of the settled frontier in northern Mississippi. His father established a farm there, clearing the forests and plowing the virgin land. Then, three years later in 1837, died – leaving sixteen year old Nathan as the head of the family, consisting of his widowed mother, seven brothers and three sisters. Mariam would eventually remarry around 1840 to Joseph Luxton.

Forrest and his older brothers continued to clear the land and plant crops. Gradually they raised corn, wheat, and cotton – and began to raise cattle. The farm became successful, and profitable. Because of the frontier conditions while growing up, and then his role as head of the family, Forrest found that he was limited to about six months of formal education.

When he was twenty, Forest went into business with his uncle, Jonathan Forrest, in Hernando, Mississippi. Forrest’s natural fighting instincts and ability came to the forefront when his uncle was about to be attacked in 1845 during an argument with the four Matlock brothers. Forrest interceded before the attack began, but one of the brothers drew a pistol and shot Forrest’s uncle, mortally wounding him. The other brothers turned their pistols toward Forrest, wounded him, and he returned fire with a double-barreled pistol, killing two of them, then wounded two others with a bowie knife thrown to him by a bystander.

That same year Forrest married Mary Montgomery – a sophisticated and intelligent woman who became his most ardent supporter and a buffer between her husband and the social set that made up Southern plantation society.

Forrest proved to be an astute businessman, settling in Memphis and increasing his wealth and property through investments, speculation, and managing his varied business interests. By the time the Civil War broke out his activities in buying/selling of slaves, speculation in land, horse trading, and more had provided him with two plantations, a hundred slaves to work them, standing as one of the richest men in the South, and the potential of living life as a country gentleman.

When the Civil War broke out and Tennessee seceded from the Union, Forrest – even though he was exempt from military service because of his standing as a planter - enlisted as a private in Company E, Tennessee Mounted Rifles, led by Captain Josiah White. His natural leadership, imposing physical appearance, and natural grasp of cavalry tactics soon led Governor Isham G. Harris to authorize Forrest to raise a regiment of mounted troops – even though Forrest had no formal military training. He would write in 1865: “I ain’t no graduate of West Point & never rubbed my backside up against any college.”

By December 1861, Forrest had recruited and equipped his new command, largely at his own expense. His unit differed from many other Southern cavalry outfits at the start of the war in that each member was outfitted with two Colt repeating revolvers, greatly enhancing their firepower and reducing the need to reload in combat.

Forrest initiated many other changes as well. He became one of the first to truly grasp the concept of mobile warfare. He would his cavalry into dismounted infantry – embodying the strategic concept, so aptly expressed by Forrest, of “getting there first with the most”. He also didn’t hesitate to brazenly bluff his opponents, sometimes capturing a Union position where the Union forces actually outnumbered his own. Finally, close, hand-to-hand fighting became a hallmark of Forrest’s cavalry, as did strategic raids far behind enemy lines.

Forrest’s audacity was shown early in the war when Union General U.S. Grant surrounded Fort Donelson in western Tennessee. The commander of the fort wanted to surrender, but gave his men the option of trying to escape. Forrest was the highest-ranking officer to lead troops out of the trap – both his cavalry and infantry – saving these men to continue the battle for the Confederacy.

Forrest was wounded on April 8, 1862, as his troops formed a rear guard covering the Confederate retreat after the battle of Shiloh. He recovered, and was wounded again June 14, 1863 – this time by a disgruntled subordinate, Andrew W. Gould, whom Forrest mortally wounded with his penknife.

By July 1862 Forrest had been promoted to Brigadier General. He had success as an independent commander, but did not fare as well when under the command of others. He would suffer a major defeat at Dover, Tennessee while under the orders of CSA General Joseph Wheeler. Appointed to his own command, he continued raids and actions against the Union, until placed under the command of Braxton Bragg for the battle of Chickamauga. Again not getting along under the command of a superior, Forrest requested and was granted a command in western Tennessee. There he bedeviled Union forces to the point where Union Commander William Tecumseh Sherman was said to exclaim in a letter to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton: "I will order them to make up a force and go out and follow Forrest to the death, if it cost 10,000 lives and breaks the Treasury. There never will be peace in Tennessee till Forrest is dead."

As word of the surrender of General Lee slowly filtered west, the question on the minds of the Union commanders was: What would Forrest do? To the surprise of many, he agreed to the surrender, bid an emotional farewell to his men, and went back to Memphis. His war, which he had fought in so valiantly, and led so brilliantly, was over.

Forrest was involved in two great controversies: one during the war, the other after. The first was the Fort Pillow Massacre on April 12, 1864. After a day-long intense battle – in which Forrest had three horses shot out from under him – Confederate forces forced the Union defenders, consisting of the 2nd U.S. Colored Light Artillery and the 6th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery and the white 13th Tennessee Cavalry, to retreat. The accusations of massacre were trumpeted by the Northern press, while the Confederacy stated that there was continued resistance. The full truth may never be known. Forrest did deny a massacre in public speeches for the rest of his life.

The second was his involvement with the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK rose after the war in a bid by disenfranchised southerners initially for protection, and ultimately to retain some element of control over their former slaves. Forrest was actually named Grand Wizard at the 1867 KKK convention in Nashville. But Forrest publically separated himself from the organization. Forrest publically stated several times a desire for equality and harmony between black and white Americans.

After leaving the army Forrest attempted to recoup his pre-war fortune. He became president of a railroad (which ultimately failed), and would live with his wife in a log cabin. His health began to deteriorate and he would pass away when he was fifty-six years old, on October 29, 1877. For a special A Tribute To Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest posted on YouTube, click here.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

Our local library has the following resources on Nathan Bedford Forrest

-Bradley, Michael R., Nathan Bedford Forrest's Escort and Staff
-Davison, Eddy W., Nathan Bedford Forrest : In Search of the Enigma
-Henry, Robert Selph, "First with the most" Forrest
-Hurst, Jack, Men of Fire : Grant, Forrest, and the Campaign that Decided the Civil WarWyeth,
-John A. (John Allan), That devil Forrest: life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest

WEB RESOURCES:

Ancestry
Google Books: Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest
New York Times Obituary
Tennessee Encyclopedia
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

F 01. Forrest Civil War portrait, Wikipedia
F 02. Forrest’s Signature, Google Books
F 03. Gravesite, Find A Grave photo by Selk
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July 10: Jack "Legs" Diamond

2009-07-09T12:21:00.000-07:00

Do you know who this is?
-He would survive four attempts on his life.
-He was pardoned for desertion from the Army by President Harding.
-He was nicknamed ‘Legs’ and ‘Gentleman Jim’.

He was a criminal – a kidnapper, bootlegger, numbers man, and much more – but he caught the public eye and fancy during the decade known as the Roaring Twenties. He would survive four attempts on his life in six years, and finally succumb to an attack in a rooming house in Albany, New York. While a popular figure to the public because of his flashy style and charismatic manner, he was an anathema his underworld brethren because of his self-centered acts – that included double-crossing and robbing them!

He was born on July 10, 1897 to John and Sara Diamond, Irish immigrants who settled in Philadelphia after their arrival in the United States in 1891. They would have their two children – Jack and Eddie - in Philadelphia. Both of the boys would struggle in school, and after their mother died in 1913 the father packed up the family and moved to Brooklyn, New York.

Lack of supervision allowed the boys to run wild, with their eventually joining a local gang called the “Hudson Dusters”. While his brother was more physically capable of surviving fights and feuds, Diamond’s specialty was creativity.

Jack “Legs” Diamond was seventeen when he had his first arrest was for the burglary of a jewelry store he broke into on February 4, 1914. Diamond would be in and out of jails for arrests until his death in 1931. He even served in the US Army during World War I, but would be convicted and jailed for desertion and theft from Fort Dix, New Jersey. After the war was over President Warren G. Harding released him under a blanket parole that was issued for more than two dozen Federal prisoners.

No one knew where “Legs” received his nickname. Perhaps it was because of his long legs – and his ability to use them to run from pursuing police officers. Or it may have been because of his ability on the dance floor of the nightclubs he loved to frequent. Or it might have been the nickname given to him by one of his gangland bosses. But, Legs was one of several nicknames Diamond had, including “Gentleman Jim”.

New York beckoned after Diamond was released from the ‘pen’, and soon Diamond found himself again involved in the ‘easy money’ criminal world that flourished during Prohibition. He worked with Lucky Luciano before Luciano hit the big-time, and in 1922 went to work for Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein. Diamond also worked for “Little Augie” Jacob Orgen, a New York gangster involved in bootlegging and labor racketeering. He began to form his own gang and began hijacking the trucks of other mobsters that were transporting illegal alcohol – a side-line that caused the first ‘hit’ to be ordered against him, almost ending his life.

Orgen had to fight to keep and expand his territory – and wealth and prestige. Diamond was hired as a bodyguard by Orgen, and then later spearheaded bootlegging activities that supplied many of the speakeasies in New York with illegal alcohol. However, there was a gangland struggle over the labor racketeering, and in 1927 Diamond was hospitalized during a drive-by shooting while walking with the target of the assassination – Little Augie. Little Augie died, Diamond was shot twice.

After recovering, Diamond went to work for Louis Buchalter – the man who had ordered the assassination of Little Augie. Diamond supervised bootlegging supplies to Manhattan speakeasies and night clubs. This job brought him into a running battle with his nemesis, Dutch Schultz. Schultz wanted to expand his criminal base of operations - and Diamond was one of those in his way. Diamond was shot on two separate occasions by Schultz’s men – once at a private dinner, where he was hit five times, and another when machine gun fire erupted at the Aratoga Inn, killing two bystanders and wounding Diamond three times. Through this series of attempts on his life, Diamond became known as the ‘clay pigeon of the underworld’.

Schultz actually wondered aloud at one point if there wasn’t anyone who could kill Diamond.

There was – and it occurred in the pre-dawn hours of December 18, 1931, in a room in Albany, New York, rooming house. Diamond had toured Europe after being shot in 1929, and while there his gang was forced out of New York by other gangs. When he returned, he decided to set up headquarters in Albany – a decision that was not appreciated by the city officials or police.

Diamond’s death hit the news racks through newsboy’s hawking “Extra, Extra” on the street corners.

Under a Albany Times Union newspaper banner headline that read "JACK DIAMOND SLAIN IN DOVE ST. HOUSE; KILLERS' WEAPON FOUND", a byline credited to H.L. Wood stated:

"Jack 'Legs' Diamond, survivor of a dozen skirmishes with the law and the lawless alike, today went from a clandestine tryst with Marion 'Kiki' Roberts, his showgirl sweetheart, to a tryst with death in an Albany rooming house.

"Unknown assassins, stalking down their prey with cool deliberation, pumped a stream of leaden pellets into the racketeer's head as he lay asleep in a small room at 67 Dove St.

"Death was instantaneous as the bullets furrowed the brain that had been set at rest a few hours earlier when a Rensselaer county Supreme court jury acquitted Diamond of a charge of kidnapping James Duncan, a Cairo youth."

The killers shot Diamond three times in the head while he was asleep. The killers were never identified, and could have been from rival gangs or the Albany police. He was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery, Queens, New York.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

There are no biographies available on 'Legs' Diamond at our local library

WEB RESOURCES:

Find A Grave
Gangster City Profiles
Kiki’s Love
La Cosa Nostra
Mobster’s Murder
Murder Inc. blog
Paddy Whacked

Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

D 01. Full Length Photo from 1931, Find-A-Grave by Ron Moody.
D 02. Mug Shot from the NYPD, Wikipedia
D 03. During Court appearance, Musicals
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July 7: “Nothing between my soul and my Savior…”

2009-07-06T15:08:00.000-07:00

Do you know who this is?
-He was a founding father of American Gospel music
-He was known as the ‘people’s pastor’.
-He was largely self-educated.

Raised with slaves in Worchester County in the pre-Civil War border state of Maryland, considered free because his parents were a slave father and free mother, he would become the self-educated minister of a 10,000 member multi-racial Methodist Church – in an era where most churches were segregated based on race.

Charles Albert Tindley was born on the Joseph Brindell farm near Berlin, Maryland, on July 7, 1851 to Charles and Hester Miller Tindley. When he was less than five years old his mother died, and he would be raised by his sister. Because economic conditions were poor for the African Americans in the mid-19th Century, Tindley was ‘hired out’ as a young boy by his father, receiving pay for working in the fields alongside slaves – providing young Tindley with the experiences of working on a slave plantation, and his family with a much needed income.

As a youth Tindley would be denied the opportunity for an education. First: he was in the field helping his family during the day. Secondly, although he was considered ‘free born’, schools in his area were for white students – so he taught himself how to read and write.

When he was about seventeen, Tindley married Daisy Henry. He would move to Philadelphia with his family in order to better support them. Working during the day as a janitor and attending school at night, he strove to achieve the American ideal. He once commented “I made a rule to learn at least one new thing—a thing I did not know the day before—each day.”

Tindley had varied educational experiences. He put himself through night school. He earned a Divinity Degree through a correspondence course. He never graduated from a college or seminary. In his seeking the source of truth from the Bible, he studied Greek at the Boston School of Theology. In order to better understand the Old Testament, Tindley studied Hebrew through a synagogue in Philadelphia. He would ultimately be awarded two honorary doctorate degrees: one from North Carolina, the other from Maryland.

He was employed as a janitor from 1880 to 1885 at the Bainbridge Street Methodist Church in Philadelphia. The same church granted him a license to preach – and he would be assigned there as its pastor in 1902 after pasturing in Delaware and New Jersey. The church had 130 African American members when Tindley was appointed as its pastor, and the congregation would reach 10,000 members under his guidance – and would be a multiracial congregation that included African Americans, Europeans, Jews and Hispanics. He led his church in ministering to Philadelphia’s poor – by establishing soup kitchens and a clothing ministry - as well as advocating civil rights in the early 20th century. As a tribute to the accomplishments of the man who led the church for over thirty years, Bainbridge was renamed Tindley Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1920s - over the objections of Tindley.

Tindley was preached powerful messages, and – although technically musically illiterate - began writing hymns that reflected his background – music that later became known as gospel music, which was based on feelings engendered by a history of oppression. He would dictate the words and tunes to a transcriber who would write down the formal musical notes and words. Eventually he would write over forty-five hymns, and while he apparently did not intend for his music to be sung congregationally, some of his hymns wound up in the Methodist hymnal and are sung around the world today. Perhaps one of the most famous of his hymns is “Stand By Me”.

When the storms of life are raging, stand by me;
When the world is tossing me, like a ship upon the sea,
Thou who rulest wind and water, stand by me.

Other well-known hymns by Tindley include “We’ll Understand Better, By and By”, “Lord, I’ve Tried”, and “I Shall Overcome”. Many believe that the words and intent of “I Shall Overcome” was the basis of the anthem for the Civil Rights movement, “We Shall Overcome”.

While many of his sermons are lost, the messages found in his songs remain. These messages are based on his past, and the events occurring in his life, ringing true to us today – over seventy years after the death of their author.

From “We’ll Understand Better, By and By”:
We are often destitute of the things that life demands,
Want of food and want of shelter, thirsty hills and barren lands;
We are trusting in the Lord, and according to God's Word,
We will understand it better by and by.

Or “Nothing Between”, written in 1906 when the church was negotiating to buy a new site for its growing congregation.

Nothing between my soul and my Savior,
naught of this world’s delusive dream;
I have renounced all sinful pleasure;
Jesus is mine, there’s nothing between.
Nothing between my soul and my Savior,
so that his blessed face may be seen;
nothing preventing the least of his favor;
keep the way clear! Let nothing between.

Tindley would pass away on July 26, 1933, from a gangrene infection in his foot. He was 82 years old. It was at the deepest point of the Great Depression when Tindley was buried in Eden Memorial Cemetery in Collingdale, Pennsylvania, and the congregation could not afford a marker for his grave. The situation was rectified in 2002 when 3000 members of his church met in a memorial to Tindley that met, provided a headstone, and remembered Dr. Tindley.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

There are no biographies of Charles Tindley in our local library.

WEB RESOURCES:

Christian History Timeline
Cyber Hymnal
Lower Shore
Preparing for Eternity
Taylor House Museum
Thinkquest
United Methodist Portal
Wikipedia
World Wide Faith News

PHOTO SOURCES:

T 01. Charles Tindley portrait, Find a Grave, by Curtis Jackson
T 02. Charles A. Tindley, Cyberhymnal
T 03. I Shall Overcome songsheet, Thinkquest
T 04. Tindley Memorial, Find a Grave, by Curtis Jackson
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July 3: “I hope I can beat the men.”

2009-07-04T07:21:00.000-07:00

Do you know who this is?
-She was known as ‘the modern Nellie Bly’.
-She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
-Her death is shrouded in mystery.

Dorothy Mae Kilgallen was born on July 3, 1913 to Hearst newspaperman James Lawrence Kilgallen and Mae Ahern Kilgallen. The family moved often during her childhood years – moving from Chicago to Wyoming, then to Indiana, then back to Chicago. They finally settled in New York City, where Kilgallen would spend one semester at the College of New Rochelle. After that semester she would leave college to follow in her father’s footsteps by accepting a job as a reporter for the New York Journal-American.

Twenty-three year old Kilgallen would skyrocket in notoriety and readers in 1936 when she would compete with to other (male) New York reporters in a race around the world. The trip was to be completed by using means of transportation what was available to the general public – no special charters or use of government transportation. The reasons for the race were threefold: to break existing around-the-world travel records; to become some of the first travelers to use the China Clipper to cross the Pacific Ocean; and to increase the circulation of their respective newspapers at home. Kilgallen attracted quite a bit of attention, as she was the only woman in the ‘race’.

Before leaving she said, “I'm off to race around the world - a race against time and two men. I know I can beat time. I hope I can beat the men.”

The New York Evening Journal printed her reports on her journey daily and, through the headlines, became known as the ‘modern day Nellie Bly’. She traveled via the Hindenburg from New York to Germany, and then used different airlines to fly to Rome, Hong Kong, and Manila. At Manila she booked a flight on the Pan Am China Clipper to Hawaii, then San Francisco, finally catching a commercial flight back to New York. She completed the trip in twenty-four days, placing second to Bud Elkins of the New York World Telegram (who took twenty-one days) and beating Leo Keiran of the New York Times. She became the first woman to fly around the world. Later that year she published an autobiographical book titled Girl Around the World chronicling the event, moved to Hollywood, and the following year wrote a screenplay for the movie Fly Away Baby. The movie would star Glenda Farrell as a character which was inspired by Kilgallen’s travels called Torchy Blane.

Kilgallen gave up her film-writing career in 1937 returned to New York to work for the New York Journal-American where she was given her own column, the Hollywood Scene. The next year She would start a new column titled The Voice of Broadway, and would write it for the next twenty-seven years, until her death in 1965. The Voice of Broadway focused on the news and gossip of the New York show business industry, but it also included articles on politics and organized crime. The column appeared in 24 other newspapers by 1941, and eventually the column was syndicated to 146 newspapers through the King Features Syndicate. She had an estimated twenty-million readers by 1950, and was being recognized as one of the most important columnists in America. Her columns were an unusual mixture. As Midwest Today article by Sara Jordan stated:

“The Kilgallen approach was a mixture of catty gossip ("A world-famous movie idol, plastered, commanded a pretty girl to get into his limousine, take off all her clothes"), odd tidbits of inconsequential information ("The Duke of Windsor eats caviar with a spoon"), and dark warnings ("Anti-American factions are planning to blow up the Panama Canal").”

Kilgallen was married in 1940 to actor Dick Kollmar – who played Boston Blackie in a popular radio crime show. The couple would have three children – two of which can be seen in this snippet from an episode of What’s My Line.

In 1945 the couple started Breakfast with Dorothy and Dick, a morning live radio show broadcast that would be on the air until 1963. The program discussed plays, books, films – the various social activities that were available to New Yorkers.

Kilgallen was invited to become a panelist on a television game show originating in New York called What’s My Line?, airing from 1950 – 1967. She would remain on the show from 1950 until her death in 1965. While the show was designed for entertainment – with a priority on getting a laugh and providing entertainment for the audience – Kilgallen’s main interest was very competitive: guessing the right answers, and the name of the mystery guest - even if it was her own father. While she was popular on-air, she often was in conflict with her co-panelists because of her competitive nature, her using information overheard in the dressing rooms in her gossip column, and her being a ‘Hearst girl’. Arlene Francis was soon brought on the show as a regular panelist to counter-balance Kilgallen.

During the 1950’s Kilgallen continued to publish her columns and perform in her radio and television shows. She extended the scope of her articles by attending the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953, as well as covering criminal trials. It was her investigative reporting that got Sam Shepard a new trial. Shepard’s case was later the basis for “The Fugitive”, a popular television series and movie. Her articles during this time were the basis of her nomination for a Pulitzer Prize.

She was also the only reporter to privately interview Jack Ruby, who was in jail accused of murdering the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963: Lee Harvey Oswald. Kilgallen had been impressed with President Kennedy, and used her investigative talents to start to raise some hard questions, especially about the thoroughness of the Warren Report. She interviewed witnesses to the shooting that the Warren Commission – headed by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren – had neglected to interview. Much of what she discovered remained unpublished – her claim was that she was gathering the information for a book.

After she had obtained a copy of Ruby’s testimony to the Warren Commission and shocked the public with her revelations of the inept questioning of Ruby by Warren, Kilgallen found the FBI on her doorstep. An FBI memo reported that when asked to reveal the name of the individual who leaked the 102 page transcript of Ruby’s testimony to her, "she stated that she was the only person who knew the identity of the source and that she 'would die' rather than reveal his identity."

America loves conspiracy theories, and Kilgallen’s death – connected to her investigation of Kennedy’s assassination – provided a wonderful one. Kilgallen was found dead in her apartment on November 8, 1965. While the official verdict was suicide, many believed that it was murder – the fact that her notes on the Ruby interview were never found and other inconsistencies in her death keeping the conspiracy theory alive over forty years later.

Kilgallen died as she lived – making the news.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

Our local library has no biographies available on Dorothy Kilgallen.

WEB RESOURCES:

Bambooweb
Find A Grave
Midwest Today
Smithsonian
Spartacus
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

01. Portrait, FanPix
02. China Clipper: Flying Clippers
03. American Airlines
04. Masked Dorothy
05. Typewriter
06. Gravestone: Find A Grave, picture by Elliot

June 30: “When there is no hope tell the man so.”

2009-06-29T14:30:00.000-07:00

Do you know who this is?
-He was the 19th Vice President of the United States.
-While he was involved in state and national politics for thirty years, he was virtually unknown outside of his home district.
-He resigned from a House Committee in order not to be tempted by bribery.

Like many of our Vice Presidents – the ‘forgotten men’ of American political history who’s sole job, as described by a wit, was to ask every morning “Is the President alive?” – there is not a huge amount of online information available on William Almon Wheeler, 19th Vice President of the United States. Yet Wheeler – like Gerald Ford in the 1970s – was a crucial element in restoring confidence in the government after a series of national scandals shook the nation.

He was born in Malone – Franklin County – in northeastern New York, on June 30, 1819. His father, Almon Wheeler, was an attorney and postmaster of Malone, who died when Wheeler was only eight years old, leaving his mother in debt. His mother, Eliza Wheeler, took in boarders from Franklin Academy to support her two children. Because of his father’s early death, Wheeler would be concerned over his health during his entire life.

Wheeler himself would attend Franklin Academy in Malone, and as a teenager would study at the University of Vermont for two years (1833-1835), but was forced to leave the college before graduation because of the an eye ailment. Subsequently, he returned to Malone and began to study law under Asa Hascall as well as to teach school. He also met and married Mary King. In 1845 he was admitted to the bar. He also became politically active, receiving the positions of town clerk, school commissioner and school inspector. He succeeded his mentor, Hascall, as the United States district attorney of Franklin County, New York from 1846-1849.

A serious throat infection caused Wheeler to abandon his legal practice in 1851. While he would serve in the political arenas of New York and Washington D.C., he would also hold positions in private industry. Wheeler would be an officer of a bank in his hometown of Malone from 1851 until 1866 as well as a President of the Northern Railroad in New York.

His political sympathies at the start of his political career – like Abraham Lincoln’s – lay with the Whig Party. Under their political banner he was elected to the New York state assembly in 1849, serving 1850-1851. In 1856 he moved into the newly formed Republican Party, remaining a Republican until his death. He was elected as a Republican to the New York State Senate, 1858-1860 - where he was the President pro Tempore from 1858-1859. He was elected as a Republican to the thirty-seventh Congress, March 4, 1861 to March 3, 1863 – where he was as the opening shots of the Civil War were fired. He only served one term, then returned to his railroad and banking interests.

He would return to politics in 1867, first as the president of the New York constitutional convention, then returned to the US House of Representatives in 1869 where he served continuously until 1877.

While in Congress Wheeler was involved with several important committees. He was chairman of the Committee on Pacific Railroads – with a special interest in the railroad lines stretching across the nation to bind east and west together. He was also a member of the Southern Affairs Committee, which dealt largely with the prostate South after the Civil War. It was as a member of the latter committee that he devised what became known as the Wheeler Compromise, settling a violent and potentially divisive election issue in Louisiana in 1872.

He did maintain a reputation for honesty during an era noted for its graft and corruption in local, state, and national politics. When agents for Credit Mobilier – a railroad construction company – began bribing members of Congress for favorable legislation, Wheeler not only turned them down: he resigned from the Committee on Pacific Railroads in order to avoid temptation. When the scandal broke, many prominent members of Congress were found to have accepted bribes. In another example of Wheeler’s exemplary honesty: In 1873 Congress voted itself a pay raise, making it retroactive for five years. Wheeler voted against the raise – then returned his pay raise to the Treasury department.

Wheeler generally maintained a low profile as a Congressman, and few outside of his district knew of him. He preferred to be cautious, and to work behind the scenes, in committees, rather than to battling issues publically. Perhaps it was because of this low profile that he was asked to run for Vice President with Rutherford B. Hayes as President in 1876. National politics had hit a new low as the scandals of the Grant administration became public, and the restlessness of the South for full reinstatement into the Union was increasing. Wheeler was a delegate to the July 1876 Republican convention.

Both political parties were looking for honest candidates to counter the public perception of and disgust with corrupt politicians. While several names were mentioned, it was decided that in the search for untarnished candidates and men with a reputation for honesty, Wheeler was an excellent choice. However, Wheeler was surprised when his name was nominated by acclamation the next morning, winning the position with 366 votes. His nearest rival, Frederick T. Frelinghuysen, would receive 89 votes. Frelinghuysen would later serve on the Electoral Commission.

Supposedly Governor Hayes said of the matter: “I am ashamed to say: Who is Wheeler?”.

Wheeler would not be involved in active campaigning. Citing his ill health, he wrote:

“I greatly regret my physical inability to do little in the way of speaking on his canvas. But I have no reserve of strength to draw upon.”

He would be inaugurated, along with the President, on March 4, 1877. A widower – his wife passed away three months before the inauguration, Wheeler would become a frequent guest of the Hayes’ at the White House. He would fulfill his Constitutional job as the President of the Senate faithfully, even though he found the job to be tedious. He also would give solid advice to the President. When dealing with job seekers, Wheeler advised the Administration to tell job seekers:

“When there is no hope tell the man so. He will be disappointed at the time, but it is the best way.”

When Hayes declined to run for reelection, Wheeler too stepped down. He was a tired and ill sixty-two year old. He retired from politics and his business interests, and would pass away in Malone on June 4, 1887. He was buried at Morningside Cemetery, Malone, New York.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

No biographies of William A. Wheeler are available at our local library.

WEB RESOURCES:

Biographical Dictionary of the US Congress
Famous Americans
Find A Grave http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=2901
Vice Presidents of the United States
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

01. Portrait: Library of Congress
02. Portrait: Library of Congress
03. Campaign poster
04. Gravestone: Find A Grave

June 26: “…I never like to do things by halves…”

2009-06-26T09:11:00.001-07:00

Do you know who this is?
-He signed the Declaration of Independence.
-He was imprisoned by the British for treason.
-He was appointed Governor of his state – but declined the offer.

Born to wealth on a family estate located on the Ashley River near Charleston, South Carolina, and educated in England, one would think that he would be a supporter of the Crown. However, he became an avid revolutionary, and he risked all that he had to support the American Revolution – his property, his wealth, his health, and – ultimately – his life.
Arthur Middleton was born on June 26, 1742 at Middleton Place, the family estate. His parents were , and his father owned a score of plantations that embraced over 50,000 acres of land and used over 800 slaves – making him one of the wealthiest and most politically active men in the colony.

While his earliest education was from private tutors and private schools in Charleston, Middleton was sent to England for an education as a young boy twelve years of age, attending Hackney School and Westminster School, then graduating from St. John’s College, Cambridge University, and studying law at the Temple in London. He opted not to practice law, instead choosing to tour Europe for two years before returning to South Carolina when he was twenty-two. While in college Middleton acquired a passion for classical literature, and during his tour of southern Europe he developed a taste for music and painting that would stay with him for the rest of his life. He also became knowledgeable in the concepts of sculpture and architecture.

Within a year of his return from Europe, Middleton would meet and marry Mary Izard on August 19, 1764. Mary was the daughter of Walter Izard, and cousin to an influential South Carolina congressman, Ralph Izard. She was seventeen at the time of the marriage, and Middleton was twenty-two. Her father – deceased at the time of the wedding – had been a wealthy plantation owner and involved in politics. He owned Cedar Grove plantation, which was across the river from Middleton Place. The Middleton family would raise nine children. With his love of travel firmly implanted from his formative years spent aboard, Middleton and his wife would leave South Carolina in 1770 on a three-year extended tour of Europe.

While living in South Carolina during the mid-late 1760s, Middleton oversaw the planting process on the plantations as well as becoming involved in local politics. He was appointed Justice of the Peace of Berkeley County in 1765, and was a member of the provincial House of Commons for three years, from 1765 -1768.

After his return from his European tour in 1772, Middleton discovered political tensions rising between the colonies and their colonial government as well as the monarchy of England. He was again elected to the South Carolina provincial House of Commons from 1772 – 1775, and helped form the new state constitution in 1776. He was a more radical thinker than his father had been, and became a leader in the “American Party” in South Carolina as well as a member of the Council of Safety in 1775 and 1776.

During the 1775-1776 period of time, Middleton helped to organize a night raid on government weapons supplies in Charleston, raised money to buy the supplies necessary to support armed resistance against the Royal Governor, and recommended a variety of defense measures for Charleston Harbor.

Middleton was elected to succeed to his father’s seat in the Continental Congress in 1776. Both Middleton’s – father and son – knew that the upcoming revolution against England could and would have an effect on their wealth and position in the community. Yet, in the face of potentially losing everything they had – their wealth, prestige, and very lives – both Middleton’s agreed that they had to take the risk in order to protect the rights and liberties they had as citizens in America. Arthur Middleton would sign the Declaration of Independence, pledging everything he had to the success of the Revolution. That same year Middleton and William Henry Drayton would collaborate to design the Great Seal of South Carolina.

In his passion for the Revolution, Middleton would become a ruthless anti-Loyalist. The Loyalists – those who wanted to remain under the authority of the Crown and often supported the Crown by money and personal service – would be persecuted by Middleton. He would advocate the tarring and feathering of Loyalists as well as support the confiscation of the estates of those Loyalists who had fled the country.

He was nominated – at the age of thirty-six - as governor of South Carolina in 1778, but declined because of a new constitution the state legislature had enacted – and which he opposed. He was re-elected to the Continental Congress in 1789 – though he failed to attend because of British threats to South Carolina. He did remain in the state legislature from 1778 until his capture by the British in 1780.

The latter years of the American Revolution found much of the action moving southward. States that had not seen a lot of fighting – such as South Carolina – became the focus of the British plan to win the war. By 1779 the British and their Loyalist allies were seeking to end the rebellion in the South and to force those supporting it to flee, be captured, be killed, or turn and support the British. Middleton Place was one of the many plantations that were ravaged during this time. While the buildings remained intact, the British and Loyalists stole anything of value they could carry, and destroyed anything they could not carry. The Middletons escaped capture by fleeing to Charleston ahead of the British raid on their home.

Middleton actively served as a member of the state militia in the defense of Charleston, South Carolina, during the Revolutionary War. He was captured when the city fell to the British in May 1780 and was sent as a prisoner of war to St. Augustine – along with fellow Declaration of Independence signers Thomas Heyward and Edward Rutledge. In July 1781 he was freed through part of a prisoner exchange and returned to South Carolina. Upon his release he would become a state senator, serving from 1781 – 1782.

His health was broken by the imprisonment he had suffered at the hands of the British, and after a brief fever he passed away in January 1, 1787, at the age of forty-four.

He was buried at the family graveyard at Middleton Place, an honored patriot and Revolutionary War hero. He risked all in the support of Independence – and paid the price of separation from his family, the stress involved in the making of a new nation and of fighting a war, the destruction of his possessions and home, as well as his health.

Yet, how many Americans today have heard of this hero?

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

There are no biographies of Arthur Middleton available from our local library.

WEB RESOURCES:

1911 Encyclopedia
Biographical Dictionary of the US Congress
Colonial Hall
Middleton Place
National Park Service
Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

01. Color drawing: Wikipedia
02. Middleton Place: Virtualogy

03. John Trumbull: Declaration of Independence
04. Signature

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June 23: “…I sing out of my soul to settle it down.”

2009-06-22T18:44:00.000-07:00

Do you know who this is?
-She was considered the greatest of the “anointed singers”.
-She had no formal training as a musician.
-She changed from Baptist to Pentecostal in 1939.

She was the seventh of fourteen children, and was born on June 23, 1904, in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. Named Willie Mae Ford, she would become known to music fans by her married name – Willie Mae Ford Smith.

Her father was a railway brakeman, and the Smith family had to move from Rolling Fork to Memphis, Tennessee, because of his job. The house was crowded, the family was poor, and in the winter up to four children would sleep in a bed, wearing their coats to keep warm. In 1918 they would move to St. Louis, where her mother would open a restaurant – where Smith and some of her siblings worked. Smith would quit school in the eighth-grade in order to help work full-time in the restaurant.

"We were so poor our coats did double time as our blankets. We sometimes slept four in the bed, but we had so much happiness, so much love, so much fun. My father was a deacon, and now I can see he just kept us singing to keep from thinking."

Smith would only have informal musical training. She was not able to attend classes for her music lessons – she picked up music by ear. She commented once that she remembered her grandmother “singing, clapping, and doing the 'Rock Daniel'“ A strict Baptist family – with her father as a deacon – Ford parents sang in churches around their area. In 1922 her father formed The Ford Sisters – a quartet made up of Mary, Emma, Geneva, and Willie Mae – with Willie Mae as the lead singer. They debuted at the National Baptist Convention that same year where they created a sensation with their performances of "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel" and "I'm in His Care".

Soon her sisters had married and quit the group, allowing Smith to pursue a solo career. While briefly considering a classical musician career, she returned to gospel music for the rest of her career after being inspired by Madame Artelia Hutchins of Detroit when she saw and heard Hutchins’ performance at the 1926 Baptist Convention.

In 1927 she married John Peter Smith, a general hauling businessman, and began touring to supplement their household income. Smith was one of the first female gospel singers to tour extensively and continuously, singing at churches as well as conducting revivals in the cities that she visited.

Smith often crossed the path of Thomas Andrew Dorsey – known as the “Father of Gospel Music” – during her many travels. Dorsey was responsible for developing a form of gospel music combining Christian praise with the rhythms of jazz and the blues. Smith adopted many of Dorsey’s musical concepts in her concerts. In 1932 Dorsey invited her to Chicago where she helped organize the national convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses – and would be appointed and retained as its director and principal singing teacher. The organization was involved with evaluating and training gospel singers until the late 1980s. She would later form – and lead- a St. Louis chapter of the organization.

The National Baptist Convention in 1937 would be a hallmark for Smith. She set a new standard for solo singing with her rendition of her own composition, “If You Just Keep Still”. By using gospel blues to rearrange and reinterpret classic Christian songs such as “Jesus Loves Me” and “What A Friend We Have In Jesus”, Smith was able to train a new generation of singers to include the revised songs in their repertoire of gospel music. She taught and mentored Brother Joe May, Myrtle Scott, Edna Gallmon Cooke and Martha Bass. Brother Joe May would give her the nickname “Mother”, which became part of her legacy.

In 1939 Smith would make anther decision that would create a new hallmark for her music: she would join the Church of God Apostolic, and her music would soon reflect the rhythm and energy evidenced by the church services. She considered herself a preacher, and created the “song and sermonette”, which involved combining a sermon at some point (or even at several points) during the concert – either before, during, or after. She toured the Midwest extensively during the 1940s, performing evangelistic concerts with her adopted daughter, Bertha, accompanying her on the piano.

Despite her success on the live music circuit, Smith would not seek to record her music until the late 1940s, early 1950s, and even then she only recorded sparingly. By the early 1950s her focus became more and more on evangelical work.

Smith was almost seventy when she began to receive national recognition. She would perform at a variety of jazz festivals, including the Newport Jazz Festival, and in 1981 would appear in “Say Amen, Somebody”, a gospel documentary film. In 1988 she received a National Heritage Award, and would continue to perform regularly at her church – the Lively Stone Apostolic Church – in St. Louis.

“The gospel song is the Christian blues. I’m like the blues singer: When something’s rubbing me the wrong way, I sing out of my soul to settle it down.”

To hear Smith sing, go here.

Smith would pass away on February 2, 1994 - at the age of eighty-nine - while residing at the Tower Village Nursing Home in St. Louis.

Willie Mae Ford Smith – Mother Smith - was considered by her contemporaries as one of the greatest of those artists who were known as ‘anointed singers’. She rarely recorded, letting her reputation rest on her live performances where her voice, message, and dramatic physical style inspired those who followed her in this musical genre.

LOCAL LIBRARY RESOURCES:

Our local library has no biographies of Willie Mae Ford Smith

WEB RESOURCES:

-African American Registry
-Answers
-Biography
-Black Gospel Choir Tribute
-Nation Master Encyclopedia
-New York Times Obituary
-Wikipedia

PHOTO SOURCES:

01. Willie Mae Ford Smith singing: National Endowment of the Arts
02. Smith singing: African American Registry
03. Singing in church: Find A Grave

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