At the death of his grandfather Gillespie, who was worth about one
hundred thousand dollars,--a large sum for that early time,--Mrs.
Blaine inherited, among other things, one-third of the great Indian
Hill Farm, comprising about five hundred acres, with great houses,
orchards, and barns,--a small village of itself.
This, with his father’s office in the courts, and other property,
placed the family in good circumstances, and it was decided to give
James a thorough education. He was now nine years old, with a mind as
fully trained and richly stored as could be found for one of his years.
He was a ready talker, and loved discussion, and so frequently showed
what there was in him by the lively debates and conversations into
which he was drawn.
Thus his ability to express himself tersely and to the point, was early
developed. He came to be, almost unconsciously, growing up as he did
among them, the admiration and delight of the large circle of friends
and loved ones, whose interest centered on and about the farm, as well
as among neighbors and acquaintances.
Bullion’s Latin Grammar was called into requisition, and mastered so
well that he can conjugate Latin verbs as readily now as can his sons
who are recent graduates, the one of Yale, and the other of Harvard.
The thoroughness with which he did his work is a delightful feature of
his career. One is not compelled to feel that here is sham, and there
is shoddy; that this is sheer pretense, and that is bold assumption, or
a threadbare piece of flimsy patch-work.
One word expresses the history of the man, and that one word is
_mastery_. It fits the man. Mastery of self; mastery of books; mastery
of men; mastery of subjects and of the situation; mastery of principles
and details. He goes to the top, every time and everywhere, sooner or
later. And it is largely because he has been to the bottom first, and
mastered the rudiments, one and all, and then risen to the heights, not
by a single bound, but “climbing the ladder, round by round.”
The amazing power of dispatch in the man, as well as thoroughness, are
only the larger development of his youthful habit and character.
It was not so much an infinite curiosity as an infinite love of
knowledge that made his young mind drink so deeply. His was a thirsty
soul, and only by drinking deeply and long could the demand be met.
When ten years old, the great campaign of General Harrison came
on. He was ready for it, and soon filled up with the subject. His
impulsiveness was powerful and intelligent, vastly beyond his years.
Few men were fresher or fuller of the history of the colonies and
states than this boy. He was, in fact, a little library on foot,
filled with incidents, names, and dates, familiar with the exploits
of a thousand men and a score of battles, posted as to the great
enterprises and measures of the day, by reason of his distinguished
relations and his abundant facilities and sources of information.
Perhaps, too, no campaign was ever more intense and popular, or
entered more into the heart and home-life of young and old, than that
of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” “Log Cabin and Free Cider.” The great
gatherings, barbecues, and speeches, and multiplied discussions and
talk everywhere in house and street, in office and shop, would fire any
heart that could ignite, or rouse anyone not lost in lethargy. James
was not troubled that way, but was always on hand; he would sit in the
chimney-corner, or out on the great porch, while the old-line Whigs
gathered to read, and hear, and digest aloud the news.
The political world had dawned upon him. He was in it for sure, and
in earnest. His historical mind was gathering history ripe from the
boughs. It was luscious to his taste. He was somewhere in every
procession that wended its way with music and banners and mottoes
innumerable to the place of speaking, and absorbed the whole thing.
Few could have voted more intelligently than he when election day came,
for few had taken a livelier interest in the whole campaign, or taken
the matter in more completely.
In three years he was admitted to college, so this was no spurt
of mental power, but a steady growth, and but marked an era of
intellectual unfolding.
It was a genuine and profitable source of most practical education,
for all through the great and exciting campaign he did nothing else
but attend the monster demonstrations. Dr. William Elder and Joseph
Lawrence, the father of Hon. George B. Lawrence, now in Congress, were
particularly powerful in impressions upon him.
Among the prominent speakers going through, who stopped to address
meetings, was Wm. C. Rivers, of Virginia, who is particularly
remembered by Mr. Blaine.
Hon. Thomas M. T. McKenna, father of the present Judge McKenna, was
a distinguished personage in that portion of the state, and took an
active and influential part in the contest,--a contest full of vim,
as it was the first Whig victory on a national scale, but as full of
good nature. Jackson’s severe methods and measures, throttling the
Nullifiers, sweeping out of existence the great United States Bank
at Philadelphia, with its $150,000,000 of capital, and sundry other
measures, had filled the people with consternation, and a great change
was imperatively demanded.
Newspapers were numerous in the home of Mr. Blaine, and never escaped
the vigilant eye of the young and growing journalist and statesman.
The Washington _Reporter_ made a large impression upon him, as did
also the old Pittsburgh _Gazette_, a semi-weekly paper, and the
_Tri-weekly National Intelligencer_ (Gales and Seaton, editors) was of
the strongest and most vigorous character; also, the _United States
Gazette_ (semi-weekly), published at Philadelphia, and edited by Joseph
R. Chandler, of that city, and later on Joseph C. Neal’s _Saturday
Gazette_. Surely the incoming of these nine or ten papers into the home
every week, counting the semi- and tri-weekly issues, would furnish
mental pabulum of the political sort in sufficient quantity to satisfy
the longing of any young mind. No wonder his growth was strong and
hardy. We have heard of an American boy of ten or twelve, who followed
the Tichborne Claim case at its original trial through the English
courts, but he was a bright high-school boy, who had every advantage
of the best graded schools, and improved them steadily, and yet it was
greatly to his credit. Graded schools were unknown in 1840, yet James,
who had finished reciting Plutarch’s Lives the year before to his
Grandfather Gillespie, watched eagerly for the heavily loaded sheets as
they came by post or steam-boat, and posted himself on their contents.
Besides these numerous papers, two magazines were taken and steadily
read by the boy. They were both published in Philadelphia,--_Graham’s
Magazine_ and _Godey’s Lady’s Book_. The one was dinner, and the other
dessert, to the ever hungry mind.
The magazines will be remembered as among the very best the country
afforded at that time. But things that do not grow with the country’s
growth are soon outgrown in the day of steam and lightning.
The boy who read those periodicals then has not been outgrown, but
he has outgrown much that then caused him to grow. They constituted
the chief part of polite literature, as it was called, of that form,
and helped in the culturing process which has resulted in harvests so
abundant.
Can we imagine the deep joy and satisfaction of that mere boy of ten
years at the election of General Harrison, for whom he had cheered a
hundred times? And when he came through on his way to Washington, to be
inaugurated president, he stayed over night at Brownsville, just across
the bridge over the river, and James was presented to him.
No camera obscura ever photographed a face so distinctly, and no
curious eyes ever took in the details of the scene more perfectly.
In addition to the two lady teachers who bore a part in the early
education of James Blaine, there are four men who held a conspicuous
place as instructors in the neighboring country school he attended, and
who are remembered with gratitude to-day. These are Albert G. Booth,
Joshua V. Gibbons, Solomon Phillips, and Campbell Beall. Mr. Booth is
still living, and has doubtless rejoiced many times that he did his
foundation work so well.
Mr. Booth was one of those patient, careful, devoted workers who do
good, honest work.
Joshua V. Gibbons bore a striking likeness to Abraham Lincoln. When
an old man, he visited Mr. Blaine in Congress, at the time he was
Speaker of the House. Mr. Blaine invited him to a seat beside him, in
the Speaker’s desk. It was a worthy honor to a noble teacher, a moment
of thrilling interest to the great national assembly, and attracted
universal attention.
Mr. Gibbons was a man of heavy, strong mind, and forceful personality,
and made himself deeply and strongly felt in the progress of young
Blaine’s mental growth. He did solid, accurate, and enduring work.
Homely people, as a general thing, have quite a fund of native
goodness, a sort of genial love and sympathy, to atone for physical
defects. Such seemed to be the case with the man who so resembled Mr.
Lincoln, and it drew all hearts to him. There was no rod or ruler
in school so long as he taught, and no need of any. Such things are
generally used in the school-room or family to supply deficiencies
of wisdom, tact, and genuine ability. He simply won their love and
respect, and it was their joy to give it. He taught them, also, things
outside of the books, and told them plenty of good, wholesome stories.
One day, in speaking about the heathen being away round on the other
side of the world, he simply remarked,--“Of course you know the world
is round,” but of course they did not.
The great eyes of James dilated, but he said nothing. He could not
help thinking and taking a child’s view of it when school was out. It
did not hurt much to fall down four or five times as he went home that
night, with his eyes upturned toward the Heavens, and the great thought
revolving in his brain. The first question his mother heard was,--
“Is this world round, anyhow, and how is it round?”
“Yes, my child,” and the old story of the ship was told, and he was
examining the picture in the atlas when his father came in, and _he_
was sounded and agreed with the assured fact of science; and that night
when he went up the hill to grandfather’s house to recite Plutarch,
first of all he asked,--
“Grandpa, did you know this world was round?”
Grandpa took him up in his great arms, and told him all about it, and
showing him through the window the great round haystack, on whose top
and sides there was room for twenty boys like him without falling off,
and how “the earth keeps turning around and around all the time, and a
great power holds people on, just as the roots hold the trees, so no
one can fall off,--and the fact is, it is so big, and large, and round,
and wide, they cannot fall off,” Jimmy thought he saw it and felt that
it must be so.
But the next week when he went to Pittsburgh with Uncle Will, on the
steamer, he was looking all the way for proof that the world was round.
But what puzzled the boy fully as much, was the grave assertion, made
without proof, that the sun does not move, when he knew that it did
rise and set. Grandpa, and his parents, and Uncle Will, had to hold
court every day until these questions were all settled, the testimony
all in, and the dreams of the young learner reflected other scenes.
His youth had a great sorrow. No grandson was ever loved and petted and
cared for and helped in a thousand ways as his Grandfather Gillespie
had helped and loved and cared for him. Though a man of affairs, and
carrying on business operations on a large scale and in distant parts,
he loved his home and all about him, and took special pride in this
boy. The heart of James was truly won. It was his special joy to be
up at grandfather’s. It was not the big red apple-tree, nor the great
clock on the stairs, nor the old rusty sabre and flint-lock musket, and
the many relics of the Revolution that attracted him, but grandfather
himself.
But grandfather did not get up, one morning, and the doctor was there,
and nobody went to work, and there was general alarm. The delirium of
fever was on him, but his strong constitution resisted its ravages of
inward fire for days and weeks. Now he went there oftener, walked more
softly, asked more eagerly. It all seemed so very strange. There was
his great chair vacant, and the hand that had so often lain on his head
seemed void of touch and power now. Everything seemed to stop. Books
had nothing in them now; papers were unopened. The world grew darker
and darker, until one black night, amid a terrific storm, word came
that grandfather had just died, and father and mother would not be home
for some time. The sun seemed to set to James, and he cried himself to
sleep, while the other children bewailed their loss.
The morrow was bright and clear, but full of sadness, and as he looked
upon the dear old man lying there, and felt his cold face and hand,--he
had never seen death before,--he was filled with wonder. The loss,
indeed, was great to him. But his memory was an inspiration, and
knowing what grandpa would have him do, he returned to his study with
renewed energy and to feel more than ever the worth and power of books
the departed one had prized so highly.
Solomon Phillips was a Quaker and a farmer, but a man of strong,
powerful intellect, honest as the day was long, painstaking and
persevering. Mathematics were his special delight. It is a triumph
of skill in teaching to love a hard, difficult science so as to get
others to love it, also. In this he succeeded. He felt its worth and
power. He would divide 0 by 1 (zero by one), and get infinity, and sit
and gaze out into its clear, white depths; and reversing the process he
would divide one by zero, and get the same result, and again gaze upon
the white depths of a world most beautiful to thought, in its clear,
unclouded, not nothingness, but somethingness, and that something
infinity. He seemed almost to worship at the shrine of this kingly
science, and would tell again and again how brilliant and beautiful,
and with what delightful accuracy, the labyrinths of the most gnarled
and vexed problems opened to him.
This was the man to give Master James his great lift in preparation for
college.
He followed promptly wherever the Quaker master led the way. Week after
week, and month after month, and term after term, the drill went on.
There were no bounds or limits then, as in academies now, so these
were passed as ships pass the equator, or railroad trains pass state
or county lines. Hard study was the work of the hour, but hard study
made work easy, and this was the secret, of all his progress,--constant
study brought constant victory.
When his Grandfather Gillespie died, his father took up the drill in
history, and Hume’s England was gone over carefully, beside Marshall’s
Life of Washington and a volume of Macaulay’s Essays which he got hold
of as a young boy.
His father had a fine, large library, in which he delved by day and
night, and aroused his son not only by example to constant application,
but also by persistent pressure. Here is the real key to that early
career of youthful days so thoroughly utilized,--the father’s
intelligent watchfulness, and careful method, and constant direction.
Only gauge the wheel to the stream, and the grist to the wheel, and
there will be no danger.
The father determined his son should be educated to the utmost, and
planned and wrought accordingly. No time was lost, and no undue haste
made; it was the persistency of constant pressure that won the day.
His boyhood was a happy, healthy period. He could swim across to
Brownsville, discarding both ferry and bridge.
He went nutting with the boys, as is their wont when autumn days are
on the woods, and Nature, glorified with a thousand tints of foliage,
is, in the poet’s sombre language, “in the sere and yellow leaf.” Black
walnuts, butternuts, shellbarks, hickory nuts, and chestnuts rewarded
their search, and gladdened winter evenings with their cheer.
There was nothing unnatural about young Blaine. He was no prodigy; no
marvel, except of industry and constant training. He was simply a fair
exhibition of what a good average boy, well endowed with pluck and
brains may become in the hands of good teachers, and under the guidance
of intelligent love and the unyielding pressure of a strong paternal
will. What his Eulogy says of Garfield is equally true of himself:--“He
came of good stock on both sides;--none better, none braver, none
truer. There was in it an inheritance of courage, of manhood, and of
imperishable love of liberty, of undying adherence to principle.”
Mr. Blaine could also speak of himself as “fifth in descent from those
who would not endure the oppression of the Stuarts,” and had fought
under Prince Charles in the affair of 1715 and 1723.
So satisfactory had been his progress thus far in the school, that the
plan of his education involved, in 1841, sending him to Lancaster,
Ohio, where for one term he was in a school taught by a younger brother
of Lord Lyons, so long our Minister from England, who according to
English law inherited nothing from his father’s estates, the eldest
brother receiving all; and so he made his home in the New World, and
worthily engaged in training future presidents of the great Republic.
During his term in Lancaster his home was in the family of Hon. Thos.
Ewing, his mother’s cousin. Mr. Ewing was a United States Senator when
James was born, and entered the Cabinet of President Harrison the
year before James’s appearance there as student, as Secretary of the
Treasury, and in 1849 in Taylor’s Cabinet as Secretary of the Interior,
both of whom died soon after their inauguration. In 1849 Governor Ford
appointed him to the Senate in the place of Hon. Thomas Corwin, who
entered Fillmore’s Cabinet.
This first and only term of school away from home and out of that
little country school-house in preparation for college, under the
broadening influences of such a home and the inspiration of such a
teacher, was a long stride forward toward the desired goal. It was
a great journey in those days for a boy only eleven years old to
make, but it added another large chapter to his already wide range of
knowledge and experience.
The other James, only a year younger, was living with his mother in
the woods of Orange, in the same state of Ohio, improving the modest
privileges of school, and maturing slowly, the winter James G. Blaine
spent at Lancaster in the spacious home of that distant relative
who had enjoyed all the high honors of the government, next to the
presidency.
These boys were probably not over one hundred miles apart that winter,
and both at school,--investing more largely in themselves than in all
besides, using themselves as capital, their own powers and endowments.
Surely no course is wiser, as their careers amply prove. It is
gathering what is outside that one may get out what is inside, that is
the process of education; not getting what is outside regardless of
what is within, that may be developed into treasures of transcendent
worth, more valuable than the contents of forest and mine.
American history furnishes few examples of the practical value of
cultivated brain more illustrious and potent than James A. Garfield and
James G. Blaine, and each the opposite in temperament and opportunity,
but both brought up on a farm, and both getting their first start up
the hill of knowledge in a country school.
Where are the two boys who, forty or fifty years from now, will take
the helm of state and guide the ponderous ship farther on her tireless
voyage?
No ever-recurring problem for the nation’s wisdom and the nation’s
choice, is greater than this one problem of presidents. It is the
nation’s offer of greatness and renown to any boy who, through long
years of patient and persistent endeavor, will seek full and honorable
preparation for the prize she proffers.
The brief stay at Lancaster was soon over, and James once more
harnessed into the old régime at home, with Campbell Beall for teacher,
in the same old house that seven years before he entered, a boy of five
years old.
In one year he is to pass his examination to enter Washington and
Jefferson College, in the village of Washington, their shire-town of
three thousand inhabitants, twenty-four miles away. Will he be ready?
Much depends on Campbell Beall, much on his father, and much on himself.
The common English branches are well wrought over, languages and
mathematics have come to be a delight, and in the old atmosphere, and
the old ways, with the old inspiration on him, progress comes anew.
Lines of reading from the library are kept up; the papers and magazines
are not neglected; political matters are settled; bad news comes in
from every quarter; Tyler is at the head of affairs; Ewing has sent
in his scathing letter of resignation as Secretary of the Treasury,
charging him with violating every promise the Whig party made to the
people; but there is no campaign, no voting to be done, so the thing is
settled.
Mr. Beall proves a good teacher. The Latin begun at Lancaster is
renewed at home, and so the winter goes by. Time seems literally to
be alive and drifts like the snow as it goes rushing by. As Benj. F.
Taylor has it:--
“How the winters are drifting like flakes of snow,
And the summers, like buds between;
And the year, in its sheaf, so they come and they go
On the river’s breast, with its ebb and its flow,
As it glides thro’ the shadow and sheen.”
Father, mother, teacher, Uncle Will, all seem convinced that James can
pass and enter college; so, though only thirteen years of age, his
father takes him in the carriage, and they drive over to Washington.
It is a great experience for older heads, but for one so young, a
veritable epoch in his history.
It does not take long to convince the president that he has drawn a
prize, and he is entered with about forty other bright, smart boys, for
the Freshman class in the autumn. After three months of vacation, the
great work is to begin in real earnest, and the stuff those boys are
made of is to be thoroughly tried and tested.
There was none of the hard, rough, and bitter experience in his boyhood
days and early manhood to which so many of our nation’s great men
were subjected. He had none of the long and desperate struggles with
poverty and adversity which hung on Mr. Garfield’s early years. He knew
nothing, by experience, of the privations and hardships through which
Mr. Lincoln came to the high honors of the nation and the world, but
sprang from the second generation after the Revolutionary war, and from
a long line of ancestors who had been large land-owners and gentlemen,
in the sense of wealth and education, as well as in that finely
cultivated.
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