remembrance than Rutherford B. Hayes, who was born in Delaware, October
4, 1822. He was a great lawyer, a great soldier, a great statesman, a
great philanthropist, a man without taint or stain. He had to suffer the
doubt thrown by his enemies upon his right to the high office they
had themselves conceded to him, but he was never wounded in his own
conscience or in the love of the people. He was three times governor
of Ohio, and when he became President of the United States he devoted
himself to healing the hurts left by the war he had helped to fight. He
made the North and South friends in the love he had for both sections,
and then he gladly laid down his charge and went back to private life,
after giving the country peace with honor. His presidency was not only
one of the most distinguished and enlightened statesmanship, but it was
consecrated by the virtues of the woman who made the White House the
happiest home in the land. Lucy Webb Hayes, who had been like a mother
to the soldiers of her husband’s command, gave the social side of his
administration the grace and charm of her surpassingly wise and lovely
character. He never knew in his youth the poverty and hard work which
narrowed the early life of Grant and Garfield. He was born to comfort
and lived in greater and greater affluence; he had only to profit by his
opportunities, while they had to make theirs; but he did profit by them.
From school to college, and from college to the study of law, he passed
easily successful in all that he tried to do, and he always tried to do
his duty. Like Grant, he was of farther Scotch and nearer New England
origin, but the next most distinguished native of Delaware County was of
Dutch stock, as his name witnesses. William Starke Rosecrans was born
in 1819, and entered West Point when only fifteen years old. He was in
civil life when the war broke out in 1861, but of course he at once took
part in it, and fought through a series of most brilliant campaigns,
without one defeat, until the battle of Chickamauga in 1863. Even this
he won, but the trust President Lincoln had felt in him and expressed up
to the last moment was shaken by Rosecrans’s enemies, and he was removed
from his command. He left the army with the rank of major general, and
he held afterwards places of high honor, but he felt that the wrong done
him was never atoned for. Twenty-five years after his removal he told
a meeting of his old comrades the touching story of how the stroke fell
and how he bore it. “It was at night that I received the order, and I
sent for General Thomas,” who was to replace him, “He came to the tent
and took his seat. I handed him the letter. He read it and as he did so
his breast began to swell and he turned pale. He did not want to accept
the command, but we agreed on consideration that he must do so, and I
told him that I could not bear to meet my troops afterwards. ‘I want to
leave,’ I said, ‘before the announcement is made, and I will start early
in the morning.’ I packed up that night, and early in the morning,
about seven o’clock, I rode away through the fog that then hung over the
camp.”
[Illustration: William Tecumseh Sherman 255]
William Tecumseh Sherman, who was born at Lancaster, Fairfield County,
in 1820, was like his comrade and beloved friend Grant in the poverty he
was born to. But his family was of historical distinction, while Grant’s
had always been obscure, and his father died a judge of the Supreme
Court of Ohio. As he died poor, his large family of children were left
to their mother, whose means were not equal to their maintenance and
education. Thomas Ewing, the great man of the place, had been the
father’s friend, and he wished to adopt “the smartest of the children.”
It is not known how his choice fell upon Sherman, who was playing with
some other boys on a sand bank near Ewing’s house when it was made, and
had apparently nothing to do with it.
His father had called him Tecumseh because he admired the Indian chief’s
noble character and his merciful treatment of prisoners, and because
he wished the boy to be a soldier. Ewing fulfilled the father’s wish
by appointing the son to a West Point cadetship at sixteen. Sherman had
meantime fallen in love with Miss Ellen Ewing, and he married her in
1850. Then he left the army and tried banking and the law, but liked
neither, and he was President of the Louisiana state military academy
when the Civil War began. With his frank, bold, impetuous nature, he
forewarned the governor that he should side with the Union, and he asked
to be notified in time before the state seceded.
He received the surrender of the last great Confederate army, after a
series of the most splendid strokes of generalship. His March to the
Sea will be forever famous. The highest British military criticism
pronounced his attempt “the most brilliant or the most foolish thing
ever attempted by a military leader,” and we all know how it turned
out. Grant called him “the best field officer the war had produced,”
and there has been nothing in history more sweet and beautiful than the
friendship between these two great men. They were unlike in everything
but their unselfishness and single-hearted patriotism, and they trusted
as wholly as they loved each other.
Irvin McDowell, born at Franklinton, Franklin County, in 1818, was the
brave and gifted officer who lost the first battle of Bull Run, where he
failed less ruinously than any other general of that moment of the war
would have done. His name and fame have outlived that disaster, though
the people did not then know enough to forgive him for his army’s
defeat. He was again of that tough Scotch-Irish breed that so many
Ohioans are of; like our other great generals, he was a West Pointer,
and he was of the high and kindly personal character common to them.
[Illustration: General George A. Custer 258R]
George A. Custer put into his life of vivid action the splendor of
romance. His figure stands foremost in any picture of the war as that of
the most dashing and daring cavalier of his time; but if his bearing was
that of a young hero of fiction, his deeds were those of an accomplished
and disciplined modern soldier. He was born at New Rumley in Harrison
County, of a Hessian ancestor who had come over to fight for King
George against the country which Custer lived and died to serve, and
he inherited from him the blue German eyes, and the yellow German hair
which he loved to wear long, and flying about his neck in his gallant
charges. But otherwise he was of the simple matter-of-fact Ohio
character. He got himself sent to West Point by means of a letter which
he wrote to the congressman of his district. He frankly owned himself “a
Democrat boy,” and though the congressman was a Republican his fancy was
taken with the honesty of the youth, whom he never saw till one day a
young officer “with long yellow hair, hanging like Absalom’s,” presented
himself at his house in Washington as Lieutenant Custer. “Mr. Bingham,
I’ve been in my first battle,” he said, “and I’ve come to tell you I’ve
tried not to show the coward.” After that, in numberless bold forays
and fierce battles, he displayed such dauntless bravery, such brilliant
prowess, that General Sheridan, in sending Mrs. Custer the table on
which Lee signed his surrender, could write, “I know of no person more
instrumental in bringing about this desirable event than your own most
gallant husband.” All the world knows how this glorious hero fell in the
West, long after the war, before an overwhelming force of Indians.
[Illustration: James A. Garfield 259L]
If Custer was the romance of our history, James A. Garfield was its
tragedy, the sort of noble tragedy which exalts while it awes. Again we
have in his life the story, so often told in the Ohio annals, of early
struggles with poverty, and of triumph over unfriendly fate. The child
who was born in the rude farmhouse in Orange, Cuyahoga County, in 1831,
was of Puritan lineage on his father’s side and Huguenot blood on
his mother’s; and throughout his life he showed the qualities of both
strains. He was left the youngest of four children to the care of his
widowed mother, soon after his birth, and at the very beginning his
blithe and dauntless spirit felt the stress of want. But he began to
help himself and school himself, as the children of the poor must and
do, and he early showed a passion for literature and adventure; he
wanted to read; he wanted to go to sea; he actually tried to ship on
a schooner at Cleveland, but, failing this, he got a chance to drive
a canal-boat team. He fell sick and came home, and when he got well he
learned carpentering. With his earnings in that trade he helped himself
through the Academy at Chardon in Geauga County. From there he went
to Hiram College, in Portage County, and then to Williams College, in
Massachusetts. He studied law, and was elected to the Ohio Senate, which
he left to enter the army. He was a brave and able soldier, and rose
from lieutenant to be major general, before he left the service of his
country in the field, to serve her in Congress. After sixteen years
in the House, his state sent him to the Senate, and then his
fellow-citizens chose him their President. He had been only four months
in the White House, when the wretched Guiteau, a fool maddened by his
own vanity and the sight of others’ malevolence toward the man who
never hated any one, shot him down; and he lingered amidst the fervent
sympathy of the whole world, till he died nine or ten weeks later. Of
all the great Ohioans he was the gentlest and kindest nature; he never
did harm to any man, and his heart was as high as his aspiring intellect
above anything base or low. His ambition was in all things for what was
fine and noble.
Quincy Adams Gilmore, who was born on a farm in Lorain County in 1825,
was graduated at the head of his class from West Point. He achieved
lasting fame in the siege of Fort Pulaski in Georgia, which other
engineers had said could never be taken. Gilmore reduced it in two days
by a feat in gunnery which changed forever the science and practice of
that branch of the military art. In the ooze of a trembling marsh, which
scarcely lifted its uncertain surface above the tides, he planted his
heavy rifled cannon at three times the distance that siege artillery was
believed effective, and battered down the walls of the fort with perfect
ease, and with the loss of only one life in his command.
The doubt as to the birthplace of Philip H. Sheridan, with a choice
between Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio, seems not to have been felt
by Sheridan himself. He decided that he was born in Somerset, Perry
County, Ohio, in March, 1831, and there is no good reason to suppose
that he did not know. While so many of our soldiers were of Scotch-Irish
origin, he was simply of Irish origin, and his father and mother were
poor Irish laboring people, Catholics in religion, and careful to rear
their son in their faith. Many stories are told of his boyhood, which
seems to have been like that of most other Ohio boys of his generation.
The most significant of these stories are those relating to his childish
love and knowledge of horses and horsemanship; for they seem the
prophecy of the greatest cavalry commander of modern times, who
invented that branch of the service anew, as Gilmore reinvented gunnery.
Sheridan’s first famous ride was on a barebacked, bridleless horse which
he mounted in the pasture where it was feeding, and clung to with his
knees and elbows in its long flight down the highway. No poet has yet
put this legendary feat into verse, but all my readers know the poem
which celebrates Sheridan’s ride from Winchester to Cedar Creek. This
ride not only saved the day, but it stamped with the fiery little
man’s character the history of the whole campaign in the Valley of the
Shenandoah; and in it, as it were, he met Sherman halfway on his
March to the Sea, and completed the deadly circuit in which the great
rebellion died.
[Illustration: General Phillip H. Sheridan 262R]
Of all our commanders he was perhaps the best beloved by his men, for
he fought with his men. He tried to account for their liking him on no
other ground. He once said, “These men all know that where it is the
hottest there I am, and they like it, and that is the reason they like
me.” He was in the hottest place because he thought it was his duty to
be there, and not because he was fearless. “The man who says he isn’t
afraid under fire, is a liar. I am afraid,” he frankly said, with a
touch of that profanity which Grant never used, “and if I followed my
own impulse I should turn and get out. It is all a question of the power
of mind over body.”
As a boy he had some schooling at a Catholic school, under an eccentric
Irish master whom he used to play tricks upon, and who used to thrash
him impartially with the rest. When he left school, he became a clerk in
a hardware store in his native village, and then in a dry-goods store.
From the last place, he was appointed in 1848 to West Point and his
destiny was fixed. In his class was another Ohio boy, born not far from
Sheridan’s birthplace, at the little town of Clyde, Sandusky County, in
the year 1828. This was James B. McPherson, Scotch-Irish by race as his
name shows, and, as his history was to show later, one of the worthiest
scions of that soldier-bearing stock. If Sheridan was the well-beloved
of his men, McPherson was singularly dear to those who were closest
to him and should have known him best. He was of a most affectionate
nature, tenderly attached to his home and kindred, as men are apt to
be if their homes are poor and their kindred have shared privation with
them; but McPherson kept through all his prosperity and success the
qualities which endear men to their fellows and comrades. The noble
friendship between Grant and Sherman is one of the most precious of
our national memories, but these great commanders seem to have loved
McPherson next after one another.
His father was a farmer who worked at the trade of blacksmithing when he
was not following the plow; and the boy helped him in the field and at
the forge. When James was thirteen, his father died, and then he got a
place in a village store, and did what he could to support his widowed
mother and orphan brothers and sisters. It is told that when he left
them on the farm he ran tear-blinded till he got out of sight, and
then sat down with his little bundle in the woods and cried with
homesickness. But he went to work, and he studied and read in his hours
of leisure, and when he got the promise of a nomination to West Point he
managed to spend two terms at the Norwalk Academy in preparing himself.
He was then so old that he was afraid he would not be admitted to West
Point; but once in the army he seemed to regain his youth. When he
took command of the Army of the Tennessee, under Sherman, he was only
thirty-two years old.
In one of the battles before Atlanta, in July, 1864, he was fired upon
by a Confederate skirmish line, while personally leading a movement of
his troops, and received a mortal wound. He rode a little way into the
woods to avoid capture, and then fell from his horse; and as he lay
there dying alone a private of an Iowa regiment found him, and cared for
him till he expired.
Sherman’s grief for his loss was open and passionate. He wept over his
dead face, and in the report of his loss to headquarters he said, “Those
whom he commanded loved him even to idolatry; and I, his associate and
commander, fail in words adequate to express my opinion of his great
worth.” Grant wrote to McPherson’s aged grandmother: “The nation had
more to expect from him than from almost any one living.” He wished to
express the grief of personal love for the departed, and he testified to
“his zeal, his great, almost unequaled ability, his amiability, and all
the manly virtues that can adorn a commander.”
Such were the greatest of the great Ohio soldiers. To say that they
were, each in his different way, the first soldiers of the war, is to
keep well within the modest truth. They believed in one another, they
trusted one another, for they knew one another. The love between
them, impassioned in Sherman, frank and hearty in Sheridan, tender in
McPherson, deep and constant in Grant, is one of the most beautiful
facts of our history, or of any history, a feeling without one
ungenerous quality. It was indeed,
“A goodly fellowship of noble knights,”
such as has not been since that of King Arthur’s Table Round.
XXIV. OHIO STATESMEN
The men who have given distinction to our state in politics could hardly
be more than named in a record like this; and I shall not try to speak
of them all or try to keep any order in my mention of them except the
alphabetical order of the counties where they were born, or where they
lived.
From Ashtabula County, the names that will come at once to the reader’s
mind are those of Joshua R. Giddings and Benjamin F. Wade, both of a
national fame inseparable from the history of the struggle with slavery.
Giddings was first to cast his lot with the almost hopeless cause of
freedom, but the fiery nature of Wade served to keep it warm in the
hearts of its later adherents and to spread its light. Neither of
these great Ohioans were Ohioans by birth. Giddings was born in Athens,
Pennsylvania, in 1795, and came to Ashtabula County in 1806, where
he dwelt until within a few years of his death, which took place at
Montreal in 1864, while he was Consul General for Canada. He studied
law, and succeeded at the bar before he entered political life. He
was then twenty years in Congress as representative from the Ashtabula
district, which promptly returned him when he was expelled from the
House of Representatives for presenting a petition against slavery. His
courage was so unconscious that he seemed never to assert it in his
long career of defiance at Washington, but it never failed him in the
presence of the dangers that often beset him there. In early life his
people were desperately poor; he had scarcely a thought of school till
he was twenty-three, and it was not until he had conquered from the
wilderness a farm for his father and himself that he found time for
study. He always loved the simplicity of the new country, and when he
came home to the village of Jefferson from the sessions of Congress,
he liked to “turn himself out to grass,” as he called it: to put on old
clothes and a straw hat, and walk barefoot through the streets which he
had known when they were forest trails.
Wade was born at Hills Parish, Massachusetts, in 1800, and he too was
born in utter poverty. He worked on a farm, and then worked with pick
and spade on the Erie Canal; but by the time he was twenty-one he
knew much science and philosophy through studies he had pursued in a
woodchopper’s hut by the light of pine knots. In Jefferson he read law
and became Giddings’s partner. He was sent to the United States Senate
in 1851 as an antislavery Whig, and he continued to stand four-square
for freedom there during nearly twenty years. He was frank, bluff, even
harsh in his speech and manner, but kind at heart, and it is told of him
that once when he discovered a wretched neighbor robbing his corn crib,
he moved out of sight that the man might not know he had been caught in
the misdeed to which want had driven him.
Thomas Ewing, at one time United States senator from Ohio, and at all
times a leading statesman and lawyer, was a citizen of Athens County,
where his father settled in 1798. There the boy led the backwoods life,
and struggled with all its adversities in his love of books, until he
was nineteen. He loved the woods, too, and his boyhood was not
unhappy, though his ambition was for the things of the mind. In his
reminiscences, he tells of his early privations and of his delight in
the first books which came to his hands: the “Vicar of Wakefield,” which
he learned largely by heart, and the “Aeneid” of Virgil, which he used
to read aloud to the farm hands on Sundays, and at such other leisure
times as they all had amidst the work of clearing the land. At nineteen,
he went to earn some money at the Salines on the Kanawha, and then
lavished it upon the luxury of three months’ study at Athens. After
several years’ labor in the salt works, he entered college at Athens,
teaching school between terms, and going to Gallipolis to pick up French
among the survivors of the disastrous settlement there. Then he turned
to the law, and won his way to ease and honor. One of his daughters, as
we know, became the wife of General Sherman, whom he had adopted as his
son.
Benjamin Lundy, the meek and dauntless Quaker who was called the
Father of Abolitionism, lived a long time in Belmont County, at St.
Clairsville, where he founded his Union Humane Society, in 1815, and
inspired the formation of like societies throughout the country. He
was born in New Jersey, and had settled in Wheeling, Virginia, but life
there became un endurable to him from the sight of slaves chained and
driven in gangs through the streets, on their way to be sold in the
Southern markets. In Belmont County, also, the first native Ohio
governor, Wilson Shannon, was born.
One of the Ohioans whom history will not forget was Robert Morris, of
Clermont County, our United States senator from 1813 till 1839. He was
one of the earliest American statesman to own the right of the slave
and to defend it. In his last speech he startled the Senate with the
prophetic words in which he recognized the danger hanging over the
Union, and he said, “That all may be safe, I conclude that the negro
will yet be free.”
[Illustration: Benjamin Harrison 268R]
Benjamin Harrison, one of the five presidents whom Ohio has given the
country within thirty years, was born at North Bend in Hamilton County,
where his grandfather General William Henry Harrison lived until chosen
President in 1840. He remained in Ohio until he was twenty-one; then he
went to Indianapolis, and it was from Indiana that he went to the war,
where he achieved rank and distinction by his talent and courage.
He is a great lawyer, as well as a soldier and politician, and a speaker
of almost unsurpassed gifts.
[Illustration: Salmon P. Chase 269L]
Salmon P. Chase, governor of Ohio and United States senator, Lincoln’s
first Secretary of the Treasury, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court
of the United States, was an Ohioan by grace of New Hampshire, where he
was born, and where he lived till he was a well-grown boy. In 1830, when
he was twenty-two years old, he began the practice of law in Cincinnati,
and prospered in spite of his bold sympathy with the slave and the
friends of the slave. The Kentuckians called him the attorney-general of
the negroes, and the negroes gave him a silver pitcher, in gratitude
for his “public services in behalf of the oppressed.” He was first an
abolitionist, but later became a leader of the anti-slavery party,
and was one of the first and foremost Republicans. As Secretary of the
Treasury his mastery in finance was as essential to our success in the
war as the statesmanship of Lincoln or the generalship of Grant. He was
followed in the office of Chief Justice by another Ohioan of New England
birth, who, like Chase, had passed all the years of his public life in
our state. Morrison R. Waite, of Toledo, was perhaps even more Ohioan in
those traits of plainness and simplicity in greatness which we like to
claim for Ohio, only upon sober second thought to acknowledge that they
are the distinctive American traits.
An Ohio Secretary of the Treasury assured to the nation the means of
meeting the expenses of the Civil War, Ohio generals fought it to a
victorious close, and an Ohio Secretary of War knew how to deal best
with both the men and the money, so as to turn the struggle from its
doubtful course. Without Edwin M. Stanton neither Chase nor Grant, with
Sherman and Sheridan, could have availed. He was born at Steubenville
in 1814, of a family of North Carolina Quakers, and as a boy his tastes
were as peaceful as those of his ancestors. He had pets of all kinds,
and he made collections of birds and insects. He was pretty diligent
at school, but his studies there were not of the severer kind. He loved
poetry; he founded a circulating library; and both before and after he
went to Kenyon College, he was clerk in a bookstore. But deep within
this quiet outside was the hot nature which fused the forces of the
great war, and shaped them according to his relentless will. He became
a successful lawyer, and had been President Buchanan’s Attorney-General
when Lincoln made him Secretary of War. He left that office worn out
with the duties to which he gave mind and body, and died soon after
Grant had appointed him, in 1869, to the bench of the Supreme Court No
man in office ever deserved more friends, or made more enemies. He was
tender and kindly with the friendless and hapless, but with the strong
and the fortunate, when they crossed his mood, he was rude to savagery.
[Illustration: John Sherman 270R]