of the chief citizens of Ohio, and of the United States. He has been in
Congress ever since 1855, and ever since 1861 he has been in the Senate,
except for the four years when he was Secretary of the Treasury under
President Hayes. If any man in our public life during this long period
merits more than he the name of statesman, it would be hard to say who
he may be. But in his boyhood he gave promise of anything but the sort
of career which he has dignified. He had all the impulsiveness of his
famous brother, General Sherman, and something more than his turbulence.
He himself, with that charming frankness which seems peculiarly a
Sherman trait, tells in his autobiography what reckless things he did,
even to coming to blows with his teacher; but all this heat seems later
to have gone to temper a most manly and courageous character for a
career of the greatest public usefulness.
[Illustration: William McKinley 271L]
He was born at Lancaster in 1810, and the second President who has
called him from the Senate to a seat in his cabinet was born at Niles in
Trumbull County, in 1844. William McKinley entered the army as a private
in the famous 23d Ohio, when he was only seventeen, and fought through
the war. When it ended he had won the rank of brevet major, but he had
then his beginning to make in civil life. He studied law, and settled
in Canton, where he married, and began to be felt in politics. He was
thrice sent to Congress, and then defeated; but in 1896 he was elected
the fifth President of the United States from the state of Ohio.
It is a long step backward in time, in fact more than a hundred years,
before we reach the birthday, in 1794, of Thomas Corwin, one of the most
gifted Ohioans who has ever lived.
[Illustration: Thomas Corwin 272R]
He was born in Kentucky and was brought, a child of four years, by his
parents to Ohio, when they settled at Lebanon in Warren County. He grew
up in the backwoods, but felt the poetry as well as the poverty of the
pioneer days, and it is told that the great orator showed his passion
for eloquence at the first school he attended. He excelled in
recitations and dialogues; but he was not meant for a scholar by his
father and he was soon taken from school, and put to work on the farm.
In the War of 1812 he drove a wagon in the supply train for General
Harrison’s army, and the people liked to call him the Wagoner Boy, when
he came forward in politics. A few years later he read law, and with
the training which he had given himself at school as well as in the
old-fashioned debating societies which flourished everywhere in that
day, he quickly gained standing at the bar as an advocate. He was
all-powerful with juries, and with the people he was always a favorite.
Such a man could not long be kept out of public life. He was called to
serve seven years in the state legislature, and ten in Congress; then
he was elected governor. He was so beloved that when he was nominated a
second time for the governorship it was taken for granted that he would
be elected, but so few of his friends were at the trouble to vote for
him that he was, to the profound astonishment of everybody, defeated.
It was a joke which no one could enjoy more than Corwin himself; for he
was not only an impassioned orator, but a delightful humorist. He could
put a principle or a reason in the form of a jest so that it would go
farther than even eloquence could carry it with the whimsical Western
people; and perhaps nothing more effective was said against the infamous
Black Laws which forbade the testimony of negroes in the courts than
Corwin put in the form of self-satire. He was of a very dark complexion,
so that he might have been taken for a light mulatto; and he used to say
that it was only when a man got to be of about his color that he could
be expected to tell the truth.
He was sent to the United States Senate soon after his defeat for the
governorship, and it was there that in 1847 he made his great speech
against the war with Mexico, as a war of conquest for the spread of
slavery. It may be that there are more eloquent passages in English than
some of the finest in this speech, where he warned the American people
against the doom of unjust ambition, but I do not know them. It was
the supreme effort of his life, but it was addressed to a time of
unwholesome patriotic frenzy, and Corwin’s popularity suffered fatally
from it. He never disowned it; he defended and justified it before the
people; but he declined from the high stand he had taken as the champion
of freedom and justice, and the later years of his political life
were marked by rather an anxious conservatism. His final efforts were
unavailingly made to stay the course of secession by suggestions of
impossible compromise between the North and South. At the close of the
war he was stricken with paralysis while visiting as a private citizen
the Capitol at Washington, where he had triumphed as representative and
senator, and he died almost before the laughter had left the lips of the
delighted groups which hung about him. Of all our public men he was most
distinctively what is called, for want of some closer term, a man of
genius, and he shares with but three or four other Americans the fame of
qualities that made men love while they honored and revered him. In the
presence of this great soul, so simple, so sweet, so true, so winning,
so wise, I think the reader will scarcely care to be reminded that among
the notable Ohio men of our day are some of the richest, if not the very
richest, American millionaires.
XXV. OTHER NOTABLE OHIOANS
Two names well-known in literature belong to Ashtabula County. Albion
W. Tourgee was born there in 1838, and made a wide reputation by his
novels, “A Fool’s Errand” and “Bricks without Straw,”--impassioned and
vivid reports of life in the South during the period of reconstruction;
and Edith Thomas, who was born in Medina County, made Ashtabula her home
till she went to live near New York. While she was still in Ohio, the
poems which are full of the love of nature and the sense of immortal
things began to win her a fame in which she need envy no others of our
time.
One of the earlier Ohioans of note was John Cleves Symmes, of Butler
County, who believed that the earth was penetrated at the poles by
openings into a habitable region within it. He petitioned Congress for
means to explore the Arctic seas and verify his theory; of course
he petitioned in vain, but he won world-wide attention and made some
converts. He had been a gallant officer of the United States Army, and
had fought well in the War of 1812, but he died poor and neglected. He
was of New Jersey birth, and of that stanch New Jersey stock which gave
character to the whole southwestern part of Ohio.
Another and still more famous theorist, who is not generally known to
have been an Ohioan, was Delia Bacon, who first maintained that the
plays and poems of Shakespeare were written, by Sir Francis Bacon. She
was born in Portage County at Tallmadge, where her father was settled as
minister.
A sculptor who, if not the greatest American sculptor, has yet achieved
in his art the most American things ever done in it, is J. Q. A. Ward,
the author of the “Indian Hunter,” and many other noble if less native
works. He was born at Urbana, in Champaign County, of the old pioneer
stock; and in a region remote from artistic influences, he felt the
artistic impulse in his boyhood. His earliest attempt was a figure
modeled in the wax which one of his sisters used in making wax flowers,
and which he clandestinely borrowed. Then he made a bas-relief of the
first train of cars he ever saw, but this he did in clay at the village
potter’s; and he also modeled in clay the head of a negro, well known in
the place, which all the neighbors recognized. A few years later he was
sent to school in Brooklyn, where he used every day to pass the studio
of the sculptor H. K. Browne, and long for some accident that would give
him entrance. The chance came at last; he told the sculptor the wish of
his heart, and Browne consented to let him try his hand under his eye.
From that time the boy’s future was assured. The famous sculptor lives
absorbed in his work in New York, where his ripe years find him crowned
with the honor that will survive him as long as his bronzes and marbles
endure.
To Clinton County belongs the name of Addison P. Russell, whose charming
books of literary comment have so widely endeared him to book lovers;
but whose public services in his own state are scarcely known outside of
it among the readers of “Library Notes,” or of “A Club of One.”
The inventor of the first successful electric light, Charles Francis
Brush, was born on his father’s farm in Euclid, Cuyahoga County, in
1840, and still pursues in Cleveland the studies which have literally
illumined the world. One of the earliest pioneers of science in geology
and archaeology, Charles Whittlesey is identified with Cleveland, where
the girlhood of the gifted novelist, Constance Fenimore Woolson, was
passed. There, too, Charles F. Browne began to make his pseudonym of
Artemus Ward known, and helped found the school of American humor. He
was born in Maine; but his fun tastes of the West rather than the East.
[Illustration: Thomas A. Edison 277L]
Thomas A. Edison, the electrician whose inventions are almost of the
quality of miracles, and have given him worldwide celebrity, was born in
Milan, Erie County, in 1847, of mixed American and Canadian parentage.
His early boyhood was passed in Ohio, but he went later to Michigan,
where he began his studies in a railroad telegraph office, after serving
as a train boy.
Another noted name in science is that of T. G. Wormley, long a citizen
of Columbus, though a native of Pennsylvania. He wrote his work on
poisons in our capital, where he had studied their effects on animal
life, in several thousand cats and dogs, while a professor in Starling
Medical College. His microscopical analysis was illustrated by drawings
of the poison crystals, made by his wife, who learned the art of steel
engraving for the purpose, when it was found that no one else could
give the exquisite delicacy and precision of the original designs. Her
achievement in this art was hardly less than her husband’s in science,
and it is a pleasure to record that she was born in Columbus.
To Franklin County also belongs the honor of being the birthplace of
the botanist, William S. Sullivant. The American Academy of Arts and
Sciences recognized him as the most accomplished student of mosses whom
this country has produced.
I do not think it at all the least of her honors that Franklin County
should be the birthplace of the horse tamer John S. Rarey, for whose
celebrity the world was once not too large. He imagined a gentle art of
managing horses by study of their nature and character, and in Europe,
as well as America, he showed how he could subdue the fiercest of them
to his will, through his patient kindness. In England the ferocious
racing colt Cruiser yielded to Rarey, and everywhere the most vicious
animals felt his magic. He was the author of a “Treatise on Horse
Taming” which had a great vogue in various languages, and he achieved a
reputation which was by no means mere notoriety.
Coates Kinney of Xenia was not born in Greene County, or even in Ohio;
but he came to our state from New York when a boy, he has lived here
ever since, and has been shaped by its life. His poem of “Rain on the
Roof” is a household word, and it is the poem which will first come into
the reader’s mind at the mention of his name. But his greatest poem is
“Optim and Pessim,” which is one of the subtlest and strongest passages
of human thought concerning the mystery of the universe; and his next
greatest is his “Ode for the Ohio Centennial,” delivered at Columbus
in 1888. It merits a place with the best that have celebrated, like
Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode,” the achievements of the people.
In Greene County began the long journalistic life of William D.
Gallagher, who was born in Philadelphia in 1808, but came while a child
to Southern Ohio, and grew up in the impassioned love of that beautiful
country. There was not much besides its beauty to endear it to him, for
his life was a long struggle there with adverse conditions. But he never
lost heart or hope; he failed cheerfully in one literary enterprise
after another, and turned from literature to politics until he found
the means and the chance to fail again in the field where his heart was
always. In Xenia, in Cincinnati, in Columbus, in Louisville, he lived,
now here, now there, as his hopes and enterprises called him, and ended
at last on a little farm in Kentucky. His poetic vein was genuine; it
was sometimes overworked, but at least one poem of entire loveliness was
minted from it; and there are few American poems which impart a truer
and tenderer feeling for nature than Gallaghers “August,” beginning--
“Dust on thy summer mantle, dust.”
[Illustration: Whitelaw Reid 280R]
The life of Whitelaw Reid, who was born near Xenia in 1837, is a
romance of success from the beginning, of the kind that seems peculiarly
American. His people were Scotch Covenanters, with the stern convictions
of that race. It is said that his grandfather first settled in Hamilton
County, but rather than run a ferry boat on Sunday, as the deed of his
land bound him to do, he sold it and removed to Greene County, where his
father was a farmer when the boy White-law was born. He sent his son
to school and to college, and then left him to make his own way in the
world, which he did by first becoming a country editor, and then going
to the war as a newspaper correspondent, and taking part in several
battles as an aid-de-camp. He learned to know the war at first hand,
and he was well fitted to make his history of “Ohio in the War” the most
important of all the state histories. He spent two years in writing this
work of truly Ohioan proportions and of unfailing interest, and then he
became Horace Greeley’s assistant on the New York Tribune. It was in the
course of nature that after Greeley’s death he should become its owner
and director, and should take a leading part in national politics. He
has been our minister to France, and has acquired great wealth as well
as honor; but he has remained affectionately true to the home of his
youth, as his care of the old farmstead at Cedarville evinces.
Among the most eminent and useful citizens of the state was Nicholas
Longworth, who came from New Jersey to Cincinnati, when just of age, in
1803. He was first to introduce the culture of grapes and the making
of wine into Ohio; he planted the Catawba vine on the uplands of
Cincinnati, where it flourished till the destruction of the forests
changed the climate. He became very rich by his investments in lands,
but he never outgrew his sympathy with the poor and struggling, and his
hand was open to every one who could intelligently profit by his help.
Many stories are told of his eccentricity. He was so simple in his dress
that he was once mistaken for one of his own workmen by a stranger whom
he had shown through his grounds, and who gave him a dime; Longworth
thanked him and put it in his pocket For a long time he received the
poor every Monday morning at his house, and gave whoever asked a loaf
of bread, or a peck of meal, or their worth in money. His charity was of
the divine order which does not seek desert in its objects. “I will help
the devil’s poor,” he said, “the miserable drunken dog, whom nobody else
will do anything for but despise and kick,” and he left the deserving
poor to others, knowing that they were sure of friends.
Hiram Powers was the first American sculptor to give us rank in Europe.
Longworth, who loved the arts as well as the industries, helped him
to go to Florence from Cincinnati, where he had begun by modeling wax
figures for a local museum. James H. Beard came from Painesville to
Cincinnati, and won there his first success as a portrait painter. He
was later to reveal the peculiar satirical gift for expressing human
character in animals, for which his brother William H. Beard is perhaps
even more famed. Among later artists, either born or bred in Cincinnati,
Frank Dengler in sculpture, and Mr. Frank Duvaneck in painting, have
shown extraordinary qualities. Dengler died at twenty-four, but not
too soon to have given proof of his great talent; Mr. Duvaneck did such
things in painting as to attract wide notice in America and Europe,
where he headed a revolt of the young painters from the Munich School,
and may be said almost to have founded a school of his own. These two
young men were of the German stock which flourishes amid the Rhine-like
hills of the Ohio; but another gifted Ohioan, who began his art life
at Cincinnati, though he was born in Trumbull County, is of that pure
American lineage commonest in the Western Reserve. Kenyon Cox, now
president of the Art Student’s League in New York, is the son of the
distinguished statesman and soldier, General J. D. Cox, who was one
of the first to enter the army from civil life, and with Garfield and
Hayes, to show military qualities second only to those of the West Point
men.
Of this class of our generals was Ormsby M. Mitchell, the eminent
astronomer in charge of the observatory at Cincinnati, who was among
the first to go from that city to the war. He won rank and honor without
fighting a battle, by virtue of the same qualities which enabled him
to do more than any one else towards founding a public observatory at
Cincinnati before any city in the East had one.
He was of Kentucky birth, and came a child to Ohio; but William H.
Lytle, dear to lovers of poetry as the author of the fine lyric, “Antony
and Cleopatra,” was born in Cincinnati, of the old Scotch-Irish
stock, in 1826. He had everything pleasant in life and he enjoyed
his prosperity, but when the war came he met its call halfway. At
Chickamauga he fell, pierced by three bullets, in the thick of the
fight. As he dropped from his horse into the arms of friends, he
smiled his gratitude, and spent his last breath in urging them to save
themselves, and leave him to his fate. The poem which begins with the
well-known words,
“I am dying, Egypt, dying,”
will keep the name of Lytle in remembrance perhaps longer than all the
poems of Phoebe and Alice Cary shall live, such are the caprices of
fame; but the verse of these sisters is a part of American literature,
as they themselves are a part of its history. They were true poets, and
in their work a sense of
“The broad horizons of the West”
first made itself felt. They left the farm where they were born near
College Hill and came to live in Cincinnati after they began to be known
in literature, and later they went to dwell among the noises of New
York, where they died; but the country, the sweet Miami country,
remained a source of their inspiration, and now and again the reader
tastes its charm in their verse.
[Illustration: Harriet Beecher Stowe 284R]
They were undeniably Ohioan, while Pennsylvania may dispute our right
to the fame of Thomas Buchanan Read, though his most famous poem,
“Sheridan’s Ride,” was written and first recited in Cincinnati. We must
not more than remind ourselves that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe passed
part of her early life in that city, and is known to have gathered much
of the suggestion for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” among the Ohio scenes where
some of its most vivid events occur.
[Illustration: George Kennan 284L]
In the county of Huron a man of unquestionable claim to remembrance was
born. George Kennan, whose enviable privilege it was to let the light
in upon the misery of Siberian exile and to awaken the abhorrence of the
world for Russian tyranny, was a native of Norwalk, where he grew up a
telegraph operator. He worked at night and went to school by day, and
when only nineteen, while one of the chief operators in Cincinnati, he
applied for leave to join an expedition for laying a cable from Alaska
to Siberia by way of Bering Strait. He was asked if he could get ready
to start in two weeks, and he answered that he could get ready to start
in two hours. He was appointed, and in this way he came to know the
horrors which he afterwards studied more fully in a second visit to
Siberia. He traveled fifteen hundred miles through that wintry prison
of Russia, and saw and heard the sorrowful things which the despotism of
the Czar has done to men who dare to love freedom.
His report of these cruelties has at least put their authors to shame
before the civilized world, if it has not wrought so great an open
change as the work of another Ohio man in dealing with even greater
atrocities. It is interesting to note that Januarius A. Mac-Gahan
was born in the same county as Philip H. Sheridan, of the same Irish
parentage, to the same Catholic religion, and the same early poverty. He
saw the light in July, 1844, in a log cabin on his father’s little farm
among the woods near New Lexington in Perry County. He studied hard at
school, and read constantly out of school, when a boy. When a little
older, he worked for the neighboring farmers; he hoped to get a school
to teach; but he could not get it in his own home, where he was thought
too young, and he had to go to Indiana for it. From there he went to
St Louis, where he became a newspaper reporter. In 1868 he sailed for
Europe to study French and German, hoping to come home and practice law
in that city. But his duty as correspondent took him to the scenes of
various European wars, and launched him at last amidst the barbaric
outrages of the Turks in Bulgaria. His exposure of their abominable
misdeeds in 1876 roused the whole world; the English government
officially examined his facts and found them indisputable. The war began
between Russia and Turkey, and MacGahan returned to Bulgaria with the
victorious Russian troops. There, wherever the people knew him, they
hailed him as their savior. He had made their miseries so widely known
to mankind as to render it impossible that they should continue. It
is not strange that they thronged upon him, and kissed his hands, his
boots, his saddle, his horse. In the peace that followed, a whole empire
was torn from the bloody hands of the Turks, and four Christian peoples
were saved from their savage rule. Bulgaria, Roumania, Roumelia, and
Servia now belong to themselves, and all this has come about from the
efforts of an unknown young Ohio man, who went abroad to study the
languages, and changed the map of Europe. It reads like wild romance,
but it is sober history.
Among all these Ohioans of celebrity we must not forget Johnnie Clem,
the Drummer Boy of Shiloh. He ran away from his home in Newark, his
native city, in 1861, when he was not yet ten years old, and joined the
24th Ohio as drummer; but he was afraid to be seen and sent home by
an uncle who was in that regiment, and he cast his lot with the 22d
Michigan. He was not only at Shiloh, but the battles of Perryville,
Murfreesboro, Chattanooga, Chickamauga, Nashville, and Kenesaw. He was
taken prisoner in Georgia, and when his captors stripped him of his
clothes he grieved for the loss of nothing except his cap, which had
three bullet holes in it. After his release, he came home to get well,
and then returned to the army, where General Thomas attached him to his
staff. Later he was sent to West Point, where he could not be regularly
entered because he was too small; but he made his studies, and Grant
commissioned him as lieutenant, and he rose to be captain of infantry.
He won the love and respect of all his generals, and while they lived
they wrote him letters of affectionate friendship. He was once wounded
by a shell, and once he lost his drum by the fragment of a bursting
bomb.
J. J. Platt, who is first among Ohio poets, was born in Indiana; but
his boyhood was passed mostly in Ohio, where he grew up on his father’s
farm, amidst the scenes which he has loved to depict in his verse, until
he became a printer’s apprentice. Since then he has dwelt in cities,
both at home and abroad; but he is always happiest in dealing with the
traits and aspects of country life, especially in the earlier times.
He was for many years consul at different points in Ireland; and he
has found in England even greater recognition for the distinctively
mid-western quality of his poems than he has enjoyed among ourselves. So
far as he is of Ohio, he is of Logan County, which has been the seat of
his family from the settlement of the country; as his name suggests, he
is of French descent.