The connection of General Thomas Ewing with the founding of the Ohio
Society of New York has been already shown. At this point some mention
may profitably be made of the chief points in his public and professional
career; as others of the same Buckeye group will be considered from time
to time.
General Ewing came into the busy life of the world at a time, and under
auspices, calculated not only to develop the best that was in him, but
to call into active play the strongest elements of his nature. Ohio was
in its youthful days; schools and culture had not yet reached that point
where a finished education was the rule and expectation of the great
mass of the youth as now. The freedom of pioneer life was around him,
and while he learned the lessons of refinement and culture within his
parental home, he was learning the lessons of self-reliance, courage and
personal responsibility, from the outdoor environments of his day and
neighborhood.
It was, also, a time when the great public questions of the day were
debated from the stump, in the home circle, and at the caucus, and not
left to the newspapers as at present. The young man was not merely a
reader—he was compelled to think, and often talk for himself. He must
know something of public life, and he usually had a personal acquaintance
with the public men of his day and neighborhood. In the case of General
Ewing, one of the chief men of Ohio history was a member of his own
household—his father, Thomas Ewing, the Senator from Ohio, and Secretary
of the Treasury in the cabinets of the elder Harrison and Tyler, and
Secretary of the Interior under Taylor.
Thomas Ewing, the son, was born at Lancaster, Ohio, August 7, 1829. Not
only was he the natural heir to the qualities that had made his father
one of the great statesmen and lawyers of his day, but he could find
back among the family names that of Findley Ewing, who distinguished
himself under William of Orange, in the famous war of 1688, and was
presented with a flag by that monarch, for gallant service at the siege
of Londonderry; George Ewing, his grandfather, an ensign and lieutenant
of the Revolutionary War; Neil Gillespie—a man of mark, in the early
days of the Monongahela, and great-grandfather to James G. Blaine and
himself; and his mother’s father, Hugh Boyle, who, in youth was driven
from Ireland because of the part he had taken in the Emmet rebellion,
and afterward served the State of Ohio for forty years, as clerk of the
Supreme Court for Fairfield county.
The public life of young Ewing commenced at an early age. When but
nineteen, he was appointed secretary of the commission to settle the
still vexed question as to whether the boundary between Virginia and
Ohio was the high water mark or the low water mark, on the north side of
the Ohio River. A year later, he became one of the private secretaries
of President Taylor, and after Taylor’s sudden death, entered Brown
University at Providence, Rhode Island, from which he was graduated in
1854.
He had already chosen the profession of the law, as the work of his
life, and immediately entered the Cincinnati Law School, from which he
was graduated in 1855. The next year he married Ellen E. Cox, a daughter
of Rev. Wm. Cox, a Presbyterian minister of Piqua, Ohio, celebrated for
his eloquence and zeal, and in the fall of ’56 removed to Leavenworth,
Kansas, which he had chosen as the opening point of his professional
career. His partners in the first firm whose sign-board bore his
name, were two gentlemen afterwards to win great distinction in a war
then farther off in the minds of men than in the dread certainties of
fact—General Dan McCook, who afterwards fell at Kenesaw, and William T.
Sherman, whose recent death the world is yet lamenting. The name of the
firm was Sherman, Ewing & McCook.
The success of Mr. Ewing was brilliant from the start. He had not only
the magnetic presence by which friends are made, but the “natural genius
for law” that made him a safe counsellor, a brilliant pleader, and a wary
contestant in the varied fields of litigation. He was soon one of the
recognized leaders of the bar of Kansas, and it was inevitable that he
should soon be called to a commanding place in the field of politics as
well. It was a time and place where no man could be silent, and when the
most sluggish was compelled to become partisan. The young advocate from
Ohio left no one in doubt as to which side he took in the struggle to
make Kansas a free State. He bore an active and conspicuous part in the
struggle on the side of freedom, and was one of the Republican leaders of
the West. He represented Kansas in the Peace Conference, which assembled
in Washington on the call of Virginia in 1860, and at the early age of
twenty-nine was elected the first chief justice of the Supreme Court
of his State—a position he ably held for two years, until the great
rebellion swept him from the bench into the ranks of the Union army.
Some more detailed mention of General Ewing’s part in that great historic
struggle to make Kansas a free State is needed, to fully explain the
public service he rendered in those days of danger. In the fall of
1857, the Pro-Slavery constitutional convention of Kansas, formed the
Lecompton constitution, of which only the slavery cause was submitted
to popular vote. The question thus left to the people was whether they
would accept a fundamental law with slavery, or without. Thus the voter
was compelled to favor the Lecompton constitution if he voted at all—a
constitution hateful to the Free State majority, as it had been framed
by a fraudulently chosen convention, composed largely of residents of
Missouri.
It was also provided in this document, that if the majority voted for
it and rejected slavery, then the slaves already held in Kansas, should
remain such for life.
At the same election, a separate vote was ordered for legislative and
executive officers under the constitution. The hope of the pro slavery
party was that the Free State men, who were in a great majority in the
territory, would refuse to vote at all, because of their indignation at
the tricky manner of the submission, and that therefore, the Democratic
Congress would admit Kansas as a slave State completely officered by pro
slavery men.
“It was an artful trap,” says one historian of those stirring times, “and
the Free State Convention was caught in it by resolving that the party
would wholly refrain from voting at that election. Thereupon Mr. Ewing
bolted the convention, but only eight out of over a hundred delegates
followed him. The bolters nominated a full State ticket and tickets in
every county for all the offices, canvassed the Territory, and in spite
of the bitterest opposition of the radical leaders and press, succeeded
in bringing a large majority of the Free State party to the polls. They
thus completely officered the proposed pro-slavery Government with
tried and true Free State men—publicly pledged, if the State should be
admitted, to immediately call another convention, form a Free State
Constitution, and destroy the Lecompton Constitution and Government, root
and branch. The pro-slavery leaders, finding themselves outnumbered at
the polls, resorted to the most enormous and astounding frauds in the
returns, and then officially proclaimed the election of the pro-slavery
candidates. Thereupon Ewing went to the Territorial Legislature then in
session at Lawrence, a majority of which were Free State men, and got a
commission appointed to investigate and expose the election frauds. He
was a member of the Board and conducted its proceedings with startling
boldness and energy, resulting within a week in the discovery and seizure
of the forged returns, which had been buried in a candle box under a
wood pile at Lecompton on the premises of the United States Surveyor
General, John Calhoun—the exposure of the forgeries—the indictment of the
chief conspirators, Calhoun, McLean and others—their flight from Kansas
never to return—and the abandonment by Buchanan’s administration, and
his party in Congress of the Lecompton Constitution, which fell covered
with execrations and infamy. This closed the long struggle to force
slavery on Kansas, and the new State was thereupon admitted under a Free
Constitution made by her own people.”
To pass from this struggle for freedom to the greater struggle in the
wider field of the war that followed, was but a logical step to the young
advocate who had devoted so much of his time to the cause that had won
his heart. He first appears in that struggle as Colonel of the Eleventh
Regiment of Kansas Volunteer Infantry, recruited and organized by him
in the summer of 1862. He led his command in several severe engagements
in Arkansas—at Cane Hill, Van Buren and Prairie Grove; and for gallant
conduct in the last named battle, which was one of the fiercest of
the war, was promoted to be a Brigadier-General on the 11th of March,
1863. He was soon after assigned to the command of the “District of
the Border,” comprising the State of Kansas and the western portion
of Missouri—a command of extreme administrative difficulty and great
personal danger, which he held from June, 1863, to February, 1864, and
in which he won the emphatic approval of President Lincoln and General
Schofield, the Department Commander. His “Order No. 11,” issued while he
held this command, directing the inhabitants of large portions of three
border counties of southern Missouri to remove to the military posts
or out of the border, was and still is severely criticised. It was the
result of a peculiarly difficult situation, solvable in no other way.
Those counties had become the impregnable base of operations of about a
thousand guerrillas, under Quantrell, the James brothers, and Yeager, who
were incessantly making incursions into southern Kansas, to rob and kill
the defenceless people, and who had just burned Lawrence, and in cold
blood murdered nearly three hundred unarmed and unresisting citizens.
After two years of strenuous effort by other Union commanders, it had
proved to be impossible to protect Kansas people from these dreadful
incursions, and equally impossible to run the guerillas to earth in their
fastness on the Missouri side of the border. These counties had been
desolated early in the war by Jennison, Hoyt and their lawless bands of
Kansas “Red Legs”—burned to the subsoil, nineteen farms out of twenty
having been absolutely abandoned, and the houses and fences destroyed or
left rotting. The condition of this district can be imagined from the
fact that when this “Order No. 11” was issued, Nevada, the county seat
of Vernon County, having at least a hundred houses standing and in good
order, had not a single inhabitant, and the Court House without door or
window-pane, had become a shelter for hogs and cattle running wild,
with its records of titles and court proceedings scattered over the
floors, and covered with filth. There were not at that time a hundred
families left in the entire district affected by the order, outside of
the military posts. They were the friends and kinsfolk of the guerillas,
who were constantly hanging about the garrisoned towns, buying arms,
ammunition and provisions for the guerillas, and carrying news to them
of every movement of our troops. It was impossible to kill the guerillas
or drive them out of the border while these country people stayed there
as their spies and purveyors. Therefore, after full conference with
General Schofield, then commanding the Department of the Missouri, and
now the honored head of the army, General Ewing ordered the few remaining
inhabitants in these desolated districts to remove to the nearest
military post, or back to the second tier of counties from the State
border, and the order was subsequently ratified by President Lincoln.
In a letter published since the war, General Schofield said: “The
responsibility for that order rests with President Lincoln, myself, and
General Ewing, in the proportion of our respective rank and authority.”
About half of the people affected by the order removed to the posts under
the protection of our troops, and the remainder further back in Missouri.
They moved in summer—were subjected to no physical force or hardship,
and were generally glad to get out of reach of the wild storm which was
about to burst on them from Kansas, in revenge for the Lawrence massacre,
and which the Government had not troops enough there to quell. Within two
or three months after the issuance of this order, Quantrell having lost
his spies and purveyors, and finding it impossible therefore to continue
the vendetta, led all his guerillas south, and the border war was thus
forever ended.
General Ewing’s most distinguished service during the war was in fighting
the battle of Pilot Knob on the 27th and 28th of September, 1864. The
Confederate General, Sterling Price, having effected an unlooked for and
unresisted crossing of the Arkansas above Little Rock, with his army of
over twenty thousand men, marched on St. Louis, where General Rosecrans
was in command of the Department of the Missouri, and General Ewing
of the District of Southeast Missouri. All the Federal troops of the
department were scattered in small detachments, with bases in earthworks
or stockades in or near the chief towns of Missouri, which were the
places of refuge of the Union men and neutrals from the savage warfare
of the guerillas. These scattered troops could not be withdrawn from
their posts without enormous sacrifice of the people and property they
were protecting, and it was, moreover, impossible to assemble them at
St. Louis in time and numbers sufficient to defeat Price’s large army,
which was increasing rapidly by accessions of guerillas from all parts
of Southern Missouri. There was but one possible means of preventing the
capture of St. Louis and the vast loss of prestige and resources which
would follow. That was to delay Price a few days until re-enforcements
could arrive from Little Rock, by occupying and holding fast to Fort
Davidson, a small hexagonal work capable of being manned by about one
thousand men, situated ninety miles south of St. Louis, at the village
of Pilot Knob, which was then the southern terminus of the Iron Mountain
Railroad. In this little fort were stored immense amounts of ordnance,
commissary and quartermasters’ supplies, which Price greatly needed, and
which lay directly between him and the great city, by capturing which he
expected to bring Missouri over to the Confederacy. General Rosecrans,
at the urgent request of General Ewing, reluctantly consented that he
should lead this forlorn hope. He reached Pilot Knob in the nick of
time—but four hours ahead of Price’s advance—and with but one thousand
and eighty men he held Fort Davidson against two of the three divisions
of Price’s army—those of Marmaduke and Cabell—numbering about fourteen
thousand men—Shelpy’s division of about seven thousand men having been
sent to Ewing’s rear at Mineral Point, twenty miles north of Pilot Knob,
to cut the railroad and insure the destruction or capture of his entire
command. After repulsing two assaults with great loss to the enemy,
General Ewing, under cover of the night, evacuated and then blew up his
untenable fort, and, favored by broken ground, though pressed on flank
and rear, held his force in hand, and by dogged fighting for two days
and nights, brought them to a fortified camp at Rolla, a hundred miles
west of Pilot Knob. Price was thus delayed for a week, and drawn so far
westward from his march on St. Louis, that reinforcements reached St.
Louis and the great objective of his invasion was lost. He turned west
and south and was soon driven from Missouri without striking an effective
blow. General Rosecrans, in a special order issued October 6, 1864,
said of this brilliant episode: “With pride and pleasure the commanding
General notices the gallant conduct of Brigadier-General Thomas Ewing,
Jr., and his command in the defence of Pilot Knob, and in the subsequent
retreat to Rolla. With scarcely one thousand effective men, they repulsed
the attacks of Price’s invading army, and successfully retreated with
their battery a distance of one hundred miles, in the face of a pursuing
and assailing cavalry force of five times their number. General Ewing
and his subordinates have deserved well of their country. Under such
commanders, the Federal troops should always march to victory.”
At the conclusion of the war, General Ewing once more made his home in
his native State. He was soon prominent in political affairs, giving
his voice and vote to such measures as in his opinion were for the best
interests of his country. He was a member of the Ohio constitutional
convention of 1873-4, where his legal attainments and admirable powers of
debate gave him a foremost place. As a member of the Democratic majority
in the Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Congresses, he was one of the leaders
of his party in resisting and stopping the employment of Federal troops
and supervisors at elections conducted under State laws, and also in
the successful movement for the preservation of the Greenback currency,
the remonetization of silver, and the issue of silver certificates,
but for which measures of finance the currency would have been greatly
contracted, to the infinite and protracted distress of the industrial and
debtor classes. In 1879, he was the Democratic candidate for governor of
Ohio, and made an able canvass of the State, but the Republican majority
was too large to be overcome.
In 1882, that magnetic attraction that draws so many men to New York
city, made General Ewing a member of the bar of the metropolis, where
the enlarged opportunities of his profession have been met by a mental
equipment and training equal to their most exacting requirements, and
where his success has been of a marked character. To this legal ability
is added a ripe scholarship, unusual grace as a speaker, and a personal
magnetism that charms all with whom he comes in contact. His published
speeches in Congress and on the stump have been numerous, and marked
by their information, ability, liberality of thought and patriotism.
Although his purely literary efforts have been less numerous, because of
the active professional life that has been thrust upon him, the work he
has done in that direction shows how much he might have accomplished,
had his life been given to letters; for example, an address delivered at
the Centennial celebration of the settlement of the Northwest territory
at Marietta, Ohio, July, 16, 1889, and his address before the Kansas
State Bar Association, on January 7, 1890, favoring the abolition of
the requirement of unanimity, of juries in civil cases, and urging the
codification of the “private law”—both of which speeches have attracted
wide attention, and most favorable comment.
While General Ewing has accomplished so much, he is still in his prime,
and is one of the moral forces in his profession in New York city, a
strong, well-balanced and successful man. As has been said, he takes a
deep interest in the affairs of the Society he did so much to create, and
with him, an “Ohio man,” whether known or unknown, is always sure of a
cordial welcome; while he enjoys life in his new home, his love for the
State that gave him birth, and which his honored father so long served,
is as deep as that of a son for a mother whose face he does not see, but
whose memory is forever carried in his heart.
COL. WILLIAM L. STRONG—ONE OF THE FIRST VICE-PRESIDENTS OF THE OHIO
SOCIETY.
In the sketches of the two distinguished Ohioans which accompany this,
the law has been so well represented that one might imagine that the
chief purpose of Ohio in the metropolis was to interpret the law, and
see that equal justice was done between man and man; but from that which
follows, it will be seen that the mission of the Buckeye in New York,
is as varied as his numbers are many, and that in the walks of business
and financial operation, he has won honor for his mother-state, and the
evidences of deserved success for himself. And while engaged in the
cares of business, he has not forgotten to fulfill all the demands of
good citizenship, nor to preserve the memory of the State he has left,
by doing all that lies in his power to perpetuate her memory loyally and
lovingly in the one of his adoption.
Those who have attended the meetings of the Ohio Society with any degree
of regularity, have not failed to notice that the genial presiding
officer, Gen. Swayne, whose genius for his position is universally
recognized is never so well satisfied as when he can so twist or change
the current of business as to bring upon the floor a gentleman who
always talks entertainingly, and whose appearance and speech justify
the efforts of the presiding officer to “draw him out.” Col. William L.
Strong has been so many years in New York, that people generally suppose
him to be of New York origin; he has travelled the world so much, that at
times it is hard to tell from what section he does hail; but when he has
been brought before the Society upon one of the occasions above referred
to, it takes no skill and no endeavor to tell that he was an Ohio man in
the beginning, and that many of the tendrils of his affection still cling
to the State in which his youth was spent, and to which he turns with a
loyal devotion, whenever the occasion renews the scenes of memory, and
the other sons of Ohio about him are recalling with varied emotions the
things of the vanished past.
Mr. Strong came to New York when quite young in years, but equipped with
all the elements needed for business success. He was born in Richland
County, Ohio, on the 22d of March, 1827, and spent his boyhood among the
Loudinville hills. At the age of sixteen he went to Wooster, Ohio, and
spent two years with the firm of Lake & Jones, a large retail dry goods
house, and from thence to Mansfield, Ohio, where he continued in the dry
goods business until he came to this city, arriving here on the 31st of
December, 1853.
When the young Buckeye reached the great city, he came with a purpose
of making the best use of all the possibilities which might present
themselves. He commenced life here as a salesman in the well-known dry
goods house of L. O. Wilson & Co., at that time one of the largest and
most prominent of the wholesale houses of the United States. In the panic
of 1857 the firm suspended, but Mr. Strong continued in its service until
1858, when he went into the dry goods commission business, entering the
firm of Farnham, Dale & Co., which was one of the prominent firms of New
York at that time. In the subsequent changes of affairs, it was succeeded
by Farnham, Sutton & Co., and afterwards by Sutton, Smith & Co. This last
named firm was dissolved and retired from business in December, 1869, and
on January 1, 1870, the firm of W. L. Strong & Co. was organized, and
succeeded to the business.
The advance of Mr. Strong in his chosen line, had been as rapid as his
wonderful success in these later years, has been deserved. He had entered
upon the work with a determination to succeed, and nothing in the line of
hard work or close application was allowed to stand in the way. He had
made the interests of his employers his own; he had studied all the needs
and possibilities of the situation, and had laid a sure foundation for
future success. He had learned the country from one end to the other, and
his business acquaintances were to be found in every quarter. It hardly
needs to be added that when the new firm of which he was the head, opened
its doors for business, it had already a clientage of the most valuable
sort, and that its prominent place among the great dry goods houses of
America, was already assured.
Col. Strong has been a faithful servant of the house from the beginning;
he has done his work as if the whole load fell upon him, and he has
never asked anyone to carry any share that properly belonged to himself.
The house has ever been recognized as one of the solid institutions of
New York. It has made but one removal since its organization, beginning
business on the corner of Church and Leonard streets, and moving several
years later to the spacious double store which it still occupies, in the
center of the dry goods district at Nos. 75 and 77 Worth street.
Some of the qualities that have made his firm what it is to-day, are
suggested in the above. Mr. Strong is a man of decided views, and great
force of character, and at the same time one of the most approachable and
genial men in the business. His good nature and open-handed liberality
are widely felt and known, and no man has a wider circle of personal
and business friends. His abilities as a business man and financier are
of the highest order, and although strongly marked by conservatism and
caution, are nevertheless, sufficiently progressive for even this day of
commercial activity.
But while Col. Strong has given the greater share of his time and care to
the interests of the firm of which he is the head, he has found time to
make his energy and capital effective in various other directions. He was
for years a director of the Central National Bank, and for three years
past has been its president; is president of the Homer Lee Bank Note
Company; was president of the Brush Electric Light Company of New York
for several years; is president of the Griswold Worsted Company, a large
corporation engaged in the manufacture of silk and worsted materials. He
is also a director in the Erie Railroad Company; a director in the New
York Life Insurance Company, Mercantile Trust Company, and Hanover Fire
Insurance Company. He is also vice-president of the New York Security
and Trust Company; is a director in the newly formed Plaza Bank, and has
been closely connected with other important commercial and financial
enterprises not necessary to mention in detail here.
In the lines of political duty, social demands, and especially in
connection with such enterprises as have had some object of public
benefit in view, Col. Strong has ever been an active factor. He is of the
Republican faith, and has long been recognized as one of the Republican
leaders of New York. He has been importuned many times to be a candidate
for public office, but has been too closely interested in his business
to take a hand in the practical manipulation of politics upon his own
account, content to do a citizen’s duty, and to remain in private life.
But he has done that duty whenever occasion offered. He is a member
of the Union League, and president of the Business Men’s Republican
Association, and has done much to make that one of the most efficient and
useful political associations of the country. He has ever taken a deep
interest in the Ohio Society, and is at present its first vice-president,
and has held that office from the date of its organization.
No words can too strongly describe the high repute in which is held the
business house of which Col. Strong is the head. It is among the most
prominent, popular and successful in the trade. It represents some of
the largest mills in this country engaged in the manufacture of dress
goods, flannels, blankets and other woolens and worsteds, also important
accounts in cotton goods. It has branch houses in Boston and Philadelphia
for the supply of the trade in those markets. The firm was organized
January 1, 1870, as above stated, and has continued in uninterrupted and
successful operation ever since. Through all the panics and business
disturbances that have visited this country at various periods since
1870, the house passed in safety with increased business prestige
and financial strength. The able business management of this large
commission house is proverbial in mercantile circles.
All that has been said in the above, in commendation of the house of
which Col. Strong is the visible head, may be truthfully repeated of
himself in his personal relations. His connection with many enterprises
of importance in the business community and his prominent position in the
same, are evidences of the business ability which he possesses and which
his associates have so practically recognized. Modest and unassuming,
his clear and analytical mind grasps the problems of business with such
skill that fortune has smiled upon every enterprise with which he is or
has been associated. His connection with so many financial institutions
as director or president, further attests the confidence of the public in
his integrity and marked ability.
While his business qualifications are of very high order, there are other
traits in the character of Col. Strong that are no less marked. He is
a man of the people, and his sympathies are wholly with the people. No
worthy object to relieve or to make the struggling masses happy, ever
fails to receive from him the substantial sympathy which his broad mind
and liberal heart so freely give. He is an American, in every sense of
the term. Plain and simple in his habits, he frowns upon everything that
seeks to make one man higher than another, except as merit or exceptional
service, have elevated him. He is, as one has well said, “One of the few
men equal to the occasion, wherever placed, and deservedly possesses the
entire confidence of the people.”