USA > Connecticut > Representative men of Connecticut, 1861-1894 > Part 71
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Mr. Batterson is a man whom a robust physical frame, and a still more robust, assimilative and flexible intellect, enable to accomplish an amount and variety of work which fills the ordinary man with wonder and despair. One of the most valuable intellectual qualities is the faculty of instant adjustment to any new piece of work - one of the rarest and most precious of faculties ; to him, five minutes' time are good for five inin- utes' accomplishment whenever taken. He is a formidable debater, a capable actuary and a thorough student of economics.
The amount of solid reading he does would alone tax severely the energies of most men ; he keeps abreast of the highest thought of the age, and knows what its leaders are thinking and saying on every subject. He has a large library, of the highest quality in selection. His judgment in art is delicate and just, and his fine collection of pictures covers a remarkable range of schools and subjects. Altogether, few men live a more symmetrical life of business and thought, assimilation and production ; and in his combination of vigor and delicacy of mind, of solid judgment and nice taste of appreciation alike of the profoundest thought and the subtlest graces of style, he has few equals.
But neither has life and accident insurance with its innumerable exactions, nor the quarrying of granite and marble and the construction of great buildings, absorbed all of Mr. Batterson's time. The leisure, which most busy men give to recreation, he devotes to study, finding in change of mental activity the rest that other men find in doing nothing. He is an earnest student of Greek, Latin, Italian, French and Spanish, and has all the time some special study on hand into which he plunges when he has a spare hour or evening. He is a great lover of Homer, Vergil and Horace, and has rendered much of the Iliad into Eng- lish, preserving the metre and the literal meaning of the Greek.
Mr. Batterson is a man of compact frame and commanding presence, possessing a pow- erful voice and a ready wit, and in public gatherings is a most effective speaker. He has never sought nor taken public office, but has, nevertheless, been and is a great force in the community. He was one of the organizers of the Republican party, and all through the war was the chairman of its state central committee, never losing an election, and man- aging affairs with a tact that dispelled jealousies, owing to his wise judgment of men, and the fact that he was not himself a candidate for any office.
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OF CONNECTICUT, 1861-1894.
Mr. Batterson's home is an elegant residence on Albany Avenue, a mile or more from his office. In the picture gallery are choice examples of the old Italian schools of paint- ing, the Dutch and Flemish schools, and the modern French, English and Belgian. His studies at home and abroad, and his extensive travels have made him an authority in art matters. His mineralogical collection is also exceedingly valuable, and includes a multitude of choice specimens-in many cases a special story of its discovery attaching to each piece. This, he found in an Egyptian chalk cliff, that, he found in Russia, another in Scotland, or Norway, or Italy or in our own far West, and each full of interest and practical instruction.
The honorary degree of M. A. was conferred upon him by Yale, at the suggestion of his friend, Dr. Bushnell, and also by Williams College. He is a trustee of Brown University, a member of the society for Biblical Exegesis and an active member of the Baptist church.
Mr. Batterson married Ennice Elizabeth, daughter of Jonathan Goodwin, Esq., of Hartford, and has two children living : James G. Batterson, Jr., vice-president of The New England Granite Works, and Mary Elizabeth, wife of Charles Coffing Beach, M. D.
USSELL, CHARLES ADDISON, of Killingly, congressman from the Third District, was born in Worcester, Mass., March 2, 1852. Of Mr. Russell's genealogy it may be mentioned that his paternal ancestors settled in Cambridge, Mass., and remained there long enough to take a hand in the celebrated fight at Lexington before they emigrated to New Hampshire where his father was born. His mother, who was a Wentworth, traced her lineage directly to the old colonial Governor Wentworth of New Hampshire.
Receiving his primary education in the common schools of Worcester, he was prepared for college under the tuition of Rev. Harris R. Greene. He was graduated fromn Yale University in the class of 1873, taking high rank as a student, and winning popularity in his class by his genial manner and his enthusiasm in athletic sports. Immediately after his gradua- tion he devoted himself to newspaper work, and, up to 1878, was actively engaged on the Worcester Press as city editor, and was for a short time thereafter connected with the Worcester Spy. Since that time Mr. Russell has been engaged in the business of manufacturing woolens at the village of Dayville, in the town of Killingly, as treasurer of the Sabin L. Sayles Company.
I11 1881, he was appointed aide-de-camp on the staff of Governor Bigelow, and was a very popular member of the official gubernatorial family. He served the town of Killingly in the state House of Representatives in 1883, and was House chairman of the committee on cities and boroughs. While in the legislature lie distinguished himself by his readiness in debate and skill in disposing of the public business. He was secretary of state in 1885-86, having been elected on the Republican ticket with Hon. H. B. Harrison at its head. Thus the stages were very natural that led in the fall of 1886 to his elevation as candidate for Congress from the Third District, and he received victorious support at the polls, which always has been the case whenever he has been a candidate for public office. The honor thus bestowed has been three times repeated, and he is now serving his fourth term in the halls of Congress. The record shows that the interests of the Third District were wisely entrusted, and have been safely guarded at the national capital during Mr. Russell's incumbency of the high and honorable office.
Congressman Russell is a forcible writer, a polished and graceful speaker, and a man of exceptional abilities. His political speeches in various portions of the state during recent campaigns were of the most reasonable and convincing character, increasing the intensity
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of partisan friendships on the part of those already within the Republican party and unques- tionably adding new recruits from among the intelligent and thoughtful part of the opposition. From his speech at the Republican State Convention in 1892, a trio of paragraphs are selected, showing his forcible style and strength of statement :
So, gentlemen delegates, assembled here as representative in every section of Connecticut of the Republi- can party, we have reason to feel and express confidence of coming success. The Republican party was born in an aggressive advocacy of freedom, progress and prosperity for American humanity. It is to continne its aggression in this campaign for the maintenance of American industry, for the development of American enterprise and the supremacy of American labor conditions. The issne is squarely drawn. Onr opponents for once have honestly expressed their policy in their platform. They didn't really intend to do so, and ever since the declaration of their national convention, they have songht to apologize and explain. But the sonthern Bourbon and the eastern mugwnmp are running Democracy and the Cleveland tariff reform is shorn of all ambiguities in this campaign and means free trade. Our opponents are thirsting for a campaign of education, and warring among themselves as to the system of education which they shall teach. It is an old heresy of Democracy to disintegrate the geography of this Union, and this Democratic campaign for the education of the people is now, as in the past, somewhat geographically disintegrated as respects industrial policies and legislation. Against their textbook theories and essays, which tax the ingennity, to corral in the respective localities for which they are con1- pounded as specific remedies, we submit as practical education the prosperous condition of the country as a whole. Our campaign is waged on the education which is illustrated in the renewed thrift of the Connecticut valley farins, and in the newly established industry of a thriving Bridgeport, or a prosperous New Haven, or a busy, bustling manufacturing village of one of our eastern counties. We gange tariff legislation on practical results, and not on theoretical disquisitions.
As Republicans, our patriotic duty is to aggressively and constantly present the issue as made for us by the nominations and the platform of the Democratic party. A noted Democratic anthority in the newspaper liue just now declares that "the Democratic party is committed to the doctrine that the Mckinley tariff is not a benefit but an injury to the American people. Its success in the present canvass largely rests upon the estab- lishment of that truth in the minds of the people." Truth, indeed ! In the last campaign malicions and false statement of the probable effect of the Mckinley law is to receive refutation in this campaign by truthful and potent illustration of practical results. The Democratic party is committed to the doctrine that the American people are in a condition of calamitons distress, staggering under a tariff which establishes and develops our industries and maintains and increases the wages and blessings of our work people. The Democratic party resents as a blow to its cause and as a factor in its defeat any publication of facts and any state of things which shows the contrary of our distress and poverty. Every pouud of tobacco grown in the Connecticut valley is a thorn in the Democratic side. Every yard of plush or velvet woven in the new Bridgeport factory is an argument against the Democratic position. Every case of cotton goods sent to South America from a Connecticut mill is a damage to the Democratic issne. The report of the United States Senate finance committee, showing increased wages and diminished cost of living, is a knock down to the Democratic party. And now "the cold facts" from the Democratic labor commissioner of the state of New York, showing that seventy-seven per cent. of the industries covered in that state present an increase either of wages, or products, or both, since the operation of the Mckinley law, is a knock ont for the Democratic issue in this campaign.
The first session of the Fifty-second Congress has closed. The Democrats enjoyed a majority of one hundred and fifty-three over the Republicans, and adjournment was made withont any serious effort to repeal the Mckinley law. Was the law a tithe of the iniquity and damage they declare it, then surely they were bound in duty and in honesty to repeal it. Failing to do so, they stand convicted of asserting what they do not believe and what the facts disprove. Their piecemeal attack on the Mckinley law was buucombe and quite on a line with " Holmanese " economy. On a profession of affording free raw material to the industries of the country, they select wool and biuding twine as the articles to be first of all relieved of all tariff duty. The nice discrimination of Democratic intellect which classes wool and binding twine in the same category of free raw material is plastic political jugglery. The wool of the West is as much a product of industry as the woolen cloth of the East, and each is a legitimate and necessary consideration of a protective tariff. Each industry has prospered and the country been benefitted by the effort of protection, and each is destined to be further developed by the continuance of the protective system. Under a high tariff on wool, the number of sheep in the United States increased from 28,000,000 to 44,000,000. Under the Democratic tariff prior to 1860, Great Britain was making most of our woolen goods for us, and her woolen mills were consuming annually 300,000,000 pounds of wool, while our mills consumed 85,000,000 pounds. Under the Republican protective tariff, we are largely making our own woolen goods, and consuming every year now more than 400,000,000 pounds of wool, while the mills of Great Britain consume scarcely 50,000,000 more than1 our factories. So we are catching up with the old country just as we did in the iron industry. We have crossed the line and passed our rival in the iron manufacture, and we will do the same in the woolen trade. In ten years we have increased the amount of wages paid to operatives in American woolen mills front $47,000,000 to $76,000,000. But in face of this maguificent increase in production and wages and in full light of the fact that domestic woolens
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OF CONNECTICUT, 1861-1894.
are cheaper than ever before to the consumer, the Democratic tariff-reformers select the wool and woolen industries in their guerilla war on protection as the first for destruction, and propose first in their reforin to give over the home market for wool and woolens to foreigners. Under protection we have become the greatest manufacturing people in the world, and the greatest agricultural people as well. Mechanical industries have been built up in the midst of our farms, and labor and capital are not inore necessary partners in the development of business than are manufacture and agriculture essential to laborers in the establishment and profit of American industry.
Mr. Russell was married in 1880, to Ella Frances, daughter of the late Hon. Sabin L. Sayles of Killingly. They have two children.
LATT, ORVILLE HITCHCOCK, LL. D., of Meriden, distinguished American lawyer and statesman, who has held in succession the offices of secretary of state, state senator and speaker of the House of Representatives of Connecticut, and who is now serving his third term as a United States senator from that state, was born in the town of Washington, Litchfield County, Conn., on July 19, 1827. He is a son of Daniel G. Platt, a well-known and respected fariner of Litchfield County, who died at Washington, where he had resided many years, in 1871, being then sixty-three years old. His mother, née Almyra Hitchcock, was also a native of Connecticut.
The subject of this sketch remained at the old homestead until he was alinost of age, giving his parents the love, honor and allegiance of a dutiful son and assisting his father in the management of the farmn. Brought up in a home dominated by intelligence and the Christian virtues, he was given every incentive to improve his mind and was warmly encour- aged to persevere in his studies. Having made excellent use during his early boyhood of his privileges at the district schools, he was sent in his youth to the academy in his native town, sometimes facetiously termed " the Gunnery," after its principal, Mr. Frederick W. Gunn, an able and accomplished teacher, under whose personal supervision he was instructed in the higher mathematics, rhetoric and the classics. When he was about twenty years of age he applied himself to the law, studying for a time in the office of the Hon. Gideon H. Hollister, then a leading lawyer of Litchfield and also celebrated as a historical writer. In 1849, Mr. Platt, then a young man of twenty-two, possessed of sound sense, a good education and a very thorough preparation for practice, was admitted to the bar at Litchfield. About a year and a half later he availed himself of an opportunity to still further qualify himself for the demands of his profession by taking a position as chief clerk in the office of the Hon. Ulysses Mercur, a leading lawyer of Towanda, Bradford County, Pa., whose distinguished abilities have since raised him to the dignified office of chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Key- stone State. Admitted to the Pennsylvania bar, he practiced at Towanda until 1851, when he returned to Connecticut and opened law offices in Meriden, where he established himself as a permanent resident.
Soon after his return to Meriden Mr. Platt became associate editor of The Whig, a paper which had an existence of about three years, and the experience he gained in this capacity has since been useful to him in numerous ways. From 1852 to 1857, he served as judge of probate for the Meriden District. In 1855, he was chosen clerk of the Senate of Connecticut and served as such during the session of that year. One of the first to enlist under the standard of the Republican party upon its organization in 1856, he took a very active part in politics and dis- played such marked ability that in 1857 he was nominated on the state ticket for the office of secretary of state, and was elected, serving one term. In 1861, he was elected to the state Senate as the representative of the Sixth District. During the single term he served in this
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body, and likewise during the whole period of the Civil War, he was a firm supporter of the war measures of the federal government, and was untiring botli as an official and as a private citizen to aid the Union cause and to comfort and sustain those who had taken up arms in its defense.
In 1864, he was elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives, and was honored by being made chairman of the judiciary committee. This appointment carried with it by long-established custom the leadership of the party, and nobly did he fulfil the trust. reposed in him. The constitutional amendment providing for the extension of the elective franchise to the soldiers in the field was passed by the Senate by the party vote of eighteen to three. The claim was immediately made by the opposition that the amendment had failed to secure the votes of two-thirds of the whole house, and the speaker, guided by the precedent in his favor, decided that the amendment was not carried. Mr. Platt appealed from this decision, and after a protracted debate, resulting from his protest, the amendment was carried without a shadow of doubt as to its legality. Five years later he was again chosen to represent the town of Meriden in that branch of the state legislature. At the beginning of the latter term he was elected speaker of the House, and presided over its deliberations with wisdom and impartiality. When he retired from the speaker's chair at the close of the terin, he was known and respected throughout the state as one of its purest and ablest officials, one whose qualifica- tions for legislative work were of an exceptionally high order, and whose brilliant abilities, energy and influence it was eminently desirable to retain in the public service. Notwithstand- ing this, however, and in the face of a strong party sentiment to keep him in public life, Mr. Platt retired for a time from politics to give his attention more fully to his law practice which had grown to very extensive proportions and demanded his close personal supervision.
He was appointed state's attorney for New Haven County in 1877. Two years later, just before the expiration of the official terin of the Hon. W11. H. Barnum as United States senator from Connecticut, Mr. Platt's name was repeatedly and prominently mentioned as that of a tried and trusted citizen of large experience in public and legislative affairs, who might be relied upon to fill this eminent position with honor and benefit to the state. The sentiment in Mr. Platt's favor grew very rapidly, and on Jan. 16, 1879, when the Republican members of the state legislature held a caucus to select their candidate, he was one of the two or three men in the whole commonwealth who was found to have a strong support for the approaching vacancy. On the thirty-eighth ballot out of the one hundred and forty-nine votes cast, he received seventy-six ; Gen. Joseph R. Hawley, one of the most popular men in the state, seventy-two ; and Marshall Jewell one. This ballot proving satisfactory, the nomination of Mr. Platt was, on motion, made unanimous, and, as the Republicans controlled the state legis- lature, he was elected senator of the United States.
From his earliest manhood, he has always enjoyed the most implicit confidence of the citizens of his adopted city. When his election became known, they gave him an enthusiastic reception, members of both political parties being represented. To be right has always been the leading aspiration of Senator Platt's life ; and in response to some kindly words he took advantage of the opportunity to emphasize this characteristic. He said: " That which is right is priceless to me ; and in all the campaigns and achievements of the Republican party in which I have participated, I have never steered a middle course, but did what I thought to be right." A friend of excellent discrimination said of him at the time,-and the words seem alinost prophetic : "Senator Platt carries to the Senate independence of judgment, intimate acquaintance with political history, and a thorough mastery of the fundamental principles of a Republican form of government. We greatly mistake if the senator does not prove to be one of the ablest and most serviceable members Connecticut has ever sent to the honorable body to which he is accredited."
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OF CONNECTICUT, 1861-1894.
In 1885, at the expiration of his first term, he was unanimously reelected ; and in 1891, at the close of his second term he was again accorded this distinguished honor. On the assembling of the Senate in March, 1893, the Republicans, for the first time in thirty years, found they were not in the majority. Senator Platt was one of the few members of his party who received a minority chairmanship. At this time when such remarkable attention is being paid to the public health, his committee, that entitled " on the transportation and sale of meat products," is one of special importance. Senator Platt also retains his assignments as a minority member on the committees with which he has hitherto been prominently identified : territories, Indian affairs, judiciary, patents, and the revision of the laws.
The official career of Mr. Platt affords a noteworthy example of the tendency in an enlight- ened community to seek out men of brains, character and merit for positions of public trust, and also of the desire to reward and honor unswerving fidelity to the public interests. Without resorting to the arts of the practical politician, Senator Platt has attained to the highest legis- lative rank in the Republic. The test of time has only served to prove the wisdom of his selection for the eminent position he has filled so ably for so many years. Every official act of his has been prompted by the purest patriotism and has had its foundation in wisdom and honor. The only question in his mind before taking sides upon a public issue seems to be: "Do the best interests of the people require that I support or oppose this measure?" Once this has been answered conscientiously, he devotes himself to the matter in hand with all the zeal of an earnest, truthful and energetic nature, confident in the success of the right and working for that end with all the skill and resources at his command.
Senator Platt is a terse and forceful speaker, preferring- brevity, clearness and precision to any striving after material effect. At the state and county conventions of his party, Senator Platt has been called to preside many times. Ease and gracefulness characterize his services in this capacity, and these attributes, combined with his strict impartiality, render him a model presiding officer. His speeches on such occasions usually give the keynote to the campaign which follows. He was selected as the president of the Republican State Convention at New Haven in September, 1890, and spoke at length on the issues of the hour. Senator Platt's services as a speaker are always in demand, and the announcement of a speechi or oration front him is sure to attract a large assemblage. At the commencement of the war his voice and talents were put to excellent use in the service of his country, and old soldiers will remember well his stirring orations. His delivery is convincing and his words well chosen,and to the point. At a meeting of the Connecticut Society of the Sons of the Revolution held at Meriden in February, 1893, he made a strong plea for a new history of the state modelled upon lines which he pointed out. He said the Connecticut Society could not assume to itself a nobler mission than to insist that such a history be written, and went on to show that a body of inen whose ancestors had any part in the Revolution might be inspired to patriotic zeal by a perusal of the vivid story of the past. His allusions to the future of the country were received with rounds of applause.
Of Senator Platt's speech in the Senate on the Roach case, the New York Recorder says : " The great speech of the debate was inade by Senator Platt of Connecticut. It was a master- piece of concise statements and irresistible logic, and he laid before the Senate and the country coldly and relentlessly the damning charges which had been made against the North Dakota senator, and which had not been denied." The New York Tribune says: "Senator Platt's arguments were conclusive and impregnable. They left the Democrats without a leg to stand upon."
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