USA > Illinois > DuPage County > History of Du Page County, Illinois (Historical, Biographical) > Part 10
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Charles Sumner was born in Boston, Mass., January 6, 1811. He was the successor of Daniel Webster in the United States Senate in 1851, which place he retained by successive elections till his death. During this long and exciting period in our country's history, he was one of the main pillars in the great anti-slavery fabric, which grew into maturity during his Senatorial terms. His speech on the rendition of Mason and Slidell was one of the most masterly arguments of his time, and settled the American mind in favor of Seward's policy in delivering them up. Mr. Sumner died in Wash- ington, D. C., March 11, 1874.
Lucretia Mott, one of the earliest female anti- slavery orators-a Quaker preacher-was born on the island of Nantucket in 1794, and resided through her active life in Philadelphia. She was a friend and supporter of Lundy on his first appearance as an agitator ; was afterward alike the friend and patron of Garrison. More than any other woman, should she be known as the female philanthropist of America, ranking with Elizabeth Fry in England. She died at her home, near Philadlphia, in November, 1880.
Lydia Maria Child, a celebrated woman, edi- tor and author, a most elegant writer. She edited the National State Slavery Standard, the organ of the Garrison party. She wrote the famous book, " An Appeal for the African." She died in Massachusetts at a very great age, in the spring of 1880.
Sarah and Angelina Grimke, two sisters and converted slaveholders from Charleston, S. C. They emancipated their slaves and came North to reside, and were active co-workers with the Garrisonians of Boston. Angelina married Theodore D. Weld. They were both women of talent, and devoted philanthropists.
Theodore D. Weld became a student of Lane Seminary in 1833, was a very eloquent orator and forcible writer. At one time, he seemed to be the literary author of the anti-slavery move- ment. "Slavery as It Is" and the' so-called "Bible Argument " against slavery, works by him, were the great guns of the moral conflict. He married Angelina Grimke, a fit helpmeet in his anti-slavery mission.
Charles T. Torrey, a minister of the Congre- gational Church and editor of the Tocsin of Liberty, of Albany, and other papers ; the operator on the Underground Railroad ; was arrested in Maryland for running off slaves : convicted, sent to prison for life and died in a year in the Maryland State Prison. He was a devoted Christian man and known now as the Martyr Torrey.
Samuel Lewis, a prominent anti-slavery man
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of Ohio and eloquent lay preacher of the Meth- odist denomination. He was a member of the Board of Education of the State. He was an effective orator, friend and supporter of Birney, Bailey and Chase.
Salmon P. Chase was born in Cornish, N. H., January 13, 1808. He was one of the founders of the Liberty party, in 1848, a member of the Buffalo Free-Soil Convention that nomi- nated Van Buren for President. In 1849, elected United States Senator from Ohio by a coalition of Democrats and Free-Soilers, and made a record in the Senate as the uncom- promising enemy of slavery. He became Gov- ernor of Ohio in 1855, and was re-elected in 1857, and was appointed Secretary of the Treasury by Lincoln in 1861, which office he held three years, during which time the bank- ing system now in use was founded, of which he may be called the father. Upon the death of Chief Justice Taney, Mr. Chase was ap- pointed by Mr. Lincoln to that position, Octo- ber, 1864. The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which guar- anteed civil rights to the Freedman, was among the last of the public acts passed under his ad- vocacy. He died of apoplexy at the residence of his daughter, Mrs. William Hoyt, New York City, May 7, 1873.
Joshua R. Giddings, the famous member of Congress from Olio, who pioneered the slavery agitation in that great conservative body, was born at Athens, Penn., October 6, 1795. His reputation for consistency and honesty as a statesman was acknowledged throughout the country. He was appointed Consul General at Montreal by Abraham Lincoln, where he died May 27, 1864.
Gerrit Smith, a wealthy man of Central New York, born in 1798, the most noted philan- thropist of the country. He was the head of the intense organization in politics known as the Gerrit Smith's Liberty Party. He was a friend alike of the two extremes of action-
John Brown and Elihu Burritt. Gave his money freely to aid the fugitives, and for John Brown's Kansas work, for the support of the temperance and anti-slavery cause, and gave away land freely to colored men upon which to make for themselves farms. He died sud- denly in New York in 1874.
Elibu Burritt was born at New Britain, Conn., December 8, 1811. He was a blacksmith by trade, and was known throughout the coun- try as " The Learned Blacksmith." Besides his wonderful linguistic accomplishments, he was a persistent searcher into the wants of the com- mon. people, and to this end made a tour through England on foot. He was ever ready in America to assist the abolition cause with his logical pen as well as every other cause on the side of humanity against oppression. He died at the place of his birth in March, 1867.
Wendell Phillips, the great New England orator, born in Boston in 1811, the most active of all the agitators; now alive and as aggressive as ever in the path to which his tenacious con- science leads. His almost unparalleled powers of eloquence have become well known through- out the country, and the fame of them is destined to pass into history.
Frederick Douglas was a slave by birth, who secured his freedom first by flight and afterward by paying his master his commercial value in cash to enable him to avoid being victimized by the Fugitive Slave Law. He distinguished himself by writing a book en- titled " My Bondage and My Freedom," which had a wide circulation, and by some subtle and secret methods, found its way into various parts of the South, where it caused great commotion. Mr. Douglas is now Recorder of Deeds in the District of Columbia.
Jane Gray Swishelm was born in Pittsburgh, Penn., December 6, 1815, descended from the old Scotch Reformers, and also from the amia- ble Lady Jane Gray, the nine days' Queen of England. In January, 1848, she started the
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Pittsburgh Saturday Visitor, a paper devoted to various reforms, but especially to the anti- slavery cause. This paper supported Van Buren when a Free-Soil candidate for the Pres- idency as she says " to smash one of the great pro-slavery parties of the nation, and gain an anti-slavery balance of power to counteract the slavery vote for which both contended." This paper, together with many other anti-slavery sheets, were the entering-wedge of disintegra- tion to the political poliey which had hitherto courted the favor of the slavery interest as in- despensable to success ; for they forced their sentiments into the ranks of the old Whig party till there was little left of it but a shell after its abolition element was brought to the sur- face. In the spring of 1857, Mrs. Swishelm established the Visitor at St. Cloud, Minn., soon afterward taking the lecture field as an aboli- tionist. Her path was a thorny one, but she succeeded with her paper in spite of mobs and threats, and the old public functionaries of Minnesota recoiled before her oratorieal and ed- itorial power, and finally sunk below the sur- face to rise no more.
In 1881, Mrs. Swishelm published her book entitled " Half a Century," which is a valuable record of the stirring time indicated in its title. She now lives at Swissvale, near Pittsburgh, still vigorous in mind and body.
Henry B. Stanton was one of the Lane Sem- inary students at the time of the anti-slavery excitement there. He was from Rochester, N. Y. He was a man of talent, a fine speaker, and soon took a prominent part in the Aboli- tion movement. His field of labor was mostly in New England and New York. Some of the time he was associated with James G. Birney. He was one of the originators of the Liberty party. He is still living, hale and hearty-a New York lawyer.
Hooper Warren, a native of Windsor, Vt., a printer by trade, and an editor by profession. The early anti-slavery man in Illinois when
the State was admitted into the Union, pub- lished the Edwardsville Spectator from about 1820 to 1826, which at the time was the only paper that opposed the introduction of slavery into Illinois. In that issue, he was a coadjutor of Gov. Coles, and first nominated him as a candidate for Governor. He was editor, in 1841 and 1842, with Z. Eastman, of the Genius of Liberty. He died at the home of his daughter at Mendota, in 1864. He was one of those who early shaped the anti-slavery move- ment in the West, from Hooper Warren, through Lovejoy, on to the culmination of the reform in the election of Abraham Lincoln, which was manifestly the result of their ef- forts.
Jonathan Blanchard, a native of Vermont, took strong anti-slavery ground when he, a young man, started out in life, armed with a college diploma and an uncompromising spirit toward slavery and secret societies. He was early associated with the abolition movement, and was outspoken as to the impolicy of slav- ery when Henry Ward Beecher, his associate, stood on neutral ground, under the wing of his venerable father, Dr. Lyman Beecher, of Cin- cinnati. Mr. Blanchard was a settled pastor over a church in Cincinnati in 1848, and, dur- ing his residence at that place, held a debate with Rev. Dr. Rice, a pro-slavery minister of his own denomination, which debate was pub- lished in book form, and is now a kind of rare old relie sometimes found on second-hand booksellers' shelves, labeled " scarce," and sold at an advance on its original price.
From Cincinnati, Mr. Blanchard removed to Galesburg, where he became President of Knox College, after remaining at which place a few years he came to Wheaton, and has been Presi- dent of the college at this place till 1882, when he voluntarily resigned for his son Charles to take his place. He is still vigorous in mind, with a positiveness of purpose whose limit has not yet been overtaken by his advancing years.
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Ichabod Codding was born in Bristol, Onta- rio Co., N. Y., September 23, 1810. Secretary Chase acknowledged him to be the greatest orator he ever heard. He was educated at Middlebury College, Vt., and came to Illinois in 1842, by invitation of Mr. Eastman, to take the lecture field in the anti-slavery agitation at the West, and it is not too much to say that his influenee in this growing locality had much to do in developing that sentiment that made it possible to nominate one of its sons to the Presidency of the United States. Mr. Codding died at Baraboo, Wis., June 17, 1866.
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Zebina Eastman, born in Amherst, Mass., a printer by trade and an educated journalist, having studied for that profession, he suc- ceeded Mr. Lundy, the pioneer, in editing his paper in Illinois, in 1839. In 1841, edited the Genius of Liberty, with Hooper Warren. In 1842, removed to Chicago, by invitation of Dr. C. V. Dyer and Philo Carpenter, and com- menced the publication of the Western Citizen, then the only anti-slavery paper in the North- west, with the exception of the Philanthropist, at Cincinnati. The Citizen was continued till 1855. He was a coadjutor with Elihu Burritt in his League of Brotherhood and a member of the Peace Congress at Frankfort, Germany, in 1850. He was appointed by Lincoln Consul at Bristol in 1861. He now resides near Chicago, and is in the employment of the Government. The policy of the anti-slavery agitation shaped in the Citizen was in some sense distinct from the issues of the Eastern Abolitionists. It was more definitely political and for the restoration of the Declaration of Independence in the Government, and was the poliey on which anti- slavery principles triumphed in the election of Mr. Lincoln.
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Dr. Charles V. Dyer, the famous Abolitionist of Chicago. and eminent as a manager of the Underground Railroad, a noted wit and ever a pronounced active man. The colored people of Chicago presented him with a gold-headed
eane for having broken a previous one over the head of a slave-eatcher. He was appointed by President Lincoln Judge of the Slave Trade Court at Sierra Leone. Died at Chicago in 1877.
Charles Durkee, residing at Kenosha, Wis., was the first anti-slavery Congressman from Wisconsin, and afterward United States Sen- ator. He was a very effective man in the anti- slavery cause in the early days of its agitation in the Northwest. He was a member of the Peace Congress at Paris in 1849.
Elihu B. Washburn, born at Livermore, Me., September 23, 1816, was elected to Congress from Galena, Ill., November, 1852, by the votes of the Old Whig party and the Abolitionists who joined them. Ile took his seat in the Thirty- third Congress in December, 1853, and to the utmost of his power resisted the passage of the Kansas and Nebraska bill, and voted for every measure tending to the abolition of slavery. In his eight subsequent elections to Congress, he received the entire abolition vote of his dis- triet.
He was a strong advocate for the nomination of Mr. Lincoln in 1860, and was his confiden- tial friend and adviser during his administra- tion.
Was appointed Secretary of State by Gen. Grant in 1869, occupying that position but a short time, when he was sent as a minister to France, in March, 1869. He held this position eight and a half years, during which time the Franco-German war took place.
He was charged with the protection of the German nationalities in Paris and France. He was recalled at his own request, in 1877, since which time he has resided in Chicago.
Edward Coles was the earliest and most dis- tinguished Abolitionist that ever lived in Illi- nois, and was the second Governor of the State. Ile was born in Virginia in 1786. His father was a large slaveholder, and at his death be- queathed to him a plantation with a large num-
.
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ber of slaves. Determining not to live in a slave-holding State, nor to hold slaves, he sold bis plantation, liberated all his slaves, giving to each 160 acres of land in Illinois and re- moved to Illinois in 1819. From his earliest childhood, he imbibed the most intense hatred of slavery, and devoted the earlier part of his life to the cause of abolitionism. He was Governor of Illinois at the time of the colossal and desperate struggle to make it a Slave State, and all his official and personal influence was wielded to defeat that great iniquity. To him more than to any other man is Illinois indebted for being a free State.
A sketch of Gen. Coles and of the slavery struggle of 1823 and 1824, has been prepared by Hon. E. B. Washburn, which will form a valuable contribution to early Illinois history. Gov. Coles died in Philadelphia in 1868.
William Henry Seward was born in Florida, Orange Co., N. Y., May 16, 1801. When the issue of a slavery or anti-slavery policy came before the administration, he became an em- phatic anti-slavery advocate, and ever after- ward was faithful to that principle. He was the author of that forcible term, the "irre- pressible conflict," which, the sequel shows, was no empty name. He was appointed Sec- retary of State by Lincoln in 1861, and it is to his able foreign policy that our nation owed the preservation of peace abroad during our Rebellion. Mr. Seward died in Auburn, N. Y., October 10, 1872.
Theodore Parker, an independent Unitarian minister of Boston, almost initiated a new school in theology, which might be styled the religion of humanity, and was a very effective laborer in the anti-slavery cause, without attaching himself to any of its sects. He was born at Lexington, Mass., in 1812, on the consecrated ground of the Revolution, and was the grand- son of one of its early heroes, Capt. John Parker. During the time of the fierce anti-slavery agi- tation, he delivered occasionally a great sermon
or an address, on the intense points of the con- test then at issue. At the time of the attempted enforcement of the fugitive slave law, he mani- fested a most fierce hostility to its enforcement ; and, at one time, he addressed a large concourse of his fellow-citizens in Federal Hall, counseling effective passive resistence, while the corridors of the hall were filled with files of United States soldiers with fixed bayonets, ordered there to preserve the peace and enforce the law. He de- fied the soldiery, and he declared that he should march out between their files when he had closed his speech ! Horace Greeley, of the New York Tribune, was always among the most anxious to publish the forcible productions of Theo- dore Parker. He died at Florence, Italy, where he had gone for the purpose of rejuvenating his gradually perishing vitality on the 16th of May, 1860. This strong and intellectually great man, who had lived such an active life, expressed regret, when he came to die, that he had accom- plished so little for humanity.
John Quincy Adams, the sixth President of the United States, and son of the second Presi- dent, was one of the greatest statesmen and remarkable men the country has produced. He was born at Quincy, Mass., July 11, 1867, and was a youth, and doubtless very much inspired by the events, during the period of our Revo- lutionary war. He should be regarded as among the most foremost of the anti-slavery men of the country, though he avowed no affinity with any of the organizations or sects that grew out of the agitation. He was in fact the first political victim to the slave power of the country, that for a generation slaugh- tered its thousands of advanced men, and the manhood of millions of the politicians of the country ; for it was because he was not a slave-holder, and was a man of the North more than for anything else that he was de- feated for the Presidency for the second term by Andrew Jackson ; from this period the sectional feeling for the protection of slavery took its
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rise. Mr. Adams, after his return to Congress, beginning a new career in political life, after he had once run its course to the Presidency, be- came specially known as the champion of the right of petition ; a sacred political and civil constitutional right, which had been smitten down in the interest of slavery at the behest of the slave leaders. Mr. Adams, from his expe- rience in political life from the beginning of the Government, and his once personal contact with its influence, knew more than any other man of the insidnous wiles of the growing slave power, and he knew better than any other man how to combat it. His was an in- dividual life of combat with that power, with- ont support from party or combination. The conflicts with it is one of the sublimest mani- festations of the career of the politician and statesman the country has ever furnished ; and in it he sought for no co-operation from any clique or combination, and seems to stand alone like the form of a giant, fighting for human and constitutional rights of the fellow-men. As he had good reason to suspect the iniquities that were covered in the heap of meal, he delved into the maturing plot, for the robbing of Mexico of her province of Texas, and get- ting special information from old Benjamin Lundy, who had traveled largely in Texas for the purpose of settling a colony of emancipated slaves there, he astonished the slave-holding plotters and the nation at large by exposing in a great speech in Congress in 1836 the whole plan of securing the annexation of Texas for the purpose of extending the area of slavery, as the programme was some years later liter- ally carried out. Mr. Adams virtually defined the slave power as a political combination, though he did not give it that name, when he said that it " was a power in American politics that governed the Government."
He gave no special encouragement to any plan of political action in hostility to slavery ; gave no special countenance to Garrison or the
Liberty party, though he was particularly con- fidential with Benjamin Lundy and Joshua R. Giddings, but worked on, partially in sympathy with the party to which he nominally belonged, in hostility to the Jackson party, though himself an original Democrat, and the last of the Jeffersonian Presidents. Standing very much alone, and, for many years, con- temned by all parties ; not apparently perceiv- ing any ground for a voting opposition to slav- ery as an institution bulwarked in the reserved rights of the States, and therefore was not a political Abolitionist, and looking probably to its extirpation by moral force alone, as dis- couraging as it then seemed to be. But to this wise man above his generation was given the foresight to predict the policy and the way in which slavery was finally abolished by the war power. Abraham Lincoln adopted the doctrine of John Quincy Adams when he used the war power of the nation to abolish slavery. It was this power, which John Quincy Adams portrayed in a great speech in 1836, as the only possible way in which the nation could reach slavery and put it out of existence. The slaveholders madly invoked that power, and met its recoil in the destruction of their pet institution.
Mr. Adams was suddenly stricken down, with his fighting armor ou, on the floor of the Representative Hall, and taken to a committee room, where he died in February, 1848, and his last words were remarkable for so remarkable a man-" This is the last of earth."
Cassius MI. Clay, a native of Kentucky, and an early anti-slavery man of the South, who made himself most odious in his native section for his hostility to their cherished institution. He was born in Madison County, Ky., in 1811, and is still alive. He edited, in 1845, the True American, an anti-slavery newspaper in Lexington, at the time of the most intense ex- citement. He defended his press against the mob spirit by the well-known efficiency of his
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tried rifle ; but being prostrated by severe ill- ness, the mob improved the opportunity, and they broke up his newspaper establishment and shipped the fragments of his material out of the State. Horace Greeley, who was foremost in encouraging him, published a volume of his anti-slavery speeches in 1848.
John P. Hale, born in Rochester, N. H., March 31, 1806, and died soon after his return from Madrid as United States Minister, under Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1873. He is distinguished as the leading politician under the Liberty party, and was that party's candi- date for the Presidency after James G. Birney, until it was merged into the Republican party. lle is known as the first successful rebel against the slave power, he at that time being a nom- inee of the Democratic party for Congress ; op- posed the annexation of Texas ; was stricken out of the party roll of candidates ; and the people taking him up, he was elected United States Senator. He was first nominated for the Presidency by the Western Citizen of Chi- cago, in 1858, and about six months after was indorsed by the National Liberty Party Con- vention. Hle was a genial, jovial man, and very much annoyed the Southern Senators by his pungent criticisms. He was the first anti- slavery man in the Senate, followed afterward by his coadjutors, Chase, Seward, Fessenden and the corps of noble men that in time came to the front, to be the supporters of Lincoln in his arduous responsibilities as the emancipator of 4,000,000 of slaves.
Rev. C. Cook, Congregational minister, was born in Vermont in 1778, graduated at Middle- bury College in 1808, preached in the State of New York till 1837 ; made an anti-slavery ar- gument in the Presbyterian General Assembly at Philadelphia, in 1836. He settled at Henne- pin, Ill., in 1837, and gave anti-slavery lectures in various parts of the State in 1838 and 1839, often being the victim of mob violence.
In 1840, he removed to Aurora, Kane Co.,
Ill., and became pastor of the First Congrega- tional Church. He died at Ottawa, Ill., March 21, 1860, at the house of his son, B. C. Cook. where he spent the last fifteen years of his life.
Horace Grecley was born in Amherst, N. H., February 3, 1811. His father removed to West Haven, Vt., when Horace was but ten years old, where, between the ills of poverty and intemper- ance which were ever present with the father, the education of the son was sadly neglected ; but the young child of fortune possessed by nature the wherewithal to educate himself, as he paddled his own canoe through the waves of the great sea of life. At the age of fifteen, he was apprenticed to the printing business, after learning which trade he went to New York, ar- riving in August, 1831. Here he worked at his trade till June 1, 1833, when he became one of the proprietors of the Morning Post, the first penny daily ever published in America. On March 22, 1834, the New Yorker was started with Mr. Greeley as editor. In the stirring times of 1840, he published the Log Cabin, a campaign paper in the interest of Gen. Har- rison's election to the Presidency, and the next year he commenced the publication of the New York Tribune, which paper he planted deep in the estimation of every thinker in America, in- cluding not only political economists, but even erratic dabblers in every species of reform, or whatever was claimed to be such-all had their "say" in the columns of the Tribune. Of course, slavery became a target for his keenest darts, and from the first to the last of the con- flict between the slavery and anti-slavery in- terest he never ceased to " pour hot shot" into the ranks of the enemies of universal freedom, all the more effective because Mr. Greeley him- self was free from any entanglements to cripple his own action, having no alliances with any party whose interests could be compromised by the downfall of slavery. Under his masterly pen, the Tribune soon took the highest rank in American journalism, and its circulation was
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