USA > Missouri > Cole County > Jefferson City > The Bench and bar of St. Louis, Kansas City, Jefferson City, and other Missouri cities : biographical sketches > Part 48
USA > Missouri > St Louis County > St Louis City > The Bench and bar of St. Louis, Kansas City, Jefferson City, and other Missouri cities : biographical sketches > Part 48
USA > Missouri > Jackson County > Kansas City > The Bench and bar of St. Louis, Kansas City, Jefferson City, and other Missouri cities : biographical sketches > Part 48
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To show how the steady, even course and the great ability of Mr. Culver have been recognized, it is a pleasure to record that but a few months ago, entirely unsolicited and unexpected by him, he was appointed by the administration of the city government to the position of assistant city counselor, which office he now holds. When it is remembered that there were a large number of applicants for this appointment, the fact that it was voluntarily tendered to Mr. Culver bears strong testimony to his qualification and fitness for so important a place.
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As an advocate Mr. Culver is strong, both with court and jury. In present- ing legal positions to a court he is concise in statement, logical in argument, and canest in his manner. He is fluent of speech, and in presenting his case to the jury has a plain, common-sense, persuasive style, which, when the theme admits of it, rises into eloquence, and obtains verdicts.
In politics he is republican, but while tenacious of his principles, he has that liberality which allows to every man the right to think for himself on all subjects, and finds many of his warmest friends in other political parties.
Mr. Culver has two children, a daughter of nine and a little son of four years. He has a strong constitution, delights in bodily exercise, and is always cheerful, hopetul, and good-humored. He is one of those young men to whom the future is be koning and saying, Come up higher.
HON. DANIEL T. JEWETT.
THE subject of this sketch is one of the best known lawyers at the Saint Louis bar. He has for many years been a practitioner in all of the courts, and is one of that kind of men who is not easily forgotten. He is learned in bis profession, understanding all of its technicalities, and he knows well how to take advantage of them. It does not seem that he has taken for a model either Cicero or Demosthenes, but he has a rapid, vehement, earnest emphasis, and deals in logic and facts, in a style peculiar to himself. He takes bold positions, and supports them with all of the ardor known to a sanguine temperament.
Mr. Jewett's early days were spent in his native town, Pittston, in the state of Maine, a small village situated on the easterly bank of the Kennebec River, oppo- site the sprightly little city of Gardiner. We are not informed how he spent the days of his boyhood, but it does not require a marvelous stretch of the imagina- tion to place him either at the village school, suffering chastisement from the terule of the ancient Yankee pedagoque, or to find him drawing alewives with a seine, from the waters of that grand old stream.
He embarked in divers enterprises, and was engaged in several different kinds of employment, and rumor has it that he was quite a traveler in his younger days. We find him at one time a student in Waterville College (now Colby University, Waterville, Maine), but for some reason he did not finish his course at that insti- tution, but later he entered Columbia College, Washington, District of Columbia,
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and he was graduated from that institution during the administration of President Jackson. He studied law, and was admitted to the bar in Maine, and was at one time associated in practice with Hon. Samuel I Blake, of Bangor, a scholarly gentleman, well known at the bar of that state. He first made his appearance in the Saint Louis courts in 1857, and for a greater portion of the time since then has been actively engaged in the practice of his profession. He was a member of the Missouri legislature two years, in 1807-8, and was appointed United States senator, by the governor, in i870, to fill a vacancy.
Mr. Jewett is the son of Daniel and Betsey (Tarbox) Jewett, and a brother of Ilon. A. G. Jewett, a lawyer of considerable celebrity, of Belfast, Maine. He was married in 1848, to a daughter of Mr. John Wilson, of Belfast, Maine. They have two children.
DANIEL K. HALL.
HARRISONVILLE.
D ANIEL KERNS HALL was for several years one of the foremost men at the Cass county bar, and is one of the most successful lawyers. He retired from active practice four years ago, and is now attending to his land interest, having several farms in Cass county. Mr. Hall was born in Dearborn county, Indiana, September 5, 1833; son of Daniel and Sabra ( Knox) Hall, both natives of Maine To a common-school education, our subject added two terms at an academy in Danville, Illinois. He had a little experience in teaching, in Ver- million county, Indiana; read law at Monmouth, Ilinois, with John T. Morgan and General A. E. Payne, was admitted to the bar at Ottawa by the supreme court of Illinois in 18bo, and was in practice at Taylorville when civil war broke out. In July, 1861, he went into the army as first lieutenant of company G, fist Illinois infantry, and in 1502 was promoted to the rank of captain. He was wounded at Jackson, Mississippi, July 12, 180}, being shot in the left thigh, hav- ing the sciatic nerve nearly severed, and he has never ceased to suffer from that wound. He was held a prisoner five days; was laid up for nine or ten months, and then promoted to assistant commissary of subsistence, which position he hold until the rebellion collapsed, being in the service in all over four years.
On leaving the army, Captain Hall spent a few months in brushing up his legal knowledge, and in December, 1865, commenced practice at Harrisonville He was in partnership with Hon. Noah M. Givan, now judge of the seventh judi- cial circuit, until that gentleman went on the beach, in the autumn of 1877.
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Since 1886 Captain Hall has given his attention exclusively to his farming inter- ests and private business. He has a very tenacious memory, and what he once learns, whether in law or any other branch of knowledge, he retains. He is well posted in the common law, has a good judgment, and while in practice he made an excellent counselor. He made a specialty of real-estate law.
Mr. Hall is a member of the chapter and commandery in Masonry, and of the Baptist Church. He was married in March, 1867, to Miss Lucy J. Hawley, of Ripley county, Indiana, and they have buted one daughter, and have five chil- dren living
HON. DAVID MEGAUGHEY. BUTTER.
O NIE of the oldest lawyers and leading men in Bates county, is David Mc- Ganghey, a member of this but since 1865, and for five years the judge of the twenty-second judicial circuit. He was born near Mount Carmel, Franklin county, Indiana, August 20, 1826. His father, Robert MeGaughey, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and his grandfather, David Mccaughey, for whom he was named, was of Scotch-Irish blood, being born in the West of Ireland. He left that coun- try on account of political trouble, came to this land, whose freedom was yet to be secured, and was an aid to General Washington
The mother of our subject was Mary Clark, who was born at Indian Hill, Hamilton county, Ohio, and whose parents were natives of New Jersey. Robert MEGaughey was a farmer, and reared his children in habits of industry, and gave them also a fair education. David entered Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, in 1845, and remained there three yours, subsequently devoting his time to teaching in different parts of the South and West.
In 185% he commenced the study of Laws in the office of Governor Wallace, at Indianapolis, and in the summer of the next year he went to Des Moines, Iowa, and engaged in locating land warrants for eastern parties, and in surveying.
In 1858 Mr. McGaughey moved to Andrew county, this state, located at Hack- berry Ridge, where he taught school two or three terms, then went to Albany, the judicial town of Gentry county, and opened a law office, and in i86o he was elected county superintendent of schools.
For some time during the civil war our subject resided at Falls City, Nebraska, and while there he was prosecuting attorney for the county of Richardson, and was appointed superintendent of schools by the county court.
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The war being ended, in August, 1865. Mr. MeGaughey returned to this state, settled at Butler, Bates county, and devoted himself to the practice of his profes. sion, until he went on the beach, on the organization of the twenty-second judicial circuit in 1800. He left a good record as a jurist, as he has also done as a lawyer.
Judge MeGaughey served for several years as county superintendent of schools, and was at one period president of the board of directors of Butler Academy. He has long taken great interest in the cause of education, and indeed in every good cause. He has been a total abstainer from alcoholic liquors for nearly forty years, and has often lectured on temperance in this state and Iowa.
He is a member of the Old-School Presbyterian Church, and was for years an elder in that Christian body. The goodness of his nature and the high tone of his character are known far and wide, and his life is a lesson to the young.
Judge MeGaughey was married in October, 1875, to Miss Dorcas Tuttle, of Bates county, and they have three children.
HON. FRANK P. BLAIR.
SAINT LOUIS.
T HE following address was delivered by Colonel Thomas T. Gantt before a special meeting of the Blair Monument Association, held at the Lindell Hotel. October 18, 1881:
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE BEAR MONUMENT ASSOCIATION,- We have been now for more than two years organized for the purpose of erecting a monument to Frank Blair. We have no cause to congratulate ourselves upon the progress we have made. All that has been done in the way of raising money was accomplished in the first six months of our existence, and all the contribu- tions made may be said to have been unsolicited. It is to a certain degree grat. ifying that so much has been spontaneously paid in, but we ought to take blame to ourselves that the whole city has not been thoroughly canvassed. During the last six months I have conversed with many, to whom I spoke with some animad- version of the slackness of our people to do honor to one who so eminently deserved well of the republic ; but I have met with the retort that the association itself has been sitting with folded arms, and doing literally nothing to secure the cooperation of hundreds who recognize the services, acknowledge the virtues, and are willing to do homage to the memory of Francis P. Blair, but who need to be approached, and, in some measure, solicited before they will take definite
Freuch P. Blair
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action toward a memorial of one of the principal benefactors and ornaments of the state and city.
To me, who knew Frank Blair from his arrival here in the spring of 18.12 until his death in July, 1875; who was in the enjoyment of familiar friendship with him during the whole of that period ; who was a witness of his career as youth and man during a most momentous portion of our history, and who marked the course of the man from his first entrance into public life down to his death, it seems strange and unaccountable that there should be any slackness on the part of the people of Missouri to honor themselves by doing honor to Francis P. Blair, and to put on record an enduring testimonial of his public services, and of their sense of the deep debt they owe to him.
frank Blair had graduated in the spring of 1842, when he came to Saint Louis to prepare himself, in the office of has elder brother, for the practice of the law. He was young, ardent, full of talent, full of spirit, and he soon became the center of an admiring circle of young friends. While devoting himself mainly to the study of jurisprudence, he gave more attention than was bestowed by most young men to the political questions which then agitated our country. In politics he was thoroughly Bentonian, and that phrase means that he was invin- cibly opposed to the heresies of paper money ; to secession, or as it was then called, nullification ; to all schemes for plundering the treasury by subsidies and land grants, and to all the plans more or less covertly entertained of creating a southern confederacy, and educating a sentiment which would look with toler- ance or complacency on the disruption of the Union. That such schemes of disruption were entertained at that early day is undeniable. The Jackson res- olutions passed by our legislature in 1849, in favor of which many unthinking men voted in ignorance of their mischievous scope, were the later product of intrigues which had been set on foot many years before, and which were sup- posted in that year to have reached a triumphant culmination.
Not for a moment was Frank Blair the dupe of the pretension that this and similar measures were simply self-protective on the part of the slave states. From the first he was an advocate of the annexation of Texas, and he was a soldier in the war which that annexation involved. But he was resolute in the determination not to make slave territory out of that portion of New Mexico which was ceded to us by the treaty of peace in 1848. He saw all the conse- quences of the pretensions of the South to a right to carry its peculiar institu- tions into lands as yet uncursed by negro slavery ; to make their acquisition as United States territory the condition of their being devoted to a system which
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had blighted the fairest portion of our own country, and checked the advance of civilization in those regions of it most favored by soil and climate. Against this hideous consummation be set hunselt like flint. So immense is the difference in our condition caused by the last thirty years, so total is the change in our senti- ments in that time, that it requires some effort of memory to do justice to the men who were mainly instrumental in bringing about that change. It seems a slight thing now that in 1849, in 1856, in 1852, and during all the years from that date to 1861, Frank Blair was an avowed, intrepid, unflinching opponent of every man and every measure that even squinted at disunion. At this day we are of one mind. No man not fit for bedlam in the whole broad country, if he could by a word, by the lifting of a finger, bring back negro slavery, or dissolve the Union which makes us free, prosperous, and happy, would dream of framing the wish or litting the finger.
We can hardly transport ourselves in imagination back to the time when myriads were ready to die for the maintenance of the one and the accomplish- ment of the other of these objects, and when the man who ventured to tell his fellow-citizens in a slave state, that by supporting the measures and following the lead of the nullifiers they were preparing for themselves incalculable evil, encountered personal dangers from which all but a very few shrank. It certainly is true, however, that no more time-serving politician, and no man of any princi- ples, unless he was at the same time endowed with rare courage, and a prevision which pierced through the mists of present party strife and discerned the coming on of time, was to be found in the band who, led by Francis P. Blair, and sym- pathizing with him, stood forth as the champions and advocates, through good report and evil report, of the imperishable Union of these states ; who pro- claimed themselves, as did Washington, Jefferson and Madison, the reluctant toterators of negro slavery where it was already established, but the determined enemies of its extension ; and who warned all men against the insidious designs by which it was sought to plunge the whole country into civil war, and to com- mit the fairest part of it to barbarism.
I wish with all my heart that I could boast of having been one of the band who, from 1856 to 1800, stood beside Frank Blair in the maintenance of these political tenets, but I am not able to make this claim. I was in those years a Douglas democrat, but not one of those advanced thinkers who discerned clearly the nature of the coming struggle. There are in this body some who had that honor. Some of them are high in your councils. They are, by the memory of what they did and dared when all seemed dank and uncertain to others, entitled
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to a distinction of the proudest kind. Of course I mention no names ; but those survivors who stood nearest to Frank Blair in that trying crisis will testify that, without his leadership and elation voice, the banner they upbore would in all likelihood have trailed in the dust, and that to him it is preeminently due that Missouri, when the hour chosen by the secessionists had struck, was not in the Same unprepared, disorganized condition that prevailed in Virginia.
I must be permitted to pause a moment here. I will not detain you by the enumeration of the events which marked that time of revolution ; but I say what all who remember that period will admit, that it was owing to Frank Blair above any other man, and above all other men, that in 1801 Missouri was stanch to the Union and irreconcilably opposed to all schemes for its dissolution. Nor is this all. In that dread hour, example was contagious. If Missouri had faltered, Kentucky would most probably have joined the ranks of the disunionists ; and each of these two great and powerful states, having a larger white population than Virginia, would have been as Virginia was, a member of the southern con- federacy. Let no one dream that it mattered little how Missouri and Kentucky spoke as states, seeing that all those in either state who had secession proclivi- ties, and the courage of their opinions, found themselves sooner or later in the confederate ranks. It did matter. In the month of February, 1801, Virginia elected a convention which was pledged to the Union cause by a tremendous popular majority, a majority as great, numerically, as that which spoke in the summe month in Missouri. But when Fort Sumter was taken, when " the smell of blood" went up, these Union men lost their heads. They were carried away by violence, and yielded to a current which they found to be irresistible. There are times when a leader of men is of incalculable value ; when
"One blast upon his bugle bom Is worth ten thousand men'"
I am not speaking the language of extravagante when I declare my belief that if such a man as Frank Blan had lived in Virginia from 1815 to 1800 her convention would never have been able to drag that proud state in the wake of South Carolina ; and if Virginia had stood as stood Missouri, in INOr, the civil war, in all human likelihood, would have been stifled in its birth. We must not lose sight of another fact, which is that the Union men throughout the whole South were far more faithful to their agreement to abide the decision of the state, speaking in its organic capacity, than were the secessionists. When the ordinance of secession was adopted in Virginia the foremost Unionists, even the stout Jubal Early, abandoned their former position and became the best soldiers
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of the confederacy. They acquiesced perhaps too tamely in a result which cer- Mainly was not reached without some most questionable arts, by cajolery, com- bined with intimidation and appeal to popular violence; and, except for the steadiness with which they endeavored to make good with their fortunes and their lives what within their hearts they condemned as a political heresy, they might be suspected of something like timidity. But they manfully supported the act of their erring mother, and presented an unbroken front to the federal armies. So it would have been in Missouri and Kentucky, if these states had, as organic bodies, declared for secession. They did declare for the Union ; and, although the secessionists in each state, not imitating the candor and manliness of the Virginia I'nionists, refused to abide by what the states in convention resolved, and though to the utmost of their power they sought to undo and set at naught the decision by which they had previously declared their willingness to abide, they were unable to transfer to the wrong scale the majority of the people and the prestige of the state governments. If Missouri and Kentucky could have been reduced to the condition of Virginia, instead of that one heroic state being compelled almost alone to uphold the cause of disunion, there would have been a phalanx of three such states opposed to the national authority, and instead of Missouri and Kentucky being counted on the Union side, they would have been arrayed against it. Whoever remembers how equal the chances of battle more than once appeared, can well understand what fearful odds would have been cast against us by the transfer of two such states from our side to that of the enemy ; and that there was no such transfer, was, as I verily believe, more owing to Francis P. Blair than to any other man, living or dead.
I must hasten to a close. I will not chromele the deeds of the gallant soldier, the heroic commander of the 17th army corps. I will not pause to commem- brate the dauntless courage, which, on the bloody field of Resacas, after the gallant MePherson had fallen, repelled the fiery onset of Hond. I come to the time when, the war being over, and the last armed soldier in opposition to the rightful authority of the constitution having surrendered, Frank Blair returned to Missouri to find that the conditions, and pledges, upon which the soldiers of the Union had compelled this surrender, were shamefully violated. He found that the war which was ended in the field by the surrender of Lee and Johnston, was still continued at home by some gentlemen who had never heard the whistle of a hostile buffet. He found that a large number of Missourians were dis- franchised by an unconstitutional act of usurpation and oppression. The men thus disfranchised were at that time no friends of Frank Blair. They had never
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sympathized with, but had always opposed him before the war. Many were fresh from fields where their duty had been to aim at his life. The party, in whose name these oppressions were practiced upon his political enemies, was one to the birth of which Frank Blair had eminently contributed, and whose tri- umphant position was largely due to his exertions. There was no reward in the gift of that party, to which he might not reasonably have aspired. It was in a dominant position throughout the whole restored Union. It required courage of a different kind from that which had so often braved death in the field (may I not say courage of a far rarer and more exalted type?) to buckler the cause of those who so lately were his enemies, and to resign all hope of favor from the party which he had raised to ascendancy. But to refrain from this magnani. mous resolution would have required Frank Blair to break his pledges and for- leit his honor; and this was simply impossible for that high-hearted man. Without a moment's hesitation he became the champion of his down-trodden lellow-citizens, and stood defiantly between them and their oppressors. These words may seem to some like a figure of thetoric. Those who remember 1865, and all the dreary term of ostracism and misrule from that date until the end of IN70, will know better. It was Frank Blair who, more than any other man, by his far-seeing statesmanstup prevented Missouri from being joined in 1861 to the southern confederacy. By the same act he preserved Kentucky, and dealt "the severest blow to the disunionists. It was the same Frank Blair, who, as much as any other man, vindicated in the field the rightful authority of the federal govern- ment ; and it was he more than any other man, who, when the sword was sheathed in 1865, upheld the imprescriptible rights of American freemen, and exhibited on that conspicuous scene the generosity which won the hearts of the brave men against whom he had so lately stood a for, but who, when they cast down their arms, found him their best friend. This heroic, magnanimous, clear-sighted, luge-hearted man has passed away from earth, and some of us have desired to erect some suitable memorial of his merits, and our gratitude.
What is the significance of a monument erected by survivors to any one ? The act can only spring from a wish to do honor to his memory. "Whom doth the king delight to honor ?" has been well said to be the question which most of all, concerns the honor of the king. We have nothing to do with kings, but the people are in this land the fountain of authority and honor, as monarchs are in some other countries; and it becomes the people to see to it, that as honor is not lavished on those who deserve it not, so it shall not be withheld from those to whom it is due as a debt of the highest obligation. 57
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The purpose of a monument is twofold; it commemorates the virtues of the dead, and holds them up as an example to the living. To all who can admire the devotion, by Frank Blair, of his lite, his health, and his fortune to the service of the public, his ardent patriotism, his foresight, his patience and his courtesy, joined, however, with its essential companion, his dauntless courage, down to 1861 ; the valor with which he maintained in the field the opinion he had advo- cated in the council chamber ; and to crown all, the self-sacrificing generosity with which he made good, at whatever loss to himself, the principles to support which he drew his sword, to all these, it is believed, the appeal may be confi- dently made to contribute to do honor to one who has so many titles to our respect and admiration Those who have no sympathy with magnanimity like his ; who can see nothing deserving applause or imitation in his career ; who can deliberately say that they esteem him a tool for having preferred the public good to his own, and for having come out of twenty years of public service rich in honor, but in estate an impoverished man, will, it is hoped, withhold all aid to his monument ; will refuse to add one stone to his cairn.
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