History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio, Part 25

Author: Williams Brothers
Publication date: 1879
Publisher:
Number of Pages: 443

USA > Ohio > Lake County > History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio > Part 25
USA > Ohio > Geauga County > History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio > Part 25

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"' Besides all these reasons, pledges look to me like a purchase of votes. I cannot stoop to it. I should expect hereafter to be spurned by my own constitu- ents for servility, for destitution of moral courage and independence of character, without which a public agent is a public curse.'

" I stand before the people of this senatorial district as their conventionally- nominated candidate. I avow myself proud of the distinction ; and if the people see fit to repose in me so much confidence as is necessary to the proper and hon- orable discharge of the duties of their senator, I trust I shall not abuse it. But if it is their pleasure to fetter their members by positive promises, I can only say that on such terms I cannot, conscientiously, serve them.

" I am, gentlemen, with great respect,

" Your fellow-citizen, " WM. L. PERKINS.

" Messrs. O. A. CRARY, S. HUNTOON, SAMUEL BUTLER, AND ED. PAINE, "Committee."

On his way to Columbus, for he was elected by an overwhelming vote, he learned that the auditor had resolved to expose the board of public works in his annual report. He hastened to the auditor's office for confirmation, and to arrange united action : said to him, " You know, Mr. Brough, this will be your political death." " Yes,". he replied, " but I am the financial officer of the State, and without their reformation and reduction of expenses, and a larger revenue, the State must soon repudiate on my hands, and political death in that manner would be certain and disgraceful." The exposure came. The retrenchment bill, and the bill for an act to appoint a committee to investigate the affairs of the board of public works, were early introduced. The first reduced the fees and salaries of all State officers, including the executive, the judiciary, and the legislative, about one-third; the per diem of members of the Legislature, from three dollars to two dollars. Both were opposed by the Democratic vote, and the first by offensive amendments. First, striking out the name of their champion, the State printer, and finally by repealing the docket fee of the lawyers. In every form the bill took it received the finally successful advocacy of Mr. Perkins, though he was repeatedly appealed to by lawyers, members of his own party, to abandon it. The success of the other bill was the eventual reformation of the board of public works. During his successive terms in the Legislature, he was always chairman of the committees of the judiciary and of common schools. Among the important acts of legislation were the acts to provide more effectually for a correct and equal assessment of money, and of capital in trade, for the purpose of taxation, and

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HISTORY OF GEAUGA AND LAKE COUNTIES, OHIO.

pointing out the mode of levying taxes, and the act to tax money-brokers, and the grand institution of "The State Bank of Ohio." This was specially in and under the advocacy of Hon. Alfred Kelly, who drew up the bill, and Mr. Per- kins, in whose charge, more especially, was the system of the independent banks. Among the important measures originated and carried through triumphantly, against strong conservative opposition, requiring two sessions to accomplish it, was an act to authorize husbands to insure their lives for the benefit of their wives and children, and an act to protect the wives' property, and the husbands' interest in it from execution to satisfy his debts, and restraining him from conveying or encumbering his interest in her real estate unless she should join in the deed. In 1844 he was elected as one of the presidential electors, and in 1848 was a mem- ber of the Whig convention which nominated President Taylor. He, with all the other Ohio delegates except two, balloted for General Scott, in compliance with the sentiments of their constituents. Upon the result, they did not disguise their disgust. They retired for consultation. A majority were disposed to with- draw, but were prevailed upon, largely by the influence of Mr. Perkins, to return and vote for Mr. Fillmore, who was popular on the Reserve, for Vice-President. The south, seeing that Ohio voted almost unanimously for Fillmore, fell in, as if by way of pacification, and Mr. Perkins always thought Mr. F. owed his nomina- tion to him. On full consideration, seeing that either General Taylor or Cass must be elected, and that it was better for the country that the government should be in the hands of the Whigs, he gave what influence remained to him towards the election of Mr. Taylor, and withdrew forever from politics, and ever after devoted himself to his profession. He was for over twelve years prosecuting attorney, first of Geauga, and then of Lake County, and three terms mayor of Painesville. An active, earnest member of the local school board, and many years president of the incorporated " Educational Society," and a devoted toilsome member of the Congregational church, taking special interest in the Sunday-school and Bible- classes.

He was always, in the Legislature or out, and even early as 1825, as a corre- spondent of the American Mercury, of Hartford, a valiant champion of women's rights, and a zealous worker for the remedying of their wrongs; but never an advocate of " woman's rights," in the more modern acceptation of the term.

In 1868, a mild attack, as the physicians called it, of paralysis seriously im- paired his physical powers. Thereafter he declined all business to the jury, with- out rejecting chancery and other paper business, until, in 1873 and 1874, his last argument in the Supreme Court of Ohio was successfully made, and the case Miller vs. Teachout, reported in O. S. R., vol. xxiv., after more than half a century of successful, honorable practice.

In the earlier years of his life he received occasionally an inspiring visit from the muse. Luxuriating on the banks of the Connecticut, and expecting a visit from the affianced of an elder brother, who resided near Boston, whose patronymic was Bird, and who had asked him to write in her album, the essay as follows appears in his manuscripts :

" Pray, sir, will you write in my album ?"

"I thank you; with pleasure I will, ma'am." For who could the trifle refuse ? It was easy to ask, And 'twas easy to say ; But it is a task, And 'twill take me all day To determine what subject to choose.

I found myself in a dilemma involved,

And all these questions must first be resolved Before I proceed in the matter. Must the subject be grave, Or must it be gay ? Must I rant, must I rave, On a word shall I play ? Will this or will that please her better ?

To solve these doubts and resolve me,

I called on the muses three times three;

But the muses knew naught of the matter.

I complain'd to the sun, I complain'd to the moon, But the sun hurried on, and the moon follow'd'soon, Dryly saying, I made a great clatter. A beautiful star appeared in the west, She'd travel'd along from far in the east ; 'Tis Venus, I think, that they call her. She pitied my plight as she look'd from above, And forthwith dispatch'd her most beautiful dove, With lines on a petal as follow :

" As I flew from the east, borne along by the wind, I passed a fair creature; 'twas one of your kind. She will come, I declare on my word; And you'll quickly indite, For you'll know what to write

When you've seen and conversed with the BIRD."

He was twice married : first, in 1826, to Miss Julia Gillett, a niece of Nathaniel and George Griswold, distinguished importing merchants of the city of New York. By this wife he had one son, William, now in the employ of Pratt & Co., of Buffalo ; and again, in 1837, to Mrs. Margaretta S. Waite, the widow of Robert Waite, a broker, late of the city of New York, daughter of Daniel Oakley, a merchant in Pearl street, in the same city, and niece of Jacob Lorillard. By her he had six children, of whom four died. The survivors are Mary Lee, who married Charles H. Morley, a wholesale and retail hardware merchant of Fort Scott, Kansas, and George, assistant editor of the Daily and Weekly Times, of Cincinnati.

GENERAL JAMES A. GARFIELD.

A STUDY.

We were told that the ancient Greeks sometimes resorted to expedients at dis- cord with our notions to secure excellence in the physical endowments of chil- dren.

In modern times no known effort has been made to breed men with reference to any particular qualities of body or mind. Men, in their superb egotisin, seem- ingly never doubt their capacity to secure offspring of the required pattern, with- out regard to any of the conditions which doubtless control the production of the species. Possibly this subject has not much occupied the attention of many thinkers, with the idea of improving the race. Possibly a student of human physiology and heredity would venture a prediction of the probable result in form, and some of the leading mental features of the offspring of a pair, could he ascer- tain the mental and physical histories of several generations of their ancestors. Whatever might in this way be predicted of bodily form or feature, to men the mental endowment of human offspring seems to be the result of pure accident. Fools of every grade are the product of seemingly well-endowed parents, the result of hidden latent causes. It is seldom, however, that a strong, healthy.brain is the product of two fools, and I doubt whether a really great man was ever born of a mentally weak mother. Whatever might be the mutual contribution of the parents, a mother cannot bestow on her child what is not in her. Nor is there a good or evil genius present that bestows the good, great, or evil gifts which bless or curse. Whatever is is the gift of the two, or the result of their united gifts. The man of practical science will, with some certainty, tell what locality of the earth's surface will yield slate, coal, salt, iron, or gold; he will hazard nothing as to the product of a youth and maiden known to him from their childhood. Nor yet when he sees the child, and marks his form and growth, can he, till the man reveals himself, decide the quality or quantity of the mental endowment.

Great men rarely, perhaps never, appear under seemingly similar circum- stances. A man and woman under the common conditions, and yet marked with minor variations, wed, and a genius is born of them. The vulgar obser- ver's of his advent look to see it repeated from other twos, under similar con- ditions, in vain. So men who observe something mean or common in the early years of a great man's life usually attribute his success to that. In the boyhood of General Garfield, he drove the horses that dragged a canal-boat on an Ohio canal one or two trips, and his biographers have usually set this forth as the lead- ing event of his youth, and quite all that is known of him, and which is supposed to have given the bent and impetus which launched him on the world as one of the great men of his time,-as in the life of a much less conspicuous individual, who was successfully nominated for Congress, an admiring editor, in searching for the pregnant cause of his advance, found it in the fact that while a student at an academy, in boyhood, he sawed two cords of wood for the institution. For boys of moderate ambition doubtless other schools can furnish wood-sawing, but for the more aspiring the Ohio canals offer small facilities.

The birth of a great man is a thing of pure accident to the parents, and this enhances the wonder in the eyes of men. Nature has no accidents, nor is she surprised at her own works. All are equally prepared for and of equal impor- tance to her, which is a comfort. It matters not whether we say Providence had certain results to work out, and prepared a specially-endowed man for its accom- plishment, or that certain particles of organic matter-protoplasm-have certain properties, which flowing along certain vital channels, gathering and losing as they flow, unite when those channels coincide, with a certain result. The ordinary incidents of human life push the ordinary man along the usual courses. He does the common work of life, because he can do no other. The same incidents push the extraordinarily-endowed man along the same avenues, and he grapples with the unusual, the extraordinary, and works their processes, because he has the power to do it. Both lives are necessary results of natural causes.

A herd of men, strangers to each other, enter the American House of Rep-

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HISTORY OF GEAUGA AND LAKE COUNTIES, OHIO.

resentatives. Two or three, half a dozen, go sooner or later to the lead, become creators and directors, because it is in them to do that work. The rest are led, because it is in them to be conducted by the others. What has produced the difference, and whence was derived the leading elements and qualities of the men, is the problem.

In the instance with which I am to deal I shall not attempt its solution. I can only hint at scanty antecedents. We know that much, many unusual qual- ities, went to the making up of the subject of this sketch. Just what they ante- cedently were, and how they were conducted and united in his production, would be a matter of the vaguest speculation. The conditions of such an inquiry are not in our hands, and the science which should guide it is of the unborn.

Some popular delusions must vanish in reference to him. He did not grow up a stalwart, unlettered, good-natured Orson of the wood, nursed by a bear till seven- teen or eighteen, and then under sudden inspiration rush through school and col- lege in an intellectual rage, ravishing from the sciences their sweets and secrets, drawing from books their blood and souls, and devouring and assimilating teachers and professors.

The Garfields had many years resided in Massachusetts, and may have been of Norse extraction. One of them, Abram, a grand-uncle, was at Concord, and gave a deposition as to how the battle began. A nephew of his pushed off into the wilds of Otsego county, New York, where his son Abraham was born. He is said to have been a man of almost heroic proportions, endowed with marvelous physical strength; one of those large-souled, generous-hearted men who, notwith- standing they might overcome by weight and strength, nevertheless win by the sweetness and richness of their natures. Many legends exist of his great strength. A laboring man, all his implements and tools had to be of corresponding size and weight; and, though the best-natured man in the world, his courage matched his strength, and on more than one occasion he employed it in resisting others. Once on the canal, where he had a large job, and was living with his young wife, and a gang of hands, the roughs of a neighboring job, led by two bullies, the terror of the whole line, came to get up a row with his men. At the first demonstration of these leaders he sprang upon and overcame them effectually ere their fellows could come to their aid, and thus secured peace. He was from that moment the acknowledged monarch of the line of work, and ruled generously. Abraham had a half-brother, Amos Boynton, his mother's son by another husband, whose for- tunes were connected with his.

At the foot of Mount Monadnock, in New Hampshire, lived a brother of Hosea Ballou, and of this family were two daughters, Eliza and a sister. Highly en- dowed intellectually, reared with the care and circumspection of New England, with its thrift and prudent economies, these sisters became the wives of these brothers, Eliza wedding with Abraham. Of these two-this grandly-formed, large- natured, large-souled, kindly man, and this slight, intellectual, spirited, high-souled, and pious woman-was born James A., their fourth and last child. The event occurred in the woods of Orange, Cuyahoga county, November 19, 1831.

After the canal job, the brothers took their families to make for them permanent homes in Orange, built their cabins near each other, and, save one, there was then no human habitation within six miles of them. The Garfields were alive with a generous ambition to win more than a bare subsistence. The implements of work were to be the weapons with which to conquer labor, and not whips in the hands of necessity to scourge them as the slaves of toil. Work, hard, long continued, and unremitting, to make a home of intelligence and virtue for their children, and, with the 'leisure and opportunity, for better culture for themselves. The forest rapidly yielded to the eight-pound axe of Garfield. In time an extensive field, surrounded by the woods, was ripening its wheat in the summer sun. A fire in the forest threatened its destruction. By a desperate exercise of strength and activity the crop was saved. The overtaxed man, overcome by heat, sat . in the cool wind, and contracted a violent sore throat. A quack came, placed a blister upon it, and the strong man was strangled. He only said, " Eliza, I have planted four saplings in these woods. I leave them in your care." He walked to the window, called his faithful oxen by name, and died.

When the earth was placed over him the battle of life for Eliza began. The eldest child was a stout lad of ten. The first work was to complete the unfinished fence, to protect the wheat. The rails for this were split by the slender Eliza, and the two laid them up. The land was unpaid for. Food was to be won from the earth.

At his father's death James was less than two years old ; the second and third children were daughters. The eldest inherited his father's generous and devoted nature in large measure. With him, till he was thirty years of age, there was but one purpose in life,-to help his mother, and do all within his power for his sisters and younger brother.

The Garfields and Boyntons, isolated from others by neighborhood, education, and habits of life, were greatly dependent on each other for society, and grew up

almost one family. The young Boyntons, as the Garfields, especially the daughters, were of quick parts and great intelligence. They had between them a few books. They generally managed to have a school at least during the winters. So far as the future statesman was concerned, instead of growing up untutored until the divine frenzy seized him, he became a good reader when he was three years old, and could almost repeat the contents of some of the volumes at his command, at an age when the children of to-day are thought first eligible to the alphabet. Eliza knew her responsibility, and entered upon the task of his education. He early made great proficiency, and the man who fancies that the stupidity of his son is the counterpart of the child or boyhood of General Garfield is sadly misinformed on a vital matter. So emulous were the young people that, master- ing all the branches taught in their early schools, they annoyed and worried their teachers about studies and lessons, and with questions quite beyond their reach. At an early day, and when James was advanced enough to take part in it, they established among themselves a class of critics, to examine and determine the accuracy of the use and pronunciation of words and the construction of sentences. To this class and its critical labors General Garfield expresses his obligation for the habit of carefully scanning the use of words, and their arrangement in sen- tences and paragraphs, written or spoken.

His cousin Harriet and himself associated the most in their literary labors. Somewhere they came across a volume of tales of the sea,-some kind of a " Pirates' Own Book,"-with which they became fascinated. They went over with the worn, but never worn-out, stories, till the young boy's imagination took fire, and he read and dreamed a boy's impossible career on the ocean. Some vein of a love of roving sea-life and adventure had come to him with his other gifts from some Norse ancestor,-some old viking,-which this book kindled, and which has never quite burned out or been extinguished. What came of it may be seen later.

His father and mother had early become interested in the religious movement on the Reserve, which resulted in the organization of the Disciple churches, and this gave to her maternal care and admonition the religious sanction of her earnest convictions of duty and destiny. A woman of spirit, with a capacity to manage and control children ; to all a mother's solicitude and anxieties, was added some apprehension on account of James, a frank, natural, tender-hearted, loving boy. Every fibre of his large frame was redolent of a love of fun, and not without a spirit of mischief, while his eldest cousin, Boynton, was the embodiment of inge- nious hectoring. There was one notable winter, in which the boys convicted a teacher, in the then populous district, of incapacity to parse a sentence of ordinary English. They agitated against him, demanding his expulsion, and made so clear and strong a case on him that a school-meeting was called of the patrons, before which they appeared as prosecutors, and sustained their charges. Despite the popular voice, he managed to retain his place, and most of the scholars, with the Boyntons and Garfields, were withdrawn. These were in the habit of holding their lyceum debates and other exercises in the school-house each week. To prevent this, the door was locked against them. Boys, under such circumstances, show as little respect for locks as love proverbially does. The youths held their meeting inside the house as usual. A man was dispatched to Cleveland, twelve or fourteen miles, for another, which was out of the way in time. Never was there such a door or such locks, though, doubtless, the world is full of such boys. At the fifth and last of these failures of the locks, careful Mrs. Eliza discovered that the handle of her fire shovel showed marks of a strange usage, and there is a tradition that the new-fallen snow retained the imprint of a foot, of two feet, that always turned back to her house as home. The good woman was greatly disturbed. She still looks grave at every reference to that magical school-house door. James escaped Middle Creek and Chickamauga, the greater perils of Congress, but expiation may still be required for that "rape of a lock."

He largely inherited the proportions, strength, and personal qualities of his father, and in the open-air life, active exercise, simple fare, and regular habits of such a boy, he grew rapidly, and at sixteen was a full-blooded, rollicking, spirited, light-hearted boy, living and growing. Though quick-witted, with considerable power of mimickry, more exercised then than now, we can fancy him a very green looking boy, with the untrained, uncouth ways of a youth of the country of that day. One would like to know what he thought of himself. Of course, he some- times looked in the glass, where he met a broad, round, laughing, richly florid face, expressive of little but animal good nature. What did he think of that im- mense head ? Of course, he tried on the hats of other boys,-of men,-and could get it into none of them. Did he ever think of that ? Did he all the time carry around that callow mass of brain, without a suspicion of what it might become ? Did he think he was like other boys-one of the common sort to work and play, be kind, love mother, sister, brother, cousins, especially cousin Harriet; chop wood and clear land, hoe corn, dig potatoes, run and jump, throw down all the boys, live and vegetate in Orange,-hilliest and remotest of townships,-with no

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HISTORY OF GEAUGA AND LAKE COUNTIES, OHIO.

thought or suspicion to the contrary ? The mule carries alike a sack of coals, a casket of gems, or precious gums, as a horse bears a clown or prince, not knowing the difference. A boy is not a mule-is something better than a horse. When does it dawn on a man of remarkable parts, not that he is unlike others,-every one feels his unlikeness to his fellows,-but that he has parts in excess of others ? The fool, perhaps, always thinks that. I am not dealing with a fool. A man is as much of a mystery and a revelation to himself as others. It is probably best that impending superiority be hidden from young mortals of the male species.

Seemingly his principal business-whatever was or is his ultimate destiny- of these years, was to live and grow strong and healthy. Growing wise was not then in order. It never becomes so to the mass apparently. He was to strengthen and develop, broaden and deepen; must be wide in the shoulders, deep in the chest, straight in loin, strong and straight in leg and thigh. The base of the brain was of more consequence then ; no matter what Humphrey Marshall, Senator Lamar, or Judge Kelley might severally be doing in these years, it was his business to grow. By and by he will ripen, and at an early day, for use; and so, in his sixteenth year, in the spring, he went to Newburg to chop one hundred cords of wood. I don't know what he was to receive for it. It is not of the least consequence whether it was twenty or twenty-five dollars. It Was not money that was of the chief use to him, though he worked for it. From the margin of the wood where was his work, there was an outlook of the wide lake, on which, under the deep blue of the March and April sky, went the white-winged ships. Day by day there to the north was the bright ridge of slaty-blue, " the high seas" of the books. It was like the sea of which he had always dreamed. It was the sea, and there were ships and sailors and sailor-boys. All the latent secret longings of his nature, quickened and fed by his childish reading, were aroused. Here lay the sea beckoning to him. Here he would begin and master the rudiments,-a funny idea for a boy at his age, this of thoroughness of begin- ning at the bottom. When he had mastered these fields of fresh water, he would go and take the boundless ocean,-that which is itself the boundary. And so he chopped and split and piled his hundred cords of wood, pausing to gaze and sigh and resolve. He was to be a sailor, not " a fisher of men." In one of these mysterious coming and going, never staying, weird phantoms of the blue, he would come and go, toss and beat, and see the far-off regions of the east, which lay in his ardent imagination like colored bubbles or painted dreams, only he knew they were real. And over the wide Pacific, the world of sundown seas and living islands, these should rise out of the blue and come to meet him, and his feet should tread their shores. All this should be his; and thus he dreamed as he chopped and piled his wood.

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History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio, Part 25

Author: Williams Brothers Publication date: 1879 Publisher: Number of Pages: 443

Author: Williams Brothers
Publication date: 1879
Publisher:
Number of Pages: 443