Sketches of prominent Tennesseans. Containing biographies and records of many of the families who have attained prominence in Tennessee, Part 84

Author: Speer, William S
Publication date: 1888
Publisher: Nashville, A. B. Tavel
Number of Pages: 1278

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were law-abiding and God-fearing men, lovers of liberty, and moved by well defined comprehension of the pow- ers of government, and that it was theirs to make, to amend or abolish at will.

In 1874, Mr. Keating went, by special invitation from ex-President Jefferson Davis, as his friend and com panion, on a trip to the Rocky mountains through Mis- souri, ; Kansas and Colorado, a trip during which Mr. Davis broke through the reserve he had imposed upon himself after the war, and delivered several addresses on agriculture. Mr. Davis counts Mr. Keating among his stanch friends, though not a partisan one; that he could not be with any man. He sees and admits the good points of all public men, makes allowance for their surroundings, their political and social connec- tions, and the possibility of their judgments being warped and sometimes obscured. He was thus enabled to be, and consistently so, the friend of President An- drew Johnson, who was the antipodes in many respects of Mr. Davis, and of Senator Isham G. Harris, whom he admired and long sustained as one of the most manly and truth-loving of the public men of the country ; a fear- less man, because he tries to be right and believing him- self to be, pushes on to the conclusion, regardless of consequences. Mr. Keating, a positive character him- self, admires positive men with definite aims, and has always been attracted to them, holding the other sort in contempt.

Mr. Keating was married, in Nashville, Tennessee, October 30, 1856, by the Rev. Dr. Edgar, of the First Presbyterian church, to Miss Josephine Esselman Smith, daughter of Mr. John Smith, a native of Penn- sylvania, related, on his mother's side, to the Norris family, of Norristown, Pennsylvania. Mrs. Keating graduated from the Columbia (Tennessee) Female In- stitute, under Rector Smith, whence she emerged with a diploma that attests a scholarship which she has al- ways kept alive by constant, earnest and faithful study, notwithstanding her absorbing duties as wife and mother and housekeeper. She has been the faithful friend, companion and counselor of her husband; has seconded all his ambitions for success and distinction in his profession, and has kept pace with him in all the channels of culture and cultivation. She is one of the most accomplished women in the State. In music, is thorough as a vocalist, pianiste and harpist, and ex- cels in a knowledge of French history and literature. Handsome of face and form, and dignified in carriage, she is beloved by all who know her for her wit and repartee and brilliancy as a conversationalist, and for her excelling abilities as a letter writer. She is also noted for her great good sense common sense --- and her love of truth, even in little things. She was a devoted daughter, and has given herself with singleness of pur- pose to the promotion of her husband and children. They have two children, a son, Neil Mcleod Keating, and a daughter, Caroline Morton Keating, Aprecins

with her husband that their children should be taught to work at what they were best fitted for, Mrs. Keating, for several years, resided in New York, and there superintended the studies of the daughter as a pian- iste in preparation for an artiste's career, and of the son, who is now in Paris, whence he went from the Art Student's League School, of New York, where, last year, he was pronounced by Prof. Dewing, the president of the school, to be the leading and best pupil, his work being regarded as equal to the best im: ported French work. Both the children of Mr. Keat- ing have a promising career before them.

Mr. Keating traces his lineage back to the first of his name, Halis Keating, who landed with FitzStephens in Ireland, in 1169, one among the first of the Norman invaders, who, as he says, had once been murdering and phindering the people of that unfortunate coun- try. Dr. Geoffrey Keating, who was the first historian of Ireland after the "Four Masters," and who wrote much poetry and many religious works, was of the same family, the origin of which is thus traced by the late Michael Dohemy in Jolm O'Mahoney's transla- tion of Keating's " History of Ireland": " According to the traditions of the family, adopted and, so to speak, legalized, by the Books of Heraldry in Ireland, the founder of the house, whose original name is now un- known, was one of the pioneers of the Norman invaders, who kindled the beacon fire that lit the way of Fitz- Stephens into the Cuan-au-Bhainbh. The story goes, that as he lay by his watch-fire, a wild boar, chancing to prowl that way, was proceeding to attack him, until frightened by the sparkling of the fire, when he fled in dismay. The watcher, thus providentially . saved, adopted for his crest a wild boar rampant rushing through a brake, with the motto, fortis et fidelis, and his name became, we are not told how, Keating or Ket- ing, from the Irish words, coad time-first fire." In all his life in Tennessee, Mr. Keating has been true to this motto, and was conspicuously noted, in 1878, for fortitude and fidelity. The Keatings passed through many vicissitudes in Ireland during the civil wars and rebellions, but furnished many distinguished priests to the Catholic church in Ireland ; general officers in the British army; a great many judges to the Eng- fish and Irish bench, and several diplomatic agents, notable among them Col. Keating, who, after twenty- four years at the court of Persia, wrote a history of that country that is yet highly valued as a standard. Another colonel of the same name, wrote a compendi- ous history of India. Gen. Keating, who commanded the expedition that captured the Mauritus, and was af- terward governor of that island, was a distinguished military and civil servant of Great Britain. In this country the Keatings of Philadelphia, New Orleans and western Virginia have distinguished themselves in the profession of engineering and medicine, being conspicu- ous in the latter, One of the name, Dr. J. M. Keating,

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of Philadelphia, traveled with Gen. Grant through India, and on his return home published his impress- ions of the tour. The branch of the Keating family to which the subject of this sketch immediately belongs, was of the yeoman or farmer class, and was settled in the north of Ireland, where its members were identified with the Tory or dominant faction, and were ardent church- men. Mr. Keating early imbibed from his Scotch-Pres- byterian mother the love of liberty and breadth of view that has always distinguished him in public life. Her teachings and explanations, her promptings and the au guries of her ambition for her boy, sent him into the world thirsting for knowledge in the solemn conviction that it is power. She, like his father, was of humble origin, but of the sturdy stock that stood behind John Knox in his contest as the great Reformer. The spirit of freedom burned brightly in her breast, and she hated the oppressions which her husband's Tory kindred aided in inflicting upon their own people, blinded, as they were, by bigotry and the intolerance born of it. Mr. Keating, profiting by these lessons learned at his moth- er's knees, availed himself of the first opportunity to manifest his love of country and, as before stated, joined the " Young Frelanders," in 1846, when yet scarce six- teen, uniting with the Curran club of Dublin, and pledging himself' to help in the regeneration and for the liberty of his native land.

Mr. Keating was a director, in 1867, in a company which formed to bridge or tunnel the Mississippi river at Memphis, and which made extensive surveys for that purpose. He was also secretary and treasurer of the first elevator company in Memphis, in that year, and in 1872, was a director in the Mississippi railroad com- pany, which anticipated the line recently constructed to New Orleans, via Vicksburg, from Memphis. He was also about that time a director in a company to build a railroad from Memphis to Jeffersonville, Texas, and another to build a railroad to Kansas City. He was also a director of the company that turned over the charter and right of way to the present Kansay City, Springfield and Memphis railroad. This latter road has been completed, and at a banquet given in Kansas City, in June, ISSI, to the guests from Memphis, Mr. Keating was selected to respond to the toast, "Cotton, corn and cattle, the links of destiny that bind us in commercial unity." His response was not only able and brilliant, but elegantly eloquent, worthy of repro- duction here, if space would admit, and in its perora- tion was as follows: "Cotton, corn and cattle bind the cities we represent in commercial unity through the medium of the Memphis, Springfield and Kansas City railroad, and we can never be separated again. We are the latest expression of American grit, pluck and enter- prise, and our future is assured. With the Union re- stored, and seetional bitterness entirely wiped out, greater possibilities are to come as a result of the enterprise of the people of the whole country. With the curse of

slavery removed, the incubus that weighed upon the energies of the white man and limited his horizon, there has come to the South a wonderful quickening. We are now free indeed. Diversity of pursuit, a more certain knowledge of our duties and best possibilities, have come to us, and we are ready for them."

In 1876, Mr. Keating was a member of the committee, appointed by Mayor Loague, to compromise the debt of Memphis with the creditors. He has never held office, and was but once before a convention as a candidate. In 1868, his name was sent to the United States senate, by President Johnson, for the postmastership of Mem- phis, but the mere mention of his name created a storm, and it was promptly, and by a full vote of the Republi- cans present, refused the courtesy of being sent to the committee. It went in at one door and was sent out at the other, and in-not more than five minutes.

Mr. Keating passed, unscathed, through the yellow fever epidemics at Memphis, in 1868, 1873, 1878 and 1879, During 1878, he edited the Appeal, and when the com- positors and pressmen, the business manager and others, went down or perished, he nobly stood at his post, and, with the assistance of but one man, Mr. Henry Mood, set up the type and made up the forms every day, for several weeks, besides doing the reportorial and editorial work, and responding to all his duties as a member of the executive committee, which really governed the city during those trying and distressful days. Thus was he true to the motto of his family, " Fortis et fidelis."

In the spring of 1879, after he had written and put to press his " History of the Yellow Fever," he de- livered an address at the theater, before an audience composed of the merchants, bankers and manufacturers of the city, and at which all the physicians of the city were present, in which he explained, with technical ac- curacy, the necessity for sanitary reform, painting in truthful colors, at the same time, the then very un- sanitary condition of Memphis, which he was enabled to do from a personal inspection. This was the begin- ning of the sanitary work that has made Memphis one of the model cities of the world in a sanitary point of view.

Mr. Keating is president of the Memphis branch of the International Association of the Red Cross of Ge- neva. He is also a member of the American Health Association, and has contributed to the papers pub- lished by that organization, in 1880, " The Value of Sanitation Trom an Economical Standpoint," in 1882, " The Cremation of Exereta and Household Wastes," and, in 1884, " The Ultimate of Sanitation by Fire," a paper that has attracted attention in Europe as well as throughout America, and has generally been endorsed by the press. In September, 1881, he published a re- port on the sewer system of Memphis, and the epidemies of' preventable diseases that have visited that city and its site since 17 10.

He is an honorary memle . of the Memphis Society

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for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Children ; and also of the Memphis Typographical Union; is a member of the Memphis Mozart Society, also of the Mendelssohn Society, the two leading musical organiza tions of that city, and is regarded as the best musical critic, south of the Ohio river. He is also a member of the Tennessee Historical Society, and has written a memoir for Dr. J. B. Lindsley's History of Ten- nessee, covering all the operations of the Confederate armies in the State, from the inception to the close of the late civil war. He has also written a great deal on negro education, and in the Popular Science Monthly, for November, 1885, published "Twenty Years of Ne- gro Education," a careful, exhaustive and convincing review.

IFe was made a Mason in 1853, and in 1879 an Odd Fellow. He began to study for the ministry in the Prot- estant Episcopal church, in 1857, under Bishop Quin- tard, then rector of Holy Trinity church, in Nashville, and during 1860, and until 1862, continued under the immediate supervision of Bishop Otey, of the diocese of Tennessee, then residing at Memphis. Bishop Otey was his warm personal friend, and during the last six weeks of his life Mr. Keating nursed him day and night. He reveres the memory of Bishop Otey as that of a second father, and owes much to his advice. He was fully prepared to take orders in the church, but gave up what had long been a cherished design, because he could not give his adhesion to the cardinals of the creed of a Christian body for which he says he has always cherished a tender love, and will ever hold in reverence, and whose prayer book he has always held to be the best book in his library. He is, in the better sense of the term. a free-thinker. He believes in God as the beginning and end of all things, and holds, with Jesus Christ, that the Golden Rule is the sum and sub- stance of all religion. He is grateful for the example of Christ; for His espousal of the cause of the poor; for the truth He preached to the people : His conmis- seration and compassion for the erring and suffering; His manly vindication of Himself' and His mission; the God-like simplicity of His lite, and above all, for the courage with which He died.

Mr. Keating is a great reader, and has one of the best working libraries in the State. He has followed, with absorbing interest, the progress of modern science, and the great religions of the world have, ever since he took up theology, been a particular study, and one that is still an absorbing one, He begins with Nature-worship, and ends with Christ, to whom he clings as the greatest

of all teachers, the Master, the sublime exemplar, the elder brother of all mankind who seek Him diligently. Medicine and surgery have always had attractions for him, and he sometimes regrets that he did not de- vote himself to a profession for which he entertains a very high respect. History and geography have been his delights from childhood. and to travel is his favorite

recreation. Politics, in the best sense of the term, have claimed much of his best thought, and he has been a close student of the constitution of the United States, and of the several States, and of colonial and early State history, that of Tennessee especially, of which he has made extensive notes, with a view to publication, in connection with a history of Memphis, which he has been writing on, as he could take time from his too engrossing editorial duties, for the past two years. He has also made extensive notes on the subject of slavery in the Southern States, with a view to the preparation of a work that will show the atti- tude the South has always maintained toward the negro as slave. freeman, citizen and voter.

Mr. Keating has, for nearly thirty years, suffered from a troublesome disease which necessitated, in 1864, and in 1866, two severe surgical operations, and he has found only in silence and seclusion the relief he craved from its attacks. . This, perhaps, accounts for much of his studiousness and love of retirement. For the last twenty-five years he has been a close and methodical reader. He had acquired from his parents the reading habit, and though, for a few years, he threw away much valuable time in "seeing the world," he yet made it a point first, to do some reading during a week, and finally mastered himself' sufficiently to do some every day. After a few years he found that this desultory sort of reading would not do, and he began carefully to formulate his studies, to make mental notes of his prog- ress on the particular subjects to which he devoted himself. Upon these methods he founded the success which he marked out for himself, when yet a boy, set- ting type, when he said one day to some companions, who laughed at him. that he would not be content until he owned, edited and controlled a newspaper, little dreaming then that this prediction was to be realized, on the far away banks of the Mississippi. He was always.anxious to be right, and always anxious to escape from prejudice of any form. He has often said he arose every morning as near like a white sheet of paper as possible, ready for all good impressions. Ilis desire was always for freedom, and to see others free. He has not now, and never has enjoyed, any privilege or right that he was not willing that all other men, and every woman, should enjoy. On this basis of freedom he has built for success, asking nothing of the world but a fair field and no favors. He is not. in the sense in which it is generally understood, self-assertive. With all the sturdy qualities of his race, he contends manfully for his prin- ciples, leaving himself out, satisfied that the people are quick to recognize and acknowledge ability and merit, and that in time, if he deserved it, he would find a high place in their confidence, esteem and respect, as a leader among men. As to political office, he holds that, as a rule, an aspirant for office is not fit for office. Of a re- tiring disposition and modest, he yet clings, with death- like tenacity, to what he believes is right. Hle loves

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his books, next after his wife and children, and these after his God.

Mr. Keating's success as a journalist is due to his conviction that a newspaper must, first of all, be de voted to news, news that will satisfy all classes, and to a rigid impersonal management, ' He believes that the newspaper should subserve the general and not par- ticular interests; that it should represent all classes fairly, frankly, and as fully as space and opportunity will admit, and that when editorial comment is made, it should be short, pointed and comprehensive. Parties and partisans should be sustained when they are right, and unsparingly condemned when wrong .. An editor should not have any friends to reward, nor enemies to punish. He must always be impartial, to enjoy the confidence of the public. The newspaper belongs as much to the public as to him. The people of the city, town or county he publishes in should be first with him, then those of the State, and nest, those of the nation, and, after that, the world at large. Wrong should be unhesitatingly denounced, and the right always fearlessly sustained, no matter who it may hurt. Hle is the implacable foe of the personal puffery by which villainy has sometimes been shielded by the press, and men, without fitness, ability or character, foisted into high places. An unswerving Democrat, he has always held his opponents in respect, believing that they have the same rights as he, and convinced that, so long as the world lasts, there will always be two sides to a question. Opinion, political, social and religious, he holds to be a matter largely of education, influenced by surroundings, and no man can, from any fair, reasonable, just or feasible standpoint, denounce another because he cannot or does not agree with him.

The following remarkable article from Mr. Keating's pen, published in the Appeal, March 21, 1886, may be taken as a specimen of the philosophical mode of thought, comprehensive, cast of mind, and philan- thropie yearnings of an editor, who ought to be classed rather as a statesman : " No man can read the news of' strikes, and impending strikes, of combinations of labor and combinations of capital, with which the papers are daily filled, without a feeling of apprehension of an im pending crisis. No man can read the news of to day without a feeling of coming calamity worse than civil war. One million of workingmen. according to the re- port of the United States Labor Bureau, are out of em- ployment and without the means of buying bread. They have no funds to draw from for support, and are with- out hope --- destitute. Enforced beggary and destitution make desperate men. Beggary, enforced by cupidity. make despairing men. It is hard to die of starvation in the midst of plenty. It is hard to go hungry in a coun- try where wealth is flaunted as as aggressive force by men whose elevation on, pedestals of gold is due to questionable, many of them, unlawful measures. Such a man can have no bowels of compassion, for no robber

can sympathize with industrious labor. What he has, has come to him without manual labor, and by the sub- version of conscience, and he laughs at the hard-work - ing and honest tofler as a simpleton. If he is appealed to for aid, his answer is: " Let them go and make money as I did." But a poor man can not buy mail- roads at twelve thousand dollars a mile and water them up to one hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars a mile, and compel the farmers, the merchants and manu- facturers to pay six per cent, per amum on the water. Such wholesale robbery, perpetrated in defiance of the plainest and simplest dictates of fair dealing, are not within the workingman's reach, even if he desired to be dishonest, but he is within the reach of these, the most powerful combinations of modern times, to be ground into subjection to a tyranny worse than that of the rob- bing barons of William the Conquerer's day. Reduced to a mere machine, imbrated by continuous labor, ex- tending, as in the case of street-ear drivers, to fourteen and sixteen hours in the twenty-four, the workingman has not time, even for a moment's serious thought, for his future or that of his children. Whatever of civil- ization he may have had when he began the race of life is thus being steadily stamped out of him, and he is gradually becoming a sullen savage. Out of this slough of despondency a ery has gone up for counter-combina- tion, and the Knights of Labor have been organized to stem the broad. deep and sweeping current of degrada- tion and slavery, and prepare for a contest that may end in anarchy, if a way is not found to meet the honest, earnest appeal of the workingmen for a chance to im- prove their condition by lessening the hours of labor to eight per day, and making such a standard of wages as shall reduce the averages of beggary to the lame, the halt and the blind. War, in any guise, is to be avoided, but a war that would find the poor arrayed against the rich, is one that must be prevented, and it can be. All sense of justice has not perished out of the country. The standards of fair dealing have not been lost. Ap- ply these, square the differences between employer and employed by the rule which Christ said embraced " all the law and the prophets," and there can not be a mo- ment's doubt as to the result. Let the rich man. the railroad combinationist, the monopolist and the manu- facturer put himself in the place of the workingman, if only for a moment, and strikes will become impossi ble. Let them remember that men, women and chil- dren must live, and that if they do not live by work they will by beggary or by robbery. Let them remember that it is easier, as well as better, to support a poor man in work than in pauperism, and that by lifting him above the accidents, the contingencies and the exigen- cies of life, they are increasing the ranks of good citi- zenship, lessening the ranks of crime, and making for civilization in its highest and best sense by raising the average of self-reliant, self-respecting and self' depend- ent men. There are large bodies of intelligent work

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ingmen who have willing allies among the professions. These have been discussing the disparities between ex- treme indigence, squalor and wretchedness and the ex- pense of indulgence, of palatial splendor and plenty. They have been asking the question, how and by what means can a man in less than thirty-five years amass or acquire control of six hundred and fifty million dollars worth of property, a sum greater by nearly one hundred thousand dollars than the estimated true valuation of all the taxable property in each of the States of Geor- gia, Kansas and Maine, and nearly as much as that of Tennessee, of Virginia and Minnesota? How few men have made one million dollars, even in a long life-time, by their own unaided efforts? In a country whose constitution declares for the equality of all men, the means and measures that enable one man to absorb and monopolize the wealth that belongs to honest industry to an extent like this, are the agencies of wrong and of crime. This it is that lies at the basis of all strikes; this it is that has put labor and capital at bay, confront- ing each other as they do to-day, with an avowed pur- pose, the one of defense and the other of aggression, regardless of consequences. It is, as Henry George says, the " House of Have" and the " House of Want " that are occupying this attitude, and are preparing for a col- lision, and that everywhere jostle and scowl at each other. What is to prevent encounter ? What is to pre- vent this threatening war of classes ? Compromise- which is better than bloodshed, turmoil, confusion and destruction of property. The South would to-day be better off by nine million dollars and six hundred thou- sand valuable lives had the negro been voluntarily set free and the civil war been averted."

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Sketches of prominent Tennesseans. Containing biographies and records of many of the families who have attained prominence in Tennessee, Part 84

Author: Speer, William S Publication date: 1888 Publisher: Nashville, A. B. Tavel Number of Pages: 1278

Author: Speer, William S
Publication date: 1888
Publisher: Nashville, A. B. Tavel
Number of Pages: 1278