Men of Vermont : an illustrated biographical history of Vermonters and sons of Vermont, Part 23

Author: Ullery, Jacob G., comp; Davenport, Charles H; Huse, Hiram Augustus, 1843-1902; Fuller, Levi Knight, 1841-1896
Publication date: 1894
Publisher: Brattleboro, Vt. : Transcript Pub. Co.
Number of Pages: 842

USA > Vermont > Men of Vermont : an illustrated biographical history of Vermonters and sons of Vermont > Part 23

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

Biographical sketch will be found among " The Senators."

t Biographical sketch will be found among " The Governors."

Biographical sketch will be found in Part 11.

NILES, NATHANIEL .- Legislator, speaker, councilor, congressman, lawyer, judge, physician, preacher, inventor, and with- al something of a poet, was, perhaps, the man of the most varied attainments of any of the fathers. He was one of the first settlers of Fairlee, and having been a legislative leader during the state's career as an independent republic, was, with Israel Smith, its first representative in the Federal Congress.

He was born at South Kingston, R. I., April 3, 1741, the grandson of Samuel Niles, the famous author and minister at Braintree, Mass. He commenced his collegiate course at Harvard, and, ill-health compelling him to suspend his studies for a time, graduated at Princeton. He studied theology under Rev. Dr. Bellamy, early exhibiting his tendency toward independent thought and inquiry along unusual lines. He was also in these young days a student of law and medicine, taught school awhile in New York City, preached for a time at Norwich and Torring- ton, Conn., and showed his versatility of mind with mechanical experiments. He was the inventor of the process of making wire from bar iron by water power, and he erected at Norwich, Conn., where he early took up his residence, a woolen card manufactory. He was an ardent patriot in the Revolution and, though there is no record preserved of

military service on his part, he was the au- thor of an ode entitled "The American Hero," written just after the battle of Bunker Hill and published in the Connecticut Ga- zette in February, 1776, which was immedi- ately set to music by Rev. Dr. Sylvanus Rip- ley, father of Gen. E. W. Ripley, and was almost universally sung in the churches of the eastern states, and is said to have be- come the war song of the New England soldiers. Its concluding stanza read :

Life for my country and the cause of freedom

Is but a trifle for a man to part with;

And if preserved in so great a contest, Life is redoubled.

He came to West Fairlee with a number of Connecticut associates just after the Rev- olution, settled near the center of the town and purchased a large tract of land. Here he preached every Sunday in his own house for twelve years, and became a strong relig- ious and moral force in the community. He was elected to the Legislature in 1784 and was immediately chosen speaker. As a pre- siding officer he won the same success as everywhere in life, being masterful in parlia- mentary law, fair in rulings, and efficient and expeditious in the transaction of business. In 1784 he was also elected with Moses Rob- inson and Ira Allen an agent to Congress to "transact and negotiate the business of this state with that body." In the break-up of

Worthington C. Smith,

1867-73

+Ezra Butler,

1813-15

William Cahoon,

1827-33

Ahiman L. Miner,

1851-53

James Elliot,

1803-09

Elias Keyes,

1821-23

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N11.A.S.

1 789, when Governor Chittenden failed for one year of re election, Mr. Niles got a few of the scattering votes for Governor. The same year also he was elected one of the judges of the Supreme Court, and held the position until 1788. In 1785 and 1787 he was also a mem- ber of the council, and served in the Consti- tutional Convention of 1791, and took the lead with Chipman in securing the ratifica- tion of the Federal Constitution.

Upon the admission of the state to the Union he was elected to Congress, serving two terins from 1791 10 1795. But the close of his service in Congress did not mean his retirement from public life. He again rep- resented Fairlee in the Legislatures of 1800- '01-'02, and in 1812-'13-'14, was again a member of the council of censors in 1799, and was again returned to the Governor's Council in 1803, and served five years until 1 808, while he also took a prominent part in the Constitutional Convention of 1814.

In politics Mr. Niles, like that other great Baptist preacher-politician of the state, Ezra Butler, was a thorough-going Jeffersonian Republican, all the more influential because their views were in such marked contrast to the generality of ministers in New England. For a period of nearly twenty years Mr. Niles was perhaps the most steadfast and most popular champion of Democratic views in Vermont. His first election to Congress was before party lines had been definitely formed in either the state or nation, and his retirement became inevitable as the Federal- ists got control of the state, and party pas- sion was running to a high degree of virulence. It is worthy of note that all four of the state's first congressmen, Senators Robinson and Bradley, and Representatives Niles and Israel Smith, afterwards took the Jeffersonian side of politics. Naturally, coming from the healthy mountain atmosphere of freedom, they were shocked even as Jefferson was, at the growth of aristocratic ideas and mon- archical leanings which increasingly charac- terized the career of the Federalist party, and ruined its usefulness so quickly after it had achieved its great work of consolidating the Union. His political feeling once led him to what approached rather near sharp prac- tice for a man of the cloth. It was in 1813, when the people of Vermont had failed to elect a Governor by popular vote and when the issue in the Legislature hung so long doubtful. Three of the Federalist councilors had failed to arrive at the opening of the Legislature, and Niles and Henry Olin on October 16, moved to proceed at once to the election and fought hard to bring it about in joint committee. Probably if they had succeeded Governor Galusha would have been re-elected, but they were beaten by a vote of 108 to 102.

NILES.

Niles was consistent with the spirit and hope of his party in those days, in being a resolute antagonist of slavery. He led in formulating the demand of the state in 1805 for a constitutional amendment to forever prohibit the importation of slaves, or people of color into the country.

His name appears all through the records of the "Governor and Council" alike during his service on the floor of the Assembly and in the Council, as among the busiest of legis- lators, alike with topics of mere local inter- est and those of large importance. He was prominent in 1801 in advocacy of the amendment to the Federal constitution for the election by districts of presidential elec- tors and representatives in Congress, which passed the Vermont legistature by a vote of nearly three to one, but failed of assent by the requisite number of states. He and Olin made sharp issue with Gov. Martin Chittenden's address of 1814, expressing the extreme Federalist antipathy to the war of 1812, and declaring it "unnecessary, un- wise and hopeless in all its offensive oper- ations." After fighting the answer of the legislative committee echoing this sentiment, they with eighty other Democratic members entered their solemn protest against it on the records of the House. It was a time that stirred men deeply.

That Niles was not ordinarily indisposed to the amenities of official intercourse was shown in 1800, when he was chairman of the committee to draft a response to Gover- nor Tichenor's address, and though they were on opposite sides in politics and it was the year of a presidential campaign, the re- port responding to the sentiments of the Governor was such as was agreed to by the Assembly without a division. He was also chairman of a committee to respond to Governor Galusha's patriotic address in 1812, and being in full sympathy with the Governor did it in a style that was called "eminently partisan." He is on record with Asaph Fletcher and Samuel Shepardson in 1804, as "entering a solemn protest" against some of the lottery legislation of that year, not so much against the principle of the thing itself as the extraordinary immuni- ties granted the sellers of the tickets. He was chairman of the committee in 1814, that reported against the constitutional amend- ment proposed by Tennessee and Pennsyl- vania to reduce the term of senators from six years to four, and he was chairman on the part of the House of the joint committee to consider the invitation of Massachusetts to send delegates to the Hartford conven- tion, and which to the lasting credit of Ver- mont, by a unanimous vote of the six Fed- eralists and three Republicans, reported

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NILES.

against having anything to do with this traitorous scheme.

He was a strenuous opponent of the bank bill schemes proposed so thickly in the early years of the century, though he did, finally, in 1806, assent to the compromise for the establishment of the Vermont State Bank. Some of the arguments of his reports read interestingly now. "Banking operations," he wrote, are " a vicious substitute for that in- dustry and economy, which constitute the best portion of our means of livelihood." "Credit is not less liable than money to be misimproved, and while the misimprovement of money merely diminishes property, that of credit creates debt and when it is employed to discharge one debt by incurring another, nothing can commonly be gained. Sudden changes in the quantity of circulating me- dium are not less fatal to prosperity than all such changes in the atmosphere to the com- fort and health of mankind. They operate powerfully, to shift property from hand to hand without at all augmenting the general wealth of a country ; banking establishments, to say the least, possess in a very high degree, the very dangerous power of producing such changes, in the circulation of the pecuniary medium of commerce." The "tendency " of bank bills would be to " palsy the vigor of in- dustry and to stupefy the vigilance of econ- omy." Among the many other measures of permanent interest with which he was iden- tified was that of 1803 defining the power of justices of the peace.

With his work in the Legislature, and the constitutional convention of 1814, Judge Niles, at the age of nearly seventy-four, re- tired from his thirty years of almost con- tinuous public service, and passed the rest of his days until his death, in November, 1828, at the age of eighty-eight, at his com- fortable home in West Fairlee, and being until the end among the most revered of our public characters. A massive granite monument, typical of his character, stands over his grave in the center of the town.

Judge Niles was twice married, first to a daughter of Rev. Dr. Joseph Lathrop of West Springfield, Mass., and second to Elizabeth, daughter of William Watson of Plymouth, Mass., a lady of the highest ac- complishments and the intimate friend and correspondent of the most eminent philoso- phers and theologians of the period. He left two sons of considerable intellectual at- tainments ; one of them, also named Nath- aniel, became United States consul at Sardinia, acting plenipotentiary to Austria, and secretary of legation at the court of St. James under General Cass.

Judge Niles was quite a voluminous writer and a large number of his sermons, addresses

on one occasion or another, essays and poems were published.

BUCK, DANIEL .- One of the state's re- presentatives to Congress and speaker of the Assembly just after the admission to the Union, was one of the earliest settlers of the state, a lawyer by profession. He repre- sented Norwich for several years, was active and prominent in legislation always, and held the speaker's chair in 1795-6. He was also in the Legislature again in 1806. He was in 1792 counsel for Ira Allen in the long and bitter fight in the Legislature over the latter's accounts, one phase of which re- sulted in a political revolution, and ousted Governor Chittenden from office for one term. He was a member of the convention at Bennington that adopted the act of union, but took the lead in opposing that action and urging Vermont to continue an inde- pendent little republic by herself. He made the motion in 1794, though then speaker, by which it was decided after long debate not to make provision to pay the debts of those Tories whose property had been con- fiscated by the state. He took a leading part in the passage of the act of 1806, em- powering judges of the Supreme Court of judicature to grant divorces. He was one of the committee in 1805 that drafted the resolution to concur in the proposal of Ken- tucky to amend the constitution so as to limit the jurisdiction of United States courts by excluding causes between citizens of different states. He was also active in the Legislature of 1806 for the establish- ment of a state bank. He appears to have served the state as attorney-general in 1794, as the records of the Governor and council show an act in October, '95, directing pay- ment for the last year.

His service in Congress from 1795 to '99 was in no way noteworthy, except that as parties formed he became an ardent Feder- alist, while his colleague Matthew Lyon was a red-hot Democrat.

Soon after his last term in the Legislature expired he was committed to jail at Chelsea for debt, and obtaining the liberties of the prison took up his residence there and kept up the practice of his profession until his death in 1817.

BUCK, D. AZRO A., son of the former, also speaker and representative in Congress, was born at Norwich in 1789, and was a young man when his father moved to Chelsea. He graduated from Middlebury in 1807, and also from West Point in 1808, when he entered the army, being appointed second lieutenant of engineers ; but he resigned his commis- sion in 1811. The state offered him a com- mission as major in a volunteer corps ordered by the Legislature. The next year, April 13,

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he became a captain in the 21st Regt. in the U. S. Army, which was made up of Ver monters, and served creditably through the war, but finally abandoned the military pro- fession in 1815, and at the age of twenty- six established himself as a lawyer at Chel- sea, and though not profoundly learned reached a reasonable success. His easy and conrteons address, with the demeanor of the real old fashioned gentleman, made him quite effective as an advocate and won rapid polit- ical promotion. He was for six years state's attorney for Washington county, and was Chelsea's representative in the Legislature fourteen years, and was speaker in 1820-'23, 1825-'27, and 1829-'30, a length of service equaled only by Gideon Olin and James L. Martin in the whole history of the state. He was with William Strong and Stephen Royce a member of the committee in 1816 that drafted the report in favor of electing congressmen and presidential electors by districts, as proposed by the constitutional amendment that had been sent up by the Kentucky Legislature. He was one of the presidential electors in 1820 that cast the vote of the state for Monroe. He was twice elected to Congress, in 1822 and 1826. In 1836 he moved to Washington, where he was connected with the Indian Bureau of the War Department, and he died there Dec. 24, 1841.

LYON, MATTHEW .- Elected to Congress from three states, the peppery, red-headed little Irishman, whose ups and downs in life with his big ideas and his untiring enterprise, made a career that can but kindle the admira- tion of the reader even as it did of some of his cotemporaries, while it stirred the pro- found animosity of others. He came to this country a poor boy, indentured for his pas- sage money, and touched, before he got through, most of the extremes of human experience. His apprenticeship indenture was transferred a few months after he reached here for a yoke of steers and his favorite oath in after years was " By the bulls that bought me."

He was born in Wicklow, Ireland, about 1746 ; his parents were poor and his father died when he was a boy. He attended school at Dublin where he got an English education and a respectable smattering of Latin. He was then apprenticed to a printer and bookbinder, where he got a taste for the "art preservative " that followed him through life ; but at the age of thirteen a sea captain, with glowing tales of America, in- duced him to run away and come here, even though it meant several years slavery to pay his passage. Lyon in after years would be- come sentimental instead of combative for a few moments whenever he recurred to this

experience and his last visit to his mother's . chamber to kiss her good bye while she slept. On the sea voyage he was very sick and tenderly ministered to by some aban- doned women on board who also supplied his necessities for new clothing, most of his old having been rendered unfit for use by his illness. This was one of the extremes of life which he touched, and perhaps it helped to give him the broad Iniman sympathy that always accompanied his resolute aggressive- ness. He never told, or if he did it is not remembered, of his first fifteen years in this country, the working out of his indenture and his struggles for a livelihood.

But he was in Vermont in 1776, for he then hell a lieutenant's commission nnder Captain Fassett and was stationed at Jericho with a squad of men to hold a post of obser- vation there. The men refused to serve be- canse of the unsupported position, and cleared out, leaving Lieutenant Lyon to report the facts. It was strongly surmised that the officers were as willing as the men to get away from the post and Lyon and the others were court martialed and cashiered for cowardice. The story, which his political enemies were careful to keep alive all through his career was that he was presented with a wooden sword, and made to ride about the camp, and he was called in derision the " Knight of the wooden sword." But General Schuyler reinstated him, and in July, 1777, appointed him paymaster of the North- ern army.

Before the end of that year and after the battle of Bennington, we find him in Arling- ton and a laborer on the farm of Governor Chittenden, with whom he had apparently come to take possession of the confiscated estates of the Tories and who made him also deputy secretary for the Governor, and clerk of the court of confiscation until 1780. He got himself into one of his scrapes in later years and suffered some opprobrium, because he refused to give up the records of this court.

He married the widow Beulah Galusha, daughter of the Governor, an intelligent, warm-hearted and benevolent, though rather coarse woman, and was soon a rising man. He had before wedded a woman by the name of Hosford, who died after bearing him four children.

He became a captain and colonel of the militia and served the state in its contests with New York.

He represented Arlington in the Legisla- ture in 1779-'82, serving on important com- mittees. He was one of the original gran- tees of Fair Haven under the new state's authority and moved there in 1783, having already established a saw and grist mill there. He erected an iron mill in 1785 and a

I31

LYON.

paper mill soon after. He manufactured paper from bass wood, and with some suc- cess, long years before it was thought of any- where else, and in his iron mill he turned out hoes, axes and various agricultural im- plements, but the business was mainly the making of iron, from the ore imported from abroad, into nail rods which were then man- ufactured into nails by hand. During the time of his prosperity he employed a large number of hands. He drew distinctions of honor between his business and his public relations that could well be emulated in these days of subsidy and special privileges. Once he endeavored to get a legislative act giving him the exclusive right of slitting iron in the state and he counted every member from Bennington county as a supporter of the bill because a political friend. But after hearing the arguments on both sides he refused to support the measure himself and when his name was reached in the roll call he asked to be excused, because his con- science would not permit him to so use the trust of the people for his private benefit. He was for years the king-bee of Fair Haven, was selectman in 1788, 1790, and 1791, the town's representative in the General Assembly ten years continuously from 1783 to 1796, except 1785, 1786 and 1789, and he gave most of his time to town affairs till the ad- mission of the state to the Union. He was a man of multifarious activities. Besides all his other business enterprises he started in 1793 a newspaper called "The Farmers Library " and later through his son James, a political sheet, the " Fair Haven Gazette."

In 1 786 he was assistant judge of the county court. He plunged into politics as soon as the state was admitted to the Union, became a red-hot Democratic leader, and immediately a candidate for Congress. He contested the election with Israel Smith and Isaac Tichenor in 1791, '93, '95. Party lines had not been very clearly formed then, but Tichenor stood for the Federalist ten- dencies, and between Smith and Lyon who were in political sympathy, it was a matter of personal choice. Lyon announced his candidacy as that of the "commercial, agricultural and manufacturing interests in preference to any of the law characters." At the first election, in August, 1791, he had a plurality-597 votes to 513 for Smith and 473 for Tichenor ; but at the second trial Tichenor withdrew and Smith was elected by a majority of 391 over Lyon. The next election, in January, 1793, also required two trials, but Smith was elected. Lyon's re- markable strength among his neighbors was shown by the fact that in 1793 he got 355 of the 376 votes cast in Fair Haven.

In 1795 he was elected in a close contest in which he and Smith were the only candi-

LYON.

dates, the vote being 1,804 to 1,783, and he took his seat in 1797, having grown steadily in the violence of his hatred of the Federal- ists. His first appearance in debate was in a long speech replying to the President's message. He and Andrew Jackson in the Senate had the distinction of being the two most rabid anti-Washington men in Con- gress. In January, 1798, he had a personal fray with Roger Griswold of Connecticutt that ruined his position in that body. In the course of a debate Griswold twitted him with the "wooden sword" story. Lyon spit in his face. Griswold started to give him a thrashing, but was prevented by his col- leagues. A motion of expulsion against both was lost by a less than two-thirds vote, though it had a majority. In an address to his con- stituents the February following justifying his conduct, Lyon said that if he had borne the insult he should have been "bandied about in all the newspapers on the continent, which are supported by British money and federal patronage, as a mean poltroon. The district which sent me would have been scandalized."

But perhaps the thing with which Lyon's name is most strikingly linked in history is his martyrdom to the alien and sedition law. At the October term of the United States court at Rutland in 1798 he was indicted for " scurrilous, scandalous, malicious, and defamatory language " about President Adams, written in June, fourteen days be- fore the passage of the law, but published in the Windsor Journal the last of July. The language, though Lyonesque decidedly, was no worse than has been used thousands of times in every political campaign without other effect than an amused pity that men will so lose their heads, and the prosecu- tion was an illustration of the dangerous and vicious tendency which Federalist ideas had taken after their great service in consolidating the Union. The article was about appointments and removals and the use of religion to make men hate each other -all legitimate though exaggerated argu- ment-and the offensive words about Presi- dent Adams were these : " Every considera- tion of public welfare swallowed up in a con- tinual grasp for power, unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation or selfish avarice.'

He was also accused of having " malic- iously " procured the publication of a letter from France which reflected somewhat severely on the government. Lyon pleaded his own case at the trial, but was convicted and sentenced to four months imprisonment and a $ 1,000 fine. He was committed to jail at Vergennes and treated with inexcusable hard- ship. But the prosecution only increased his popularity. While in the jail, he was re-elected to Congress by five hundred ma-

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jority. The sentence expired in February, 1799, and he ouly saved himself from re- arrest by proclaiming that he was on the way to Philadelphia, as a member of Congress. Ilis journey was one of trimuph in a coach and four under the American flag and with a succession of fetes along the way, especially at Bennington. He was for the time being a party and popular hero. Another effort was made to expel him, but without success. In the prolonged contest over the presiden- tial election of 1800, he became prominent by finally casting the vote of the state, which had been divided in the House, for Jefferson, and in after years when out of temper with that great leader, he said, " I made him, and can unmake him." This was of course an exaggeration, as Bayard, of Delaware, also cast the vote of that state for Jefferson, while Maryland voted blank, and Jefferson had nine of the sixteen states, without Ver- mont.

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Men of Vermont : an illustrated biographical history of Vermonters and sons of Vermont, Part 23

Author: Ullery, Jacob G., comp; Davenport, Charles H; Huse, Hiram Augustus, 1843-1902; Fuller, Levi Knight, 1841-1896 Publication date: 1894 Publisher: Brattleboro, Vt. : Transcript Pub. Co. Number of Pages: 842

Author: Ullery, Jacob G., comp; Davenport, Charles H; Huse, Hiram Augustus, 1843-1902; Fuller, Levi Knight, 1841-1896
Publication date: 1894
Publisher: Brattleboro, Vt. : Transcript Pub. Co.
Number of Pages: 842