USA > Vermont > Vermonters : a book of biographies > Part 6
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General Dodge played an important part in the Atlanta campaign and was then assigned to the command of the De- partment and Army of the Missouri. On May 1, 1866, he was given a leave of absence from the army and assumed the duties as chief engineer of the Union Pacific Railroad with head- quarters at Omaha. On May 30, 1866, his resignation from the army was finally accepted and he took immediate charge of the engineering forces in the field. It is impossible for the present generation to have any understanding of the obstacles that stood in the way of the construction of this important line. The country was occupied by hostile Indians and the laborers went to their work under arms, stacking their guns in the near vicinity. Although many of them were killed and much of their stock captured, the organization was so care- fully planned that the project was completed with unpre- cedented rapidity. On May 10, 1869, the last rail was laid completing the connection of the road with the Central Paci- fic Road at Promontory Point, Utah. In the performance of this feat approximately 1500 miles of instrumental line were run and over 2500 miles of reconnaisance made.
During the next decade General Dodge was particularly
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active in railway matters and in 1880 he organized and be- came president of The American Railway Improvement Com- pany and built the New Orleans and Pacific Railroad from Shreveport to New Orleans. In 1882, he was appointed vice president of the Mexican and Southern Railroad of which U. S. Grant was president, succeeding him in that position in 1885. For the next thirty years General Dodge was a prom- inent figure in the business life of America.
General Dodge was a Republican in politics and played an important part in the activities of that party. He was a dele- gate-at-large from Iowa to the National Republican Conven- tion in 1868, again in 1872 and a third time in 1876. In 1866 he was elected Congressman from the fifth district in Iowa and his public service in this capacity was characteristically active and efficient. Perhaps his most notable work was in the sup- port of the bill for the reorganization of the army. He de- clined a renomination in 1868 in order that he might give all his energy to the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad.
General Dodge was married at Salem, Massachusetts, May 29, 1854, to Annie Brown, a native of Peru, Illinois. Three daughters were born to them, Lettie, Ella and Annie. He was a member of many fraternal and patriotic organizations and throughout his lifetime was a loyal son of Norwich, his Alma Mater. He served as a trustee of the University from 1882 until his death in 1916, and he stands first among the bene- factors of the institution which was so dear to him.
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JULIA CAROLINE RIPLEY DORR
By Beth Bradford Gilchrist
H TOW is poetry made? Who shall say? Now and again there befalls a flowering in human life. Possibilities of structure in mind and body are achieved. Beauty brims over. Then poets are born. In such a flowering there is something of physical strain, something of time and place, something of the unpredictable, the gift beyond measure which is genius.
Julia Caroline Ripley, Vermonter by half her heritage, by residence and appropriation of what Vermont has to give, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, February 13, 1825, of mingled Yankee and French blood. Through her father, William Young Ripley, six feet four, "with very decidedly the air noble," farmer's son of Middlebury and Weybridge, gone south to seek fortune in business, she derived from early American immigrants, William Ripley of Hingham and Wil- liam Bradford of Plymouth. Through her mother, Zulma Caroline Thomas, daughter of parents who had fled from Santo Domingo to escape the slave uprising under Tous- saint L'Ouverture, she came of both Catholic and Protestant ancestry, granddaughter of Jean Jacques Thomas, born in London of refugeé stock, and of Susanne De Lacy, born in New Rochelle. Such were the strains of inheritance that met in the child.
Her environment was predominantly Vermont. The south- ern idyl was of short duration. The young mother died in Weybridge on the northern visit it had been hoped would bring her health. The father established a business in New York City and his little daughter attended a small boarding school on fashionable Bleeker Street. Yet, the only child of her mother, she grew up the eldest of a large family. William Young Ripley married again, this time a Vermont woman, and
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lived the rest of his life, first as farmer in Middlebury, then as pioneer of the Vermont marble industry in Rutland.
At six she was in the new home in Middlebury, browsing in her father's large well-chosen library. She could not remember a time when she did not know how to read. "I read ad libitum whatever I could lay my hands on-fiction, romantic history, travel-understanding much and guessing at the rest." Here she recited daily lessons to her father and did her daily "stent" of sewing and knitting.
Her schools betoken her period. There was a small cere- monious puritanical one in Plattsburg; two in Middlebury homesteads, at one of which she began the study of Latin, of all subjects the most useful to her in afterlife, so she said; Middlebury Seminary under an inspiring teacher; Troy Con- ference Academy. At Rutland when she was fourteen, three girls and a boy collaborated in transportation, providing-a gray mare, wagon or sleigh, the "keep" of old Dolly,-and drove daily to the "Academy" two miles from home. There she recited Latin with boys preparing to enter college as sophomores. "Study was joyful labor, done for the pure love of it . . . its own end, not simply a means to some other end."
Love and marriage were single in her experience. Marriage initiated her into life and gave her what seems to have been for nearly forty years very felicitous companionship. At twenty-two she was wedded to Seneca M. Dorr and went to live in a stately old Dutch colonial mansion in Ghent, New York. There three of her five children were born. After ten years the Dorr family started for the far west by way of Rut- land. But Vermont was not to be left. The farewell visit ended in building in Rutland a new home, The Maples, dig- ging its garden, planting its orchard.
Publication began after marriage. The famous Mrs. Sigourney wrote her: "I feel so anxious that men, husbands, fathers, and the community at large, should not miss any comfort or suffer any discomfort in the department allotted
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to our sex when we indulge in intellectual pursuits and pleas- ure . . If you can, without abstracting necessary attention, secure one hour to yourself, daily, free from interrup- tion, it would be well to cultivate this taste and pursue the studies that give it aliment." She had the background of a husband proud of her work and doing all in his power to forward her success. He carried her first novel to a New York publisher; he investigated the possibilities of book publica- tion of her poems. Verse, short stories, novels came from her pen. The state called on her for fitting celebration of its great occasions. Later travel sketches were widely read. But at heart she was a poet and a steadily ascending line of achieve- ment marked the development of her power. Her best work was her last work. The sonnet was her favorite verse form and her sonnets were hailed as unsurpassed in America.
Always she wrote accessible to the demands of a busy house- hold. With her, writing was no substitute for living. She led a full rich life and out of that experience of life she wrote. Generously she gave leadership to her community. She was honored on those occasions where authors gather, from the garden-party given Mrs. Stowe, to W. D. Howells' seventy- fifth birthday dinner. She belonged to the classic age of American letters and was by none more appreciated than by her fellow craftsmen. Friend of Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Stedman, the Stoddards, she was the contemporary of more than her own generation.
It was said of her that she had a genius for friendship. On her eightieth birthday Edmund Clarence Stedman wrote:
To MRS. DORR,
My Friend of so many years:
Beloved Woman and Poet,
Can it be that this greeting is to reach you on your eightieth birthday! If I had not long since jotted down the date, it would have failed to do so, for all my thoughts of you belie the annalists.
As I face the truth, I realize that I am congratulating myself even more
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than you upon your arrival at the eightieth parallel. More than a year ago, when I reached seventy, I felt that my frailer bark had crossed the Arctic Circle and that few vessels of the argosy in which I started were still above water and within hail. One by one we have seen them go down or fade within the mists. And of late I am, like you, feeling the lonelier for the disappearance of many that began the voyage long after me. So you may conceive what a joy it is to me to see your noble ship still pushing toward the north star, marking the way for us, and showing how much "may yet be done."
I long since observed that a grand soul, by its vital and dynamic power, will sustain a feeble body long beyond the time allotted to a strong physique less staunchly garrisoned. But when to such a frame as yours a mind of equal rank is given, the combination is heroic and uncon- querable. As I look back the three women most distinctly of this type whom I have known are Mrs. Howe, Madam Ristori, and Julia C. R. Dorr.
And your life has been a rich and fortunate one, though I well know that of late you have met and bravely endured those sorrows which close around-by the impartiality of Fate-those who are favored with length of years, and which spare least of all those whose worth has won them
honor, love obedience, troops of friends.
It is not callousness that makes us strong against sorrow in our sunset years, it is not philosophy, it is our own close approach to the inevitable, our place upon the danger line, our knowledge that a few years more or less are given to all, and that nothing can affect the soul.
Still, I am human and while of the earth, earthy; and so I pray that your bark will not pass out of sight until I need its companionship no longer.
And so I am, like many another, Affectionately yours, EDMUND C. STEDMAN
At The Maples on the Creek Road in Rutland on January 18, 1913, she died. "My dress," she said, "is wearing out." But a poet never grows old. A few days before her last ill- ness began she finished one of her noblest sonnets, O STRONG YOUNG RUNNER.
There is nothing parochial in her story. None knew better than she that "reputations are made around dinner tables." A little apart from the world's ways, Vermont gave her, not
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incentive, but opportunity ; fed her imagination on beauty ro- bust yet exquisite; gave her a life both of culture and prac- ticality, a realization of the amenities of living which is in the best Vermont tradition; bred her mind to freedom. "If a girl wanted to study with her brother and his friends, she did it and that was all there was of it." If a woman wanted to write, she wrote.
If poetry is a revelation of life, she was herself her greatest poem. Beautiful, spontaneous, courteous, and gracious, she was cast in the mould of Vermont's mountains, regal yet friendly.
BROTHER JOSEPH
By Mary Barrett
I RA B. DUTTON was born at Stowe, Vermont, April 27, 1843. When the Dutton family moved to Janesville, Wisconsin, in 1847, he was about four years old.
Young Ira received the greater part of his early education from his mother, Abigail Barnes, who had been a school teacher before her marriage. In 1857, he attended Milwaukee Academy, now Milton College at Milton, Wisconsin. Dur- ing vacations he worked, first in a printing office, later, a book store.
When the Civil War broke out, he joined the Union Army, enlisting as a private in Company B. Thirteenth Wisconsin Infantry, September 9, 1861. His promotion was fairly rapid; at the end of the war he held a captain's commission. Cap- tain Dutton did not immediately quit the army. He worked for two years after the war's close at gathering the Federal dead into the national cemeteries of Shiloh and Corinth. Then
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followed a period of six years, 1868-73, of which Brother Dutton, in his public letter of 1928 speaks with a good deal of distaste. He was badly in debt, but he never told the cause nor made any excuse.
In 1873, fra Dutton left his employment at the Louisville and Nashville railroad in Memphis, Tennessee, to join the War Department service as investigation agent and claim ad- juster. Nine years later, April 29, 1883, he entered the Catho- lic Church taking as his baptismal name, Joseph, in honor of his patron St. Joseph. He read about Father Damien, his work among the lepers and his need for assistance, and after twenty months spent in a Trappist Monastery at Gethsemane, Kentucky, he came to the conclusion that his mission lay in the same field.
Joseph Dutton reached Hawaii, July 29, 1886. Of his ar- rival he speaks in his public letter of 1926. "Forty years ago this morning, I landed at Kalaupapa. Father Damien was there with his buggy, low, wide, and rattling, and a steady old horse. This was before the islands became a part of our country. Kalaupapa was a town of non-lepers then. Father Damien had a little church there, but he lived by one at Kalawao, the leper settlement where he had been for about thirteen years, and was a leper in advanced stage. He died nearly three years later. I was happy as we drove over that morning. The Father talked eagerly, telling how he had wanted Brothers here, but the Mission had none to spare. So he called me Brother as I had come to stay " So Brother Joseph came to Molokai.
For forty years he worked with no compensation. Not only was he not paid for his services at Kalawao, but he contributed his annual war pension to St. Catherine's Industrial School at .. Memphis, Tennessee, and gave any gifts of money he received to the leper's fund. He did not allow himself to take satis- faction in "what he has done. "The real value of this service," he wrote (public letter, 1926), "has not been very great ac-
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cording to modern standards." He remarks the difference be- tween conditions in his own time and in Father Damien's when the place was greatly in need of help. The urgency was only in Father Damien's time and up to about 1895. The brothers of the Sacred Heart Order began coming to Kalawao in 1895, and between Brother Dutton's arrival and that date had intervened nine years of hard work. To look back it would seem that the development of the leper colony, if not rapid, was at least steady. It is easy to forget the setbacks.
But in spite of obstacles the work at Molokai went forward. The first home for orphan boys and helpless men was begun in 1886 with a few old cabins. Two larger buildings were added in 1887-SS. The present Baldwin Home for Boys was established at Kalawao, 1892-94, with Brother Dutton in charge. The Franciscan Sisters, who had first come in 1890, took care of the women. At Kalaupapa, about two miles from Kalawao, on the other side of the little peninsula where the steamer lands, a new village was built in 1894. It was out- fitted with a general hospital, several newer homes, a beauti- ful Bishop-Home for girls and women, and an amusement hall, shops, a factory and warchouses. In fact, the whole colony, like the old instruments in the leper band has been "cleaned, patched and polished."
In 1909, the American fleet sailed by Molokai in the day- light as a tribute to Brother Joseph, "a brave man and a brave soldier." In 1929, the House of Representatives of Hawaii passed a resolution thanking him for his "inspiring work and service."
Brother Dutton grew old in work. He worked all day, sat up nights to write his friends in America and got up, after a few hours' sleep, to begin all over again at four-thirty in the morning. This is the sort of life he was living, when, eighty- three years old, he wrote his public letter of 1926. He called himself, "an old relic," but he was still active in duty, cheerful and happy in the atmosphere of affiliction and disease.
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Still, one cannot endute forever. In the summer of 1929, Brother Dutton, almost blind from cataracts, underwent an unsuccessful operation at Molokai. From then on he failed quickly. When in July, 1930, he left the island for the first time in forty-four years to undergo a second operation at Saint Francis' Hospital in Honolulu, he was so weak that he had to be carried from the steamer to an automobile. When the Pope learned of Brother Joseph's serious illness, he sent his apostolic benediction by cable.
Brother Joseph did not return to Molokai. Deaf and al- most entirely blind, the feeble old man who was fast losing his grip on things present, though his memory of the past was good, entered the Honolulu hospital, where he died March 27, 1931. But at Molokai the splendid work, which he helped to start and in which he labored for so many years, is going on. In time to come it will remain to him as a monument, "more lasting than bronze and loftier than the Pyramid's royal pile."
STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS
By Edward S. Marsh
TF the question should be asked, What native Vermonter has achieved the greatest eminence and the most durable fame? Stephen A. Douglas would be the answer given by many persóns. His own remarkable career would ensure this. Going to Illinois at the age of twenty, without either a col- lege or a legal education, hampered by poverty and ill health, teaching school for his pressing necessities, studying law he was elected state's attorney, then in succession he became a justice of the Supreme Court, was elected to the lower house of Congress, where he served several terms, elected a United
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States Senator at the age of thirty-three, re-elected twice, and finally was made the nominee of his party for the presidency, the only man of Vermont birth, with the exception of Calvin Coolidge, to be so honored. In Congress he took a leading part in the great pro- and anti-slavery struggle, no history of which can avoid devoting much space to his activities in that contest. But it may be that all of this might in time be forgotten, but nevertheless his connection with Lincoln would assure him imperishable fame. No biography of Lincoln has been written or can be written without making Douglas a prominent fig- ure, second only to Lincoln himself. Lincoln was first brought into national prominence by his memorable debates with Douglas in the senatorial campaign of 1858. Douglas was then, and had been for years, a personage of national import- ance, while Lincoln was little known outside of Illinois. Douglas won the senatorial election, but two years later was defeated by Lincoln for the presidency. In this campaign, while Douglas made a poor showing in the electoral vote, in the popular vote he was second to Lincoln.
Stephen A. Douglas was born in Brandon on April 23, 1813, in a small cottage still standing, now used as a chapter house by the local D. A. R. His father dying soon after his birth, he went with his mother to live on a farm near by, where as he grew older he did farm work and attended the district . school in winter. Later he secured employment as a cabinet maker in Middlebury, and afterward in Brandon. For about a year he attended the "Academy" in Brandon, which was only a village school. His mother re-marrying, he went with her to New York state, where he resumed his studies at the Acad- emy at Canandaigua. Three years later he started for the West.
Space will not permit a detailed examination of Douglas's career as a politician and statesman. Suffice it to say that he became known far and wide for his plan to solve the slavery problem, as "popular sovereignty." This plan involved the
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removal of the subject from Congress to the states and terri- tories, which should have slavery or not as the majority de- creed. He did not care, he said, whether slavery was voted up or down, so long as the people had their way. He was without doubt sincere in this view, and was consistent in upholding it, even though it had an adverse effect on his own political fortunes. When the so-called Lecompton con- stitution was fraudulently adopted in Kansas, legalizing slav- ery against the wishes of a large majority of the population, and President Buchanan asked Congress to ratify it without first submitting it to a vote of the people, Douglas opposed it and succeeded in defeating the scheme, for which reason the President became his bitter enemy. Douglas's error here lay in his failure to realize that slavery was fundamentally wrong and could not be allowed to exist in any state, even, though a majority of its population favored it. Neither did he realize the depth and strength of the feeling against it in the North- ern and Western states.
When Douglas was the candidate of the northern Demo- cracy for president in 1860, he visited Vermont, his principal object being to revisit his birthplace and the graves of his ancestors. He arrived at Brandon on Saturday, July 28. On his arrival a procession was formed, headed by two bands and the local military company, and marched through the princi- pał streets to the birthplace and back to the hotel, where he addressed the throng. In the evening a public reception was held at the hotel, where the citizens met him and Mrs. Doug- las, who accompanied him. He remained in Brandon over Sunday, and Monday morning proceeded to Burlington. He was met at the station by a committee, one of whom was John G. Saxe, the poet, then the Democratic candidate for gover- .. nor. He was escorted to the town hall, where he addressed a large audience, speaking nearly an hour. That evening he went to Montpelier, where a great crowd awaited his arrival. Shops and dwellings were illuminated, bonfires were kindled,
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cannons were fired, fireworks discharged and a torchlight procession formed an escort. He addressed the multitude from the balcony of the Pavilion Hotel. His speeches in Ver- mont were non-political in the main, as he had no hope of carrying the state, but he explained and defended his doctrine of popular sovereignty. The next morning he left for Con- cord, New Hampshire, thus terminating his last visit to his native state.
In 1851, Douglas visited Brandon and Middlebury, and at Middlebury College received the honorary degree of LL.D. In his response on that occasion he made his celebrated re- mark which has been widely quoted to the effect that Vermont is a good state to be born in provided the native emigrates early. Some years later in a speech in Illinois he gave this account of the affair :
I was born away down in Yankee land; I was born in a valley in Ver- mont, with the high mountains around me. I love the old Green Moun- tains and valleys of Vermont, where I was born and where I played in my childhood. I went up to visit them seven or eight years ago, for the first time in twenty-odd years. When I got there, they treated me very kindly. They invited me to the Commencement of their college, placed me on the seats with their distinguished guests, and conferred upon me the degree of LL.D. in Latin, the same as they did on Old Hickory at Cambridge many years ago, and I give you my word and honor that I understand just as much of the Latin as he did. When they got through conferring the honorary degree, they called on me for a speech; and I got up with my heart full and swelling with gratitude for their kindness, and I said to them: "My friends, Vermont is the most glorious spot on the face of this globe for a man to be born in, provided he emigrates when he is very young."
It does not seem probable that he would have used just that language on such an occasion and in the state to which he was referring. Fortunately we have the testimony of a mem- ber of the audience, who heard what was said, Mr. E. G. Hunt, a graduate of Middlebury College in the class of 1857. He says: "I should say that his language was: Vermont is a
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good state to be born in, a good state to be brought up in,' and then after a little pause, 'and a good state to emigrate from.' That 'brought down the house.'"
We think Mr. Hunt's version is a more reasonable one than that of Douglas, and is probably about what he said.
The crowning glory of Douglas's career came after the southern states seceded. He then stood as firm as any north- ern Republican for the preservation of the Union, and by patriotic speeches and letters did all that was possible to aid the administration to suppress the rebellion. But his time on earth was short, as he died in June, 1861. A beautiful and lofty monument marks his sepulcher in Chicago, on the sum- mit of which stands a bronze statue of the great statesman and patriot.
In 1913, Brandon celebrated the centenary of the birth of her distinguished son. A monument was dedicated to his memory. It stands in front of the birthplace, is of Vermont marble, and bears two bronze tablets, one having a replica of a bas-relief of Douglas in the University of Chicago by Lorado Taft, with suitable inscriptions. The orator of the occasion was Senator James Hamilton Lewis, like Douglas a Democra- tic Senator of Illinois.
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