USA > Wisconsin > A political history of Wisconsin > Part 6
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Like some other public men, Governor Dodge did not always keep faith with those who had supported him when he was running for office, but he found it convenient to kick down the ladder upon which he had climbed to distinction and power. When Dodge was first elected Senator one of his most active and influ- ential supporters was Gen. Harrison C. Hobart, then a young man who was rapidly coming to the front as a leader in the Demo- cratic party, and who has since twice been the nominee of his party for the highest office within the gift of the people of the State. When Dodge was first elected the office of sub-Indian agent was located at Sheboygan, where Gen. Hobart at that time resided. Hobart was a candidate for that office, and went on to Wash- ington, in the interest of his anticipated appointment, with his rec- ommendations from the big men in the Democratic party, and called on Dodge and asked him to support him for the office. which Dodge promised to do. Hobart had previously quarreled with Walker. The difficulty between them grew out of Hobart's . opposition to Walker on account of Walker's pro-slavery attitude in the California admission case. and Hobart had openly justified the Legislature in asking Walker to resign his seat and come home. The two met on the street in Milwaukee on one occasion and a fist fight would have been the result if the bystanders had not interfered. Dodge went to Walker, but Walker made it a point with Dodge that he would not join with him in anything if he supported Hobart. A Dodge man informed Hobart that Dodge was not supporting bim, and when Hobart heard this ite determined to fight the Dodge party at the next State Convention, and Dewey and Hobart got together at Washington and agreed
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to meet at Madison and defeat them. Dewey wanted to be sur- veyor general. They agreed to take up Barstow, and as he had been Secretary of State, he was very popular with the young men. Dodge and Barstow were not on good terms. Hobart and Dewey went to Madison when the convention met. where the Dodge party had already settled on J. C. Fairchild for Governor. The prospects were not very good at Madison. Someone said to Hobart that Dodge wanted to see him. When he called on Dodge the latter said he was sorry that he could not support him for that office at Sheboygan, and added, "Walker is a very great enemy of yours, sir." Hobart replied: "When a man has no enemies, he has no need of friends." After two days' fight in the State convention, Barstow was, nominated. The fight between Barstow and Fairchild ended Dodge's political career. This also weakened the ranks of the old Democracy. While Dodge was in the Senate he usually acted with the Free Soil party. The resolution adopted by the Legislature in 1849. that no new State . should be admitted into the Union without the Wilmot proviso, was drawn by Gen. Hobart, but not presented by him.
Some of Dodge's warmest supporters were men of mark in their day and generation. Josiah A. Noonan, of Milwaukee, was one of the most conspicuous. He attended to the details of the Democratic party management at the east end of the State, while Judge Dunn. James H. Earnest. M. M. Cothren, John Y. Smith and Moses M. Strong looked after the fences in the west. Alto- gether it was a strong combination. It had ability, cunning. influence with the voters, wide personal acquaintance, experience in all sorts of political manipulations, and exercised that eternal vigilance that is said to be the price of liberty. Mr. Noonan had musual facilities for reaching the public ear. He was in the paper and type foundry business which brought him into direct business relations with the most of the editors in the State of all political parties, and most of them had unsettled accounts with . him. He had often shown many of them favors in a business.way. and they felt under obligations to him. He had been an editor himself, and was a terse. caustic and forcible writer. combative and aggressive in the extreme, and the Irish blood in his veins
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made him love a fight as an ox loves clover. He had a habit of writing articles of a strongly personal character and sending them to some country newspaper and asking the favor of having them appear as editorials. In this way he could attack his enemies while lying in ambush, and they would feel the smart, without knowing who was really applying the lash. He was not content to confine his labors to his own political party, but often had his say about his political opponents in the same quiet and steady manner. He was a man of heavy frame, red hair, florid complexion, big head, gray eyes, aggressive manners, self-assertive, voluble speech and quick wit, indicative of his Celtic origin. He often secretly attacked those with whom he was personally on good terms just for the fun of it. When Alexander Mitchell was running for Congress in 1870 against Gen. Halbert E. Paine, Noonan wrote a scorching article very derogatory to Mr. Mitchell, and sent it out and had it appear as editorial in one of the country papers in the district. Mr. Mitchell, who had known Noonan for many years and was well acquainted with his methods, at once suspected him of its authorship, and immediately sent a trusted agent out to the newspaper office to ascertain the facts. The poor editor, fearing a libel suit with the great banker, at once produced Mr. Noonan's unmistakable manuscript and turned it over to Mr. Mitchell's friend, who returned with it to Milwaukee. The handwriting was unimpeachable evidence of its authorship. At that time Mr. Noonan kept his account at Mitchell's bank, and he often had the privilege of overdrawing it. Mr. Mitchell now directed that Mr. Noonan's account be closed, and gave orders that he should never be allowed to do any more business at his bank.
It is highly probable that if General Dodge had kept his word with General Hobart in regard to that little office of sub-Indian agent at Sheboygan. Dodge would have been elected to the United States Senate for the third time; the Dodge party woukl have nominated and elected Jairus C. Fairchild governor, instead of Barstow, and there would have been no Barstow-Bashford incident in our history. Upon such slender threads sometimes hang ever- lasting things!
General Dodge died in 1867 at the ripe age of 85 years.
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There were a number of disappointed candidates at the close of the first senatorial election, as there have been at every other similar election for the last fifty years, and prominent among them were Judge Doty. Judge Dunn. Marshall M. Strong and Byron Kilbourn. All these except Dunn were pronounced candidates, and of course all of them were straight-out Democrats except Doty. and he was occasionally a Democrat. He was always a candidate for office when there was a good one to be filled. and for the office of Senator he had really a fine equipment. Judge Dunn, who was the superior of all his rivals in point of ability, legal learning and natural gifts, was too modest to press his own claims, and was no cioubt made a candidate by his friends against his will. Marshall M. Strong, who was really a first-class man, was handicapped by hailing from the lake shore, like Kilbourn and Walker, and he had incurred the disfavor of some of the leading men of his party, like E. G. Ryan and other supporters of the first constitution, which Strong was credited with being chiefly instrumental in defeating. It was the dream of Byron Kilbonrn's life, and nothing but a dream, to sit in the Senate of the United States, and he never learned to fling away that ambition to the day of his death. Intel- lectually, and as a broad-minded man of practical affairs, possess- ing executive ability of a commanding kind, he would have made a fit Senator for any State. How the dark horses felt, like A. Hyatt Smith, Moses M. Strong. Mortimer M. Jackson, Morgan L. Martini, George B. Smith and others, never will be known.
As the two administrations of Nelson Dewey were absolutely colorless as far as any political excitement or party rivalry is con- cerned. all comment on the public career of that noted gentleman may as well close with this chapter. The following estimate of the ex-Governor's character was the utterance of one of his most intimate and trusted friends and supporters, and is here given in his own words:
"The rise and fall of Nelson Dewey is one of the most interest- 'ing chapters and the most pathetic and dismal at the close of any political career of which I have had personal knowledge during my long life. No man ever entered political and official life in
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Wisconsin with a better reputation for honesty and integrity than Nelson Dewey. He was the soul of honor, and his word was as good as his bond. He possessed sufficient moral rectitude, every- · body thought, to run a whole political party, and still have some- thing in reserve for home consumption. He was also a man of most excellent judgment, not only of men and business affairs, but of party policy and expediency. All his neighbors valued his advice highly in every-day affairs, and all the prominent politicians of the Democratic party often sought his advice and acted upon it. He was not a public speaker: he was tongue-tied, modest. and of a retiring disposition even in private life. He was little accustomed to the use of the pen, seldom if ever wrote articles for the newspapers discussing public questions, and his messages to the Legislature, while he acted as Governor. displayed none of the rhetorical graces and finish that distinguished the well-read scholar. He was simply plain, honest, straightforward, reliable Nelson Dewey, and his sincerity and sound common-sense won for him a host of friends. So when the dominant Democratic party was looking about for a suitable candidate for Governor of the State, when Wisconsin was admitted into the Union in 1848, the choice easily fell upon Dewey, and he was nominated and elected with little opposition.
"Of his political career I am not now speaking, but of things personal. He was a man small of stature, with a well-knit and compact frame, something of the style of General Grant; brown hair and light blue eyes, and altogether of rather a pleasing, but nowise of a striking personality. He had married the gifted daughter of Judge Dunn, a distinguished jurist and politician in territorial days, who inherited much of her eminent father's intelli- gence, wit and family pride, and of course when Dewey was elected, Governor of the new State and took up his residence in Madison, the family naturally took its place at the head of society. When his first term was ended he was easily nominated and re- elected and things went well with him. Unlike other Governors. he never made use of the Governor's office as a convenient step- ping-stone to the United States Senate, as is the fashion in these
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latter days, but was seemingly content to rest on his laurels that had been already so easily won and modestly worn. Then he retired to private life and disappeared from public view. When a man has been Governor for two terms, even though he has discharged his official duties ably and well and to the satisfaction of his constituents, he seems to be a much smaller man, somehow, than when he was first elected. At the time Dewey went out of office. 1852, Daniel Wells, Jr., of Milwaukee, and George Dousman. of Prairie du Chien, both of them millionaires, owned large quantities of unimproved lands in the western and northern portions of the State, and ex-Governor Dewey was made their agent. For many years he looked after their interests, and such was their abiding faith in his honesty and integrity that no accounting was made with him for years, the proprietors forgetting that good old adage. proved to be true in a thousand instances, that 'short settlements make long friends.' But settlement day came at last. Meanwhile. Dewey had been seemingly prosperous, and had been spreading himself like the proverbial green bay tree. He had sent his wife and daughter to Europe for the purpose of educating the latter. and he commenced the building of a residence that far excelled in elegance and in all its appointments anything of the kind in . Western Wisconsin. The day of settlement was the day of judg- ment. His wife and daughter were recalled from their protracted stay in Europe, and for the first time the wife was made acquainted with the unwelcome and humiliating fact that -her expenses in Europe had been paid with money belonging to other people. Then followed those domestic difficulties which financial ruin is always sure to bring in its train. especially 'among the higher classes, and it all ended in a separation of the father and mother. and the accomplished daughter being thrown upon her own re- sources for a livelihood. Dejected. Inumiliated, ashamed, broken in health and spirit. Governor Dewey often sought reconciliation with his wife, but all in vain. That proud woman made one answer to all her friends who pleaded with her to return to her husband, and that was that he had no right to deceive her as to his real financial situation, and that to send his family abroad at the expense of other people was to her mind an unpardonable sin. It
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was one she never condoned. The Governor's last days were spent in darkness and gloom, with the accumulating sorrows and in- firmities of old age gathering thick upon him, augmented by a comparison of bankruptcy with the splendor and glamour of official grandeur. when all joined in the one acclaim: "Long live the king!' He died in poverty and obscurity, July 21, 1889."
CHAPTER VII.
FARWELL AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.
Before taking final leave of the territorial epoch. it may be well to remind the student of our carly history that perhaps he may find instruction and enjoyment in comparing the first convention, which met in Madison October 5. 1846, to frame a constitution for the State of Wisconsin, with that other more distinguished and eminent group of men who assembled in Independence Hall. Philadelphia, September, 1798. to form the organic act of a great nation. Perhaps we are not yet far enough removed from the scene and date of their labors to properly estimate their value, and we are still to some extent deprived of that enchantment which distance lends to the view. But just as the photographer takes a large picture and reduces the size of his copy of it by those delicate processes known only to his cunning art, so the reader must allow his imagination to help him in his comparison of the two bodies, that he may not break the images which we have been worshiping for over one hundred years.
The Philadelphia aggregation consisted of 55 men; the Madi- son convention numbered 124. In the former, 29 were college-bred men; in the latter a university or liberal education was the excep- tion and not the rule. There were only seventeen college gradu- ates in the first convention. In the Federal Convention Benjamin Franklin was the oldest man. 81; and Jonathan Dayton was the youngest, 26. In the Badger Convention the oldest man was William Berry, 65; and the youngest, George B. Smith, 23. Ii the Federal Convention had consisted of 124 members instead of 55. it is safe to say that it would never have agreed upon a con- stitution, and if it had not been for the wisdom and conciliatory spirit of Washington and Franklin, it would have broken up in fruitless disorder, without accomplishing anything. as Washington (7)
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at one time predicted it would. Our first convention was found to be too cumbersome and unwieldy, and so the next one was reduced to only a little more than one-half as large-(x) members. Some of the great men of Revolutionary times that one would naturally expect to find in that renowned gathering were not there. Thomas Jefferson, of all others, and his intimate friend and co-worker, John Adams, were absent on a foreign mission: and Sammel Adams, who did more by his fiery eloquence to stir the colonies to revolt than any other one man, was for a long time opposed to the adoption of the constitution. And Patrick Henry, who wanted "liberty or death," in his famous speech, not only opposed the convention from the start. but fought the adoption of the consti- tution after it was made, by the State of Virginia, to the best of his fine ability. The two ablest men in the convention were unquestionably Madison, 36, and Hamilton, who was only 30. Madison has been called the Father of the Federal Consti- tution, and the title is well deserved. Hamilton was a brill- iant orator and an aristocrat in his tastes, habits, and opinions; Madison, the skillful manager, the adroit politician, the suave . peacemaker, who brought about compromises, allayed irritations. and reconciled differences of opinion. Our convention consisted of a different class of men. Some of them had never seen the in- side of a college, and most of them could have carried their private libraries on their backs. But they were broad-gauged men of affairs, intensely practical and hard-headed, and had studied human nature instead of books. The men in the Federal Conven- tion afterwards held high positions in the nation; Washington and Madison becoming Presidents. Hanuitton the greatest financier the country has ever known, and others rising to be cabinet officers. foreign ministers and members of the Congress. So some of the Wisconsin delegates got to be Governors, Chief Justices, Congress- men and State officers. The Federal Constitution was debated for weeks by the State Legislatures before it was finally ratified- Massachusetts and New York being the storm centers of the con- 'troversy, where the opposition to it was most violent and long continued, while the work of the Wisconsin convention was doomed to ignominious defeat. And when Marshall M. Strong
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resigned his seat in disgust and went away to oppose the adoption of the Wisconsin Constitution, he was only following the bad example of Yates and Lansing of New York. Luther Martin of Maryland, and Mason and Edmund Randolph of Virginia, who went home to fight against the ratification by their State of the instrument which Gladstone has said "is the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man!" Nowhere was the opposition to the Federal Constitution more pronounced than in Massachusetts, notwithstanding Lexington and Bunker Hill; nowhere was its every provision more severely criticised, and no other State Legislature suggested so many amendments to the original draft.
In our convention Edward G. Ryan occupied the same place, in the estimation of his associates, as an orator and lawyer, that Alexander Hamilton did in the convention of Philadelphia. Han- ilton was famous at 30, and was well known to the country before he became a member of that historic convention; Ryan did not achieve distinction. for lack of opportunity, until he was over 40 years of age. Both were foreign born; Ryan was born and edu- cated in Ireland, and inherited all the ready wit. volubility, versa- tility, hot temper. impatience. eloquence, sarcasm, vehemence, . impracticability and other distinctive peculiarities of his race. He was a better lawyer than Hamilton, as his decisions while Chief Justice amply demonstrate, but in statesmanship he lacked the training, the breadth of view and comprehensive insight which characterized the brilliant New Yorker. Hamilton has left us no address upon any subject that will compare, in all essential quali- ties which make such an effort as enduring as the language in which it is uttered. with Judge Ryan's wonderful appeal at the impeachment trial of Judge Hubbell. There was no speech at the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson on either side- although the forensic opportunities were infinitely greater-that can be likened to it. and some of the best lawyers the nation could boast were engaged in the case. It was like Cicero's philippie against the conspirator Cataline. In some respects Judge Ryan was undoubtedly the greatest genius that has yet appeared in the history of Wisconsin.
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The people of Wisconsin had a comparative release from political excitement during Governor Farwell's administration. He was counted in on a very narrow margin over D. A. J. Upham, the Democratic candidate, but all the other State offices were filled by Democrats, which gave color to the suspicion of foul play. Farwell was a Madison man, largely interested in the improvement of the city, owning nearly one half of the town site, a progressive and public spirited citizen of Whig antecedents and anti-slavery proclivities, whose election was considered of great benefit to the town, whereas Upham was a Milwaukee man, whose pecuniary interests, present and prospective, were all in the metropolis. At that time, also, there was a very strong feeling of jealousy towards Milwaukee in Janesville and Madison; the former being ambitious to become a large manufacturing and railroad center, and Madison having the capitol, State University and other public institutions, did not propose to take a back seat for anybody. It was at a time, too, when Chicago business men, aided by the Northwestern Rail- . road projectors, were trying hard to divert business from Milwau- . kee to Chicago, and when the Milwaukee business men seemed to be indifferent to all such rivalry.
If there was a miscount by the State canvassers-and many people of that date believe to this day that there was-whereby Farwell was counted in and Upham counted out, either by mistake or intentionally. the motive is to be found in the supposed interest which the city of Madison had in the deal. The effort to count William A. Barstow in four years later upon fraudulent returns has given some faint color to this suspicion. That Upham was beaten by the treachery of some of the active politicians in his own party is undoubtedly true. That he was purposely counted out when his own party had possession of all the election machinery, is almost incredible, for it was a time when the lust for political power was rampant. Farwell was himself an honest, upright man, whose dislike for politics was as great as the hankering after that. sort of life which was felt by Doty, Dodge and Barstow. He was a man of negative character. and his picture as a politician must always be painted in neutral tints. He accepted the nomination of the Whigs, Abolitionists, Free Soilers and sore-headed Democrats
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with great reluctance, and probably with the hope and expectation that he would be defeated at the polls, as was the fate of all his colleagues on the ticket. When he saw that he was likely to be nominated, he fled the city. Of his reluctance to take the nomina- tion, Sherman M. Booth says:
"Leonard J. Farwell, a non-partisan anti-slavery Whig. seemed to me to be the only man who could combine a majority vote against Upham. I spent two or three days with Farwell at his bachelor home at Madison, and rode half a day with him on the ice over the lake, trying to convince him that he had a call to be Governor of Wisconsin. With some difficulty I got the Free Soil Convention to nominate him. Gen. Paine and I argued with him two hours to persuade him to agree not to decline the nomina- tion until after the Whig Convention. Soon after the Whig Con- vention met and nominated A. L. Collins for Governor. Collins declined, and the convention then nominated Farwell and sent a committee to bring him in. Meanwhile Farwell had fled to the next town. The committee followed him to the house, the lady denied his presence, but they found his horses in the barn, called him from his hiding place in the chamber and took him to the conven- tion, where he accepted the nomination. And this is how Farwell became Governor of Wisconsin."
If there was fraud in the hat when Farwell was counted in as Governor over Upham, those who were guilty of the shameful and illegal act took good care not to leave any documentary evi- dence of their dishonesty behind them. It can safely be said. however, that the story that l'pham was cheated out of the office was generally believed by many of the leading Democrats then, and it is the belief of nearly all of them now. General Harrison C. Hobart said: "I have no doubt of it." The Hon. Wilson Graham, a member of the first constitutional convention, has very positive views upon the subject, and a vivid recollection of the Upham- Farwell election. B. K. Miller, then a boy, often heard his father. Judge A. G. Miller, assert his belief that Upham was defrauded out of his election. Another old resident of Wisconsin, who was a member of the first constitutional convention. and repeatedly a member of both the Territorial and State Legislatures. then a
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