USA > West Virginia > Encyclopedia of contemporary biography of West Virginia. Including reference articles on the industrial resources of the state, etc., etc. > Part 40
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The full list of State officers nominated and elected with Governor Pierpont were: Lieuten- ant-Governor, Daniel Polesley of Mason County, who was chosen on the same day with Governor Pierpont, June 20th; a few days later the Con- vention elected James S. Wheat, of Ohio, for Attorney-General; L. A. Hagans, of Preston, Secretary of State; Campbell Tarr, Treasurer; Samuel Crane, Auditor of Public Accounts, and H. J. Samuels, Adjutant-General. Peter G. Van Winkle, Daniel Lamb, William Lazier, William A. Harrison, and A. J. Paxton were selected as members of the Governor's Council. The office of Lieutenant-Governor was abolished by the Constitutional Convention, which met in November, 1862, and the same office was omitted in the Constitution of the new State. West Virginia has no Lieutenant-Governor. The con- stitution of West Virginia did not provide for
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Lieutenant-Governor, but Virginia had still a Lieutenant - Governor. The following rapid summary of the early State history of West Vir- ginia is copied from the "History of Monongalia County :"
"The Wheeling Convention reconvened on the 6th of August, 1861, and on the 20th passed an ordinance for the formation of a new State, to be called Kanawha, whichsordinance was sub- mitted to the people in October. At the same election delegates were to be chosen, who, if the ordinance were ratified, were to form a con- vention to frame a Constitution for the new State. The ordinance was ratified, the conven- tion assembled November 26, 1861, and con- cluded its labor on the 18th of the following February, and the Constitution framed was sub- mitted to the people on the 3d of April, 1862, and ratified. On May 13th the Legislature of the Reorganized Government of Virginia passed an act giving its consent to the formation of the State of West Virginia, the name West Virginia having been substituted by the constitutional convention for the proposed name of Kanawha. The consent of Congress to the admission of the State into the Union was next sought. The peti- tion for the admission was presented in the United States Senate by Senator Willey on the 29th of May, 1862. After a long struggle, the amended bill offered by Mr. Willey on the Ist of July, 1862, was passed. It provided that the new State should be admitted in the event of a certain change being made in the constitu. tion. The constitutional convention, which, fortunately, had not adjourned, but merely taken a recess, reassembled February 12, 1863, made the change, submitted it to the people, the people ratified it, and President Lincoln, by proclamation of April 19, 1863, declared the fact, and West Virginia became a State of the United States. The State officers elected on the 28th of May were inducted into office on the 20th of June, 1863-the day from which the existence of the State is reckoned."
Governor Pierpont makes this statement in regard to President Lincoln's signing the bill creating West Virginia a State: There were great doubts about his signing the bill. The excitement at Wheeling was intense. In the afternoon about two o'clock of the day on which the time for the President to sign the bill ex- pired, A. W. Campbell, A. J. Paxton, and E. M. Norton went to Governor Pierpont's office and wanted him to send the strongest telegram he could to President Lincoln, urging him to sign the bill. The Governor objected, said he had written and telegraphed twice and feared wear-
ing the President out with importunity. But they would take no refusal, so the telegram was sent as follows, Mr. Campbell writing to the Governor's dictation :
" PRES. LINCOLN. Iam in great hopes you will sign the bill to make West Virginia a new State. The loyal people of the State have their hearts set on it. The soldiers in the army have their hearts set on it. If the bill fails, God only knows the result. I fear general demoraliza- tion. I am clear, the consequence is in your hands. F. H. PIERPONT, Gov."
On the day Mr. Lincoln returned from Rich- mond after its evacuation, he sent for Governor Pierpont to talk about Reconstruction. The following is a summary of Governor Pierpont's recollections: He and President Lincoln dis- cussed the subject in all its phases for several hours. The President said that reconstruction had come upon him before he expected it. When through he remarked: "Governor, I be- lieve I never told you the turning point with me in signing the Bill making West Virginia a new State." "No," replied the Governor. "Well," said he, " a great deal had been said on both sides about the constitutionality of the bill. The members of the Cabinet have given me written opinions-some claiming, some denying its con- stitutionality. I was perplexed on the subject. On the last day I could hold the bill you sent me a telegram, do you remember it?" "Per- fectly," replied the Governor. "Well," said he, "when I got that telegram a new light flashed upon me, I said to myself, 'Here! there is no constitutional question about this bill. It is purely political. We have been fighting the Rebellion for near two years without success. The friends of the bill say it will strengthen the Union cause and weaken the Rebels. I will haggle no longer over the Constitution, but sign the bill on political grounds.'" Governor Pier- pont also makes the following statement: he says the State of Virginia was never out of the Union technically, according to the dogma of State rights. The Legislature calling the Seces- sion Convention required that whatever altera- tions were made in the original law should be submitted to the people for adoption or rejec- tion. The ordinance was passed and submitted to the vote of the people. They voted. The Convention was in session for months after the vote was taken. A committee was appointed to
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count the vote. That committee made a partial report, but asked and obtained leave to continue their work. It never reported; the convention passed no resolution that the people had ratified the ordinance of secession. The Governor never issued a formal proclamation that the ordinance of secession had been ratified. So in fact Vir- ginia, according to the dogmas of States' rights, was never out of the Union. The people within her boundaries who adhered to the Confederate cause were simply engaged in a big insurrection or rebellion conducting it under the forms of law. The Restored Government of Virginia was the only legal authorized government in the State. It is an eminent example of the doctrine laid down by Mr. Madison in the Federalist, "that a majority may be in rebellion against a legal minority in a State." The ancestral his- tory of Mr. Pierpont is of romantic origin and unusually interesting. Shortly after his settle- ment in Richmond as the head of the loyal State Government, the Richmond Republic published the Pierpont genealogy, which was copied in the Wheeling Intelligencer of June 13, 1865, on file at the City Library of Wheeling. It reads:
"The present Chief Magistrate of Virginia is descended from William Pierpont, who was one of the chief 'men at arms' of William the Nor- man, and was with the Conqueror at the battle of Hastings, and for his conduct in that battle was ennobled and endowed with lands at King- ston-upon-Hull. The family was a noble family in England till the death of Evelin, the last Duke of Kingston, in 1772. John Pierpont, from whom all of the name in this country are descended, emigrated from London to Roxbury, now Boston, Mass., some time about 1683. His son James graduated at Cambridge College, and was settled at New Haven, Conn., in 1685, and from him are descended all of the name now known to be living in this country. On the death of Evelin, last Duke of Kingston, without heirs male, the title lapsed, the estates descend- ing to collateral kindred. By the first emigrant to America, John, and by his father James, who, at John's emigration was a merchant of London, the name was written Pierpont. Thus it is cut upon a tombstone of John in the old burying ground of Roxbury, Mass., where he and others of his family are interred, and the same orthog- raphy is observed in an autograph signature to a deed of conveyance of real estate in Roxbury, still in the hands of a kinsman of Governor Pierpont-the Rev. John Pierpont, D.D., for many years minister of the Unitarian Church in Boston and now a clerk in the Treasury Depart-
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ment at Washington, from whom we have de-
rived these particulars. From New Haven, some members of the family removed to the city of New York and to Jersey City, opposite, shortly before the Revolutionary War. John Pierpont, the grandfather of our present Gov- ernor, early in life emigrated from Jersey City to Monongalia County, where the latter was born. In issuing to John Pierpont the patent for the land on which he settled, the officers in Richmond misspelt the name, writing it Pier- point, and it is in this way that the corrupt or- thography has obtained in Virginia."
Governor Pierpont returned to the original and correct spelling of his name in 1881. Pre- vious to that date it was Pierpoint and as Gov- ernor his name so appears in the newspapers and was signed with that spelling to all his offi- cial documents. Further interesting history about the family and inspired from entirely dif- ferent sources, yet strikingly confirming the foregoing and as strikingly corroborated by it, is the history of the distinguished Pierpont family of the City of Brooklyn, New York State. The following is from the sketch of Hezekiah Beers Pierrepont, in Vol. V. of "Contemporary Biog- raphy of New York:"
"He was descended from the Rev. James Pierrepont, who was the first minister settled in the colony of New Haven, Conn., at the time of its establishment. It is a most interesting his- torical fact in regard to the lineage of this family, that the town plot in New Haven ceded by the aborigines in 1684 has been ever since occupied by the family, and is still in their pos- session. The immediate ancestor of Rev. James Pierrepont was John Pierrepont, an Englishman, who came from the family of Holme Pierrepont, of Norman descent. John Pierrepont came to this country, according to tradition, about the year 1640, with his younger brother Robert. His design was merely to visit the country; but he remained, married here, and finally settled in Roxbury, then a suburb, but now a part of Boston, Mass. The family name being Norman- French, was at this time spelled in English fashion, Pierpont, but the correct spelling was returned to by the subject of this sketch, and has ever been adhered to by this branch of the family."
Also see sketch of Henry E. Pierrepont, son of the above, in the same volume. Confirma- tory of this ancestral line of the family is the following cablegram announcing the death of Hon. Edwards Pierrepont, of New York, who, of course, belongs to the same family, and whose
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biography and portrait may also be found in the work above named.
"LONDON, March 9, 1892.
"The news of the death of Hon. Edwards Pierrepont, formerly Minister to England, has caused sincere grief here in the social and official circles in which he mingled. Although his claim to descent from the Duke of Kingston causcd him much ridicule and loss of political prestige in America, nobody here doubts that the claim is genuine, and that the records of the extinct Dukedom of Kingston are to be found in the United States. The name of Pierrepont went with this dukedom, and is now held by the Manvers family, through the female line. Mr. Pierrepont was highly esteemed in London so- ciety, apart from his possession of a name that goes back to the days of William the Conqueror."
In the month of December, 1854, Mr. Pierpont became united in marriage to Miss Julia Augusta Robertson, daughter of Rev. Samuel Robert- son, whose wife was Dorcas Platt. Mr. Robert- son was a Presbyterian minister of New York. Their children are named Samuel R., Francis William, and Anna, who is the wife of William Henry Siviter, of Pittsburgh, the well-known writer and humorist.
ARCHIBALD W. CAMPBELL.
HON. A. W. CAMPBELL,* the subject of this sketch, is the son of the late Dr. A. W. Campbell, of Bethany, Brooke County, W. Va., and was born in Jefferson County, Ohio, April 4, 1833. He removed to Bethany in his boyhood days and was educated at the well-known college there, graduating in 1852, when nineteen years of age. He afterward studied law, attended lectures at Hamilton College Law School, New York, and graduated from that institution in 1855. He removed to Wheeling in the spring of 1856 as an attaché of the Daily Intelligencer, then owned by Pendleton & Bcatty, and in the fall of that year bought out the paper in partnership with John F. McDermot and became its editor. At once the paper took ground in favor of liberal political principles and soon allied itself with the then young but rapidly growing Republican party. These were not the days of free speech on the slavery question on the soil of Virginia.
The influence of the eastern part of the State was predominant here in the west, albeit so many of the western counties had so few slaves, and to be a Republican was but little better than being an out-and-out Abolitionist, and to be an Abolitionist was but little better socially and politically than to be tainted with crime. All classes of society felt the despotic influence of slavery over their status. It made preachers timid in the pulpit, merchants and tradesinen timid in their business, and politicians timid and time-serving in their utterances. To be in accord with Richmond, with the pro-slavery press there, with the growing demands of the South in general for more slave territory, was the correct thing in politics and social life, and ambitious lawyers, editors, and public men bowed their heads and knees at this shrine. Wheeling and Ohio County had then not more than one hundred slaves. This is the number given by the census of 1860. And yet the gov- erning tone in politics and in society was but an echo of Richmond and old Virginia. In the year in which the Intelligencer began its career as the advocate of the right of all men to ex- press and vote their political sentiments, the circuit judge of the Wheeling district charged a grand jury (in effect) that Republicans were suspicious persons and obnoxious to the laws and institutions of Virginia. Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, was de- terred from delivering a conservative lecture in Wheeling on the issues of the day, because sim- ply of incidental references in his address to the slavery question. A Baptist minister of culture and high character left the city under the ban of this proscriptive opinion, because he taught colored children to read in his Sunday-school. The circuit court of Harrison County issued a menacing edict against the reading of the New York Tribune, and the club agent of that paper fled the State to escape indictment and impris- onment. Partisan post-masters, subservient to the Richmond despotism, withheld such papers as the New York Christian Advocate from their subscribers and were not rebuked by their su- periors at Washington. A valuable statistical book written by a native North Carolinian, which discussed the economic phases of slavery, had to be read by stealth in Wheeling, and news- dealers were afraid to keep it on their shelves.
* By Hon. George W. Atkinson.
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They were threatened with indictment in the courts. Republican meetings were broken up by mobs and their processions stoned in the streets. They had no adequate police protec- tion. Cassius M. Clay, of Kentucky, was threat- ened with personal violence for coming to deliver an address in Wheeling that he had delivered in the heart of his own State, and the directors of the hall in which he was to speak deliberated whether it would be safe to open their doors to this eminent citizen. These were the days and these the auspices under which Mr. Campbell began his career as the editor of the only Re- publican daily paper in all the then vast area of Virginia. A stout heart might well have quailed over the prospect. Almost from the start the Intelligencer was the constant target of the pro- slavery press of the State. The Richmond press reproached Wheeling because such a publica- tion was permitted to exist in her midst, and between these reproaches and the objurgations of influential persons and papers at home it looked as if the fate of the enterprise was un- certain indeed. But the paper lived, although in a precarious way for a time, and pursued such a fair, firm, and conservative course that it grad- ually gained in influence and circulation, and when the great and exciting Presidential can- vass of 1860 opened it was fairly able to stand alone. Mr. Campbell went as a delegate from Virginia to the Convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for President, and returning home gave his candidacy an enthusiastic sup- port. Wheeling was the scene of many excite- ments that year. There was no telling what a day would bring forth in the way of violence. Eight hundred Republican votes were polled in the county-mostly in the city of course-and these among the workmen in the iron mills, particularly the La Belle mill. About three thousand votes were polled in the State. These were the nucleus of the Union organization that at a later day rallied to the defence of the Na- tion and the salvation of the State from seces- sion. The local Republican speakers of that day were Mr. Campbell, Alfred Caldwell, and E. M. Norton. They discussed the discriminations in favor of slavery, in the matter of taxation and the basis of representation in the Legislature, and these were strong points that arrested public attention and made a decided popular impres-
sion. Governor Pierpont, although a Bell and Everett elector, discussed these issues from the same standpoint, and virtually made Republican speeches. Public documents were issued and sent out among the people showing how West Virginia was subordinated and injured in all her interests by Eastern Virginia, and gradually the way was prepared for the new State movement that assumed practical shape at the very outset of the war-just as Daniel Webster predicted in 1851 would be the case in the event that Vir- ginia ever allied herself with secession. The history of the Intelligencer during the war is the history of the Union and new State cause. They will all remain one and inseparable in the annals of West Virginia. In all those years no one threw himself more earnestly, ably, and untir- ingly into the support of both than Mr. Camp- bell. President Lincoln told Governor Pierpont that it was a dispatch penned by Mr. Campbell that determined him to sign the bill (against the wishes of a part of his cabinet) that admitted West Virginia into the Union as a State. The Intelligencer was the right arm of the " Restored Government" of Virginia and Mr. Campbell was the trusted counsellor and supporter of the Union authorities both in civil and military matters. When the new State Constitution was being framed he protested against the clause recognizing slavery, and predicted that Con- gress would never consent to the formation of a second slave State out of the territory of Vir- ginia, a prediction that was verified to the letter. The Constitution had to come back for amend- ment, and West Virginia was finally admitted as a free State. After the war the great problem of the political rehabilitation of the State had to be met. There was an intense feeling among the rank and file of the Union element in favor of restricting the suffrage. All who had aided or abetted the rebellion were regarded as public enemies, dangerous to the results of the war and the public peace of society, and therefore not to be trusted with the ballot. Mr. Campbell was forced to dissent from this view of many Union men. He believed that such a policy would make an Ireland out of the State, produce endless discord, and work to the infinite injury of all the material interests of the Common- wealth. He, therefore, prepared the celebrated "let up" address (as it was called) to the Union
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people of West Virginia, which was influentially signed, in which these views were strongly dis- cussed, and although there was wide-spread dis- sent on the part of many leading Union people and some bitter criticisms at the moment, yet the sober second thought of the people indorsed the position thus taken, and at a later day it be- came, in substance, an amendment to our State Constitution and as such was adopted by the people. Mr. Campbell, although an original and unswerving Republican, has not hesitated when the occasion arose to thus differ from his party. He differed from them on the policy of the Greenback alliance and held that sound ideas on the currency of the Government was a matter of such vital moment to the public welfare that the party could not afford to temporize for the sake of any campaign advantages. He differed from a large and influential element of the party on the issue of the third term in the Grant movement of 1880, a difference that resulted in the memorable denouement in the Chicago Con- vention of that year that is supposed to have paved the way to Garfield's nomination for President. In that Convention Senator Roscoe Conkling, who was the leader of the third term movement, sought by the introduction of a reso- lution before the balloting begun to commit the delegates in advance to a support of the nominee, whoever he might be. Mr. Campbell, in an able and vigorous speech, opposed such unprece- dented action. Senator Conkling promptly offered a resolution proposing to expel Mr. Campbell from his position as a delegate in the Convention. Mr. Campbell obtained the floor . and most ably defended the position he had con- scientiously taken, and among other things gave utterance to the remark, which gave him a na- tional reputation as a man of unusual courage and ability, viz .: "Whether in or out of this Convention, I carry my sovereignty under my own hat." Mr. Conkling's resolution did not prevail. Upon Mr. Campbell's return to Wheel- ing a public mass meeting was held in the opera house, elaborate addresses indorsing his conduct in the Convention were made, and he was pub- licly presented with a large oil painting repre- senting the scene alluded to in the Chicago' Convention. Mr. Campbell, with all his promi- nence in the public affairs of West Virginia for a generation, has never been a politician. He
has left the manipulation of conventions and nominations to others. He had no taste what- ever in that direction, preferring to discuss public measures in his paper and on the hust- ings. He has been largely voted for time and again for the United States Senate, and there is no doubt had he so chosen he could have effected his own election. But this he always declined to do, and because he did not no one ever heard him repine over the result, or saw him falter in his usual political course. His name was urged by his friends for a position in President Gar- field's cabinet. His indorsements were exten- sive, and came from the leading Republicans from nearly every portion of the Republic. Of late years he has given more attention to busi- ness interests than to politics. He has been connected for many years with iron and steel manufacture as president and director of one of the large works, but has always been ready to take up his pen or go before the people in advocacy of Republican principles. He was one of the three commissioners on the part of West Virginia to adjust the debt question with Vir- ginia, and was charged with the duty of prepar- ing a large part of the able report upon that question. He has from time to time delivered addresses on various subjects of public interest, and in 1887 prepared an interesting historical résumé of the events, civil and political, that led to the formation of the State, at the request of the Society of the Army of West Virginia. His familiarity with all matters relative to the tariff caused him to be sent to Washington as the representative of the Ohio Valley Steel As- sociation before the Ways and Means Committee of Congress. But few Americans have studied the varied phases of political economy as deeply and with the same amount of care and research that Mr. Campbell has given to them. He seems to know the history of the great tariff question from A to Z. The writer has heard him make a large number of public speeches upon that subject, and it was a rare thing for him to repeat himself. Each address seemed to be a presentation of some new feature of the matter that he had not formerly considered. He appeared to have stored away in his memory a fund of information that was illimitable, and like a great spool unravelled at his will. It was said of his uncle, the great Bishop Alexander
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