The Ohio people had the impulse to this great work from the New York people, who had built the Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo, and whose governor, De Witt Clinton, had urged forward that work. Now, when our whole state was ablaze with joy at the action of the legislature in providing for the work, Governor Clinton was invited to come and first strike the spade into the earth in digging the new canals. He arrived by steamboat at Cleveland, where the people received him and his train of distinguished New Yorkers with rejoicings worthy of the great event. He took stage for Newark, and on the 4th of July, 1825, when our state had just come of age, in the presence of all the Ohio magnates and dignitaries, and a mighty throng of citizens, he lifted a spadeful from the ground on the Licking Summit. Governor Morrow of Ohio lifted the second spadeful, and then followed a struggle among the distinguished men as to which should lift the third. New Yorkers and Ohioans vied in filling a wheelbarrow with successive spadefuls, and a happy citizen of Chillicothe had the honor of wheeling it away and dumping it over a bank. He was the captain of a company of militia, and the crowd was so great that a squadron of cavalry had to keep a space for the speakers in the midst of their hollow square. Thomas Ewing delivered the oration, and men all round him wept for joy.



There were like scenes when the canals were completed. Multitudes gathered to see the water let into the channels which to their impatience had been so long in digging, and they took hopefully the disappointment of having it sink into the gravelly beds, before it could slowly fill the banks, instead of rushing like a flood to their brims. At Dayton, 1829, when the first fleet of three canal boats arrived from Cincinnati, it was greeted with the firing of cannon and the shouts of an immense crowd lining the canal banks. This was as it should be, and will be wherever a great work is done for the common good; and it ought never to be forgotten that the canals of Ohio were dug by Ohio men that all Ohio men might freely prosper more and more, and not that a few rich men might get richer.

After the National Road, which was our first way out, came the steam navigation of the lake and the river, and after that came the railroad, which will be our main reliance for getting back and forth over the state and to and from it, till some of the many schemes of travel through the air are realized. We cannot tell how far off the event may be; but in the mean time it is curious, if not very flattering to our Ohio pride, to learn that the first railroad enterprise within our borders was fostered by Michigan. The legislature of that state granted the charter of the Erie and Kalamazoo Railroad, which opened in 1836. The line ran from Toledo to Adrian, thirty-three miles, but when it was projected the matter was so far from serious with the legislature which authorized it, that it was granted because it was "merely a fanciful scheme that could do no harm, and would greatly please" certain citizens of Toledo; just as now a balloon line might be laughingly authorized. It was entirely successful, however, as far as the running was concerned, though the road was so hampered by the cost of fighting enemies and the expenses of building that it was seized for debt seven years later.

This has been the history of many railroads since in Ohio, and if we could read between the lines that now cobweb the map of the state, we should come to know many tales of broken fortunes and of broken hopes. The railroads are no different in this from other business enterprises, but they are different from the canals. These, as we have seen, were the work of the state for the advantage of the whole people, while the railroads were from the beginning private schemes for making money. Each kind of highway came in its time, and each in its way served the purpose of Ohio. At the time the companies began to build their railroads, the state system of canals was in its highest usefulness, and it is no wonder that the people should have regarded the railroads as fanciful schemes. No one could then have dreamed how rapidly they would increase and multiply, and that in less than fifty years they should so far surpass the canals in service to the public that some of these would be abandoned by the state, and become grass-grown ditches hardly distinguishable in their look of ancient ruin from the works of the Mound Builders. At the most there were once nine hundred miles of canals in Ohio, and now there are twelve or fourteen thousand miles of railroads. Yet the canals were a greater achievement for Ohio in 1837 than the railroads are in 1897.

The children of this day can hardly imagine what rude and simple affairs the earliest railroads were. Instead of the long smooth steel rails which now carry the great trains, with their luxurious cars, in their never-ceasing flight, day in and day out the whole year round, flat bands of iron, spiked to wooden rails, formed the path of the small carriages drawn by a locomotive of the size and shape of a threshing-machine engine. These amazed by a speed of ten or twelve miles an hour the gaping spectator whose grandchildren do not turn their heads to look at the express as it makes its sixty miles in sixty minutes. In the very beginning, indeed, the carriages were drawn by horses, and it was several years before steam was used.



Little by little the railroads began to be built on the easy levels of the state, and before a great while a line was projected from Cincinnati to Columbus along the course of the Little Miami River. This was completed piecemeal, from point to point, and at last carried through. In the mean time other lines were laid out, and then all at once the railroad era was at hand. It was a time of great excitement and expectation, if not of that public rejoicing which had welcomed the canals.

In a few years the magnificent fleets of the river began to feel the fatal rivalry of the trains that swept along its borders. Travel deserted them, and traffic sought the surer and swifter transportation of the shore. The great packets that had carried swarms of passengers to and from Pittsburg and Cincinnati and all the points between, disappeared or were converted into freight-boats, and then these began to fail for want of traffic, and the Beautiful River was almost abandoned to the stern-wheeler pushing a flotilla of coal-barges. A like change took place upon the lake; steamers which formed the means of communication between the towns and cities from Cleveland to Buffalo, and from Cleveland to Detroit, ceased to touch at the smaller ports, and became the pleasure-craft of the summer tourists, or the carriers of heavy freight, and the ports which did not become the feeders of the railroads dwindled to insignificance. But the railroads could not affect the navigation of the lake quite so disastrously as that of the river; the lake in such a rivalry had some such advantage as that of the sea from its mere vastness, and from the expanses where the railroads could not follow the steamer in the mere nature of things. The iron horse had his way with the canals, though, and these monuments of a former period of enterprise grow more and more like its sepulcher, where he drank them dry. or where he left their slow currents to stagnate unstirred by the keels of the leisurely craft once so jubilantly welcomed to them.

Except for the occasional breaking of an embankment, the history of the canals could hardly be marked by any incidents of exciting interest. It was not so with steamboating and railroading, which has each its long tale of disasters such as give times of peace almost as dark a record as those of war. The most tragical of these events took place at the opposite extremities of the state, in Cincinnati and in Ashtabula, and they occurred at the beginning and the end of an interval of nearly forty years.

The rise of steamboating on the Western rivers was perhaps all the more rapid because of the daring and reckless spirit of the Western people, who took almost any risk in order to carry a point in their rivalries or to gain an end of their ambition. It is certain at any rate that the builders and the crews of the popular boats joined in contriving and urging them to a speed that should leave all competitors behind. There was frequent racing between the packets on the Ohio and Mississippi, and the frightful calamities from bursting boilers continued for a long time before public opinion quelled the boyish love of victory which tempted not only the steamboatmen but their passengers too. These joined with the captain in forcing the boat to the top of its speed, at the risk of a swift or agonizing death to all on board; and it was no doubt with their full approval that the master of the beautiful new steamer Moselle took the chance that resulted in the loss of more than two hundred lives on the 26th of April, 1838. She had just left her moorings at Cincinnati for her trip to Louisville, and had run up to take on a family from a raft a little way above the city. In order that she might show her speed before the crowd on the landing, and pass a rival boat in sight of all as she returned, the captain held to the full head of steam with which he had started. Her wheels had scarcely turned, after she parted from the raft, when her boilers burst with a roar like thunder. The air was instantly filled with the flying fragments of the wreck, and with the bodies and the heads and limbs of men, women, and children. These fell, strewing the shore and dropping into the river, where what was left of the Moselle sank within fifteen minutes. Cries of anguish, groans and shrieks from the sufferers, followed the awful sound of the explosion. Many of the victims whom the accident had spared were drowned before boats could reach them. The mangled body of the captain was hurled into the street; the pilot was thrown a hundred feet into the air and fell back into the stream.



In 1876, on the evening of December 29, an express train of the Lake Shore Railroad, broke through the bridge at Ashtabula, and plunged seventy-five feet down into the bed of the creek below. The train was of eleven cars with a hundred and fifty-six passengers on board, and the bridge was further strained by the weight of the two massive locomotives which drew it. The night was extremely cold, and a blinding snow storm was raging, while the freezing wind blew a gale. The wreck at once took fire, and with the cries of the wounded were now mingled the agonized prayers of those who saw themselves doomed to death in the blazing ruins which imprisoned them. Nearly every one on the train was hurt more or less severely; eighty persons perished in the fall or the fire, and five died after they were rescued.

There were other paths which the Ohio people had to open before they could reach a yet wider world than any that lay to the east of them, or the south of them. Their course to civilization lay not only through the woods and down the rivers and over the mountains, but it ran also through the great realm of books, and every log schoolhouse was a station or a junction on it; or rather, as they had things in these days, a milestone or a finger-post.

The great glory and strength of the Ohio people, as I have hinted before, came from their varied origin.

They have shown themselves among the first of the Americans, not because they were born in Ohio, but because they were born of the Massachusetts and Connecticut men, the New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians, the New Jerseymen and Marylanders, the Virginians and Carolinians and Kentuckians who made Ohio what it was to be by the mixture of their characteristics and qualities here. It is of no use to pretend, however, that it was their virtues alone which got into the Ohio people; their foibles got in too, and their prejudices and their vices. A traveler in our state, just after it had become a state, believed that we were destined to be more like the people of the North and East than the people of the South, whom he then found, in Kentucky at least, much livelier in mind and manner than the Pennsylvanians, fond of public life and society, very hospitable and courteous, but dissipated, restless, and reckless. Our public spirit did not come from our Southern ancestry, but from our New England ancestry. The South gave Ohio perhaps her foremost place in war and politics, but her enlightenment in other things was from the North. It was the aristocratic indifference of the South to public schools that for twenty-four years after Ohio became a state kept her from profiting by the magnificent provision of school lands made for her by the whole nation through Congress. It was not until almost a generation after Ohio became a state that she began to have schools partly free, and it was still a generation later before the men of New England blood framed the present school law, and got it enacted by the legislature. This was in 1853, but in 1825 the first great effort for public schools was made. There was then a party in favor of canals in the legislature, and another party in favor of schools, and these two parties fought each other a long time. At last they united, and together gave the people canals and schools, the two ways out of the wilderness.

Our canals are no longer the great avenues of commerce, because the modern needs and means are different from those of former days, but our schools are still the royal roads, the people's roads, to and from the world of letters and arts. Ohio is now second to no other state in her public school system: and well-nigh three-quarters of a century ago, when General Lafayette visited Cincinnati in his tour of the Republic which he had helped to found, nothing surprised and charmed him more than the greeting which the children of her public schools gave him. It spoke to him of a refined and graceful life, such as he could never have imagined in the young city so lately carven out the forests; and such proofs of the general culture must have done more than all the signs of material prosperity, all the objects of industry so proudly shown him, to make him regard Ohio (to use his own words) as the eighth wonder of the world. Six hundred boys and girls from the public schools met him at sunrise, on the morning of his arrival, and scattered flowers under his feet and made the air ring with their shouts of "Welcome to Lafayette!"

As for the Indians, who fought so long and so hard here for the graves of their fathers and the homes of their children, they had to find their ways out too. But it would not be easy to say what became of them all, for they went such various ways out of Ohio and out of the world. Some remained in the country which they had lost, and in a few cases they tried to take on the likeness of civilized men. But oftener they only took on the vices of civilization; they were the drunkards and the vagrants of their neighborhoods, living by a little work and by the contemptuous charity of the settlers. In them the proud spirit of their race was broken; they suffered insult and outrage from their conquerors without resisting; a small white Titian might knock a stalwart Indian down with his fist, and the Indian would not attempt to revenge himself. For a while, the settlers feared the lingering red men, but they soon learned to despise them, and it was seldom that they troubled the whites by theft or violence.

A good many of the tribesmen followed the British into Canada, after the War of 1812, where it must be owned to our shame as Americans that they had wiser, kinder, and juster treatment than we gave those who remained with us, and who followed westward from their old hunting grounds in Ohio the buffalo, the elk, the beaver, and the deer. Several nations, or parts of nations, were gathered on reservations in Seneca, Lucas, and Wyandot counties, where they were given land and taught farming and other trades. Missionaries came to dwell among them and try to make them Christians, and many were converted. The Quakers seem to have done the best work in this way, for the Indians always trusted and loved the men of peace.

But although their friends could teach the Indians to plow and sow, to build houses and barns, to make tools and mend them, to sing and to pray, and to wear clothes and to lead decent and sober lives, they could not uproot all their old customs and superstitions. The superstition that seemed to last longest was the belief in witchcraft, which was indeed very common among their white neighbors. Nearly all forms of sickness were treated as the effect of witchcraft by the Indians, and the afflicted were carried into the woods and left alone with none near them except the medicine man whose business it was to expel the witch.

A suspected witch or wizard might be safely killed by any kinsman of the sufferer; and it is said that Indians were known to walk all the way from the Mississippi to the Ohio reservations in order to shoot down persons accused of witchcraft, and then return unmolested. In 1828, the Mingo chief Seneca John was put to death by two of his tribesmen as ruthlessly as Leatherlips in 1812. He was accused of having bewitched the chief Comstock, and though he protested, "I loved my brother Comstock better than the green earth. I stand upon; I would shed my blood, drop by drop, to bring him back to life," yet he was sentenced to die, and Comstock's brothers, Coonstick and Steel, carried out the sentence.

In 1831 the Senecas ceded their lands, forty thousand acres on the Sandusky, to the United States, and were removed to the southwest of the Missouri. Each of the other reservations was given up in turn for lands in the Far West, and in the early forties I myself, when a boy living in Hamilton, saw the last of the Ohio Indians passing through the town on the three canal boats which carried the small remnant of their nation southward and westward out of the hind that was to know them no more forever.



It was quite time. I cannot say how far they had been civilized, and for all I know they may have been tame farmers and mechanics, but in their moccasins and blankets, with their bows and arrows, they looked like wild hunters; and Ohio was no longer a good hunting ground. All the larger game had long been killed off or driven away, and the smaller game was fast vanishing before the rifle and the shotgun. As if its destruction by gunners singly was not rapid enough it was the custom in somewhat earlier days for whole neighborhoods to meet together for the wholesale slaughter of the sylvan creatures which still abounded. One of these great hunts took place in Medina County, in 1818, when the region was as yet very sparsely settled. The drive, as it was called, was fixed for the 24th of December, and at sunrise, six hundred men and boys drew up their far-spreading lines. They were armed with rifles, shotguns, old muskets, pistols, knives, axes, hatchets, bayonets fastened to long poles, and whatever other weapons they could lay hands on, to shoot, strike, or stab with, and they began to draw their vast circle together with a hideous uproar of horn, conchshells, and voices. The deer fled inward from all sides; bear and wolf left their coverts in terror; foxes and raccoons joined the panic rout, and the air was full of the flight of wild turkeys. Then the slaughter began, and before it ended three hundred deer, twenty-one bears, and seventeen wolves were killed; of the turkeys and the smaller game no tale was kept.

Later these drives were common in the years whenever game was abundant in any neighborhood. They were called squirrel-hunts, because the squirrel was the unit, and larger or smaller game counted so many squirrels, or went to make up the value of a squirrel. I knew of one of these hunts during the late fifties in Northern Ohio, when the wild pigeons were still in such multitude that their flight darkened the sky, where now one of them is rarely seen.



XXI. THE FIGHT WITH SLAVERY.

Almost from the beginning Ohio was called the Yankee state by her Southern neighbors. Burr had found her people too plodding for him, as he said, and it would not have been strange if the older slave-holding communities on her southern and eastern border had seen with distrust and dislike the advance of the young free state, and had given her that nickname partly out of envy and partly out of contempt. Their citizens were high-spirited and generous, but they had not the public spirit which New England had imparted to Ohio, for public spirit comes from equality and from the feeling for others' rights, and the very supremacy which the slaveholders enjoyed was fatal to this feeling. Virginia and Kentucky were rich in independent character, but public spirit is better than this, for it cares for the independence of all through the self-sacrifice of each. That was the secret which Ohio early learned from New England, and which kept her safe from slavery when it pressed so hard upon her in the friendship as well as the enmity of her neighbors.

We know that the Northwestern Territory was devoted to freedom by the law that created it, but we have seen that slavery was kept out of Ohio by one vote only when her first constitution was adopted; and for a very long time there was a very large party favorable to slavery in our state. It will seem strange to many of my readers that Ohio people of color were once not only not allowed to vote, but were not allowed to give testimony in the courts of law. They were treated in this like the Southern slaves, and in fact there was really a sort of slaveholding in Ohio, in spite of the law. In the river counties many farmers hired slaves from their masters in Virginia and Kentucky; and when the Southerners traveled through Ohio, they brought their slaves into the state with them, and took them out again. But when the conscience of the Northern people began to stir against slavery, the Ohio abolitionists coaxed away the slaves of these Southern travelers and sojourners, and this, with the constant escape of runaway slaves by their help, infuriated the friends of slavery inside as well as outside of the state. The abolitionists had what they called the Underground Railroad, with stations at their houses in town and country, and they sped the fugitives from one to another till they reached Canada. Their enemies accused them of tempting slaves across the Ohio, in order to give them their freedom, and in a little while the rage against them broke out in mobs and riots.

It would not be easy to trace here the course of events which led to these outbreaks. It is no doubt true that the abolitionists were often rash, if not reckless, and that when they were maddened by the coldness or the hostility of the people to the cause of human freedom they did not stop at some acts which, though they were righteous enough, were unlawful. It was unlawful to harbor runaway slaves, but they did it gladly, and they appealed to the passions as well as the consciences of men in their hate of the sum of all villainies, as John Wesley called slavery. They not only met their foes half way, they carried the war into the hearts and homes of the enemy. From time to time wicked and sorrowful things happened to fret their fanaticism and keep it at a white heat. Peaceable negroes were attacked in their homes by ruffianly whites, their cattle killed, their fields wasted; and sometimes they made a bloody resistance. They were not always harmless, and they were not always pleasant neighbors. Slavery was a bad school, for the slaves as well as the masters; and the negroes, when not vicious and dishonest, were degraded and ignorant, for the public schools were shut against them, and they could not read, any more than they could vote or bear witness. So it is not strange that they should have been hunted and harried everywhere in Southern Ohio.

In Pike County a whole neighborhood was invaded, and several lives were lost before one of these foolish and wicked persecutions ended. This incident, which was one of many more or less violent, occurred in 1830, and two years later something still more tragical happened. A negro calling himself Thomas Marshall, who had lived several years at Dayton, was caught up in the streets of that town by some men who, when his cries brought the citizens to his help, declared that he was a runaway slave. They took him before a magistrate, and proved their charge; but one of the slavecatchers held out the hope that his master would sell him. The poor slave gave fifty dollars himself toward his freedom, and his ransom was well made up when word came from his owner in Kentucky that he would not part with him for any sum. His captors then took Marshall to Cincinnati, where he was lodged for safe keeping over night in the fourth story of a hotel. When his guards fell asleep, the slave rose and threw himself out of the window to the ground fifty feet below. He was taken up fatally hurt, and he died at dawn.

The anti-slavery meetings were often broken in upon by mobs and sometimes broken up. One of these riots took place in 1834 at Granville, in Licking County, where the Ohio Anti-slavery Convention held its anniversary in a barn on the outskirts. The members were returning to the village in a procession when the mob met them, and at sight of the ladies among them shouted, "Egg the squaws!" and began to pelt them with eggs and other missiles, while some ran and tried to trip them up. Many of the men were beaten and egged, and the manes and tails of their horses were shaved. This was a favorite argument with the friends of slavery, and if shaving horses' manes and tails could have availed, their party would easily have won.

Some of the anti-slavery speakers and lecturers came on missions from the Eastern States, but several of the fiercest and bravest were like the Rev. John Rankin, of Clermont County, who had emigrated from Tennessee to Ohio, because he would not live in a slaveholding community. He used to preach against slavery at frequent peril of his life, and his son tells how a mob leader once mounted to his pulpit, and threatened him with his club. "Stop speaking, or I will burst your head," he shouted, but Rankin went quietly on as if nothing had been said, and one of his friends dragged the ruffian from his side. Of course, he was always coming home with his horse's mane and tail shaved, and of course his house was a station on the underground railroad to freedom.

One of the boldest of the abolitionists was James G. Birney, who like Rankin had come to Ohio from the South. He started a newspaper called The Philanthropist in Cincinnati, and for three months attacked slavery unsparingly in it. Then, on the 23d of July, 1836, the mob rose, broke into the printing office, threw the types into the street, tore down the press, and cast the fragments into the river. Then they assailed the black people living in one of the alleys, and shots were exchanged but no lives were lost. A few years later, however, in 1841, a general assault was made upon the negroes by the mob; several on both sides were killed and many wounded, and the office of The Philanthropist was again destroyed. Of course these things did not stop the fight against slavery, and it did not help slavery at all when the authorities of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati forbade the students to write or to talk about it. That was foolish and useless; it only hurt the seminary, and drove many students from it to the college at Oberlin, then newly founded in the woods of Lorain County. There they could not only discuss slavery, but they could learn about it at first hand from the negro students. The founders of Oberlin were not abolitionists, but it is related that when they took Christ for their guide, they found that they could not shut out the friendless people whom the law kept from the schools, the polls, and the courts.

These few scattered facts will give some notion of the bitter feeling that prevailed during the first ten or twelve years of the fight against slavery in Ohio. Afterwards it became less intense, as slavery became a political question between the two great parties of that day, the Whigs and the Democrats. Neither party expected to abolish slavery, but the Whigs hoped to keep it out of the territories and all the new states. Both parties split upon this question at last, and in 1856 the anti-slavery Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats joined in forming the Republican party, which in 1860 elected Abraham Lincoln upon its promise to shut slavery up to the states where it already existed.

But it must not be supposed, because the first bitter feeling had passed away, that the facts were changed or that the tragedies and outrages had ceased. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, there was a new hunt for runaways all over the state, and business on the underground railroad was never so brisk. The hatred of slavery was revived in all its intensity by such cases as that of Margaret Gorden in 1856. This unhappy mother had escaped from Kentucky with her four children to the house of a free colored man below Mill Creek in Hamilton County, where they remained concealed with thirteen other fugitives. One night the place was suddenly attacked by the slavehunters under the lead of the United States officers. A fight followed, and several on both sides were wounded, but at last the slaves were overpowered. While the officers were dragging the others from the house, Margaret seized a knife from the table, and killed her little daughter rather than see it taken back to slavery, and then turned the bloody weapon against herself, but failed in the attempt on her own life. She was taken to Cincinnati and tried, not for murder, but for escaping from slavery, together with the other fugitives, who said they would "go singing to the gallows," if only they need not go back to the South. They were all found guilty of seeking to be free, and were returned to their owners. On her way down the river it is said that Margaret jumped from the boat with one of her remaining little ones in her arms. The child was drowned, but Margaret was saved for the fate which she dreaded, and which she had twice risked her own and her children's life to shun. What became of her at last was never known; it is only known that she was carried back to her owner. She had two deep scars on her black face. At her trial she was asked what made them, and she answered "White man struck me."

In Champaign County, a fugitive slave named Ad White resisted the attempt of the slavehunters to take him, in 1857, and fired upon one of the United States marshals, whose life was saved by the negro's bullet striking against the marshal's gunbarrel. The people and their officers took the slave's side, and the case was fought in and out of court. The sheriff of the county was brutally beaten with a slungshot by the marshal who had so narrowly escaped death himself, and never take a thousand dollars for him; the money was promptly raised and paid over, and White lived on unmolested.



As late as the summer of 1860 a fugitive slave was arrested near Iberia, in Morrow County. A party of young men caught one of the marshals and shaved his head, while others beat his comrades. Rev. Mr. Gordon, President of Ohio Central College, stood by trying to prevent the punishment, but he alone was arrested. He was sentenced to prison, where he lay till Lincoln pardoned him. The pardon did not recognize his innocence, and he would not leave his cell until his friends forced him to do so. By this time the damp jail air had infected him, and he died, shortly after, of consumption.

One would think that such things as these would have cured the Ohio people of all sentiment for slavery, for they had no real interest in it. But even in the second year of the Civil War, which the love of slavery had stirred up against the Union, the famous anti-slavery orator, Wendell Phillips, was stoned and egged while trying to lecture in Cincinnati. Before this time, however, events had gone so far that there was no staying them. One of the earliest and chiefest of these events was the attempt of John Brown to free the slaves in Virginia. He had already fought slavery in Kansas, where it was trying to invade free soil, and in 1859 he thought that the time had come to carry the war into the enemy's country. He did this by placing himself with a small force of daring young men, several of his own sons among the rest, in the mountains near Harper's Ferry. He hoped that when he had seized the United States Arsenal at that point, and given them arms the slaves would join him, and help to fight their way to the free states under his lead. But when they were attacked in the Arsenal, Brown and his men were easily overpowered by a detachment of Marines sent from Washington; several of his followers were killed; a few escaped; the rest suffered death with their leader on the gallows at Charlestown.

Some think that Brown was mad, some that he was inspired, some that he was right, some that he was wrong; but whatever men think of him, there are none who doubt that he was a hero, ready to shed his blood for the cause he held just. His name can never die, so long as the name of America lives, and it is part of the fame of Ohio that he dwelt many years in our state. For many years of his younger manhood Brown had lived at Hudson, in Summit County; for months before his attempt in Virginia he and his men were coming and going at different points in the Western Reserve, and in Ashtabula County where one of his sons then had a farm, he kept hidden the pikes with which he hoped to arm the slaves. One of the young men who died with him on the scaffold at Charlestown was the Quaker lad, Edwin Coppock, of Columbiana County, who wrote, two days before he suffered, a touching letter of farewell to his friends. "I had fondly hoped to live to see the principles of the Declaration of Independence fully realized; I had hoped to see the dark stain of slavery blotted from our land.... But two more short days remain to me to fulfill my earthly destiny. At the expiration of those days I shall stand upon the scaffold to take my last look of earthly scenes. But that scaffold has but little dread for me, for I honestly believe that I am innocent of any crime justifying such a punishment. But by the taking of my life and the lives of my comrades, Virginia is but hastening on the day when the slave will rejoice in his freedom."



XXII. THE CIVIL WAR IN OHIO

Though the Ohio people were too plodding for Aaron Burr, and though they were taunted almost from the first as the Yankee state of the West, they seem to have had war in their blood, which may have been their heritage from the long struggle with the Indians. But after the peace with Great Britain in 1815 there was no war cloud in the Ohio sky until Morgan swept across our horizon with his hard-riders, except at one time in 1835. There had then arisen between our state authorities and those of Michigan a dispute concerning the border line between the two commonwealths, and matters went so far that the governors of both States called out their militia. The Michigan troops actually invaded Ohio, and overran the watermelon patches near Toledo, ate the chickens of the neighborhood, destroyed an ice house, and carried off one Ohioan prisoner. But the mere terror of the Ohio name sufficed to send them flying home again when they heard that our riflemen were waiting for them in Toledo, and many deserters from their ranks took to the woods on their way back. This vindicated the glory of our state; we cheerfully submitted when the arbitrators chosen to settle the dispute decided it mainly in favor of Michigan, and we have ever since lived at peace with that commonwealth.

All this seems now like a huge joke, and so it has ever since been regarded, but a war was coming which was serious enough. It might be said that the great Civil War began with "John Brown's invasion of Virginia," in 1859, but it might just as well be said that it began with the fighting for and against freedom in Kansas in 1856. In fact it might be said that it began with the mobbing of anti-slavery speakers and the rescue of runaway slaves all over the North, from 1830 onwards. Yet this would be fantastic, even if it were true, and we had better accept the dates which history gives. In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President by the men opposed to the spread of slavery, and in 1861 the slave states, feeling that their mastery of the Union was gone, left it one after another, and the first fighting took place through the effort of the United States government to hold its forts in the South.

In this war, Ohio played so great a part, that it is hard for Ohio people to keep from claiming that she played the first part. Remembering that General Grant, General Sherman, General Sheridan, the three greatest soldiers of the war, were all Ohio men, we might be tempted to claim that without these the war would not have been won for the Union, but it is safer to claim nothing more than that Ohio gave the nation the generals who won the war. Our three greatest soldiers were only chief among many others under whose lead Ohio sent to the war some three hundred and twenty thousand men, during the four years of fighting, a force almost as great as that of whole nations in other times.



Ohio men shed their blood on all the battlefields of the South, but only once was the war which consumed her children by tens of thousands brought home to her own hearths. This was when the state was invaded by John Morgan and his hard-riders in 1863. Morgan was born at Huntsville in Alabama, and was of the true Southern type, gallant, reckless, independent. He was one of the bravest and luckiest chiefs of Confederate cavalry, and when he was ordered to march northward from Tennessee through Kentucky, and attempt the capture of Louisville, but not to pass the Ohio, he trusted to his fortune, and crossed the river into Indiana at the head of some twenty-three hundred horsemen. On the 13th of July he entered the state of Ohio, a few miles north of Cincinnati, and passed eastward unmolested by the Union general Burnside, who preferred not to bring him to battle in the neighborhood of the city, but to wait some chance of attacking him elsewhere. The militia had been called out by the governor, and the whole country was on the alert. But Morgan's men passed through Clermont, Brown, Adams, Pike, Jackson, Vinton, Athens, and Gallia counties into Meigs with comparatively little molestation, though the militia learned rapidly to embarrass if not to imperil his course. His men suffered terribly in their long ride. They had to live on the country as best they could, and they were literally dropping with sleep as they pushed their jaded horses along the roads, everywhere threatened by the Ohio sharpshooters. They fell from their saddles and were left behind; they crawled off in the darkness and threw themselves down in the woods and fields, glad to awaken prisoners in the hands of their pursuers. At first the large towns were alarmed by the fear of pillage, but Morgan had hardly got into Ohio before it became his chief aim to get out again. His hard-riders were confined in their depredations mainly to the plunder of the country stores on their route. They stole what they could, but they stole without method or reason, except in the matter of horses, which they really needed and could use. They commonly left their worn-out chargers in exchange, but they took the freshest and strongest horses they could get, at any rate. In their horse stealing they were not so very unlike the Kentucky pioneers, who used to cross into the Ohio country for the ponies of the Indians, and they practiced it at much the same risk; for the Ohio people were becoming every moment madder and more mischievous. At first they only cut down trees to check Morgan's march after he got by, but they soon began to obstruct the roads in front of him; and though they burned one bridge over a river that he could easily ford, it was not long before they learned to destroy bridges where the streams were otherwise impassable.

By the time he reached Portland the militia were closing in around him, and the next morning two detachments of United States cavalry struck him, while the gunboats which had been watching for him on the river, opened fire on him. In a few minutes the fight was over. Morgan left seven hundred of his men prisoners behind him, and with twelve hundred others fled north and east to seek a new way out of Ohio. The fight at Buffington Island took place on the 18th, five days after Morgan crossed the Ohio line into Hamilton County, and on the 26th he surrendered with the constantly lessening remnant of his force seven miles from New Lisbon in Columbiana County.

The prisoners were all sent for safe keeping to the penitentiary at Columbus, but on the night of November 7th, Morgan and six of his comrades made their escape, by digging into an air-space under the floor of his cell with their table-knives, passing through this to the prison walls, and letting themselves down with ropes made of their bed-clothes. At the station where they were to take the train for Cincinnati, Morgan was dismayed to realize that he had no money to buy a ticket; but one of his officers had been supplied by a young lady who sent him some bank notes concealed in a book. They rode all night in great fear and anxiety, and just before the train drew into Cincinnati they put on the brakes and slowed it enough to drop from it with safety. Then they lost no time in making for the Ohio River, where they hired a boy to set them over to Kentucky in his boat. Morgan had not found the Ohio people too plodding for him, as Aaron Burr had, but he was quite as glad to leave their state, which he never revisited, for he was killed the next year in Tennessee. He left behind him in Ohio by no means a wholly evil name, and some stories are told of him that more than hint at a generous nature. A Union soldier whom his men had taken tried to break his musket across a stone, and one of the Confederate officers drew his pistol to shoot him. Morgan forbade it. "Never harm a man who has surrendered," he said. "He was only doing what I should have done in his place."

We may be sure that such an enemy inflicted no wanton injury upon the country, and there was something in Morgan's presence that corresponded with this magnanimity of his character. He was a man of powerful frame, large beyond the common, of great endurance, and able to outride any of his men, without sleep or rest. He had a fresh complexion, with fair hair and beard, and his face was rather mild. When he gave himself up at last, it was with an apparently cheerful unconcern at the turn of luck which in other raids had enabled him to break bridges, capture trains, and destroy millions of value in military stores.

Ohio is herself built upon so grand a scale that even her enemies seem to have been cast in a noble mold; and the jokes upon her own people that form the life of most of the stories of Morgan's raid are as large as he. At one point, forty miles from their line of march, a good lady saved the family horse from the southern troopers by locking him into the parlor, where his stamping on the hollow floor kept the neighborhood awake the whole night through.

One of Morgan's men, who plundered wildly, but not very wickedly, carried for two days a bird cage with three canaries in it; another, at the looting of a country store, filled his pockets with bone-buttons; they were only dangerous when they met reluctance in their frequent horse trades. They called at the house of a gentleman in Hamilton County at one o'clock in the morning, and asked for breakfast; when he objected that there was no fire at that time, they suggested that they could kindle one for him that it might be hard to put out; then he made one himself and they got their breakfast.

In Carroll County Morgan himself called for dinner at the house of a lady whose maiden name was Morgan, and at table they fell into such kindly chat about their cousinship, that she ended by giving him a clean shirt, which he needed badly, and gratefully wore away.



A farmer in Morgan County took refuge in his pigpen, where one of the raiders found him trying to hide behind a fat mother of a family, who was suckling her farrow. The raider grinned: "Hello! How did you get here? Did you all come in the same litter?" A stuttering hero who had been bragging of what he would do to the enemy if he got at them, was surprised by Morgan's men with a demand for his surrender. He flung up his hands instantly. "I s-s-surrendered f-f-f-five minutes ago!"

One of the greatest jokes of all was played upon a friend of the South in Hamilton County. My younger readers may not suppose that there could be any friends of the South in Ohio, at that time; but in truth there were a great many, and far more than there were at the outbreak of the war. Then most of us believed that it would be quickly fought to an end; but after it had dragged on for two years, when its drain on the blood and the money of the nation was severest, and the end seemed as far off as at the beginning, those who had never loved the cause of freedom could easily blow the smoldering fires of discontent into a wide and far-raging flame. It must not be imagined that the Northern enemies of the North were all bad men; they were sometimes men of conscience, and sincerely opposed to the war against the South as unjust and hopeless. But they were called copperheads, because for a long time they lurked silently among the people, like that deadly snake which used to haunt the grass of the backwoods, and bite without warning. They were still called copperheads when they lifted their heads and struck boldly at the Union cause, under the lead of a very able man, Clement L. Vallandigham, whom we shall presently learn more of; and it was an old copperhead who followed Morgan's rear guard with the best horse the hard-riders had left him, and who tried to get speech with the officer in command. He explained that he was a follower of Vallandigham and against the war, and he pleaded that on this ground he ought to have his horses back. The Morgan colonel said they could not stop to listen, but they would hear him if he would drive along with them. He added that as some of his soldiers were worn out, the copperhead had better give them his wagon; and when the copperhead said that he could not ride, the colonel answered that he should be allowed to walk. After walking awhile, he complained that his boots hurt him, and the colonel ordered them taken off. The copperhead was obliged to follow in his stockings till the raiders camped. Then, to amuse their leisure, they taught him a Morgan song, and obliged him to dance, fat and fagged as he was, to his own music, while they applauded him with shouts of "Go it, old Yank! Louder!" till their commanding officer ordered them to harness a worn-out crow bait to his wagon, and bring him three wretched jades for the horses he wanted to recover, and let him go.



It is not known whether this behavior of his friends turned the copperheads against them or not But in spite of the Morgan raid, and in spite of all the reasons and victories of a North, the largest vote that the Democratic party had ever polled, up to that time, was cast in favor of a man who had been bitterest against the war, and who was then in exile from his native country because of his treasonable words and practices. Even three thousand soldiers in the field voted for him, and this is far more surprising than that forty thousand voted against him. As we look back through the perspective of history, our state seems to have been solid for the Union and for freedom; but this is an appearance only, and it is better that we should realize the truth. It will do no harm even to realize that the man who embodied the copperhead feeling was by no means a malignant man, however mistaken.

Clement Laird Vallandigham was born in 1820 at New Lisbon, of mixed Huguenot and Scotch-Irish ancestry, a stock which has given us some of our best and greatest men. His father was a Presbyterian minister, who eked out his poor salary by teaching a classical school in his own house. Clement was ready for college long before he was old enough to be received; and when he was graduated from Jefferson College, at Cannonsburg in Pennsylvania, he came back to New Lisbon and began to practice law.

So far all the influences of his life should have been at least as good for the generous side of politics as for the ungenerous; but from the first he cast his lot with the oppressor. In 1845 he was sent to the legislature, where he took a leading part in opposing the repeal of the Black Laws, which kept the negro from voting at the polls or testifying in the courts. Two years later he fixed his home in Dayton, where he quickly came to the front as a States Rights Democrat in the full Southern sense. He was given by a Democratic house the seat to which Lewis D. Campbell was elected in 1856, and he remained in Congress till defeated in 1862. Up to the last moment he never ceased to vote and to speak against the war, because he believed it impossible to conquer the South; and when he came back to Ohio he kept on saying what he believed.

This brought him under condemnation of General Order No. 38, issued by General Burnside at Cincinnati, forbidding any person to express sympathy for the enemy under pain of being sent out of the Union lines into the lines of the Confederates. Vallandigham defied this order; he was arrested by a company of the 115th Ohio, and taken to Cincinnati from Dayton, where a mob of his friends broke out the next day, and burned the office of the leading Republican newspaper. General Burnside sent a force and quelled the mob, and promptly had Vallandigham tried by a court-martial, which sentenced him to imprisonment in Fort Warren at Boston during the war. President Lincoln changed this sentence to transportation through our lines into the borders of the Southern Confederacy, and Vallandigham was hurried by special train from Cincinnati to Murfreesboro, in Tennessee, where General Rosecrans was in command. In a long interview, General Rosecrans tried to convince him of his wrongdoing, and asked if he did not know that but for his protection the soldiers would tear him to pieces in an instant. Vallandigham answered, "Draw your soldiers up in a hollow square to-morrow morning, and announce to them that Vallandigham desires to vindicate himself, and I will guarantee that when they have heard me through they will be more willing to tear Lincoln and yourself to pieces than they will Vallandigham." The general said he had too much regard for his prisoner's life to try it; but the charm of the man had won upon him. "He don't look a bit like a traitor, now, does he, Joe?" he remarked to one of his staff, and he warmly shook hands with Vallandigham when they parted at two o'clock on the morning of May 25.

Vallandigham mounted into the spring wagon provided for the rest of his journey, and was driven rapidly out of the sleeping town toward the Confederate lines. It was still in the forenoon when, in response to a Federal flag of truce, Colonel Webb of the 51st Alabama sent word to say that he was ready to receive him; two Federal officers crossed the enemy's lines with him, where he was met by one private soldier, and after some hours taken into the presence of the commander. General Bragg received him very kindly at Shelbyville, and allowed him to report on parole at Wilmington, North Carolina. There he took a blockade runner for Nassau, where he found a steamer for Canada.

He arrived in the British province early in July, to find that the Ohio Democrats had nominated him for governor, and that his party throughout the country had expressed its sympathy with him. President Lincoln met one of their committees, and agreed with them that Vallandigham's arrest was unusual, but he quaintly added: He could not be persuaded that the government should not take measures in time of war which must not be taken in time of peace, any more than he could be persuaded that a sick man must not take medicine which was not good food for a well one.

So thought the great majority of the Ohio people, who duly chose John Brough, a War Democrat, for their governor in October. Vallandigham remained in Canada until 1864, when he returned to Dayton, where he was warmly received by his friends, and not molested by the authorities. But he had never afterwards any political importance, in spite of his great abilities and the peculiar charm of his manner for all kinds of people. After the war was over, he accepted its conclusions with earnest good faith, and three years later he met his death by a curious accident. He was showing a friend, in behalf of a client in whom he was greatly interested, how a pistol might go off in a pocket and cause a mortal wound such as his client was accused of inflicting on another. The pistol in his hand was really discharged; Vallandigham was fatally wounded and died shortly afterwards.



XXIII. FAMOUS OHIO SOLDIERS

First among these I count the great chief Pontiac, who led the rebellion of the mid-western tribes against the English after the French had abandoned them, and who was born in Auglaize County. I count the renowned chief Tecumseh, too, that later and lesser Pontiac, who attempted to do against the Americans what Pontiac tried to do against the English.

It was some time before the great white men of Ohio began to be born here, but in the meanwhile there were those born elsewhere who, like General Harrison, became Ohioans, and so did what they could to repair the defect of birth. There is no reason to think that such men were shaped by Ohio influences, but it is the habit of our generous Ohio state patriotism to claim as Ohioans not only those who were born here, and those who came to live here, but those who were born here and then went to live elsewhere.

Valiant and able generals came from the different parts of Ohio, and from the different races which settled there. But the Scotch race, descending through New England, has the highest place in our soldiers' ancestry, and the county of Clermont has the deathless glory of being the birthplace of Ulysses Simpson Grant, one of the greatest captains of all time, one of the purest patriots, one of the best and gentlest men. I need not speak of his career as a soldier, for that has become a part of the nation's history. The beginnings of his life were rude and hard; it was afterwards often clouded with failure; it brightened out into such splendid success as few lives have ever known; it was again darkened by trouble and disaster, and it closed in a long anguish of suffering. But if ever a life was worth living it was his, and his memory is safe forever in the love of his country and the honor of the world.

His parents removed soon after he was born to Brown County, where Georgetown was his home until he was sent to West Point at seventeen. His whole boyhood, therefore, was spent in Southwestern Ohio, where a boy may live the happiest life on earth, and where Grant played, worked, planned, and studied not only without a dream of the place he was to take in history, but without special thought or liking for the calling in which he was to stand with Caesar and with Napoleon.

When he was eight years old, he began to work in his father's tannery, where he drove the horse that turned the bark mill, and broke the bark into the hopper. He did not like the work, and he escaped from it when he could, and did jobs of wagoning about the village. He loved his horses and kept them sleek and fat; and it is told of him that when he first traded horses he was so eager to get a certain colt that he offered the man even more than he asked. He was fond of all boyish sports, but he was never rough, or profane, or foul-mouthed, and he was noted among his mates for his truth and honesty. The girls liked him for his gentleness, the younger children for his kindness; he never teased them, and he never tormented any living creature. There may have been better boys, but I have never heard of them; and if Grant passed only his first seventeen years in his native state, they were years of as true a greatness relatively as any that followed. From the first he was self-reliant, and taught himself to trust to his own powers and resources. When seven years old, he got an unbroken colt from the stable in his father's absence, hitched it to a sled which he loaded with wood in the forest, and then drove home with a single line. He once wished to ride his father's pacer on an errand he was sent upon; but his father could not spare it and the boy took his colt. "I will break him to pace," he said, and he came back with the colt pacing. At twelve he hauled logs with a heavy draft team. Once the men who were to load for him did not come, and Grant managed with the help of a fallen tree to get the logs on the truck alone and drove home with them. After eleven he had scarcely any schooling except that of hard work, until he was appointed to West Point.

From Georgetown, another Ohioan famous in the great war was sent about the same time to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. This was the boy Daniel Am-men, who was destined to become Admiral Ammen. He had saved Grant's life when they were bathing together in White Oak Creek, and Grant remembered him with his high office and title when he became President.

But Ammen had won both by his services during the war, for the Ammens were fighters. The admiral's brother Jacob had early distinguished himself by gallantry that won him a generalship. Long before this their father had begun the good fight by printing John Rankin's letters against slavery in his newspaper at Ripley.

From Carroll County came that wonderful race of fighters, the McCooks. Daniel McCook, Presbyterian elder and Sunday-school superintendent, went into the war at sixty-three with his sons, and two years later was killed in the engagement with Morgan at Buffington Island. Latimer A. McCook died in 1869 of wounds received during his service as surgeon in the battles of the war. General Robert Latimer McCook was murdered by guerrillas as he lay sick and wounded near Salem, Alabama, in 1862. General A. McDowell McCook was a West Pointer who won his major generalship by his gallantry at Shiloh. General Daniel McCook, Jr., led the assault at Kenesaw Mountain, where he was mortally wounded. Edwin Stanton McCook was graduated at Annapolis, but preferred the land service, and rose to the rank of brevet major general, through the courage and ability he had shown at Fort Henry, at Fort Donelson, at Chickamauga, and in Sherman's March to the Sea. Charles Morris McCook was killed at the first Bull Run in 1861, while in his Freshman year at Gam-bier. His father saw him overwhelmed by the enemy and called out to him to surrender; but he answered "Father, I will never surrender to a rebel," and was shot down by one of the Black Horse Cavalry. John J. McCook served in the campaigns of the West and with Grant from the battle of the Wilderness onward to the end. He was severely wounded at Shady Grove, and left the army with the rank of colonel.

Dr. John McCook, another Sunday-school superintendent, was the father of Edwin Moody McCook, who rendered brilliant service early in the war and left the army at its close with the rank of major general. His greatest exploit was breaking through the enemy's lines before Sherman began his march to the sea, and effecting a diversion by the damage he did and the prisoners he took. His brother Anson George McCook was at the first Bull Run and in the great battles of the Southwest, and was brevetted Brigadier General at the end of the war. Rev. Henry C. McCook enlisted first as a private soldier and became chaplain of a regiment, but did no actual fighting. He is well known as a naturalist and theologian, and his youngest brother John James is distinguished as a linguist. His brother left the army as colonel after seeing some of the first fighting and became an Episcopal minister. Roderick Sheldon McCook left Annapolis in 1859 and promptly shared in the capture of a slaver off the African coast. From 1861 to 1865 he was engaged in all the naval movements at Newbern, Wilmington, Charleston, Fort Fisher, and on the James, and suffered lasting injury to his health on the monitors. He left the navy with the rank of commodore. All these McCooks, except the Rev. J. J. McCook, now professor in Trinity College, Hartford, remained of the Presbyterian faith, which seems natural to their Scotch-Irish race.



Of all the Americans who have lived, none is securer of lasting remembrance than Rutherford B. Hayes, who was born in Delaware, October 4, 1822. He was a great lawyer, a great soldier, a great statesman, a great philanthropist, a man without taint or stain. He had to suffer the doubt thrown by his enemies upon his right to the high office they had themselves conceded to him, but he was never wounded in his own conscience or in the love of the people. He was three times governor of Ohio, and when he became President of the United States he devoted himself to healing the hurts left by the war he had helped to fight. He made the North and South friends in the love he had for both sections, and then he gladly laid down his charge and went back to private life, after giving the country peace with honor. His presidency was not only one of the most distinguished and enlightened statesmanship, but it was consecrated by the virtues of the woman who made the White House the happiest home in the land. Lucy Webb Hayes, who had been like a mother to the soldiers of her husband's command, gave the social side of his administration the grace and charm of her surpassingly wise and lovely character. He never knew in his youth the poverty and hard work which narrowed the early life of Grant and Garfield. He was born to comfort and lived in greater and greater affluence; he had only to profit by his opportunities, while they had to make theirs; but he did profit by them. From school to college, and from college to the study of law, he passed easily successful in all that he tried to do, and he always tried to do his duty. Like Grant, he was of farther Scotch and nearer New England origin, but the next most distinguished native of Delaware County was of Dutch stock, as his name witnesses. William Starke Rosecrans was born in 1819, and entered West Point when only fifteen years old. He was in civil life when the war broke out in 1861, but of course he at once took part in it, and fought through a series of most brilliant campaigns, without one defeat, until the battle of Chickamauga in 1863. Even this he won, but the trust President Lincoln had felt in him and expressed up to the last moment was shaken by Rosecrans's enemies, and he was removed from his command. He left the army with the rank of major general, and he held afterwards places of high honor, but he felt that the wrong done him was never atoned for. Twenty-five years after his removal he told a meeting of his old comrades the touching story of how the stroke fell and how he bore it. "It was at night that I received the order, and I sent for General Thomas," who was to replace him, "He came to the tent and took his seat. I handed him the letter. He read it and as he did so his breast began to swell and he turned pale. He did not want to accept the command, but we agreed on consideration that he must do so, and I told him that I could not bear to meet my troops afterwards. 'I want to leave,' I said, 'before the announcement is made, and I will start early in the morning.' I packed up that night, and early in the morning, about seven o'clock, I rode away through the fog that then hung over the camp."



William Tecumseh Sherman, who was born at Lancaster, Fairfield County, in 1820, was like his comrade and beloved friend Grant in the poverty he was born to. But his family was of historical distinction, while Grant's had always been obscure, and his father died a judge of the Supreme Court of Ohio. As he died poor, his large family of children were left to their mother, whose means were not equal to their maintenance and education. Thomas Ewing, the great man of the place, had been the father's friend, and he wished to adopt "the smartest of the children." It is not known how his choice fell upon Sherman, who was playing with some other boys on a sand bank near Ewing's house when it was made, and had apparently nothing to do with it.

His father had called him Tecumseh because he admired the Indian chief's noble character and his merciful treatment of prisoners, and because he wished the boy to be a soldier. Ewing fulfilled the father's wish by appointing the son to a West Point cadetship at sixteen. Sherman had meantime fallen in love with Miss Ellen Ewing, and he married her in 1850. Then he left the army and tried banking and the law, but liked neither, and he was President of the Louisiana state military academy when the Civil War began. With his frank, bold, impetuous nature, he forewarned the governor that he should side with the Union, and he asked to be notified in time before the state seceded.

He received the surrender of the last great Confederate army, after a series of the most splendid strokes of generalship. His March to the Sea will be forever famous. The highest British military criticism pronounced his attempt "the most brilliant or the most foolish thing ever attempted by a military leader," and we all know how it turned out. Grant called him "the best field officer the war had produced," and there has been nothing in history more sweet and beautiful than the friendship between these two great men. They were unlike in everything but their unselfishness and single-hearted patriotism, and they trusted as wholly as they loved each other.

Irvin McDowell, born at Franklinton, Franklin County, in 1818, was the brave and gifted officer who lost the first battle of Bull Run, where he failed less ruinously than any other general of that moment of the war would have done. His name and fame have outlived that disaster, though the people did not then know enough to forgive him for his army's defeat. He was again of that tough Scotch-Irish breed that so many Ohioans are of; like our other great generals, he was a West Pointer, and he was of the high and kindly personal character common to them.



George A. Custer put into his life of vivid action the splendor of romance. His figure stands foremost in any picture of the war as that of the most dashing and daring cavalier of his time; but if his bearing was that of a young hero of fiction, his deeds were those of an accomplished and disciplined modern soldier. He was born at New Rumley in Harrison County, of a Hessian ancestor who had come over to fight for King George against the country which Custer lived and died to serve, and he inherited from him the blue German eyes, and the yellow German hair which he loved to wear long, and flying about his neck in his gallant charges. But otherwise he was of the simple matter-of-fact Ohio character. He got himself sent to West Point by means of a letter which he wrote to the congressman of his district. He frankly owned himself "a Democrat boy," and though the congressman was a Republican his fancy was taken with the honesty of the youth, whom he never saw till one day a young officer "with long yellow hair, hanging like Absalom's," presented himself at his house in Washington as Lieutenant Custer. "Mr. Bingham, I've been in my first battle," he said, "and I've come to tell you I've tried not to show the coward." After that, in numberless bold forays and fierce battles, he displayed such dauntless bravery, such brilliant prowess, that General Sheridan, in sending Mrs. Custer the table on which Lee signed his surrender, could write, "I know of no person more instrumental in bringing about this desirable event than your own most gallant husband." All the world knows how this glorious hero fell in the West, long after the war, before an overwhelming force of Indians.



If Custer was the romance of our history, James A. Garfield was its tragedy, the sort of noble tragedy which exalts while it awes. Again we have in his life the story, so often told in the Ohio annals, of early struggles with poverty, and of triumph over unfriendly fate. The child who was born in the rude farmhouse in Orange, Cuyahoga County, in 1831, was of Puritan lineage on his father's side and Huguenot blood on his mother's; and throughout his life he showed the qualities of both strains. He was left the youngest of four children to the care of his widowed mother, soon after his birth, and at the very beginning his blithe and dauntless spirit felt the stress of want. But he began to help himself and school himself, as the children of the poor must and do, and he early showed a passion for literature and adventure; he wanted to read; he wanted to go to sea; he actually tried to ship on a schooner at Cleveland, but, failing this, he got a chance to drive a canal-boat team. He fell sick and came home, and when he got well he learned carpentering. With his earnings in that trade he helped himself through the Academy at Chardon in Geauga County. From there he went to Hiram College, in Portage County, and then to Williams College, in Massachusetts. He studied law, and was elected to the Ohio Senate, which he left to enter the army. He was a brave and able soldier, and rose from lieutenant to be major general, before he left the service of his country in the field, to serve her in Congress. After sixteen years in the House, his state sent him to the Senate, and then his fellow-citizens chose him their President. He had been only four months in the White House, when the wretched Guiteau, a fool maddened by his own vanity and the sight of others' malevolence toward the man who never hated any one, shot him down; and he lingered amidst the fervent sympathy of the whole world, till he died nine or ten weeks later. Of all the great Ohioans he was the gentlest and kindest nature; he never did harm to any man, and his heart was as high as his aspiring intellect above anything base or low. His ambition was in all things for what was fine and noble.

Quincy Adams Gilmore, who was born on a farm in Lorain County in 1825, was graduated at the head of his class from West Point. He achieved lasting fame in the siege of Fort Pulaski in Georgia, which other engineers had said could never be taken. Gilmore reduced it in two days by a feat in gunnery which changed forever the science and practice of that branch of the military art. In the ooze of a trembling marsh, which scarcely lifted its uncertain surface above the tides, he planted his heavy rifled cannon at three times the distance that siege artillery was believed effective, and battered down the walls of the fort with perfect ease, and with the loss of only one life in his command.

The doubt as to the birthplace of Philip H. Sheridan, with a choice between Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio, seems not to have been felt by Sheridan himself. He decided that he was born in Somerset, Perry County, Ohio, in March, 1831, and there is no good reason to suppose that he did not know. While so many of our soldiers were of Scotch-Irish origin, he was simply of Irish origin, and his father and mother were poor Irish laboring people, Catholics in religion, and careful to rear their son in their faith. Many stories are told of his boyhood, which seems to have been like that of most other Ohio boys of his generation. The most significant of these stories are those relating to his childish love and knowledge of horses and horsemanship; for they seem the prophecy of the greatest cavalry commander of modern times, who invented that branch of the service anew, as Gilmore reinvented gunnery. Sheridan's first famous ride was on a barebacked, bridleless horse which he mounted in the pasture where it was feeding, and clung to with his knees and elbows in its long flight down the highway. No poet has yet put this legendary feat into verse, but all my readers know the poem which celebrates Sheridan's ride from Winchester to Cedar Creek. This ride not only saved the day, but it stamped with the fiery little man's character the history of the whole campaign in the Valley of the Shenandoah; and in it, as it were, he met Sherman halfway on his March to the Sea, and completed the deadly circuit in which the great rebellion died.



Of all our commanders he was perhaps the best beloved by his men, for he fought with his men. He tried to account for their liking him on no other ground. He once said, "These men all know that where it is the hottest there I am, and they like it, and that is the reason they like me." He was in the hottest place because he thought it was his duty to be there, and not because he was fearless. "The man who says he isn't afraid under fire, is a liar. I am afraid," he frankly said, with a touch of that profanity which Grant never used, "and if I followed my own impulse I should turn and get out. It is all a question of the power of mind over body."

As a boy he had some schooling at a Catholic school, under an eccentric Irish master whom he used to play tricks upon, and who used to thrash him impartially with the rest. When he left school, he became a clerk in a hardware store in his native village, and then in a dry-goods store. From the last place, he was appointed in 1848 to West Point and his destiny was fixed. In his class was another Ohio boy, born not far from Sheridan's birthplace, at the little town of Clyde, Sandusky County, in the year 1828. This was James B. McPherson, Scotch-Irish by race as his name shows, and, as his history was to show later, one of the worthiest scions of that soldier-bearing stock. If Sheridan was the well-beloved of his men, McPherson was singularly dear to those who were closest to him and should have known him best. He was of a most affectionate nature, tenderly attached to his home and kindred, as men are apt to be if their homes are poor and their kindred have shared privation with them; but McPherson kept through all his prosperity and success the qualities which endear men to their fellows and comrades. The noble friendship between Grant and Sherman is one of the most precious of our national memories, but these great commanders seem to have loved McPherson next after one another.

His father was a farmer who worked at the trade of blacksmithing when he was not following the plow; and the boy helped him in the field and at the forge. When James was thirteen, his father died, and then he got a place in a village store, and did what he could to support his widowed mother and orphan brothers and sisters. It is told that when he left them on the farm he ran tear-blinded till he got out of sight, and then sat down with his little bundle in the woods and cried with homesickness. But he went to work, and he studied and read in his hours of leisure, and when he got the promise of a nomination to West Point he managed to spend two terms at the Norwalk Academy in preparing himself. He was then so old that he was afraid he would not be admitted to West Point; but once in the army he seemed to regain his youth. When he took command of the Army of the Tennessee, under Sherman, he was only thirty-two years old.

In one of the battles before Atlanta, in July, 1864, he was fired upon by a Confederate skirmish line, while personally leading a movement of his troops, and received a mortal wound. He rode a little way into the woods to avoid capture, and then fell from his horse; and as he lay there dying alone a private of an Iowa regiment found him, and cared for him till he expired.

Sherman's grief for his loss was open and passionate. He wept over his dead face, and in the report of his loss to headquarters he said, "Those whom he commanded loved him even to idolatry; and I, his associate and commander, fail in words adequate to express my opinion of his great worth." Grant wrote to McPherson's aged grandmother: "The nation had more to expect from him than from almost any one living." He wished to express the grief of personal love for the departed, and he testified to "his zeal, his great, almost unequaled ability, his amiability, and all the manly virtues that can adorn a commander."

Such were the greatest of the great Ohio soldiers. To say that they were, each in his different way, the first soldiers of the war, is to keep well within the modest truth. They believed in one another, they trusted one another, for they knew one another. The love between them, impassioned in Sherman, frank and hearty in Sheridan, tender in McPherson, deep and constant in Grant, is one of the most beautiful facts of our history, or of any history, a feeling without one ungenerous quality. It was indeed,

"A goodly fellowship of noble knights,"

such as has not been since that of King Arthur's Table Round.



XXIV. OHIO STATESMEN

The men who have given distinction to our state in politics could hardly be more than named in a record like this; and I shall not try to speak of them all or try to keep any order in my mention of them except the alphabetical order of the counties where they were born, or where they lived.

From Ashtabula County, the names that will come at once to the reader's mind are those of Joshua R. Giddings and Benjamin F. Wade, both of a national fame inseparable from the history of the struggle with slavery. Giddings was first to cast his lot with the almost hopeless cause of freedom, but the fiery nature of Wade served to keep it warm in the hearts of its later adherents and to spread its light. Neither of these great Ohioans were Ohioans by birth. Giddings was born in Athens, Pennsylvania, in 1795, and came to Ashtabula County in 1806, where he dwelt until within a few years of his death, which took place at Montreal in 1864, while he was Consul General for Canada. He studied law, and succeeded at the bar before he entered political life. He was then twenty years in Congress as representative from the Ashtabula district, which promptly returned him when he was expelled from the House of Representatives for presenting a petition against slavery. His courage was so unconscious that he seemed never to assert it in his long career of defiance at Washington, but it never failed him in the presence of the dangers that often beset him there. In early life his people were desperately poor; he had scarcely a thought of school till he was twenty-three, and it was not until he had conquered from the wilderness a farm for his father and himself that he found time for study. He always loved the simplicity of the new country, and when he came home to the village of Jefferson from the sessions of Congress, he liked to "turn himself out to grass," as he called it: to put on old clothes and a straw hat, and walk barefoot through the streets which he had known when they were forest trails.

Wade was born at Hills Parish, Massachusetts, in 1800, and he too was born in utter poverty. He worked on a farm, and then worked with pick and spade on the Erie Canal; but by the time he was twenty-one he knew much science and philosophy through studies he had pursued in a woodchopper's hut by the light of pine knots. In Jefferson he read law and became Giddings's partner. He was sent to the United States Senate in 1851 as an antislavery Whig, and he continued to stand four-square for freedom there during nearly twenty years. He was frank, bluff, even harsh in his speech and manner, but kind at heart, and it is told of him that once when he discovered a wretched neighbor robbing his corn crib, he moved out of sight that the man might not know he had been caught in the misdeed to which want had driven him.

Thomas Ewing, at one time United States senator from Ohio, and at all times a leading statesman and lawyer, was a citizen of Athens County, where his father settled in 1798. There the boy led the backwoods life, and struggled with all its adversities in his love of books, until he was nineteen. He loved the woods, too, and his boyhood was not unhappy, though his ambition was for the things of the mind. In his reminiscences, he tells of his early privations and of his delight in the first books which came to his hands: the "Vicar of Wakefield," which he learned largely by heart, and the "Aeneid" of Virgil, which he used to read aloud to the farm hands on Sundays, and at such other leisure times as they all had amidst the work of clearing the land. At nineteen, he went to earn some money at the Salines on the Kanawha, and then lavished it upon the luxury of three months' study at Athens. After several years' labor in the salt works, he entered college at Athens, teaching school between terms, and going to Gallipolis to pick up French among the survivors of the disastrous settlement there. Then he turned to the law, and won his way to ease and honor. One of his daughters, as we know, became the wife of General Sherman, whom he had adopted as his son.

Benjamin Lundy, the meek and dauntless Quaker who was called the Father of Abolitionism, lived a long time in Belmont County, at St. Clairsville, where he founded his Union Humane Society, in 1815, and inspired the formation of like societies throughout the country. He was born in New Jersey, and had settled in Wheeling, Virginia, but life there became un endurable to him from the sight of slaves chained and driven in gangs through the streets, on their way to be sold in the Southern markets. In Belmont County, also, the first native Ohio governor, Wilson Shannon, was born.

One of the Ohioans whom history will not forget was Robert Morris, of Clermont County, our United States senator from 1813 till 1839. He was one of the earliest American statesman to own the right of the slave and to defend it. In his last speech he startled the Senate with the prophetic words in which he recognized the danger hanging over the Union, and he said, "That all may be safe, I conclude that the negro will yet be free."



Benjamin Harrison, one of the five presidents whom Ohio has given the country within thirty years, was born at North Bend in Hamilton County, where his grandfather General William Henry Harrison lived until chosen President in 1840. He remained in Ohio until he was twenty-one; then he went to Indianapolis, and it was from Indiana that he went to the war, where he achieved rank and distinction by his talent and courage.

He is a great lawyer, as well as a soldier and politician, and a speaker of almost unsurpassed gifts.



Salmon P. Chase, governor of Ohio and United States senator, Lincoln's first Secretary of the Treasury, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, was an Ohioan by grace of New Hampshire, where he was born, and where he lived till he was a well-grown boy. In 1830, when he was twenty-two years old, he began the practice of law in Cincinnati, and prospered in spite of his bold sympathy with the slave and the friends of the slave. The Kentuckians called him the attorney-general of the negroes, and the negroes gave him a silver pitcher, in gratitude for his "public services in behalf of the oppressed." He was first an abolitionist, but later became a leader of the anti-slavery party, and was one of the first and foremost Republicans. As Secretary of the Treasury his mastery in finance was as essential to our success in the war as the statesmanship of Lincoln or the generalship of Grant. He was followed in the office of Chief Justice by another Ohioan of New England birth, who, like Chase, had passed all the years of his public life in our state. Morrison R. Waite, of Toledo, was perhaps even more Ohioan in those traits of plainness and simplicity in greatness which we like to claim for Ohio, only upon sober second thought to acknowledge that they are the distinctive American traits.

An Ohio Secretary of the Treasury assured to the nation the means of meeting the expenses of the Civil War, Ohio generals fought it to a victorious close, and an Ohio Secretary of War knew how to deal best with both the men and the money, so as to turn the struggle from its doubtful course. Without Edwin M. Stanton neither Chase nor Grant, with Sherman and Sheridan, could have availed. He was born at Steubenville in 1814, of a family of North Carolina Quakers, and as a boy his tastes were as peaceful as those of his ancestors. He had pets of all kinds, and he made collections of birds and insects. He was pretty diligent at school, but his studies there were not of the severer kind. He loved poetry; he founded a circulating library; and both before and after he went to Kenyon College, he was clerk in a bookstore. But deep within this quiet outside was the hot nature which fused the forces of the great war, and shaped them according to his relentless will. He became a successful lawyer, and had been President Buchanan's Attorney-General when Lincoln made him Secretary of War. He left that office worn out with the duties to which he gave mind and body, and died soon after Grant had appointed him, in 1869, to the bench of the Supreme Court No man in office ever deserved more friends, or made more enemies. He was tender and kindly with the friendless and hapless, but with the strong and the fortunate, when they crossed his mood, he was rude to savagery.



The chief citizen of Richland County is John Sherman, who is also one of the chief citizens of Ohio, and of the United States. He has been in Congress ever since 1855, and ever since 1861 he has been in the Senate, except for the four years when he was Secretary of the Treasury under President Hayes. If any man in our public life during this long period merits more than he the name of statesman, it would be hard to say who he may be. But in his boyhood he gave promise of anything but the sort of career which he has dignified. He had all the impulsiveness of his famous brother, General Sherman, and something more than his turbulence. He himself, with that charming frankness which seems peculiarly a Sherman trait, tells in his autobiography what reckless things he did, even to coming to blows with his teacher; but all this heat seems later to have gone to temper a most manly and courageous character for a career of the greatest public usefulness.