Gib-Gra: Gibbons through Gray

See below for annotated biographies of American abolitionists and anti-slavery activists. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.


GIBBONS, Abby (Abigail) Hopper, 1801-1893, Society of Friends, Quaker, women’s prison reformer, daughter of Isaac and Sarah Hopper.  Gibbins was a member of the Executive Committee from 1841-1844.  American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS).  The Manhattan Anti-Slavery Society.  (Emerson, 1897; Yellin, 1994, p. 43n41; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 636; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 237; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 347-348; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 8, p. 906)

GIBBONS, ABIGAIL HOPPER (December 7, 1801-January 16, 1893), philanthropist, Abolitionist, prison-reformer, the third child of Isaac Tatem Hopper [q.v.] and Sarah Tatum, was born in Philadelphia. Being the child of Quaker parents, she was a birthright member of the Society of Friends, and at the "Separation" in 1827, she threw in her lot with the Hicksite branch. She was carefully educated at home and in the Quaker day-schools of the period. When about twenty years old she set up a school of her own in Philadelphia for the elementary education of the children of Friends, in which she continued to teach for ten years. In 1830 she moved to New York and became the head of a Friends' School in that city.

She was married in the Friends' Meeting-House, New York City, February 14, 1833, to James Sloan Gibbons [q.v.] of Philadelphia, a native of Wilmington, Delaware. After their marriage they lived in Philadelphia until 1835 when they moved to New York City, which became their permanent residence. Both were devoted Abolitionists and they made their home a refuge for escaping slaves. They also identified themselves completely with all the lines of humanitarian work which were carried on by Mrs. Gibbons's father. Both Isaac Hopper and James Sloan Gibbons were disowned as members of the Society of Friends in 1842 by the New York Monthly Meeting, of the Hicksite branch, on account of their antislavery activities, whereupon Mrs. Gibbons went to the same meeting in June of that year and publicly read her resignation of membership, and resignations in behalf of four of her minor children, giving her reasons for withdrawal from the religious Society in which she had been born. Until her death, however, she remained loyal to the ideals and the way of life of the Quakers.

Becoming interested in some homeless German children in her neighborhood, she set about the establishment of an industrial school which she conducted for twelve years. She worked for a large part of her life to improve the conditions of the poor, the crippled, and the blind children in the city poor-house at West Farms, now Randalls Island, and as a major interest took up the work of prison reform, in which her father had been a prime mover. She made weekly visits to the Tombs and became the wise helper and counselor of the noted matron of that period, Flora Foster. She brought to this work tender sympathy balanced by sound judgment, and rare talent for administration and management. When the Civil War began, she offered herself as nurse and helper in the camps and hospitals, and served with few intermissions from 1861 to 1865. During the anti-draft riots, her home in New York was one of those picked out by the mob for destruction. The house was completely sacked and many papers and articles of great value were destroyed. As soon as the war was over, she helped to start a "Labor and Aid Society" to assist the returning soldiers to find employment and new opportunity. She assisted in establishing the Protestant Asylum for Infants, and was president of the New York Committee for the Prevention of State Regulation of Vice. Her most important humanitarian work, however, was done through the Women's Prison Association, of which she was for many years the efficient president. A "Home" was established by the Association in which discharged prisoners could live while they were finding their way back to normal life again. It was through her efforts also, that provision was made for arrested women to be searched by persons of their own sex. With much right can she be called "the Elizabeth Fry of America."

[S. H. Emerson, Life of Abby Hopper Gibbons: Told Chiefly Through her Correspondence (2 volumes, 1896); L. M. Child, Isaac T. Hopper, A True Life (1853); R. P. Tatum, Tatum Narrati11e 1626-1925 (1925); Charities Reverend, May 1893; Friends' Intelligence,· and Journal, January 28, I 893 ; Boston Evening Transcript, January 21, 1893; New York Times, January 17, 18, 1893; New York Tribune, January 19, 1893.]

R.M.J.


GIBBONS, James Sloan, 1810-1892, Philadelphia, PA, New York, NY, Society of Friends, Quaker, merchant, abolitionist, philanthropist.  Member of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839-1840, 1840-1844.  Married to abolitionist Abigale Hooper.  (Drake, 1950, pp. 160, 162, 198; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 636; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 242)

GIBBONS, JAMES SLOAN (July 1, 1810- October 17, 1892), Abolitionist, author, was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the son of William [q. v. ] and Rebecca (Donaldson) Gibbons. His father was for years the Nestor of Delaware physicians and was an influential member of the Society of Friends. Respect for learning, so und business judgment, deep religious feeling, Quakers simplicity of manners, and sympathy for the poor and the oppressed were all part of the family tradition. After attending a Friends' school, Gibbons became a dry-goods merchant in Philadelphia, prospered, became known as an opponent of negro slavery, and in 1833 married Abigail Hopper, daughter of Isaac Tatem Hopper [q. v.],  the Quaker philanthropist. In 1835 he moved to New York. There he was one of the organizers of the Ocean Bank and of the Broadway Bank and was cashier of the former for many years. He wrote frequently for magazines and newspapers on banking and finance and was the author of The Banks of New York, their Dealers, the Clearing House, and the Panic of 1857 (1859), a clear and readable explanation of contemporary banking practise, and The Public Debt of the United States (1867), in which he advocated a substantial reduction in federal taxes. Under the pseudonym of Robert Morris he published a pamphlet on the Organization of the Public Debt and a Plan for the Relief of the Treasury (1863), in which his chief proposal was a 20 per cent export tax on gold, and a volume of didactic essays entitled Courtship and Matrimony, with Other Sketches from Scenes and Experiences in Social Life (1879); but as ap author he is remembered only for his war song, "We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand strong," which appeared first 1n the New York Evening Post of July 16, 1862, had won immense popularity by reason of its swinging lines and its patriotic and sentimental appeal. Gibbons took a prominent part in the work of the American Anti-Slavery Society and was one of the chief supporters of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. At one time he mortgaged his furniture in order to keep the paper alive. For their connection with this paper he and his father-in-law, together with Charles Marriott, were disowned in 1842 by the New York Meeting of Fri ends, but until his health failed two years before his death Gibbons continued to attend the Friends' meetings. He is said to have begun the movement that resulted in Arbor Day. During the draft riots of July 13-16, 1863, his house on Lamartine Place was sacked by the mob, his papers destroyed, and his own life endangered. His wife, Abigail Hopper Gibbons [q.v.], who was nine years his senior, was his partner in all his philanthropic work. She, with two of their six children, survived him.

[Narrative of the Proceedings of the Monthly Meeting of New-York nid their Subsequent Confirmation by the Quarterly and Y early Meetings in the Case of Isaac T. Hoppe r (privately printed, 1843); W. P. and F. J. Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison: The Story of his Life Told by his Children (1885); New York Evening Post, October 18, 1892 ; New York Daily Tribune, October 19, 1892; Friends' Intelligencer and Journal, October (Tenth Month) 29, 1892; S. H. Emerson, Life of Abby Hopper Gibbons (2 volumes, 1896).]

G. H. G.


GIBBS, Mifflin Wistar (American National Biography, 2002, Vol. 8)


GIDDINGS, Howard, abolitionist


GIDDINGS, Joshua Reed, 1795-1865, lawyer, statesman, U.S. Congressman, Whig from Ohio, elected in 1838. First abolitionist elected to House of Representatives. Worked to eliminate “gag rule,” which prohibited anti-slavery petitions. Served until 1859.  Leader and founder of the Republican Party. Argued that slavery in territories and District of Columbia was unlawful.  Active in Underground Railroad.  Was censured by the House of Representatives for his opposition to slavery.  Opposed Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and against further expansion of slavery into the new territories acquired during the Mexican War of 1846.

(Blue, 2005, pp. 69, 84, 86, 100, 163, 165, 188, 199, 201, 202, 216, 218-220, 221, 224, 245; Dumond, 1961, pp. 243-245, 302, 339, 368; Filler, 1960, pp. 103, 145, 186, 224, 247, 258, 264, 268; Locke, 1901, pp. 64, 175; Mabee, 1970, pp. 56, 63, 261, 305, 306; Miller, 1996; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 6, 23-26, 32-33, 45, 48-49, 54-55, 60, 61, 63, 65, 69-72, 131, 136, 162-163, 166-167; Pease, 1965, pp. 411-417; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 45, 47-49, 56, 173, 305, 316-318; Stewart, 1970; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 641-642; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 260; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 8, p. 946)

GIDDINGS, JOSHUA REED (October 6, 1795- May 27, 1864), Abolitionist, was for twenty years a militant anti-slavery congressman from the Western Reserve of Ohio. His relentless attacks on slaveholders, marked by exaggeration and bitterness, and his severe, uncompromising attitude were in a large measure the inheritance of a pioneer, provincial ancestry. George Giddings emigrated from St. Albans, Hertfordshire,  England, to Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1635. His descendants moved in succession to Lyme and to Hartland, Connecticut, and then to Tioga Point (now Athens), in Bradford County, Pennsylvania. Here Joshua Reed Giddings was born, the youngest of the children of Joshua and Elizabeth (Pease) Giddings. When he was six weeks old the family moved to Canandaigua, New York, only to move again ten years later to Ashtabula County, Ohio. His father had made large purchases of land, and the family was forced to toil long hours to carry the debt and wrest a living from the soil. The boy found little time to attend school. In the War of 1812 he enlisted as a substitute for his brother and saw a short service against the Indians in northwestern Ohio. For several years thereafter he divided his time between teaching school and farm work, interrupted by nine months' private study of mathematics and Latin in the home of a country parson. On September 24, 1819, he was married to Laura Waters, daughter of Abner Waters, an emigrant from Connecticut. He studied law in the office of Elisha Whittlesey at Canfield, Ohio, in 1821 was admitted to the bar, and then engaged in an eminently successful general practise at Jefferson, Ohio, until 1838. Meanwhile, in 1826, he served one term in the Ohio House of Representatives.

In 1838 Giddings was elected to the federal House of Representatives as a Whig. He threw himself into John Quincy Adams's struggle over the right of Congress to receive anti-slavery petitions, and in the early years of his incumbency he carried on a crusade in Congress for freedom of debate on all matters touching slavery and for a denial of the power of the federal government to tax the people of the free states for the support of slavery. He vigorously opposed the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War in the belief that they were conspiracies to extend the institution. For attempting during the negotiations with Great Britain over the Creole case to put the House of Representatives on record as opposed to any federal measures in defense of the coastwise slave-trade, he was censured in resolutions which passed by a vote of 125 to 69. He resigned his seat in Congress in order to appeal to his constituents, and was triumphantly reelected.

President Polk's compromise with Great Britain over the Oregon boundary seemed to Giddings an attempt to avoid a war which might threaten the life of slavery. With the nomination of Taylor in 1848 he broke definitely with the Whigs and joined the Free-Soil party. In 1854, upon the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, he joined the Republicans. By this time he had formulated an anti-slavery program which included the dedication of all national territories to freedom, opposition to disunion, and the use of the war powers of the President, if war came, to emancipate the slaves of the Southern states. Lincoln was his messmate in Washington in 1847-48, and a careful student of his speeches in Congress (Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1928, II, 19). Thus it may be that Giddings's greatest influence upon the course of American history was exerted in the evolution of Lincoln's ideas, or at least in the preparation of public opinion for Lincoln's leadership. Owing to a breakdown of his health in April 1858, Giddings was not renominated in his congressional district in the following campaign. He took an active part in the Republican convention of 1860, however, as he had in the convention of 1856, and in 1861 President Lincoln appointed him consul-general to Canada, at which post he served for the remainder of his life. Following his death in Montreal he was buried in Jefferson, Ohio. In addition to his printed speeches and essays he left two published works: The Exiles of Florida (1858), and The History of the Rebellion (1864). If a man is to be known by the company he keeps, Giddings should be associated politically with John Quincy Adams, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, and John G. Palfrey. His severe attitude toward those who did not share his views regarding slavery was a result of a moral earnestness and an inflexible purpose. In private life he revealed quite different traits. He loved sports, music, and children, and his letters to his own children reveal a charming understanding, sympathy, and mutual confidence.

[The Life of Joshua R. Giddings (1892), by Geo. W. Julian, a son-in-law, is the best biography, though written with obvious bias. Part of the extensive Giddings correspondence has been preserved in the Library of Congress; part is in the possession of the Ohio State Archeological and Historical Society at Columbus, Ohio. For Giddings's attitude on slavery the best printed sources are his Speeches in Congress (1853) and the series of articles, later reprinted in the Julian biography, which first appeared in 1843 in the Western Reserve Chronicle over the name Pacificus. His annual addresses to his constituents were published in the Ashtabula Sentinel. For further reference see M. S. Giddings, The Giddings Family (1882); and the article by B. R. Long in the Ohio Archeological and Historical Quart., January 1919.]

E. J. B.


GIDDINGS, Lura Maria, abolitionist, member of the American Anti-Slavery Society.  Daughter of Joshua Reed Giddings.  (Blue, 2005, p. 183)


GIDDINGS, Salmon, Missouri, clergyman, pioneer missionary, member of the Colonization Society. (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 642-643)


GILBERT, Abijah, 1806-1881, New York, advocate of abolitionism.  Member of the Whig and Republican Parties.  U.S. Senator from Florida, 1869-1875.  (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II; Biographical Directory of the United States Congress)


GILLILAND, James, b. 1761, South Carolina, Presbyterian clergyman, vice president of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, anti-slavery activist, censured and silenced for speaking for slave emancipation in 1796.  Moved to Brown County, Ohio, in 1805.  Pastor, Red Oak Church, with mixed race congregation.  Known as “Father Gilliland.”  (Dumond, 1961, pp. 91, 134-135; Locke, 1901, p. 90)


GLOVER, SAMUEL TAYLOR (March 9, 1813-January 22, 1884), lawyer, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt.

GLOVER, SAMUEL TAYLOR (March 9, 1813-January 22, 1884), lawyer, the son of Turner Fales and Mary A. Gilmore, was born in Boston, Massachusetts Although destined for college, he deserted his preparations for it and entered business, to become at twenty-five the head of a hew firm which conducted a shipping and cotton business in New York City. Apparently his career was very successful, for in 1857 he retired from business with a competency. The Civil War found him relatively unemployed and in possession of a knowledge of Southern conditions which he had derived from his frequent business trips to that region. His facile command of language completed the background of his literary qualifications. His first venture was the Continental  Monthly, a periodical devoted to anti-slavery propaganda. Although its publication gave Gilmore a great deal of rather flatulent self-satisfaction, it was suspended after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Meanwhile his flood of books had begun. The first, Among the Pines (1862), professed to be a true picture of life in the Southern states. It was followed rapidly by six other rather colorless volumes, the last of which, On the Border, appeared in 1867. During these years also, Gilmore contributed random articles to the New York Tribune.

It was logical that Greeley and Gilmore should cherish the same implacable distrust of Lincoln. In 1863 Gilmore was therefore an understandable choice as an emissary to Gen. Rosecrans to determine whether he was a candidate whom the Tribune might support for the presidential nomination in the following year. It was on this journey that Gilmore met James F. Jaquess [ q. v.], the Methodist parson-colonel who wanted to go to Richmond and convert Jefferson Davis to peace. Almost against his will, Gilmore became associated with this zealous project. At Rosecrans's request, he went to Washington, outlined Jaquess's hopes to Lincoln, and aided the Colonel in obtaining a furlough for his purpose. This visit was not without other result, for it converted Gilmore into an admirer of the President.

When the Jaquess mission failed, Gilmore was too busy writing and lecturing to devote his attention immediately to remedies, but in April 1864 he interviewed Lincoln, and according to his own stories, he persuaded the President to permit a second attempt. Although neither Jaquess nor Gilmore could carry credentials as representatives, Lincoln drew up a statement of peace terms to guide their conversation. These included the perpetual abolition of slavery and the immediate recognition of the supremacy of the Union. In return for this surrender, Lincoln proposed a compensation to the slaveholders of $500,000,000, the restoration of the states to the Union with all their rights, and an amnesty to those engaged in the rebellion. Finally in the first part of July, Gilmore and Jaquess were passed through the lines and transported to Richmond. Once there it was difficult to secure an interview with Jefferson Davis because they were wholly unaccredited, but they finally persuaded or deceived the Confederate President into a willingness to see them, and on the evening of July 17 the conference took place in the old Customhouse.

Gilmore's later narratives of the prelude to this interview conceal by flippancy and the dimness of recollection the motive which led to the dispatch of the mission. Probably both Lincoln and he hoped that it would produce some statement of Confederate war aims so extreme that it could be used in the North to stem the growing clamor of the peace partisans. Ii such were their hopes, they were not disappointed. Davis vigorously denied that slavery was the barrier to a reconciliation between the nations, insisting rather that the point at issue was the right to self-government. When the interview was over, Gilmore was apprehensive that they would not be allowed to return, but on July 21, he made his report to President Lincoln in safety. It now remained to get the news before the public. Under the pseudonym "Edmund Kirke," Gilmore published a card on July 22, in the Boston Transcript, containing the high lights of Davis's ultimatum, and followed it with a longer account in the September and December issues of the Atlantic Monthly. With Jaquess, he visited some northern governors, and the two made several speeches to secure further publicity. It is not unlikely that the results of the mission had some minor influence upon the presidential campaign of 1864.

After the war, Gilmore married Laura Edmonds, the daughter of Judge John W. Edmonds of New York. His fortune was so diminished that he reentered business in 1873, but in spite of this employment, he kept himself in practise with incidental writing. In 1880 he published The Life of James A. Garfield, a campaign biography which had an extensive sale, and in 1881, with Lyman Abbott, he edited The Gospel History. In 1883 he was able again to retire and devote his time solely to writing and lecturing. His chief interest in both fields was history diluted for popular consumption. Although he gave a course of lectures at the Lowell Institute, most of his addresses seem to have been delivered to societies interested in genealogy or local history. Of his later literary productions, John Servier as a Commonwealth-Builder (1887) is typical. He died at Glens Falls, New York.

[J. R. Gilmore, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War (1808), and "A Suppressed Chapter of History," Atlantic Monthly, April 1887; Official Records (Army), 1 series XL (pt. 3); Official Records (Navy), 2 series III; E. C. Kirkland, The Peacemakers of I864 (1927); Literary World, November 14, 1885; Boston Transcript, Albany Evening Journal, November 17. 1903; Outlook, November 28, 1903. The Glens Falls Times, November 7, 1903, states that Gilmore was survived by his second wife. Possibly his first wife was Amelia Harris, whose marriage to a James R. Gilmore was noted in the Boston Transcript, August 1, 1851.]

E.C.K.


GLOVER, SAMUEL TAYLOR (March 9, 1813-January 22, 1884), lawyer, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt.

GLOVER, SAMUEL TAYLOR (March 9, 1813-January 22, 1884), lawyer, was of Virginia stock. The son of John and Fanny (Taylor) Glover, he was a descendant of Richard Glover who came from England in 1635, settled in Virginia, and became a wealthy planter. About 1825 John Glover moved with his family from Virginia to Harrodsburg, Mercer County, Ky. His son's youth was spent on a farm, but he also received an academic education, graduating at Bardstown College with highest honors. He had taken up the study of law in his spare moments and in 1835 moved to Knox County, where he was admitted to practise. Two years later, however, he went to Missouri, was admitted to the bar of that state, and settled at Palmyra, Marion County. This was the center of the 2nd judicial district and he soon acquired an extensive clientele in Marion and the adjoining counties and became the undisputed leader of the district bar. In 1849, desiring a larger field of opportunities, he once more moved, this time to St. Louis, where he practised until his death. He confined himself to his profession taking little part in public or municipal affairs, until the emergence of the slavery question. He had identified himself with the emancipation policy from his youth up, despite the overwhelming preponderance of pro-slavery sentiment in the states where he had lived, and in 1860 he was a prominent supporter of Edward Bates [q.v.] in his candidature for the Republican nomination for president at the Chicago convention of that year. The situation was tense in St. Louis for some months prior to and after the outbreak of the Civil War. Glover was appointed a member of the "Committee of Safety" at a mass meeting which adopted the platform of "unalterable fidelity to the Union under all circumstances," and he took a leading part in the events which retained Missouri within the Union. After the close of the war he gave a signal example of adherence to principle by refusing to take the oath of loyalty which the Constitution of 1865 required, inter alia, of all lawyers. He was indicted for practising without having taken the oath, and demurred to the indictment on the ground that the provisions respecting oaths were unconstitutional. His contention was sustained (The Murphy and Glover Test Oath Cases, 41 Mo., 339). Thereafter he abstained from participation in politics-emerging on only one occasion when his name was unsuccessfully placed before the Democratic caucus in connection with the United States Senate-and confined himself to his law practise, becoming the recognized head of the St. Louis bar. He was preeminent as counsel, the Reports showing that during his career he was retained in thirty cases in the Supreme Court of the United States, thirty-five cases in the court of appeals, and no less than 410 in the Missouri supreme court. Well versed in the law of real property and crimes, an expert in commercial law, and esteemed the best constitutional lawyer of his time in the West, he was noted in court for his clear forcible arguments and his infinite resourcefulness. Fluent of speech, he was capable of rising to real eloquence, though owing to a nervousness which he could never overcome, he often weakened his addresses by stammering. Another serious defect was an infirmity of temper which occasionally became uncontrollable. His failure to achieve more success in public life may be ascribed to a lack of magnetism which precluded him from ever becoming a popular politician. To his intimate friends he could unbend and on such occasions he would shine by his brilliance and geniality, but to the crowd he appeared cold and his forgetfulness of names and faces was apt to be embarrassing. He was married on June 28, 1843, to Mildred Ann Buckner, a native of Louisville, Ky.

[Anna Glover, Glover  Memorials and Geneals. (1867); History of the Bench and Bar of Mo. (1898), ed. by A. J. D. Stewart, p. 120. Encyc. of the History of Mo. (1901), ed. by H. L. Conard, III, 65; American Law Review, January-February 1884; and Proc. Fourth Ann. Meeting Mo. Bar Assn. (1884), p. 125.]

H.W.H.K.


GODWIN, PARKE (February 25, 1816-January 7, 1904), editor, author, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt.

GODWIN, PARKE (February 25, 1816-January 7, 1904), editor, author, the son of Abraham and Martha (Parke) Godwin, was born in Paterson (originally Totowa or Totawa), New Jersey, where his family had been of some prominence. His great-grandfather, Abraham Godwin, had kept a tavern in or near Totowa in the middle of the eighteenth century (William Nelson, History of th e Old Dutch Church at Totowa, 1892, p. 27) and with three sons, one of them Parke's grandfather, had fought in the Revolution. His father had served as a lieutenant in the War of 1812. Something of his early family history is embodied in The First Settlers of Totawa, which he printed privately in 1892. He was graduated from Princeton in 1834, read law at Paterson, and went to Louisville, Ky., where he was admitted to the bar and opened a law office. Before acquiring a practise he returned to New York City, being, according to one account, too much disturbed by the presence of slavery to remain. In a New York boarding house in 1836 he met William Cullen Bryant and began an acquaintance that Jeri to both professional and personal relations hips. Bryant offered him a position on the New York Evening Post, a journal with which Godwin was intermittently connected for forty-five years; and on May 12, 1842, he was married to Bryant's eldest daughter, Fanny. He contributed articles, largely on economic and social subjects, to J. L. O'Sullivan's United States Magazine and Democratic Review. He was one of the New Yorkers who sympathized with the social movements being advocated in New England during the early forties, especially Brook Farm. Though never a resident, he is said to have given this venture hearty support, and to have written the fir st address in favor of "association "; and he later edited the Harbinger, organ of the disciples of Fourier, who became increasingly important in the movement. He also published Democracy, Constructive and Pacific, and A Popular View of the Doctrines of Fourier (both 1844). He always retained his idealism, although, when he died, the fact that he had been prominent in these transcendental experiments full sixty years before appealed to the imagination and probably led commentators to lay undue stress upon this part of his career. In politics he became first a Free-Soil Democrat, then a Republican. During the presidential campaign of 1860 he was active both in writing and in speaking. His faith in Lincoln was unwavering, and from a once famous interview with the President he brought back to doubting New York Republicans the personal message that an emancipation proclamation was being delayed only until a favorable moment.

In 1853 he became associated with C. S. Briggs and George William Curtis in the editorship of the newly founded and short-lived Putnam's Monthly Magazine. His volume of Political Essays (1856) was gathered from his contributions to Putnam's. Besides his work for the journals mentioned, and others, he compiled a Hand-Book of Universal Biography (1852), late r revised as The Cyclopaedia of Biography (1866, 1878). He projected a history of France, of which only the first volume, bringing the narrative to 843 A.D., was published (1860). He also edited the works of William Cull en Bryant (4 vols., 1883-84), and accompanied them with a biography (2 vols., 1883). He was in demand as a speaker on memorial occasions, and his Commemorative Addresses (1895) contains his utterances on G. W. Curtis, Edwin Booth, Bryant, and others. Evidence of his general literary interests may be found in his translations, made during the transcendental period, of the first part of The Autobiography of Goethe (2 vols., 1846-47), which he edited, and Zschokke's Tales (2 vols., 1845); in Vala, A Mythological Tale (1851) associated with the life of Jennie Lind; and in A New Study of the Sonnets of Shakespeare (1900), published when he was eighty-four years old. Out of the Past (1870) was a collection of literary and critical papers contributed to various journals the first as early as 1839. A similar collection of political and social papers, promised in the preface of this volume, seems never to have been issued.

Godwin acquired a financial interest in the New York Evening Post in 1860. Both before and after that date he was close to Bryant in the editorial conduct of the paper. After the death of Bryant in 1878 he became editor-in-chief. Differences of opinion as to policies had long existed between Bryant and Godwin on the one hand, and Henderson, business manager and half owner, on the other; and a controversy that had smouldered while the veteran editor lived became active at his death. After three somewhat troubled years of editorship, Godwin closed his connection with the Post in 1881, when the paper was sold to the Villard interests. He soon became editor of the Commercial Advertiser, a position that he held until he retired from active routine duties. The list of his books and the known amount of his journalistic work would seem sufficient to refute the charge of laziness made by some of his acquaintances; though it must be remembered that his active career covered a period of nearly seventy years. Godin's hair and beard are said to have become snowy white at a comparatively early age, and in his impressive portraits both appear as profuse as those of his distinguished father-in-law. A public- spirited citizen, member of many social and civic organizations, a patron of the opera and of other arts, he was long a familiar and a notable figure in New York, and in his later years seemed the most important if not the sole remaining link between the twentieth century and the literary past of Irving, Cooper, Willis, Poe, and their contemporaries.

[See Who's Who in America, 1903-05; obituary notice in the New York Evening Post, January 7, 1904; Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (1922); Wm. Nelson and C. A. Schriner, History of Paterson and its Environs, II (1920), 65-67; Eugene Benson, "Parke Godwin, of the Evening Post," Galaxy, February 1869; W. W. Clayton, History of Bergen and Passaic Counties, New Jersey (1882), p. 524.]

W. B. C.


GOODELL, Reverend William, 1792-1878, New York City, reformer, temperance activist, radical abolitionist.  Manager, 1833-1839, and founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, December 1833.  Published anti-slavery newspaper, The Investigator, founded 1829 in Providence, Rhode Island; merged with the National Philanthropist the same year.  Wrote Slavery and Anti-Slavery, 1852. Co-founder of the New York Anti-Slavery Society, 1833.  Editor of The Emancipator, and The Friend of Man, in Utica, New York, the paper of the New York Anti-Slavery Society.  Co-founded the Anti-Slavery Liberty Party in 1840.  Was its nominee for President in 1852 and 1860.  In 1850, edited American Jubilee, later called The Radical Abolitionist.

(Blue, 2005, pp. 19, 20, 23, 25, 32, 34, 50, 53, 54, 101; Drake, 1950, p. 177; Dumond, 1961, pp. 167, 182, 264-265, 295; Goodell, 1852; Mabee, 1970, pp. 48, 107, 187, 228, 246, 249, 252, 300, 333, 341, 387n11, 388n27; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 1, 7, 22, 29, 31, 35, 46, 63, 64, 71, 72, 162-163, 199, 225, 257n; Pease, 1965, pp. 411-417; Sorin, 1971, pp. 411-417; Van Broekhoven, 2001, pp. 30-31, 35-36, 87; Abolitionist, Vol. I, No. XII, December, 1833; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 384; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 9, p. 236).

GOODELL, WILLIAM (October 25, 1792-February 14, 1878), reformer, was born in Coventry, Chenango County, New York, where his parents, Frederic and Rhoda (Guernsey) Goodell, were among the first settlers. He was descended from Robert Goodell, or Goodale, who settled at Danvers, Massachusetts, in 1634. Delicate in childhood, he spent much of his time indoors with his mother, who encouraged his interest in literature, particularly poetry, and in composition. Shortly after her death, in his eleventh year, he went to live with his grandmother Goodell in Pomfret, Connecticut. Here he remained five years, attending the common school, working on the farm, and enjoying the use of two large libraries. Important in his intellectual and moral development was the influence of his grandmother, a strong-minded woman with advanced ideas on some of the social evils of her day. William hoped for a college education, but was disappointed, and at eighteen, his health much improved, he entered the employ of a mercantile firm in Providence, Rhode Island. On January 1, 1817, he sailed as supercargo in a ship bond for East Indian, Chinese, and European markets. Returning to the United States in 1819, he reentered business in Providence, Wilmington, North Carolina, and Alexandria, Virginia. On July 4, 1823, he married Clarissa C. Cady, daughter of Josiah Cady of Providence. Upon the failure of his commercial venture in Alexandria, he found employment in New York City where he was active in promoting the Mercantile Library Association, of which he became a director in 1827. In that year he gave up business and removed to Providence to become editor of a reform weekly, the Investigator and General Intelligencer, which soon drifted into temperance reform. In 1829 this paper became connected with the National Philanthropist of Boston and in 1830 was removed to New York, where, as the Genius of Temperance, it continued to assail various evils. To arouse interest and gain subscriptions, Goodell was frequently forced into the lecture field. During these same years he also published the Female Advocate to further the movement for the moral reform of unfortunate women, as well as the Youth's Temperance Lecturer, one of the earliest temperance papers for children. In 1833 he helped to organize the American Anti-Slavery Society and began to publish the Emancipator, in the name of C. W. Denison. In 1834 the paper, appearing under Goodell's name, became the Society's organ. Two years later he spoke effectively before the Massachusetts legislature in behalf of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and against the appeal of certain Southern states for legislation restraining the anti-slavery agitators. The same year (1836) he took charge of an anti-slavery paper in Utica, New York, the Friend of Man, which he edited for six years in Utica and Whitesboro. Here he also published for a year the monthly Anti-Slavery Lecturer and began (1842) the Christian Investigator. Meantime he lectured widely and, in 1840, helped organize the Liberty Party. In 1843 he was induced to set up in Honeoye, New York, his ideal church, based upon temperance, anti-slavery, and church union principles. He entered the ministry without seeking or desiring formal ordination, and was very successful, being "a man of tender and exquisitely sympathetic nature." In 1847, feeling that the Liberty Party's program of opposition to slavery was too narrow, he left that party to found the Liberty League, which, with a platform of opposition to slavery, tariffs, land monopoly, the liquor traffic, war, and secret societies, nominated Gerrit Smith for president. While at Honeoye, Goodell wrote extensively on slavery, notably Views Upon American Constitutional Law, in its Bearing Upon American Slavery (1844), The Democracy of Christianity (2 volumes, 1849), Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A History of the Great Struggle in Both Hemispheres (1852), and The American Slave Code, in Theory and Practice (1853). In 1854 he settled in New York to edit the American Jubilee, later the Radical Abolitionist, which, enlarged and published as the weekly Principia, continued until abolition was effected. Unlike Garrison, Goodell thought it possible under the Constitution to do away with slavery and was a believer in both the Constitution and the Union. Following the war, he wrote for reform and religious papers, and occasonally preached. In 1869 he was among the organizers of the National Prohibition Party. The next year he removed to Janesville, Wis., to be near his two daughters, and there he passed the remaining years of his life, retaining to the end an active interest in religion and reform.

[In Memoriam, William Goodell, Born in Coventry, New York, October 25th, 1792. Died in Janesville, Wis., February 14th, 1878 (1878); The U. S. Biographical Dictionary and Portrait Gallery of Eminent and Self-Made Men: Wis. Volunteer (1877), pp. 193-95; Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872), I, 232 ff., 408-21, 555; W. P. and F. J. Garrison, Wm. Lloyd Garrison (4 volumes, 1885-89), I, 91; obituary in Wis. State Journal (Madison), February 18, 1878.]

W.R.W.


GOODLOE, Daniel Reaves, 1814-1902, associate editor and editor of anti-slavery newspaper, The National Era, in Washington, DC, the newspaper of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.  Worked, with abolitionist leader Gamaliel Bailey.  Goodloe also wrote for the New York Tribune.  (Dumond, 1961, p. 265; Filler, 1960, pp. 63, 116, 122, 152, 156, 240, 261, 263-264; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 39, 162; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 390)

GOODLOE, DANIEL REAVES (May 28, 1814-January 18, 1902), Abolitionist, author, was born in Louisburg, North Carolina, the son of Dr. Kemp Strother and Mary Reaves (Jones) Goodloe. He attended a local academy for some years and was then apprenticed to a printer in Oxford, North Carolina. True to the adage, he never thereafter got far away from printer's ink, beginning his journalistic career as soon as he reached his majority by publishing the Examiner in Oxford. It soon failed and he went to Tennessee and attended a school in Mount Pleasant. In 1836 he volunteered for service against the Creek Indians in Alabama. They soon made peace and his company then volunteered for the Seminole War and served in Florida. The pension Goodloe later received for this service supported him in his old age. Returning !o North Carolina, he studied law under Robert B. Gilliam and was admitted to the bar but was unsuccessful in practise. He was offered a nomination to the legislature but declined because he was out of harmony with the people of the state on the subject of slavery, and finally in 1844 drifted to Washington where Senator Willie P. Mangum secured for him a position with the Whig Standard, of which he shortly became editor. That soon failed, and he edited the Georgetown Advocate and later the Christian Statesman until 1852 when he was made assistant editor of the National Era, an anti-slavery paper established in 1847 to advocate the principles of the Liberty party. When Gamaliel Bailey, the founder and editor, died, Goodloe succeeded him and held the position until the outbreak of the war caused the collapse of the paper. Into its columns he brought writers of distinction, such as Grace Greenwood, Mary Mapes Dodge, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mrs. Southworth.

While he was still an apprentice, his reading in the Richmond Whig and Richmond Examiner, both advocates of emancipation in Virginia, of the debates on the subject, had converted him to anti-slavery views; and he quickly became a full-fledged Abolitionist. In 1844 he published in the New-York American an anti-slavery article, the first of a considerable number which came from his pen. After the suspension of the National Era he was Washington correspondent for the New York Times until 1862, when President Lincoln appointed him chairman of the commission to carry out the compensation provision of the act emancipating slaves in the District of Columbia. From the close of 186.3 he did editorial work on the Washington Chronicle, and later in 1865 President Johnson appointed him United States marshal for North Carolina. He supported Johnson's policy of restoration until 1866 when he became convinced that it was not sufficiently drastic. He accordingly signed the call for the Southern Loyalist convention, and, advocating congressional reconstruction, joined in the organization of the Republican party in the state in 1867. He was violently opposed, however, to the proscriptive tendencies or the Carpet-baggers and of certain native leaders, such as Holden, whom he disliked and distrusted, and he soon parted company with them. In 1868 he bitterly opposed the ratification of the "Carpet-bag" constitution and was an independent candidate for governor against Holden. Later he went again to Washington where he was a free-lance writer, but finally returned to Louisburg, North Carolina. He suffered a stroke of apoplexy in 1900 but survived it two years. He died in Warrenton, North Carolina, and is buried there.

Goodloe's most important writings include the New-York American article of 1844, later published as a pamphlet entitled, Inquiry into the Causes which have Retarded the Accumulation of Wealth . . . in the Southern States (1846); The South and the North: Being a Reply to a Lecture ... by Ellwood Fisher (1849); Is it Expedient to Introduce Slavery into Kansas? (1855); The Southern Platform (1858); Federalism Unmasked (1860); Emancipation and the War (1861); "Resources and Industrial Condition of the Southern States" in Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture, 1865 (1866); Letter of Daniel R. Goodloe to Hon. Charles Sumner on the Situation of A ff airs in North Carolina (1868); The Marshalship in North Carolina (1869); The Birth of the Republic (1889); and A History of the Demonetization of Silver (1890). He wrote (Bassett, post, p. 56) the history of Reconstruction in North Carolina which appeared without credit in Samuel S. ("Sunset") Cox's Three Decades of Federal Legislation (1885). During 1894-95 he wrote a series of articles on the same subject for the Raleigh News and Observer. A close friend of Greeley and Raymond, he wrote constantly for the New York Tribune and the New York Times. Goodloe was attractive and genial, generous to a fault, unswervingly courageous, charitable, and tender-hearted. He had a genius for friendship and held the affection and confidence even of political enemies.

[J. S. Bassett, "Anti-Slavery Leaders of North Carolina," Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies in History and Pol. Sci., series XVI, no. 6 (1898); S. B. Weeks in Southern Historical Assn. Pubs., vol. II (1898); News and Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina), January 26, 1902.]

J. G. de R. H.


GOODNOW, ISAAC TICHENOR (January 17, 1814-March 20, 1894), educator, Kansas pioneer, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt.

GOODNOW, ISAAC TICHENOR (January 17, 1814-March 20, 1894), educator, Kansas pioneer, was born in Whitingham, Vt., the son of William and Sybil (Arms) Goodnow. He attended the local schools and at the age of fourteen became a merchant's clerk. At twenty he entered the Wesleyan Academy, Wilbraham, Massachusetts, for four years of study, and then (1838) became professor of natural sciences at the Academy. On August 28, 1838, he was married to Ellen D. Denison. In 1848 he accepted a position as professor of natural sciences at the Providence Conference Seminary and moved from Wilbraham to East Greenwich, R. I. Since 1840, when he had voted for James G. Birney, he had been outspoken in his opposition to the extension of slavery, and in 1854 he became vitally interested in the project of the New England Emigrant Aid Company to send Free-Soil colonists to Kansas. Resigning his professorship, he devoted himself for several months to raising a company of some 200 emigrants, who left Boston in March 1855 and founded the town of Manhattan, Kansas. Goodnow was a member of the committee which selected the townsite. He was one of the representatives of Manhattan in the Free-State convention held at Lawrence in August 1855, and in April 1858 was a member of the convention which drew up the Leavenworth Constitution. In 1857 he had returned to the East to solicit funds for the establishment of a Methodist church in Manhattan, and secured $4,000. Encouraged by this success, he took a leading part, together with his brother-in-law, Joseph Denison, and Washington Marlatt, in the founding of Bluemont Central College. In the interest of this institution Goodnow again visited the East, and raised $15,000 in cash and a library of some two thousand miscellaneous volumes. The college was chartered by the territorial legislature in 1858 and the cornerstone laid at Manhattan in 1859. Goodnow was elected to the first state legislature, in November 1861, and secured the passage of a bill locating the state university at Manhattan. The bill was vetoed by Governor Charles Robinson, however, and the university established at Lawrence, but a year later, when the Morrill Act made possible the establishment of a state agricultural college, the offer by the trustees of Bluemont Central College of their building, land, and equipment as the nucleus for such a school, was accepted, and in September 1863 the Kansas State Agricultural College was opened at Manhattan. In 1862 and again in 1864 Goodnow was elected state superintendent of public instruction, in which capacity he was ex officio a regent of the Agricultural College. In 1866 he was made agent to dispose of some 82,000 acres of land belonging to the college, and before 1873, when he relinquished the office, had sold about 42,000 acres. He was subsequently appointed land commissioner of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railway, which office he held for seven years. During that time he sold land amounting to more than $1,500,000. The last ten or twelve years of his life he spent quietly at his home near Manhattan, where he died.

[J. D. Waters, Columbian  History of the Kan. State Agric. College (1893); Industrialist (pub. by the State Agric. College), March 24, 1894; Portrait and Biog. Album of Washington, Clay, and Riley Counties, Kan. (1 890); Trans. Kan. State Historical Society, vols. IV (1890), V (1896), 141-42; W. E. Connelley, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, IV (1918), 1853- 54; D. L. Wilder, Annals of Kan. (1876); J. D. Baldwin and Wm. Clift, A Record of the Descendants of Capt. George Denison (1881); E. W. Arms, A Genealogy Record of the Arms Family (1877); David Sherman, History of the Wesleyan Acad. at Wilbraham, Massachusetts (1893); obituaries in Central Christian Advocate, April 11, 1894, Zion's Herald, April 4, 1894.]

M. S.


GORDON, Reverend Dr. William, 1729-1807, clergyman, author.  Pastor of the Third Church in Roxbury, Massachusetts.  Opposed slavery.  (Appletons, 1888, Vol. II, p. 687; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 426; Locke, 1901, pp. 40, 62, 62n2; Moore, “Notes on Slavery in Massachusetts,” p. 177; Zilversmit, 1967, pp. 110, 112, 153)

GORDON, WILLIAM (1728-October 19, 1807), author, clergyman, born at Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England, was educated for the dissenting ministry under the learned Dr. Zephanitah Marryatt in London. He began his ministry in 1752 in an Independent Church in Ipswich and remained there until 1764 when he quarreled with a leading member of the church who employed his workmen on Crown business on Sunday. He then succeeded Dr. David Jennings in the Old Gravel Lane Church in Southwark. His political sympathies were with the colonists; he had already been in correspondence with several of the colonial leaders and in 1770 he resigned his pastorate and emigrated to America (Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, VII, 1863-64, 291-97). On July 6, 1772, having already preached to the society a year, he was ordained as pastor of the Third Congregational Church at Roxbury, Massachusetts. In the same year he published at Boston a Plan of a Society for Making Provision for Widows, a pamphlet advocating old age pensions. He was a vigorous partisan of independence and in 1775 was made chaplain to both houses of the Provincial Congress assembled at Watertown. Congress possessed great confidence in him and voted him a good horse and access to the prisoners of war. He was commissioned to obtain the letters of Governor Hutchinson which Congress learned were in the hands of a Capt. McLane of Milton. In 1776, "struck with the importance of the scenes that were opening upon the world," he determined to write an adequate history of the Revolution. To this end he tirelessly collected his materials. He conducted a vast correspondence, interviewed generals and statesmen, consulted manuscript collections, borrowed letters and memoranda, and in his wide travels became a familiar figure in council and camp. But he was rash and devoid of restraint; he was "somewhat vain, and not accurate nor judicious; very zealous in the cause, and a well-meaning man, but incautious" (C. F. Adams, Works of John Adams, II, 1850, 424). He delivered the election sermon before the General Court on July 19, 1775, and the first independence anniversary sermon on July 4, 1777, both of which were published and ·widely circulated. Early in 1778 he delivered a pungent attack against Article V of the proposed constitution and was summarily dismissed from both houses.

When Gordon was ready to publish his history he thought it necessary to return to England because of the objections in America to an impartial history of the Revolution. Accordingly he returned to London in 1786 and lived with John Fields, the noted apothecary, whose sister, Elizabeth, he had married. He was surprised to find in England prejudices similar to those he had left America to escape. A friend told him that his history could not be printed according to his manuscript, that it was too bold, too favorable to the Americans, and filled with statements which the English law would regard as libels. The manuscript was then revised by several hands and much original material was omitted. At length, in 1788, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment of the Independence of the United States of America was published in four volumes. An American edition appeared in New York the following year in three volumes, and a second American edition in 1794. Gordon realized £300 from the sale of the History. For more than a hundred years it was considered to be an authority of the- very first importance but at length it was discredited and shown to be chiefly a plagiarism from the Annual Register (O. G. Libby in Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1899, I, 367- 88). Gordon in 1789 secured a congregation at St. N eats in Huntingdonshire. He returned to Ipswich in 1802 and lived in great poverty until his death.

[The article in the Dictionary National Biography is inadequate and inaccurate. See M, C. Tyler, Lit. Hist. of the American Revolution, II (1897), 423-28; J. S. Loring in the History Mag., February, March 1862; H. Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America (1822), PP- 482-83; R. L. Hine, History of Hitchin (1929); Monthly Repository (London), December 1807. Manuscript materials include letters at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and a biography, "Life of the Reverend Wm. Gordon" (1810), by Jas. Conder, in Williams Library, Gordon Square, London.]

F. M-n.


GRAFTON, CHARLES CHAPMAN (April 12, 1830--August 30, 1912), Episcopal bishop, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt.

GRAFTON, CHARLES CHAPMAN (April 12, 1830--August 30, 1912), Episcopal bishop, son of Joseph and Anna Maria (Gurley) Grafton, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and died in Fond du Lac, Wis. His father, descended from Salem ancestors of English extraction, was a major in the War of 1812 and afterwards surveyor of the port of Boston. His mother was the daughter of John Ward Gurley, first attorney-general of Louisiana. Charles attended the Boston Latin School 1843-46, and entered Phillips Academy, Andover, from which-because of eye-trouble, it is said, he soon withdrew to study at home under a private tutor. In 1863 he was graduated in law at Harvard. Confirmed in the Episcopal Church in 1851 and already a laboriously earnest Christian, he found himself increasingly drawn toward the High Church principles enunciated in England by Pusey. He determined to enter the priesthood and to that end, soon after his graduation, went to Baltimore and put himself under the tutelage of Bishop W. R. Whittingham, an ecclesiastic whose views were more in accord with his own than were those of the Bishop of Massachusetts. He was made deacon in 1855 and appointed assistant at Reisterstown, Md.; later he engaged in missionary activities in Baltimore. In 1858 he was ordained priest and the following year became a curate of St. Paul's Church, Baltimore, and chaplain of the deaconesses of the Maryland diocese. At Harvard he had been an Abolitionist, but by the time of the Civil War his position was more that of a conservative Unionist. Going to England at the conclusion of the war, he associated himself with one or two others in establishing the Society of St. John the Evangelist, known as the "Cowley Fathers," an order inspired by the ideals of monasticism. Later he organized the first great London mission and acted as chaplain in a cholera hospital. From 1872 to 1888 he was rector of the Church of the Advent in Boston, achieving a degree of success indicated by the fact that during those years he baptized half as many converts as were baptized into all the other nineteen Episcopal churches in the city. One of his dearest interests was the Sisterhood of the Holy Nativity, which he founded in 1888, resigning his church and going to Providence where the mother house was established. The next year he became Bishop of Fond du Lac, Wis. Here he raised endowments, built churches, inaugurated seminaries and schools most notably Grafton Hall, a school for girls, instituted religious orders and houses, and in general administered the affairs of his realm with great energy and sagacity In the early 1900's, in pursuance of his life-long concern with Eastern Christianity, he visited Russia, and upon returning did what he could to bring about a coalition between Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Old Catholic communions. Among the most important of his many books are: Plain Suggestions for a Reverent Celebration of the Holy Eucharist (1898); Pusey and the Church Revival (1902); Christian and Catholic (1905), devoted to religious essays; A Catholic Atlas (1908), ecclesiastical lore presented chart-fashion; A Journey Godward of a Servant of Jesus Christ (1910), personal reminiscences; The Lineage of the American Catholic Church Commonly Called the Episcopal Church (1911); and Meditations and Instructions (1923). The Works of Rt. Reverend Charles C. Grafton, in eight volumes, edited by Talbot Rogers, appeared in 1914. Personally Grafton was distinguished in appearance and manner, suave in his contacts, consciously, if never complacently, as true a medieval Prince of the Church as Wisconsin ways would warrant.

[H. W. Belknap, The Grafton Family of Salem (1928); Harvard Univ. Quintennial Cat. (1919); Who's Who in America, 1912-13; Churchman, September 7, 1912; Milwaukee Sentinel, August 31, 1912.)

J.D.W.


GRANDY, Moses, c. 1786-?, African American, former slave, anti-slavery activist, author of slave narrative.  Author of “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy.” (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 5, p. 139).


GRANGER, FRANCIS (December 1, 1792-August 28, 1868), American political leader, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt.

GRANGER, FRANCIS (December 1, 1792-August 28, 1868), American political leader, was born in Suffield, Conn., the-second of the three sons of Gideon [q.v.] and Mindwell (Pease) Granger. His father was for thirteen years postmaster general in the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. Francis entered Yale College at the age of sixteen and graduated in 1811. When his father removed to Canandaigua, New York, in 1816, the son followed and began the practise of law. In 1817 he married Cornelia Rutson Van Rensselaer, daughter of Jeremiah Van Rensselaer of Utica, a well-to-do Federalist. Granger was elected to the state Assembly in 1825 as a follower of Governor Clinton, won a following, and when reelected in 1826 received thirty-three votes for speaker, but was not chosen. The opportunity now presented itself for him to extend his popularity. With the Anti-Masonic excitement sweeping New York, Granger made himself one of the conspicuous figures of the movement and thus became associated with Thurlow Weed, who was just rising into prominence. He was chairman of a select committee of the legislature that recommended more stringent laws against kidnapping, and of a legislative joint committee of investigation with power to visit the seat of the excitement, hear witnesses, examine papers, and make a report. The committee's recommendations were rejected, but Granger won considerable prominence. His political strength was augmented at this time by his advocacy of a canal in Chenango County. In 1828 he was nominated by the National Republicans for lieutenant-governor, and by the Anti-Masons, who held a separate convention, for governor. After some consideration he accepted the first of these nominations, but was defeated in the election. The next year he returned to the Assembly. In 1830 he was the unanimous choice of both the Anti-Masons and the National Republicans for governor, and he was nominated again in 1832. Both times he was defeated, and in 1834 his candidacy was not renewed, William H. Seward being nominated in his stead.

Granger was by this time closely associated with the rising Whig party. He was elected to Congress as a Whig in 1834, but played a relatively inconspicuous role. In 1836 he was nominated on the Anti-Masonic ticket for vice-president, and by the Whigs of Massachusetts for the same office. The election was thrown into the Senate, where Granger received sixteen votes, against thirty-three for Richard M. Johnson. He now returned to Congress, serving two more terms in the House. During this period he joined John Quincy Adams in opposing Southern restriction on the right of petition and earned the hostility of the slave-holders. He was a supporter of Harrison's candidacy in 1840, and u on the victory of the Whig ticket was appointed postmaster-general. His nomination was opposed by Southern members of the Senate but was confirmed. After the succession of Tyler to the presidency, and the rupture between the President and the Whig leaders, Granger accompanied most of the other members of the cabinet into retirement. Reelected to Congress to fill a vacancy, he served until March 3, 1843, but thereafter resisted every effort to bring him back into public life, even declining the offer of a foreign mission.

His views on the slavery question were now becoming more conservative. Though opposed to the annexation of Texas, he broke with Weed on slavery in 1845, and was a partisan of the Compromise measures of 1850 and a strong supporter of the Fillmore administration. He presided over the Whig convention of 1850, having been put in the chair, as Weed confesses in his Autobiography (II, 186), because that was where he could do the least harm. When the convention adopted resolutions praising William H. Seward, Granger retired from the hall. He and the conservative Whigs held a separate convention, but made no nominations for the state officers. Granger at this time gave the name to a faction of hit- party, the Silver Grays, so called from the flowing gray hair of their leader. Again retiring into private life, he emerged for the Peace Conference of 1861. In this convention he app eared as an ardent advocate of compromise. He was by now thoroughly conservative and had voted the Bell-Everett ticket in 1860. His part in the Conference was not very effective. From 1861 till his death he lived in retirement at Canandaigua.

[J. N. Granger, Lancelot Granger of Newbury, Massachusetts, and Suffield, Conn.: A Genealogical History (1893); Autobiography of Thurlow Weed (2 vols., 1884), ed. by his daughter, Harriet A. Weed; Wm. H. Seward: An Autobiography, from 1801 to 1834 (3 vols., 1891), ed. by F. W. Seward; De Alva S. Alexander, Pol. History State of New York (3 vols., 1906-09); F. B. Dexter, Biog. Sketches Grads. Yale College, vol. VI (1912); J. D. Hammond, History of the Pol. Parties in the State of New York (3 vols., 1852); L. E. Chittenden, A Report of the Debates and Proc. in the Secret Sessions of th e Conference Convention, for Proposing Amendments to the Constitution of the U. S., Held at Washington, D. C., in February, A. D., 1861 (1864); obituary in Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, August 31, 1868.

J. D. P.


GRANT, ULYSSES SIMPSON (April 27, 1822-July 23, 1885), general of the armies, president of the United States, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt.

GRANT, ULYSSES SIMPSON (April 27, 1822-July 23, 1885), general of the armies, president of the United States, was the descendant of a long line of hard-working, undistinguished Grants, of whom the earliest in America, Matthew Grant, landed in Massachusetts with his wife, Priscilla, in 1630. The progeny of this Puritan clung to New England until Captain Noah Grant, having served throughout the Revolution, emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1790 and later to Ohio. The Captain's second son, Jesse Root Grant, learned the trade of tanner and established himself at Point Pleasant, Ohio, where in 1821 he married Hannah Simpson, the daughter of a farmer. She had youth, strength, and health, and stood in need of them during the years of hard work and meager comforts that followed. In their little two-roomed frame cabin the future president was born. He was baptized Hiram Ulysses Grant. His youth was spent at Georgetown, Ohio, whither the family moved when he was a year old.

From his mother he seems to have inherited many of the traits that distinguished him. She was a silent, undemonstrative, religious woman, of great common sense and good judgment. The father, Jesse Grant, was an aggressive, hardworking person whose shrewdness and thrift were rewarded, in the passage of time, by business successes. Almost entirely self-taught, he desired for his children the educational opportunities that had been denied him. From the time he was six years old until he was seventeen, young Ulysses regularly attended school, but this did not exempt him from labor. Detesting the tannery, he was set to work on his father's farm. Like many silent people, the boy had no difficulty in understanding and in securing the obedience of dumb animals. His love of horses amounted to a passion. At seven he was hauling. wood with a team; at eleven he was strong enough to hold a plow; thereafter, until seventeen, he writes, "I did all the work done with horses" (Personal Memoirs, I, 26). During these years he developed the qualities that later marked him-fearlessness, self-reliance, resourcefulness, determination. In person he was rather short but sturdy and well-muscled; he was modest, reticent, clean-minded, and did not use profanity; he abhorred hunting and the taking of animal life.

In the winter of 1838-39, Jesse Grant applied for and received for his son an appointment to the United States Military Academy. The information roused no enthusiasm in the boy. In due time, however, he departed and, after several wonderful days in Philadelphia and New York, registered at West Point as Ulysses Hiram Grant. He had transposed his given names, fearing that his initials " H.U. G." would make him an object of ridicule. At West Point he was informed that his congressman had reported his name as Ulysses Simpson Grant. Failing to obtain a correction from the authorities, he accepted uncomplainingly the designation bestowed upon him (Edmonds, post, pp. 35-37; Wilson, post, pp. 7, 21-22 ). No high lights marked Grant's four years at West Point. Throughout this time he held a place near the middle of his class, though his work in mathematics was above average. As a rider he had no peer among the cadets, but in other respects he was colorless. Quiet, unobtrusive, as tidy as necessary, " Sam" Grant sought neither honors nor popularity. He had no intention of remaining in the army.

Upon graduation in June 1843, the best rider at West Point requested a commission in the cavalry but, as there was no vacancy in that arm, he reported for duty with the 4th Infantry. He served two years in Missouri and Louisiana, and in September 1845 joined General Taylor's small but efficient army at Corpus Christi, Texas. Later it moved to the Rio Grande River where a conflict with the Mexicans occurred. "With the Mexican War, Grant was never in sympathy (Personal Memoirs, I, 53). Nevertheless, he took part actively in all of Taylor's battles except the last, Buena Vista. At Monterey he participated, as the only mounted man, in the charge of his regiment and repeatedly distinguished himself, making at one time a dash, mounted, through the city held by the enemy to obtain ammunition for the troops. For Taylor, Grant conceived a great admiration (Ibid., I, 100). He saw this rough and ready Indian fighter, individualized by bluntness, lack of ostentation, and by the uniform success of his operations, advance from a seat in the saddle to the president's chair. Unconsciously perhaps, he seems to have patterned his own habits and dress on those of Taylor (Coolidge, post, p. 30). After Monterey, Grant, with his regiment, was transferred to General Scott's army) and as regimental quartermaster made the long march from Vera Cruz to Mexico city. He took part in the hand-to-hand fighting at Molino del Rey and in the attack on the gates of the capital city, receiving mention in division orders and in brigade and regimental reports for bravery. From the war Grant emerged a first lieutenant and brevet captain, but no less averse to a military life than he had always been.

As soon as his regiment was settled in its new station in Mississippi he obtained leave and, on August 22, 1848, married Julia Dent, to whom he had become engaged shortly after graduation. The wedding journey ended at his new station, Sackett's Harbor, New York, where the southern bride with unimpaired cheerfulness made the best of a northern winter. The year 1852 witnessed his departure with his regiment for the Pacific coast by way of the Isthmus of Panama, a region so infested with disease that Mrs. Grant, who in 1850 had given birth to a son, did not make the journey. The transit of the Isthmus was a nightmare. Mules could not be obtained. Delays occurred. Cholera broke out and many died: Grant, the quartermaster, buried the dead, cheered the living, and by his energy and resourcefulness prevented a greater loss of life. From the mushroom, San Francisco, the regiment was ordered to Fort Vancouver, near the present city of Portland. Here Grant remained until September 1853, when promotion to a captaincy took him to Humboldt Bay, California. No place more dreary than this tiny frontier settlement can be imagined. With little to do, lonely as only the inarticulate can be lonely, hungry for his wife and children whom he saw no prospect of supporting on his pay, Grant at times drank more than he should have done (Coolidge, p. 35; Edmonds, p. 74; Meade, post, II, 162-63; W. C. Church, in Army & Navy Journal, June 6, 1908). A warning from his commanding officer was followed by his resignation, which was promptly accepted by Jefferson Davis, then secretary of war (Old Records Section, Adjutant General's Office).

In July 1854, after eleven years of service, Grant was out of the army, out of money, without an occupation, and a long way from home. Late in August he joined his family in St. Louis. In the six years that followed he was successively farmer, real-estate agent, candidate for county engineer, and clerk in a custom house. In none of these occupations was he successful. Finally, after a visit to his father, he was given a clerkship in a leather store conducted by two of his brothers at Galena, Illinois. He did not, however, remain very long. The turn in the tide had arrived. Following the bombardment of Fort Sumter in April 1861 and Lincoln's call for volunteers, Grant presided at a mass-meeting in Galena: He declined the captaincy of a company but announced that a war would find him in the service.

There followed a period of about six weeks during which he strove without success to find in the military hierarchy a place that befitted his training and experience. He was successively drillmaster of the Galena company, clerk in the state adjutant-general's office, and mustering officer. He wrote to the adjutant-general at Washington requesting the command of a regiment but never received a reply. He spent two futile days in Cincinnati cooling his heels in the outer office of George B. McClellan, then considered the coming man. Finally, in June, Governor Yates appointed him colonel of the 21st Illinois Volunteers. In a few days Grant had the regiment in camp at Springfield, hard at work. In a month it was ordered to Mexico, Missouri, where, in August, much to Grant's surprise, he was appointed brigadier-general (Personal Memoirs, I, 254; Wilson, p. 86; Woodward, post, p. 189).

In 1861 Illinois and the states west of the Mississippi constituted what was known as the Western Department, under the command of Major General John C. Fremont. The latter, in September, placed the new brigadier in charge of a district with headquarters at Cairo, Illinois. Throughout the next two months recruits poured in until Grant had nearly 20,000 men. The Confederate General Polk had converted Columbus, Kentucky, about twenty miles south of Cairo, into a strong fortification which controlled the traffic on the Mississippi. Across the river lay Belmont, a Confederate camp. Early in November, Fremont directed Grant to make a demonstration down the river toward Columbus. By converting this demonstration into an attack on Belmont, Grant nearly ruined a promising career. Having defeated the enemy on landing, his 3,100 boisterous recruits got out of hand and began to loot the captured camp. Meanwhile the Belmont garrison, reenforced from Columbus, had been rallied and interposed between the Union troops and their boats. Grant fired the tents to regain the attention of his men. They reformed, forced their way through the enemy, and, under heavy Confederate fire, piled pell-mell into the boats which hastily pulled out. Their commander was the last to embark (Badeau, post, .pp. 17-18; Personal Memoirs, I, 273,279; Battles and Leaders, I, 351).

At this time the Confederates under General Albert Sidney Johnston held the West Tennessee border and protected their great supply depot at Nashville by a line from Bowling Green, Kentucky, westward to Columbus. The flanks were strongly held, but the center was lightly guarded by Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River and Fort Henry on the Tennessee. Grant proposed to General Henry W. Halleck, who had succeeded Fremont, the capture of Fort Henry (Personal Memoirs. I, 287). He purposed to penetrate Johnston's vulnerable center, capture the forts, and cut in two the enemy's forces. In making this proposal, he was probably unaware that, since November 1861, General Buell at Louisville had repeatedly urged upon both McClellan and Halleck, without success, a similar movement in connection with a land movement against Nashville (Official Records, Army, I series, VII, 451, 457, 487, 520, 527, 53 I). The recurrence of these recommendations caused Halleck to study the situation. Appreciating that the capture of the forts would cause the abandonment of Columbus, a place too strong to attack, he acceded to Grant's second request of January 28, in which Commodore A. H. Foote [q.v.] joined ( Official Records, Army, I series, VII, 121; Badeau, p. 27; Wilson, pp. 103-04; Woodward, p. 215).

Preceded by gunboats, the expedition of 17,000 men started up the Tennessee five days later. Fort Henry surrendered to the gunboats, whereupon two of them steamed twelve miles upstream and destroyed the Memphis and Ohio bridge. Donelson, twelve miles eastward, was Grant's next objective. Heavy rains delayed his start until February 12, but by the 13th his army had invested the fort, then held by about 17,000 men. Foote attacked with the gunboats on the 14th, but was so roughly handled that he withdrew. In the freezing dawn of February 15, Grant, at the request of the wounded Foote, boarded the flagship for a conference. While this was in progress the Confederates attacked heavily and by 9:00 A. M. had driven back and broken the Union right and most of the center. The road was open for their escape.

While returning to his headquarters from the flagship, Grant was informed of the situation. A gallop along the line determined his conduct. With his right and center in confusion, he decided, with rare courage, to attack with his left. His order to General C. F. Smith to assault at once was magnificently executed. By nightfall the Union troops had possession of the entire outer line of Confederate trenches. The fate of the garrison was sealed. General Simon B. Buckner on the following morning requested an armistice. Grant replied: "No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted. I propose to move immediately upon your works" (Badeau, p. 48). So Buckner, who in 1854 had loaned Grant the money to rejoin his family (Wilson, pp. 77-78; Coolidge, p. 37; Edmonds, p. 78), surrendered over 14,000 men to his former classmate. When the telegraph announced this victory, the North became frantic with joy. President Lincoln at once named Grant a major-general of volunteers and the Senate promptly confirmed the nomination.

Buell’s advance into Tennessee with about 37,000 effectives and Grant's control of the Tennessee determined the Confederates to seek a union of their forces south of that river. About 40,000 effectives were concentrated at Corinth, Mississippi, to crush Grant's army before it could be reenforced by Buell. A brief misunderstanding between Halleck and Grant, early in March, resulted in the replacement of the latter by General C. F. Smith. On March 17, Grant was reinstated (Personal Memoirs, I, 327; Badeau, I, 60, 65; Official Records, Army, l series, X, part 2, pp. 3, 5, 6, 15, 17, 32; Woodward, pp. 225-27). While Smith commanded, he took the army up the Tennessee River, established headquarters at Savannah, and began operations for the capture of Corinth. When Grant rejoined, he retained the headquarters at Savannah, for no apparent good reason, and ordered the concentration at Pittsburg Landing of all his forces (about 38,000 men), except General Lew Wallace's division of 5,000 which was left at Crump's Landing, five miles below Pittsburg.

Although both Grant and his chief lieutenant, Sherman, were aware that the numerically superior Confederate army was only twenty-two miles distant, no intrenchments were constructed about the Union camp, no line of defense was established, no adequate system of reconnaissance instituted, no plan of action prepared. From March 17, when Grant reassumed command, to April 6, when Johnston's army attacked, the Union commander was in ignorance of the movements of his foe. Grant says: "When all reinforcements should have arrived I expected to take the initiative by marching on Corinth .... I regarded the campaign ... as an offensive one and had no idea that the enemy would leave strong intrenchments to take the initiative" (Personal Memoirs, I, 332). Less than one and a half miles from Sherman 's headquarters, Johnston's soldiers formed line of battle on the afternoon of April 5, and, without discovery, slept all night on their arms. That afternoon Grant had said: "There will be no fight at Pittsburg Landing; we will have to go to Corinth" (Official Records, Army, 1 series, X, part 1, p. 331). That evening he had sent a telegram to Halleck: "I have scarcely the faintest idea of an attack (general one) being made upon us, but will be prepared should such a thing take place" (Ibid., 4, part r, p. 89). Before 6:00 A. M. on the 6th, the Confederates attacked. Notwithstanding desperate efforts, the Union lines were forced steadily back.

Grant, breakfasting at Savannah nine miles from the battle-field, heard the roar of the guns and hastened to Pittsburg Landing. On the battle-field he rode from division to division, encouraging officers and men, but otherwise exercising no influence on the combat (Personal Memoirs, I, 343). He sent an urgent appeal to Buell and ordered Lew Wallace to march to the battle. Johnston was killed about 2:30 in the afternoon. Beauregard, his successor, issued an order at 5:30, suspending the attack. At this time the leading regiments of Buell's army were moving into position on the heights above the landing to repel Confederate attacks. Grant spent the stormy night of April 6 on the river bank, nursing a swollen ankle. Lew Wallace arrived about 7:00 P. M. on his extreme right. Three divisions of Buell's army took position on the left. With 25,000 fresh men in line, there was no question as to the outcome of the struggle when it opened on the following morning. Resisting stubbornly, the Confederates were driven back all day and by nightfall were in full retreat toward Corinth. There was no pursuit.

No battle fought in the West ranks with Shiloh in severity. No major battle displayed less generalship, and none more courage on the part of the enlisted men. Doubtless, on the night of April 6, Grant, sitting under a tree in the rain, reviewed in his mind the things he had left undone. The results of this mental castigation became evident in the next campaign. In the storm of denunciation that followed, the captor of Donelson offered no excuses. Lincoln refused to relieve him, saying: "I can't spare this man-he fights."

During the remainder of 1862, Grant, at Corinth, devised plans for taking Vicksburg, the capture of which would give the Union army control, not only of the Mississippi, but also of the Confederacy's only remaining railroad leading east from that river. In November, Grant with 30,000 men marched south from Memphis in his first effort to take Vicksburg. Sherman's force was to cooperate by moving clown the Mississippi. Sherman was defeated. Grant's movement was halted when the enemy cut his railroad line of communications and burned his supply depot at Holly Springs, Mississippi. Back again in Memphis, he began on January 20, 1863, the formation of the second expedition. In this, several projects were attempted, all of which contemplated the cutting of waterways for placing the troops, by boats, south of Vicksburg, without encountering the Confederate river batteries.

Convinced, by the end of March, of the impracticability of these schemes, Grant decided to march the army, west of the river, to a point below the fortifications and then transport it by steamers to the eastern bank. Rear Admiral David D. Porter [q. v .] undertook to run the batteries with his iron-clad gunboats and transports and then place them at Grant's disposal. The plan was successfully carried out. On April 30 the invading force, consisting of 20,000 men, landed at Bruinsburg. It was one of the boldest movements in modern warfare (Wilson, p. 169). Abandoning his communications, Grant had placed his numerically inferior force in the heart of a hostile country. Behind him was a wide river controlled above and below his landing place by the enemy; between him and Memphis, his base, were Johnston's and Pemberton's armies. Knowing that he must live off the country he immediately sent out foraging parties. Before the three days' rations carried by his men had been consumed, ample supplies were on hand, and the army did not thereafter lack food.

Shiloh showed Grant at his worst; Vicksburg showed him at his flawless best. He skilfully interposed his army between the forces of Johnston and Pemberton and struck quickly and vigorously. With his right he defeated Johnston and drove him out of Jackson; with his left he defeated Pemberton at Champion's Hill. Pemberton withdrew to the fortifications of Vicksburg on May 20, to emerge therefrom as a prisoner of war. The garrison never had a chance. The surrender took place on July 4, 1863. When, ten days thereafter, Port Hudson fell, the Mississippi was Unionist from source to mouth. The Confederacy was cut in two.

During the months of the campaign, Grant had been denounced by the newspapers and would perhaps have lost the confidence of Lincoln but for the favorable reports of Charles A. Dana [q.v.], who "probably saved Grant's career" (Woodward, pp. 291-93; J. H. Wilson, The Life of Charles A. Dana, 1907, p. 193). Now, after the completion of one of the most brilliant military operations in American history, he was again acclaimed and promoted, this time to major-general in the regular army; and again, as at Corinth, his army was scattered. In September, by Halleck's direction, he ordered four divisions, under Sherman, eastward to cooperate with Rosecrans in the relief of Chattanooga. Before these started, Rosecrans had been badly defeated at Chickamauga and penned in Chattanooga while Bragg, perched on Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain, in control of all approaches waited for the Union army to starve into surrender.

In this plight the Administration turned to Grant. Secretary of War Stanton met him en route to Louisville in October, conferred on him command of all the territory from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi except the southwestern section, and enabled him to replace Rosecrans by Thomas (Personal Memoirs, II, 17-19; Wilson, pp. 184-85). Grant proceeded to Chattanooga, where he found the Union army not only perilously close to starvation but almost without shoes and clothing for the coming winter. Acting on plans that had been prepared before his arrival (Coppee, post, pp. 165-68; Edmonds, p. 197, note; Battles and Leaders, III, 717-18), Grant, within five days, had opened communications with his base at Nashville. The army was soon reclothed, well fed, and supplied with ammunition.

As soon as Sherman arrived at Bridgeport on November 14, Grant fixed November 23 for the execution of his plan for attacking Bragg. Accordingly, Thomas on that day took Orchard Knob, the right of the Confederate outpost line. On the 24th, Hooker captured the point of Lookout Mountain and Sherman seized the extreme right of Missionary Ridge. When, the following morning, Thomas attacked the Confederate center, his men, as directed, captured the first line of rifle pits; then, without orders, in a tremendous burst of patriotic fervor, swept up Missionary Ridge to its summit and drove their enemies from the field. Pursuit begun by Sherman was halted by Grant when Bragg's defeated army, the only obstacle between the Union forces and Atlanta, intrenched at Dalton, Georgia.

A gold medal, the thanks of Congress, and the grade of lieutenant-general, the latter to carry with it the command of the armies of the United States, were bestowed on Grant, together with the adulation of a grateful nation. He was undeniably the man of the hour. Repeatedly urged to become a candidate for the presidency, he invariably refused, stating that he had but one desire-to end the war (Woodward, pp. 307-08; Coolidge, p. 142). Lincoln sent for him, wanting to judge for himself what manner of man Grant was. He saw a short, round-shouldered, rather scrubby-looking man in a-tarnished major-general's uniform, with clear, resolute, blue eyes, a heavy jaw, and an inscrutable face partially covered by rough, light-brown whiskers which served to conceal its strength (Badeau, II, 20; Coolidge, p. 146). Lincoln liked him, believed in him; and remained his steadfast friend. When Grant became general-in-chief, the Union forces stood in need of nothing so much as unity of plan and coordination of effort. The new leader supplied both. For the first time since the beginning of the war a plan of action was prepared that covered the concerted movements of all the Union forces. In his letter of April 4, 1864, to Sherman (Personal Memoirs, II, 130), Grant proposed three simultaneous major movements: that of Meade's Army of the Potomac against Lee's army; that of Butler's Army of the James against Lee's communications and Richmond; that of Sherman's Army of the Tennessee against Johnston's army and Atlanta (Wilson, p. 223). For these he had available about 253,000 men. Grant's policy, to which he consistently adhered, was to use the greatest number of troops practicable against the armed forces of the enemy; to hammer those forces and their resources until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to them but submission. On May 4 all the armies moved. Throughout the campaigns that followed, Grant, from his headquarters with the Army of the Potomac, kept in touch with them, directing and coordinating their operations toward the common end.

Meade's army crossed the Rapidan and bivouacked the night of May 4 in the Wilderness. Meade hoped to pass its tangled depths before Lee could intercept him, but that alert foe had decided that the Union army should fight in a locale where the ter rain compensated for his weakness. He had 65,000 men to Meade's 118,000. When Meade, early on May 5, moved southward, he was struck in flank by Lee. For two days the opponents, in the desperate battle that ensued, swayed back and forth through the dense forest, without material advantage to either. Undeterred by his appalling losses (17,666, Battles and Leaders, IV, 248), Grant then determined to march by Lee's right flank and interpose between him and Richmond. Sherman called this decision "the supreme moment of his [Grant's] life" (Battles and Leaders, IV, 248). But Lee, informed of the movement, beat his opponent to the objective-Spotsylvania Court House.

At Spotsylvania, after another bloody conflict, and again after North Anna, Grant repeated successfully his tactics of passing by Lee's right. When Lee, however, only twenty miles from Richmond, assumed an intrenched position past Cold Harbor to the Chickahominy, Grant realized that his former tactics would no longer avail, that he must attack Lee in front or abandon the campaign north of the James. A break through Lee's center would probably result in the capture of Richmond and possibly in the disintegration of Lee's army. So Grant attacked at Cold Harbor and lost nearly 6,000 men in an hour (Steele, p. 502; Battles and Leaders, IV, 148). Satisfied that he could not drive Lee from his intrenched position, he called off the attack and, on the night of June 12, withdrew from Lee's front to cross the James River. The Wilderness campaign was ended. The terrific losses of the Army of the Potomac were made up by heavy reënforcements, but in the public mind Grant's prestige was lowered (Woodward, p. 325). He had not defeated Lee during the entire campaign and had been regularly outmaneuvered ( Meade, II, 202), yet his policy of attrition had worn down his enemy and robbed him of the initiative. After the battle of the Wilderness, Lee did not again assume the offensive.

In conception and execution, the withdrawal from Lee's front and the movement across the James was a brilliant military achievement. The army began its silent march after dark on June 12. By midnight of the 16th it was south of the river. Lee was completely deceived and for four days lost his foe (Battles and Leaders, IV, 541; Lee, post, p. 348). Finally realizing what had occurred, he brought his army south of Richmond. The long-drawn-out siege of Petersburg was on-a siege made necessary by the failure of the left wing, under Butler, to capture Petersburg and invest Richmond during the progress of the Wilderness campaign (Adams, post, pp. 269-75; Coolidge, p. 170; Wilson, p. 223; Woodward, pp. 318-19, 346-48). From June 18, 1864, to April 2, 1865, the Army of the Potomac invested Petersburg, sapping, mining, assaulting, cutting Lee's avenues of supply and sending out flanking expeditions far to the west. In this long siege the Confederate commander, having the advantage of interior lines, was able to meet every attack that Grant made with a force large enough to stop it. But the siege was doing its work. The Confederate army stood desperately in need of food and transportation. Sherman's men, marching through Georgia, found it a land of plenty while Lee's heroic army was starving in the trenches.

Sheridan's victory at Five Forks on April 1, 1865, marked the beginning of the end. On the following day Grant assaulted the Confederate right, breaking it and forcing it back. That night Lee's army abandoned Petersburg and Richmond and marched westward, hoping to join General Joseph E. Johnston's army. Grant paralleled the march and sent Sheridan's cavalry far ahead to carry on a running fight and cut off Lee's retreat. At Appomattox Court House, Sheridan stood across Lee's path. The end was at hand. On April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia on Grant's terms, which were so considerate and magnanimous that they were never questioned by the Confederate chieftain (Personal Memoirs, II, 483-94). Seventeen days later Johnston surrendered his army to Sherman. The Civil War was over.

Grant's greatness lay in his ability to visualize the war in its essentials. He saw that as long as the Confederacy was an undivided unit its military forces and resources could be shifted to any point where they were needed. He saw, furthermore, that no great success could result from the capture of localities, that success could come only by the destruction of armies. As general-in-chief his strategy was sound: to cut the Confederacy into fragments; to engage all its armies at the same time so that one could not reenforce another; to destroy those armies by following them wherever they might go and by pounding them to pieces. To these principles he adhered and by them he won.

[Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (2 volumes, 1885- 86);

Official Records (Army); Old Records Section, Adjutant-General's Office;

A. Badeau, Military History. of Ulysses S. Grant (3 volumes, 1868-81); Jas. G. Wilson, General Grant (1897); W. C. Church, "The Truth about Grant," Army and Navy Journal, June 6, 1908; F. S. Edmonds, Ulysses S. Grant (1915); L.A. Coolidge, The Life of Ulysses S. Grant (1922); W. E. Woodward, Meet General Grant (1928); J. F. C. Fuller, The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant (1929); J. H. Smith, The War with Mexico (2 volumes, 1919); Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (4 volumes, 1887-88) ; J. C. Ropes, The Story of the Civil War (4 volumes, 1894,-1913); J. F. Rhodes, History of the U. S., volumes III-V (1893); C. F. Adams, "Some Phases of the Civil War," in Studies Military and Diplomatic (1911); M. F. Steele, American Campaigns (1922); H. Coppee, General Thomas (1893); Fitzhugh Lee, General Lee (1894); Jas. Longstreet, From Manassas to Appomattox (1896) George Meade, Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade (1913).

C.A.B.

The subsidence of conflict left Grant in command of the army of the United States, in a position under the President and the Secretary of War which was never clearly defined. He had been transferred rapidly from volunteer and temporary status to a commission in the permanent establishment; and in 1866 Congress revived the rank of general, unused since 1799, in the certainty that President Johnson would nominate Grant for the post. Trusting Grant more completely than it did the President, the radical Congress in the following year blocked removals from office by the Tenure of Office Act and required that all army orders must pass through the office of the commanding general. Johnson was as ready to give as Grant was to accept the position, for he was at the moment courting Grant. He forced him, in the month after the appointment, to join the presidential party in the memorable "swing round the circle," hoping to gain popularity from citizens who saw Grant on the same platform with himself. Grant declined to be ordered on a mission to Mexico for the President, and tried, but without skill, to avoid giving the prestige of his own name to Johnson's plans.

Demobilization, a shapeless affair, took place under Grant. The policing of the western border and the protection of the construction camps of the continental railroads came under his control; yet he was convinced that the whole Indian policy of the United States was corrupt and wrong. His most delicate duty, however, was in connection with the administration of the Reconstruction acts, passed over Johnson's veto and enforced by the army until such time as Congress was ready to declare the Confederate states restored. Grant had toured the South for the President, and thought the "mass of thinking men of the south" were willing to accept the result of the war (Senate Executive Document No. 2, p. 106, 39 Congress, 1 Session); but he supported Stanton who had become anathema to Johnson. Protesting the suspension of Stanton, Grant assumed the duties of secretary of war ad interim, August 12, 1867. For the next five months he was his own superior officer, for he retained the actual command as general. But he enraged Johnson by surrendering the secretaryship to Stanton after the Senate had declined to concur in the latter's dismissal. Johnson raised an issue of personal veracity (R. W. Winston, Andrew Johnson, 1928, p. 418), asserting that Grant had promised not to surrender the office but to force a case for judicial interpretation of the Tenure of Office Act. The merit of the issue seems beyond historical determination, but it ended the relations of the two men. Grant never forgave the President, and upon the occasion of his own inauguration in 1869 declined to ride in the same carriage with his predecessor (H. Garland, Ulysses S. Grant, 1920, p. 385).

The course of events of the spring of 1868 made Grant the inevitable nominee of the Republican party for the presidency. He had become the rallying figure for the opponents of Andrew Johnson, and was already the outstanding character in American life. He had no real party affiliation. Only once had he voted for president, and that time for James Buchanan, "because I knew Fremont" (L.A. Coolidge, Ulysses S. Grant, 1917, p. 270). But he embodied the forces that maintained the Union. Without enthusiasm he allowed himself to be nominated by the Republicans. He disliked politics as he disliked war; he had no vindictive spirit toward the soldiers who had sustained the Confederacy, but he had no intention of permitting the defeated leaders to direct the policy of the United States. He was aware that election would mean retirement from the comfortable salary and allowances of the general of the army (nearly $25,000 a year) and an exchange of a life post for the presidency, which meant eight years at most. He accepted the nomination in a brief note, four words of which have constituted his contribution to American opinion: "Let us have peace." His companion on the ticket was a popular Indiana politician, Schuyler Colfax.

Grant was elected president in 1868, losing the electoral votes of only eight states, though the popular majority was much smaller than these figures would indicate. He had taken no active part in the canvass and he admitted no one, not even his wife, to his confidence after election. The official family that he set up in the Executive Mansion was like an army headquarters, where work was done with military aides and orders were expected to receive in time of peace the same respect that they had commanded in time of war. Grant was in no sense a militarist, but the only way he knew how to work was the way of a commanding general. He picked his cabinet officers to suit himself, and so clumsily that the group had to be reorganized before it could function. The state department he gave to a personal friend, Elihu B. Washburne, to gratify his pride; he allowed a military aide, John A. Rawlins, to appropriate the war department to reward himself (J. H. Wilson, The Life of John A. Rawlins, 1916, p. 351); he picked a great merchant with whom he had dined, Alexander T. Stewart, to fill the treasury post, only to discover that his appointee was legally incompetent. The other places he passed around with no reference to the existence of a party that fancied it had a right to rule, or to popular sense of fitness in appointment; and he could not understand or forgive criticism of himself because of this.

He and his family enjoyed life in the White House. All four of the children were there part of the time, though Frederick Dent Grant [q. v.] graduated at West Point in 1871, went to Europe, and was then on active duty. The military guard that had remained on duty since Lincoln's time was dispensed with, and the mansion was opened to family and friends. A former mess sergeant became the butler until Mrs. Grant rebelled. There was a "spare room" for the casual guest. Mrs. Grant's father, Colonel Frederick Dent, still an unreconstructed Southerner but meticulously polite, was commonly much in evidence. The correspondents around the offices led him on to tell them how the General was a good Democrat but did not know it. Grant's own old father, Jesse, was sometimes there, though more often he was at his post-office at Covington, Kentucky, where Grant found him and left him. The vacations were likely to be spent in a cottage at Long Branch, where Grant kept out of ballrooms and took his keenest pleasure in driving in a light carriage behind a span of spirited horses. He did not care who gave him the horses. The old rumors about his excessive drinking hovered about him periodically, but most of the testimony is unreliable and none suggests that any of his official acts was ever affected by intoxication.

The financial status of the government was at the front among the problems of the Grant administrations. The Democratic party, in the preceding canvass, had made an appeal to the debtor farmers of the West and South, with an offer of greenbacks as a painless way of paying off the war debt. Earliest of the important bills to receive Grant's signature was one to establish the public credit by declaring a policy of ultimate redemption of legal-tender notes in coin. Steps were taken promptly to fund the confused mass of Civil War securities, and to baffle the gamblers in gold. These latter, on "Black Friday" (September 24, 1869), thought they had cornered the gold on the market and "fixed" the President by extending favors to his hangers-on (R. H. Fuller, Jubile Jim, The Life of Colonel James Fisk, Jr., 1928, p. 361 ; New York Herald, October 8, 1869; House Report No. 31, 41 Congress, l Session). Grant ruined their hopes by releasing from the treasury such a flood of gold that it broke the corner. The financial collapse of 1873 increased the difficulty of currency deflation, for it was easy to array the debtor classes against any measure tending to appreciate the currency. But Grant vetoed an inflation bill in the following spring (April 22, 1874), and signed on January 14, 1875, an act setting January 1879 as the date for the resumption of specie payments.

For almost the whole of Grant's term of office Hamilton Fish [q.v.] was secretary of state. The two men never developed a friendly intimacy, yet Grant in general supported Fish in a firm and wise foreign policy. The attempt to annex the Dominican Republic in 1869, which produced a disastrous breach with Charles Sumner, was Grant's own venture, though it may have been the idea of political profiteers. He never receded from a belief in its wisdom, beaten though he was. Controversies with the British were cleared after the surrender of the latter on the Alabama claims, in the Treaty of Washington, May 8, 1871. Neutrality was maintained in spite of provocation given by Spain during her suppression of the Ten Years' War in Cuba.

The enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment was attempted only half-heartedly and without success. Northern opinion reached its crest of militancy against the South in the spring of 1868. After the failure of the impeachment proceedings against Johnson there was never again adequate backing for a comprehensive interference with the gradual reestablishment of home rule at the South. Midway in Grant's first term began the terrorism of the negro electorate that deterred the negroes from exercising their right to vote. Despite the Force Acts of 1870-71, the Southern states elected white officers and advanced along the process of consolidation in Democratic ranks that ended in a Solid South by 1876. Grant came, by 1880, to fear the election as president of one of the Confederate leaders who had tried to wreck the Union, but as president himself he saw the impossibility of permanent coercion.

Out of the Western and Northern moderate opinion there developed a Liberal Republican movement based on a belief in the unwisdom of Reconstruction and a demand for a reform in the administration of the national government. Its first objective, which was unattainable, was the defeat of Grant for renomination and reelection in 1872. Horace Greeley, who received incongruous nominations from both the Liberal Republicans and the Democrats, was easily defeated. Grant again stayed out of the canvass. "I am no speaker," he wrote, "and don't want to be beaten" (A. R. Conkling, Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling, 1889, p. 435). The storm of scandal broke around his head before he was reelected, and panic soon followed. A conviction was being driven home that as president he was a failure. "What wretched work. . . . They are tearing the government to pieces," Gideon Welles had written (Americana, April 1912, p. 403) ; "Can you really believe that the maker of the first Grant Cabinet ... is fit for a President? I cannot," asserted Greeley before he was himself nominated (W. B. Parker, The Life and Public Services of Justin Smith Morrill, 1924, p. 239). The New York Tribune (July 24, 1885) at Grant's death still believed that "the greatest mistake of his life was the acceptance of the presidency." "The crisis came," said the Nation (March 9, 1876), "when an ignorant soldier, coarse in his taste and blunt in his perceptions, fond of money and material enjoyment and of low company, was put in the Presidential Chair"

The personal criticisms of Grant during his second term were galling to him, for he knew no way of dramatizing a simple personal honesty, and his power of speech and pen was totally inadequate in a fight with fluent and impassioned reformers. He sometimes replied to opposition with destruction. Sumner denounced the Dominican project and prevented the ratification of the treaty; whereupon Grant forced his deposition as chairman of the Senate committee on foreign relations (R. Cortissoz, Life of Whitelaw Reid, 1921, I, 190; S. Welles, Naboth's Vineyard, 1928, I, 392), and recalled his friend Motley from the post of minister to Great Britain. Grant was capable of letting go without a word the most dependable of his advisers-Hoar, Jewell, Bristow. Yet, craving association, he had room in his entourage for Conkling, the Camerons, and Zach Chandler. He believed the prosecution of his private secretary, Orville F. Babcock, was only a disguised attack upon himself, and did not lose confidence in Babcock's integrity until long after most other Americans. Conkling, to whom among others he offered the chief justiceship after Chase died, had a nicer sense of the needs of the office than did Grant and declined it. Yet the final choice, Morrison R. Waite, was good. Grant's critics long alleged that he packed the Supreme Court after its first legal-tenders decision (Hepburn vs. Griswold, February 7, 1870, 8 Wallace, 603), by appointing Bradley and Strong, thus procuring a reversal in the second legal-tenders case, but the evidence for this seems unconvincing (Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History, 1922, III, 238; American Historical Review, April 1929, p. 532).

The breath of personal scandal has not touched Grant in any plausible form, but it struck so close to him and so frequently as to necessitate the vindication of his honor by admitting his bad taste in the choice of associates. Babcock was under suspicion of improper interest in the Dominican matter (S. Welles, Naboth's Vineyard, 1928, I, 400), long before he was smirched by his connection with the whiskey ring. Grant allowed himself to appear in public as the guest of Jim Fisk. Belknap, his secretary of war, was proved to have accepted graft money from a post trader; and Grant by letting him resign protected him from the consequences of a successful impeachment. The accumulating criticisms that Grant incurred threw him into the arms of those who did not criticize, and these were not the best leaders in the nation or the party.

As the second term approached its end there was suggestion of a third. Grant, in a somewhat cryptic letter (New York Herald, May 31, 1875), declined to be a candidate. He could not see why his fellow citizens did not desire him to continue in the presidency, and his wife resented the fact that they did not; but he accepted retirement without complaint. He had some achievements, after all. He had inherited a situation with Great Britain that was full of threat, and left it with American esteem satisfied and Anglo-American relations more harmonious than they had ever been. He had brought the United States through the factional hazards that followed the attempt to remove a president, through the financial and moral uneasiness of a period of deflation and the panic of 1873, and through the uncertainties of an electoral contest that might have blossomed into another civil war (A. Badeau, Grant in Peace, 1887, p. 256). There were trying days during the electoral count. It was uncertain until a few hours before March 4, 1877, whether Grant would have a successor, and there was a possibility that he would be called upon to face a new crisis. The conviction that he would not have any hand in a coup d'etat helped to prevent one.

Grant left office with a few thousand dollars saved from his salary, and a craving to see Europe. With a family party, he sailed from Philadelphia in May 1877 for Liverpool and the foreign world. He embarked as a private citizen, but he landed as a world figure with whom the chamberlains of the European courts were uncertain how to act; for to treat him as a simple commoner would be grotesque, whereas he had no rank that would establish him in any rigid sequence of court precedence. It was left for his son Jesse to put Queen Victoria in her plate (J. R. Grant, In the Days of My Father General Grant, 1925, pp. 224...;.27), but it took a long time for the European governments to assimilate ex-presidents with their own ex-royalties. For more than two years the Grants went from capital to capital, with an increasing baggage train of gifts and souvenirs, and an increasing need for a fortunatus purse (J. R. Young, Around the World with General Grant, 1879). As the tour approached its end, a longing for home stimulated its progress, to Grant's political disadvantage.

Hayes had failed to get along with his party, and neither sought nor could have obtained a renomination. The friends of Grant were desirous for a return to the "good old days." The murmurings of labor presaged to the nervous a possible industrial revolt, and there was clamor, much of it inspired, for a "strong" man at the helm of state. The political advisers of Grant urged him to delay his return until the eve of the campaign of 1880, when his renomination might be accomplished on a wave of friendly publicity. He came back, instead, in the autumn of 1879, and the spreading third-term boom excited a stronger wave of opposition. At the Chicago convention in 1880 the faithful old guard, 306 strong, stood firm for Grant, and later struck off a medal to celebrate their loyalty; but they did him no good, for a coalition of his opponents defeated him by agreeing upon Garfield as the candidate.

The last phase of Grant's life was saddened by lack of means, by positive misfortune, by calumny, and at last by sickness until death. He took up his residence in a house in East Sixty-sixth St., New York, in August 1881, and lived with gratitude upon the income from a fund of $250,000 which some of his admirers placed in trust for him. The securities in which this was invested proved unreliable, and the income failed him (Woodward, Meet General Grant, 1928, pp. 476, 490). He went into business and was exploited. The failure of the brokerage firm of Grant & Ward (May 6, 1884) threw him into bankruptcy and humiliation. He had earlier used his swords and souvenirs as security for a loan which had been swallowed up. An attempt was made by his friends to care for him by reviving the office of general, which he had vacated upon entrance to the presidency, but political opposition delayed this until it was almost too late. On his last day in office President Arthur signed the revival bill, and it was left to a Democratic president, Cleveland, to deliver the commission that carried a salary for life.

The life was short. A dangerous cancer of the throat was wearing Grant away, though he was fighting the disease in order to carry to completion the only civil task that he had learned how to do well. In 1884 he wrote for the publishers of the Century Magazine an article (February 1885) on the battle of Shiloh. This paid him handsomely and was an immediate success, whereupon was conceived another Caesar’s Commentaries to be written by the victor of the Civil War. He set to work upon the Personal Memoirs, writing in the sickroom and in the quiet of the house at Mount McGregor where he was taken to die. Mark Twain, then in business as a publisher of subscription books, waited for the copy, to put upon the market one of the most successful of American books. The family of Grant received nearly $450,000 from this literary endowment (A. B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 1912, II, 816); but he himself died, simply and greatly, before he could know of its triumph. He was buried at last in a great mausoleum of granite on Riverside Drive in New York City. [Grant was not a bookish man, and he wrote as little as possible until he compiled the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (2 volumes, 1885-86).

There is no considerable collection of his manuscripts, and the printed salvage from his letters is fragmentary:

J. G. Cramer, ed., Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to his Father and his Youngest Sister, 1857-1878 (1912); J. G. Wilson, ed., General Grant's Letters to a Friend [Elihu B. Washburne] 1861-1880 (1897).

The many biographies are rarely more than compilations from his Personal Memoirs, enriched with fragments from the two works by his military aide, Adam Badeau, Military History of Ulysses S. Grant (3 volumes, 1868-81); and Grant in Peace (1887).

The best of these biographies is W. E. Woodward, Meet General Grant (1928).

Others not already listed in the previous bibliography are:

J. S. C. Abbott, The Life of General Ulysses S. Grant (1868); W. C. Church, Ulysses S. Grant and the Period of National Preservation and Reconstruction (1897); Hamlin Garland, Ulysses S. Grant. His Life and Character ( 1898, new ed., 1920); Owen Wister, Ulysses S. Grant (1900); Chas. King, The True Ulysses S. Grant (1914).

Better than any of the biographies for the period of his presidency are: J. F. Rhodes, History of the U. S., volumes VI-VII ( 1893) ; E. P. Oberholtzer, A History of the U. S. Since the Civil War (3 volumes, 1917-26); and C. G. Bowers, The Tragic Era (1929), a spirited brief for Andrew Johnson by an eloquent Democratic historian.]

F.L.P-n.  


GRAY, HORACE (March 24, 1828-September 15, 1902), Massachusetts jurist, justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt.

GRAY, HORACE (March 24, 1828-September 15, 1902), Massachusetts jurist, justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the eldest child of Horace and Harriet Upham Gray. He was the grandson of Lieut.-Governor William Gray [q.v.] and an elder half-brother of John Chipman Gray [q.v.]. He was prepared for college in Boston at private schools, but during the latter part of his youth the family lived in a country suburb where there was opportunity for rambles and sport. In 1845 he was graduated from Harvard College, but probably on account of his extreme youth, he had not yet attained distinction as a scholar. After leaving college, he took a trip to Europe. His chief intellectual interest was in natural history, but in 1847, while he was in Europe, his father, who had been a wealthy man, met with financial reverses. The son returned home and in February 1848 entered the Harvard Law School. His ability, industry, and enthusiasm soon won him a place among the best scholars in the school. He there learned with his fellow student, C. C. Langdell [q.v.], to study law by an examination of all decided cases bearing upon the point immediately under consideration. This method he followed through life, and his judicial opinions are characterized, unduly in the opinion of some, by a critical and chronological examination of all important decisions bearing upon the question at issue.

After leaving the law school, Gray studied in Boston in the offices of Sohier & Welch and of John Lowell prior to his admission to the bar in 1851. Soon afterward, on the illness of Luther S. Cushing, reporter of decisions of the supreme judicial court, Gray served as a temporary substitute, preparing the last volume of Cushing's Reports, and in 1854 he was appointed to the office. The position of reporter at that time was regarded as one of great importance and often served as a stepping-stone to the bench. The reporter was allowed to engage in private practise, and Gray was counsel in a number of important cases. He also took an active interest in the political conflicts which engaged the country shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. The influence of his social circle and of his own temperament, naturally conservative, might have been expected to draw him to the side of the Whigs, but he was an original Free-Soiler; and, as a Republican, he was an unsuccessful candidate in 1860 for the nomination of attorney-general for Massachusetts. After 1861 his legal advice was frequently sought by Governor John A. Andrew on the legal problems arising from the war. On August 23, 1864, Governor Andrew appointed Gray an associate justice of the supreme judicial court. He was then thirty-six years old, the youngest man ever made judge of that court. By the death or resignation thereafter of five of the judges then on the bench, he became senior associate justice in the short period of five years; and on the death of Chief Justice Chapman was himself appointed chief justice on September 5, 1873. During his tenure of office the members of the court not only sat together to hear appeals but individually conducted trials of cases in the first instance. The training thus gained in deciding questions of fact Gray deemed throughout his life as of great importance for the appellate work to which in his later life he was almost exclusively confined. He remained on the Massachusetts bench for eighteen years and during that period wrote far more than his share of the published opinions of the court. He was gifted with a remarkable constitution and a quickness in reading that enabled him to take in a printed page almost at a glance, as well as a memory that retained what he read. The distinction of Gray's work in the Massachusetts court naturally led to his appointment in 1881 as a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. There he sat for the remainder of his life, lending strength to the Court by his profound knowledge of the common law and his wise judgment. If he did not attain the reputation of his colleague Miller, on constitutional questions, or that of his colleague Bradley, on problems demanding acute analysis, he was preeminent in his knowledge of former decisions, and of the history and development of legal doctrine. He was actively engaged in the work of the Court until 1902. On February 3 of that year, after sitting in court, he had an apoplectic shock from which he never recovered.

While Gray was a judge in Massachusetts, and to a lesser extent after his appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States, he was frequently regarded as a martinet. Undoubtedly he was a strict disciplinarian who would not brook even slight offenses against proper decorum in court. This characteristic, however, was not due to a harsh or impatient temper. He was of genial disposition, and, except where the dignity of the court was in question, he was a patient man. The key to his conduct, and, indeed, to his whole life, is found in an undeviating devotion to what he deemed the duties of his office. His serious work was largely confined within the limits of his judicial labors. Before he went on the bench he wrote for Josiah Quincy's Reports an elaborate appendix on writs of assistance and notes on slavery in Massachusetts and England. He also delivered an address on Chief Jus tice Marshall at Richmond in 1901. But for the most part both the amount of work which his office required and his views of judicial propriety restricted such activities.

Though his working hours during most of his life exceeded those of most men, Gray was fond of congenial society. He was also a great reader of miscellaneous literature. Biography, books of travel, and especially books relating to birds and animals, he read with avidity. The tastes which had seemed at one time likely to lead him to devote his life to natural science continued, and he often spent a portion of his vacation in fishing or duck shooting. In appearance he was one of the most striking men of his time. He was six feet and four inches tall and, unlike most very tall men, all his proportions were on the same large scale. His massive head, his large but finely shaped hands, and the great bulk of his frame, all seemed to mark him as belonging to a larger race than his fellows. His face in repose was serious, but he relished a joke or good story that did not infringe on the rather strict boundaries which he thought should limit humorous conversation. He remained unmarried until 1889. On June 4 of that year he was married to Jane Matthews, the daughter of his friend and colleague Stanley Matthews, who had recently died.

[Geo. F. Hoar, memoir in Proc. Massachusetts Historical Society, 2 series, vol. XVIII (1905), and tributes by C. F. Adams and Solomon Lincoln, Ibid., vol. XVI (1903); Samuel Williston, "Horace Gray" in Great American Lawyers, vol. VIII (1909), ed. by W. D. Lewis; Proc. of the Bar and of  The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in Memory of Horace Gray, January 17, 1903 (1903); Proc. American Acad. of Arts and Sci., June 1904; Bost on Transcript and Evening Star (Washington, D. C.), September 15, 1902.]

S. W.



Source: Dictionary of American Biography, Volumes I-X, Edited by Dumas Malone, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.