G: Gage through Grimes

See below for annotated biographies of Free Soil Party leaders, members and supporters. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography.

GAGE, Francis Dana Barker, 1808-1884, journalist, poet, reformer, temperance leader, women’s rights, anti-slavery leader. Supported Free Soil movement.  Lectured on abolition and was often threatened with physical violence.  Her home was burned three times.  During the Civil War, she taught newly freed slaves and was active as a volunteer with the Sanitary Commission.  In 1863, she was appointed Superintendent of a refuge of more than 500 freed slaves at Paris Island, South Carolina.  Gage was married to abolitionist James L. Gage, a lawyer from McConnelsville, Ohio.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 568-569; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 84; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 326-328; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 8, p. 605; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. II. New York: James T. White, 1892, p. 321)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 84;

GAGE, FRANCES DANA BARKER (October· 12, 1808-November 10, 1884), reformer, author, was born in Marietta, Ohio, where her father, Colonel Joseph Barker, a native of New Hampshire, was among the original settlers. Her mother, Elizabeth  Dana, was connected with the Dana and Bancroft families of Massachusetts. Frances secured such an education as the. little frontier: community afforded. On January 1, 1829, when 119t, yet twenty-one, she married James L. Gage, a lawyer of McConnelsville, Ohio. In spite of the demands upon her made, ultimately, by a family of eight children, she found time for reading, writing, and even speaking on temperance, slavery, and woman's rights. She later wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "From 1849 to 1855 I lectured on this subject [ woman's rights] in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York, and wrote volumes for the press" (letter quoted in Parton, post, p. 386). In 1853 the family moved to St. Louis. Here Mrs. Gage's anti-slavery proclivities promptly branded her an Abolitionist, her articles were excluded from the press, and she herself was socially ostracized and threatened with violence. While in St. Louis the family suffered three disastrous fires, possibly the work of incendiaries, and James Gage failed in business and in health. Mrs. Gage thereupon took the post of assistant editor of art agricultural paper in Columbus, Ohio, which she held until the Civil War destroyed the circulation of the paper. On the outbreak of the war, four of her sons joined the Union armies, and in 1862 she went to Port Royal, Beaufort, and Paris Island, South Carolina, and Fernandina, Florida, where for thirteen months, with the aid of her daughter Mary, she ministered to the freedmen of the soldiers. She then returned North to lecture and arouse others to the needs of the freedmen and the armies. Later she served as an unsalaried agent of the Western Sanitary Commission in Memphis, Vicksburg, and Natchez. In September of 1864, however, her active war work was ended when she was thrown from her carriage in Galesburg, III., and crippled for a year. Following the war, she lectured widely on temperance. In August 1867, a stroke of paralysis brought her public life to an end, but she continued her writing, and, as "Aunt Fanny," became well known for her children's stories, sketches of social life, and poems. Her larger published works were Elsie Magoon; or the Old Still-House in the Hollow (1867), a temperance tale; Poems (1867); Gertie's Sacrifice (1869); and Steps Upward (1870). She was large and vigorous,. with a kindly face, easy manners, and a rich fund of conversation. An excellent extemporaneous speaker who never failed to interest her audiences, she was much in demand, and rendered valuable aid to the various causes in which she became interested. She died in Greenwich, Connecticut.

[Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Frances D. Gage," in Jas. Parton and others, Eminent Women of the Age (1868); E. F. Barker, Barker Genealogy (1927), p. 401; E. C. Sta,1ton, S. B. Anthony, and M. J. Gage, History of Woman Suffrage (3 vols., 1881-87), passim; L. P. Brockett and M. C. Vaughan, Woman's Work in the Civil War (1867), pp. 683-90; obituary in New York Tribune, November 13, 1884.]

W.R.W.


GATES, Seth Merrill, 1800-1877, abolitionist leader, lawyer, newspaper editor, U.S. Congressman, Whig Party, Western New York.  Anti-slavery political leader in House of Representatives.  In 1848 he was the Free-Soil candidate for lieutenant-governor of New York, but was defeated. He drew up the protest of the Whig members of Congress in 1843 against the annexation of Texas,

(Dumond, 1961, p. 295; Mabee, 1970, p. 128; Sewell, 1976; pp. 47, 48, 63, 66, 77, 139, 166; Sorin, 1971, p. 104; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 615-616; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

GATES, Seth Merrill, lawyer, born in Winfield, Herkimer County, New York, 16 October, 1800; died in Warsaw, New York, 24 August, 1877. He studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1827, and began practice in Le Roy. He was elected to the state legislature in 1832, but declined a re-election. During this session he was instrumental in procuring a charter for the first Railroad in western New York, being a portion of the present New York Central. In 1838 he purchased the " Le Roy Gazette," which he edited for several years. He was elected to Congress in 1838, and re-elected in 1840. On the expiration of his Congressional service, he moved to Warsaw, and continued his law-practice. On account of his hostility to slavery, a reward of $500 was offered by a southern planter for his "delivery in Savannah, dead or alive." In 1848 he was the Free-Soil candidate for lieutenant-governor of New York, but was defeated. He drew up the protest of the Whig members of Congress in 1843 against the annexation of Texas, erroneously attributed in several histories to Mr. Adams's pen; and the correspondence between Mr. Gates and ex-President John Quincy Adams, who signed the protest, is still in the possession of his son. Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888,Vol.II, pp.615-616


GERARD, JAMES WATSON (1794-February 7, 1874), lawyer, philanthropist. In 1854, having always been a consistent opponent of slavery, he took a leading part in the agitation against the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill.

("Genealogical and Biographical Sketch of the Late James W. Gerard," by J. W. Gerard, Jr., in New York Genealogy and Biog. Record, July 1874; Proceedings of the Bar of New York in Memory of James W. Gerard (1874); Prominent Families of New York (1897), ed. by L. H. Weeks; Sewell, 1976; p. 232)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 217-248;

GERARD, JAMES WATSON (1794-February 7, 1874), lawyer, philanthropist, was of Scotch and French descent. His father, William Gerard, born in Banff in the Highlands of Scotland, was a member of a French family which had fled thither to escape religious persecution. He emigrated about 1780 to New York City, where he married Christina Glass and became a prosperous merchant. There his son, James Watson Gerard, was born. The younger Gerard obtained his early education from private tutors. Entering Columbia College while yet a boy he graduated in 1811, being third in his class and distinguishing himself in mathematics and the classics. On the outbreak of the War of 1812, he enlisted and served in one of the volunteer companies raised for the purpose of defending New York City. On the conclusion of the war he entered the office of George Griffin, one of the leading New York lawyers, and was admitted to the bar in 1816. He had read widely, and was instrumental in forming a debating society called the Forum, in whose discussions he, with Fessenden, Hoffman, and other brilliant juniors constantly participated. His first retainer was on behalf of a boy fourteen years old who was indicted for the theft of a canary, and the circumstances of the case-it being the accused's first offense-made so strong an impression upon him that he determined to take steps to assist in the reformation of junior offenders. He joined the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism, and was a prime mover in the appointment of a special committee which investigated the subject of juvenile delinquency. He strongly advocated the creation of an asylum for youthful criminals where they would be safe from contamination by hardened convicts, and procured the incorporation, on March 29, 1824, of the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents, whose House of Refuge, built shortly, was the first institution of its kind in the country. As a member of the board of managers, Gerrard contributed powerfully to its successful operation. Though he was now enjoying an extensive practise at the bar, he continued to devote much of his time and means to social reform, identifying himself with all movements having for their object the amelioration of distress, the advancement of the best interests of the city, and efficient administration. Inter alia, he induced great reforms in the police system and was the first to advocate the wearing of uniforms by policemen. In 1854, having always been a consistent opponent of slavery, he took a leading part in the agitation against the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. […].

["Genealogical and Biographical Sketch of the Late James W. Gerard," by J. W. Gerard, Jr., in New York Genealogy and Biog. Record, July 1874; Proc. of the Bar of New York in Memory of James W. Gerard (1874); Prominent Families of New York (1897), ed. by L. H. Weeks; New York Times, February 8, 1874; New York Herald, February 10, 1874.]

H. W. H. K.


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; Sewell, 1976; pp. 47, 48, 66, 93, 141-142, 150, 151, 231, 240, 244,149, 254, 277-280, 289, 308, 313, 341; 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; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

GIDDINGS, Joshua Reed, statesman, born in Athens, Bradford County, Pennsylvania, 6 October, 1795; died in Montreal, Canada, 27 May, 1864. His parents moved to Canandaigua, New York, and in 1806 to Ashtabula county, Ohio, where the boy worked on his father's farm, and by devoting his evenings to hard study made up somewhat for his limited educational advantages. In 1812 he enlisted in a regiment commanded by Colonel Richard Hayes, being the youngest member, and was in an expedition sent to the Peninsula north of Sandusky Bay. There, 29 September, 1812, twenty-two men, of whom he was one, had a skirmish with Indians, in which six of the soldiers were killed and six wounded. Mr. Giddings afterward erected a monument there to the memory of his fallen comrades. After the war he became a teacher, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1820. He was elected to the Ohio legislature in 1826, served one term, and declined a re-election. In 1838 he was elected, as a Whig, to Congress, where he had hardly taken his seat before he became prominent as an advocate of the right of petition, and the abolition of slavery and the domestic slave-trade. He had been known as an active abolitionist before his election. His first attempt to discuss the subject on the floor of Congress, 11 February, 1839, was thwarted by the gag rule; but two years later, 9 February, 1841, he delivered a notable speech on the war with the Indians in Florida, in which he maintained that the contest was waged solely in the interest of slavery, the object being to enslave the Maroons of that state, who were affiliated with the Seminoles, and break up the asylums for fugitives. This subject he set forth more elaborately years afterward in his “Exiles of Florida” (Columbus, Ohio, 1858; new ed., New York, 1863). In the autumn of 1841 the “Creole” sailed from Virginia for Louisiana with a cargo of slaves, who got possession of the vessel, ran into the British port of Nassau, N. P., and, in accordance with British law, were set free. In the excitement that followed, Daniel Webster, secretary of state, wrote to Edward Everett, U. S. minister at London, saying that the government would demand indemnification for the owners of the slaves. Thereupon Mr. Giddings, 21 March, 1842, offered in the House of Representatives a series of resolutions in which it was declared that, as slavery was an abridgment of a natural right, it had no force beyond the territorial jurisdiction that created it; that when an American vessel was not in the waters of any state it was under the jurisdiction of the United States alone, which had no authority to hold slaves; and that the mutineers of the “Creole” had only resumed their natural right to liberty, and any attempt to re-enslave them would be unconstitutional and dishonorable. So much excitement was created by these resolutions that Mr. Giddings, on the advice of his friends, withdrew them, but said he would present them again at some future time. The house then, on motion of John Minor Botts, of Virginia, passed a resolution of censure (125 to 69), and by means of the previous question denied Mr. Giddings an opportunity to speak in his own defence. He at once resigned his seat and appealed to his constituents, who re-elected him by a large majority. In the discussion of the “Amistad” case (see Cinque), Mr. Giddings took the same ground as in the similar case of the “Creole,” and in a speech a few years later boldly maintained that to treat a human being as property was a crime. In 1843 he united with John Quincy Adams and seventeen other members of Congress in issuing an address to the people of the country, declaring that the annexation of Texas “would be identical with dissolution”; and in the same year he published, under the pen-name of “Pacificus,” a notable series of political essays. A year later he and Mr. Adams presented a report discussing a memorial from the Massachusetts legislature, in which they declared that the liberties of the American people were founded on the truths of Christianity. On the Oregon question, he held that the claim of the United States to the whole territory was just, and should be enforced, but predicted that the Polk administration would not keep the promise on which it had been elected — expressed in the motto “Fifty-four forty, or fight” — and his prediction was fulfilled. In 1847 he refused to vote for Robert C. Winthrop, the candidate of his party for speaker of the house, on the ground that his position on the slavery question was not satisfactory; and the next year, for the same reason, he declined to support the candidacy of General Taylor for the presidency, and acted with the Free-Soil Party. In 1849, with eight other Congressmen, he refused to support any candidate for the speakership who would not pledge himself so to appoint the standing committees that petitions on the subject of slavery could obtain a fair consideration; and the consequence was the defeat of Mr. Winthrop and the election of Howell Cobb, the Democratic candidate. Mr. Giddings opposed the compromise measures of 1850, which included the fugitive-slave law, and the repeal of the Missouri compromise, taking a prominent part in the debates. In 1850, being charged with wrongfully taking important papers from the post-office, he demanded an investigation, and was exonerated by a committee that was composed chiefly of his political opponents. It was shown that the charge was the work of a conspiracy. In 1856, and again in 1858, he suddenly became unconscious, and fell while addressing the house. His Congressional career of twenty years' continuous service ended on 4 March, 1859, when he declined another nomination. In 1861 President Lincoln appointed him U. S. consul-general in Canada, which office he held until the time of his death. One who knew him personally writes: “He was about six feet one inch in height, broad-shouldered, of very stalwart build, and was considered the most muscular man on the floor of the house. Whenever he spoke he was listened to with great attention by the whole house, the members frequently gathering around him. He had several affrays on the floor, but invariably came out ahead. On one occasion he was challenged by a southern member, and promptly accepted, selecting as the weapons two raw-hides. The combatants were to have their left hands tied together by the thumbs, and at a signal castigate each other till one cried enough. A look at Mr. Giddings's stalwart frame influenced the southerner to back out.” Mr. Giddings published a volume of his speeches (Boston, 1853), and wrote “The Rebellion: its Authors and Causes,” a history of the anti-slavery struggle in Congress, which was issued posthumously (New York, 1864). Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 641-642.

Biography from the Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 260;

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.


GILLETTE, Francis, 1807-1879, Windsor, Connecticut, anti-slavery political leader, activist.  U.S. Senator, Free Soil Party, co-founder of the Republican Party.  Opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in the Senate in 1854. 

(Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 652; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 290; Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); obituary in Hartford Courant, October 1, 1879; Sewell, 1976; pp. 260, 329)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

GILLETTE, Francis, senator, born in Windsor, now Bloomfield, Hartford County, Connecticut, 14 December, 1807: died in Hartford, Connecticut, 30 September, 1879. He was graduated at Yale in 1829 with the valedictory, and then studied law with Governor William W. Ellsworth. Failing health compelled him to relinquish this pursuit, and he settled in Bloomfield as a farmer. In 1882 and again in 1836 he was sent to the legislature, where he gained notice in 1838 by his anti-slavery speech advocating the striking out of the word "white" from the state constitution. In 1841 he was nominated against his own will for the office of governor by the Liberty Party, and during the twelve following years frequently received a similar nomination from the Liberty and Free-Soil parties. He was elected by a coalition between the Whigs, temperance men, and Free-Soilers, in 1854, to fill the vacancy in the U. S. Senate caused by the resignation of Truman Smith, and served from 25 May, 1854, till 3 March, 1855. Mr. Gillette was active in the formation of the Republican Party, and was for several years a silent partner in the "Evening Press," the first distinctive organ of that party. He was active in the cause of education throughout his life, was a coadjutor of Dr. Henry Barnard from 1838 till 1842, one of the first trustees of the State Normal School, and for many years its president. Mr. Gillette took interest in agricultural matters, was an advocate of total abstinence, and delivered lectures and addresses on both subjects. He moved to Hartford in 1852, and passed the latter part of his life in that city.  Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 652.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 290;

GILLETTE, FRANCIS (December 14, 1807-September 30, 1879), statesman, was a descendant of Jonathan Gillett, who settled in Windsor, Connecticut, about 1636. Francis Gillet (or Gillette as he signed himself) was born in Bloomfield, then a part of Windsor, the son of Ashbel and Achsah (Francis) Gillet. When he was six years old his father died. Between the boy and his stepfather there was no sympathy, a situation which embittered his formative years. Gillette received his preparatory education at Ashfield, Massachusetts, where his mother was then living, and was graduated from Yale College in 1829. He was an excellent student, the unanimous choice of his classmates for valedictorian, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1834 he married Eliza Daggett Hooker, a descendant of Thomas Hooker. He had begun the study of law, but because of ill health, was obliged to abandon it and take up the life of a farmer on the family estate in Windsor. There he remained until 1852 when he purchased a farm in Hartford. Twice he was sent to the Connecticut House of Representatives, in 1832 from Windsor and in 1838 from Bloomfield. As a member of the Assembly, he identified himself with the anti-slavery group. In 1838, supporting an amendment to erase the word "white" from the state constitution, he professed to find "the length of the nose" as valid a qualification as color for political rights (Columbian Register, New Haven, May 26, 1838).

In 1841 he became the first candidate of the Liberty party for governor. Repeatedly, during the twelve years following, he received the Abolitionist or Free-Soil nominations and was as often defeated. In 1854, however, his long association with minority parties bore fruit, when a coalition of Whigs, Free-Soilers, and temperance men elected him United States senator to complete the unexpired term of Truman Smith. He reached Washington barely in time to vote against the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. During his brief stay in the Senate (May 24, 1854-March 3, 1855), he delivered one formal speech on the slavery issue (Congressional Globe, 33 Congress, l Session, pp. 1616-18). In Connecticut he was actively interested in the formation of the Republican party, whose first organ, the Hartford Evening Press, knew him as a silent partner. To the temperance movement, as well as the anti-slavery crusade, he lent his vigorous support. He was an incorporator of the American Temperance Life Insurance Company, now the Phoenix Mutual. He devoted his efforts, also, to the cause of education, and gave sympathy and cooperation to Henry Barnard [q.v.], who was laboring to reform the Connecticut schools. When the State Normal School was established in 1849, Gillette became chairman of the Board of Trustees and held that office until 1865. He embodied qualities common to many New Englanders of his day, a reforming spirit and a passion for minority causes. His interest in abolition, temperance, and education, though sometimes a bit combative, was sincere and unselfish (Hartford Courant, October l, 1879), and he was the antithesis of the professional politician and office-seeker.

[H. R. Stiles, The History and Geneals. of Ancient Windsor, Connecticut, volume II (1892), contains the Gillet genealogy and a long biographical footnote on Francis Gillette (p. 293). See also J . H. Trumbull. Memorial History of Hartford County (1886), I, 516, 611, II, ch. iii; Obit. Record Graduates Yale College, 2 series (1880); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); obituary in Hartford Courant, October 1, 1879.]

D. E. O.


GODWIN, PARKE (February 25, 1816-January 7, 1904), editor, author. During the presidential campaign of 1860 he was active both in writing and in speaking. His faith in Lincoln was unwavering. (Who's Who in America, 1903-05; obituary notice in the New York Evening Post, January 7, 1904)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt.1 pp. 351-352;

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 the 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, Kentucky, 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 first 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), later 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 Cullen 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.


GOODNOW, Isaac Tichenor (January 17, 1814-March 20, 1894), educator, Kansas pioneer. Was  outspoken in his opposition to the extension of slavery, and in 1854 he became interested in the support of the New England Emigrant Aid Company to send Free-Soil colonists to Kansas.

(Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1 pp. 394-395;

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 Captain 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.


GOVE, William Hazeltine, politician, born in Weare, New Hampshire, 10 July, 1817: died there, 11 March, 1876. “He was a member of the first Free-Soil Convention, held in Buffalo, New York, in 1848, was a candidate of his party for the legislature year after year, and in 1851, by a combination of Free-Soilers and Whigs, he was elected. He was re-elected in 1852 and 1855. After the Free-Soil organization was merged in the Republican Party, Mr. Gove was for many years an active Republican”.

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 697-698.

He received a common-school education, taught in Lynn, Massachusetts, one Year, and an equal length of time in Rochester, New York. He also studied law a short time in Boston. He early became an active worker in the anti-slavery cause, a supporter of the Liberty Party, and later a prominent Free-Soiler. While connected with the latter party he became well known as a stump speaker, and gained the title of the " silver-tongued orator of New Hampshire." He was a member of the first Free-Soil Convention, held in Buffalo, New York, in 1848, was a candidate of his party for the legislature year after year, and in 1851, by a combination of Free-Soilers and Whigs, he was elected. He was re-elected in 1852 and 1855. After the Free-Soil organization was merged in the Republican Party, Mr. Gove was for many years an active Republican. During the administrations of Lincoln and Johnston he held the office of postmaster. In 1871, having become dissatisfied with his party, he engaged in forming a labor reform party, whose voters, combining with the Democrats, elected him to the lower branch of the legislature, of which body he was chosen speaker. In 1872 he was a delegate to the Liberal Republican Convention at Cincinnati, and acted thence forth with the Democratic Party, which elected him to the state senate in 187&-'4." In the latter year he was made its president. As a young man Mr. Gove was engaged in the Washingtonian temperance movement, and spoke and wrote eloquently in aid of the cause. He edited for a short time the "Temperance Banner." published at Concord.  Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 697-698.


GRAY, Horace (March 24, 1828-September 15, 1902), Massachusetts jurist, justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Gray was an original Free-Soiler; and, a Republican, he was an unsuccessful candidate in 1860 for the nomination of attorney-general for Massachusetts.  

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt.1 pp. 518-519; 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).

(Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt.1 pp. 518-519;

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.


GREELEY, Horace, 1811-1872, journalist, newspaper publisher, The New York Tribune. Supporter of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Major opponent of slavery.

“The effort which the Tribune had expended in the forties on numerous causes was concentrated in the fifties upon the Free-Soil movement. Greeley objected to slavery on both moral and economic grounds. At first he held mild views, but his opinions underwent a steady intensification. He opposed the Mexican War, indorsed the Wilmot Proviso, and in 1848 supported Zachary Taylor as the only candidate who could prevent Cass's election to the presidency. Two years later he showed coolness to the compromise measures, declaring to the South that he would let "the Union be a thousand times shivered rather than that we should aid you to plant slavery on free soil" (Tribune, February 20, 1850). The fight over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill aroused Greeley to his greatest eloquence. His editorial, "Is It a Fraud?" (February 15, 1854), was a magnificent answer to the Democratic claim that the measures of 1850 had involved a recognized repeal of the Missouri Compromise. He advocated "determined resistance" to the execution of the Kansas- Nebraska Act and assisted Gerrit Smith, Eli Thayer, and others in arming the Kansas Free-Soilers.” Co-founder, Liberal Republican Party in 1854.  Supporter of the Union.

(Blue, 2005, pp. 62, 110, 147-149, 159, 182, 253, 258, 262; Dumont, 1961, p. 352; Filler, 1960, pp. 6, 45, 56, 88, 112, 117, 163, 219, 237, 259; Greely, 1866; Greely, 1868; Mitchell, 2007, pp. 33, 54, 78, 81, 86, 96, 98, 116-117, 136, 138, 143, 146, 153, 154, 199, 204, 217-220, 227-229, 233; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 65, 67, 69, 141, 324, 476, 692-695; Sewell, 1976; pp. 252, 271; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 734-741; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 529; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 370-373; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 9, p. 647)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 529;

GREELEY, HORACE (February 3, 1811-November 29, 1872), editor, political leader, was born at Amherst, New Hampshire, the third child of Zaccheus Greeley and Mary Woodburn his wife, the former being of English and the latter of Scotch-Irish stock. The father made a scanty living by farming and day labor, first at Amherst, later at Westhaven, Vermont, and finally in Erie County, Pennsylvania. Greeley's irregular schooling ended at fourteen, when he :was apprenticed to Amos Bliss, editor of the Northern Spectator at East Poultney, Vermont. But he was a precocious lad, who gained much from his mother's repetition of British traditions, ballads, and snatches of history, the family copies of Shakespeare, Campbell, and Byron, and the omnivorous reading possible in a newspaper office and the town library of East Poultney. When the Nor them Spectator died in June 1830, he walk ed most of the way to the Erie County home, and after a short stay with his still-struggling parents found employment as a printer at Jamestown and Lodi, New York, and Erie, Pennsylvania. Finding his prospects poor, he set out, with about twenty-five dollars and his personal possessions tied in his handkerchief, for New York City, where he arrived in August 1831. He was twenty years old, "tall, slender, pale, and plain," as he later described himself, with an "unmistakably rustic manner and address," and equipped with only "so much of the art of printing as a boy will usually learn in the office of a country newspaper" (Recollections, p. 84). Obtaining board and room for two dollars and a half a week, he sought work in vain for several weeks before accepting the eye-ruining job of setting up a New Testament in agate with notes in pearl.

A succession of employments, including some typesetting for the Evening Post, from which William Leggett discharged him because he wanted only "decent-looking men in the office," enabled Greeley to save a small sum, and in January 1833 to form a partnership with a printer named Francis V. Story, who when drowned the following July was succeeded by Jonas Winchester. During 1833-34 the firm printed from 54 Liberty St., two lottery organs called Sylvester's Bank Note and Exchange Manual and the Constitutionalist, and did a job-printing business. But Greeley was far more than a printer. His fingers itched for the pen, and he was shortly contributing paragraphs to the two journals and to newspapers. He soon gained reputation in press circles, and a dubious tradition states that James Gordon Bennett offered him a partnership in starting the Herald. One reason for distrusting the tradition is that Greeley and Winchester had already, on March 22, 1834, found ed a weekly literary and news journal called the New Yorker. This periodical, well pri11ted, avoiding political partisanship, containing full abstracts of foreign and domestic newspapers, and selected tales, reviews, and pieces of mu sic, was edited largely with shears; but there were original contributions by Greeley, R. W. Griswold, Park Benjamin, and Henry J. Raymond (F. L. Mott, History of American Magazines, 1741-1850, 1930, pp. 358-60). It gained steadily in circulation. At the end of one year it had 4,500 subscribers; at the end of three years, 9,500. But the "cash principle" not yet being applied to the magazine business, it still lo st money. Greeley suffered great mental anguish from his constant struggle with debt. "My embarrassments were sometimes dreadful," he wrote; "not that I feared destitution, but the fear of involving my friends in my misfortunes was very bitter" (Parton, post, p. 172). He had married on July 5, 1836, Mary Youngs Cheney, who was born in Cornwall, Connecticut, but was a schoolteacher for a time in North Carolina. However great his worries over his magazine, it shortly gave him a wide reputation.

The failure of the New Yorker was fortunate for Greeley in that literary and non-partisan journalism was not his real forte. To add to his income he wrote constantly for the Daily Whig and other newspapers, and in 1838 accepted from Thurlow Weed, William H. Seward, and other Whig leaders the editors hip of a campaign weekly, the Jeffersonian. It ran for one year, obtained a circulation of 15,000 and exercised real influence. Greeley's salary of $1,000 was less important than the political friendships he formed. He struck Seward as "rather unmindful of social usages, yet singularly clear, original, and decided, in his political views and theories" (F. W. Seward, Autobiography of William H. Seward …with a Memoir of his Life, 1877, p. 395). In 1840 the Whig leaders called upon him to edit and publish another weekly. The result was the Log Cabin, begun May 2, which gained an unprecedented success. Of the first issue 48,000 copies were sold, and the circulation swiftly rose to almost 90,000. Greeley not only edited it and the New Yorker simultaneously, but made speeches, sat on committees, and helped manage the state campaign. He thought later that few men had contributed more to Harrison's victory than he (Recollections, p. 135). Ceasing after the election, the Log Cabin was revived on December 5, 1840, as a general political weekly, and continued till it and the New Yorker were merged in the Tribune. Greeley's apprenticeship was now completed.

Though in 1841 twelve dailies were published in New York City, no penny paper of Whig allegiance existed. Nor was there any newspaper standing midway between the sensational enterprise of Bennett's Herald and the staid correctness of Bryant's Evening Post. Greeley, now fully trusted by his party, with a large popular following and a varied practical experience, saw the opportunity. With a capital which he estimated at two thousand dollars, one-half in printing materials, and with one thousand dollars borrowed from James Coggeshall, he launched the New York Tribune on April 10, 1841. His object, he stated later, was to found "a journal removed alike from servile partisanship on the one hand, and from gagged, mincing neutrality on the other" (Recollections, p. 137). For some days the prospect was dubious; his first week's receipts were ninety-two dollars, the expenses $525 (Ibid., p. 140). Then, thanks to the Tribune's sterling merits and the Sun's bitter attacks, subscriptions poured in rapidly. The paper began its fourth week with an edition of 6,000, and its seventh with 11,000, after which progress was slow, Success had been fairly assured when during July Greeley formed a partnership with a far more practical man, Thomas McElrath, who for ten years gave the establishment efficiency and system and Greeley entire independence. On September 20 the Log Cabin and New Yorker were merged into the weekly Tribune. Greeley, assisted with great ability by H. J. Raymond, labored tirelessly, his average day's writing in the early years according to Parton being three columns of close print. As funds accumulated, however, the staff was increased, till by 1846 the Tribune was the best all-round paper in the city, and Greeley had time for additional pursuits.

The Tribune set a new standard in American journalism by its combination of energy in newsgathering with good taste, high moral standards, and intellectual appeal. Police reports, scandals, dubious medical advertisements, and flippant personalities were barred from its pages; the editorials were vigorous but usually temperate; the political news was the most exact in the city; book reviews and book-extracts were numerous; and as an inveterate lecturer Greeley gave generous space to lectures. The paper appealed to substantial and thoughtful people and when its price was raised, on April 11, 1842, to nine cents weekly or two cents daily it lost fewer than two hundred subscribers. Greeley stamped it with his individual and then highly radical views. He was an egalitarian who hated and feared all kinds of monopoly, landlordism, and class dominance. Believing that all American citizens should be free men politically and economically, he sought means of increasing this freedom. At first he turned to Fourierism. Through the influence of Albert Brisbane [q.v.], he not only allowed a Fourierist association to publish first daily and then tri-weekly articles on the front page of the Tribune (1842-44), but also advocated the formation of Phalanxes, conducted a newspaper debate on the subject with Raymond, (1846), and invested in the North American Phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey. He espoused the agrarian movement for the free distribution of government lands to settlers as a guarantee against capitalist tyranny, attacked the railway land grants as fostering monopoly; assailed the heartlessness of corporations which exploited their workers, and in general inveighed against the fierce acquisitive competition of the day. Wage slavery in the forties distressed him as much as bond slavery. "How can I devote myself to a crusade against distant servitude," he wrote an anti-slavery convention in 1845, "when I discern its essence pervading my immediate community" (Tribune, June 20, 1845). Newspapers, he wrote, should be "as sensitive to oppression and degradation in the next street as if they were practised in Brazil or Japan." His thinking seemed inconsistent when it included high-tariff doctrines, but he never favored protection as more than a temporary means to an end. "Protection is the shortest and best way to real Free Trade, he wrote in 1851 (Tribune, June 23, 1851). He opposed capital punishment, urged freedom of speech and of the mails for Abolitionists, advocated the restriction of liquor-selling, and supported cooperative shops and labor unions, himself becoming in 1850 first president of the New York Printers' Union. Though no believer in woman's suffrage, he sympathized with other parts of the woman's rights crusade.

Greeley's devotion to such social aims made the Tribune more than a mere financial success; it became a great popular teacher, champion, and moral leader, and a vehicle for the ideas and experiments of constructive democracy. It required an able and liberal staff, and he drew to the Nassau Street office a versatile group. Margaret Fuller was literary reviewer and special writer from 1844 to 1846, living for a time in Greeley's Turtle Bay home. Charles A. Dana joined Greeley in 1847, acting as city editor, foreign correspondent, and managing editor. Bayard Taylor, after contributing travel letters, became a staff member in 1848. George Ripley was made literary assistant in 1849, raising the literary department to high influence. In the fifties the staff included James S. Pike, Washington correspondent and editorial writer ; Solon Robinson, agricultural editor; W. H. Fry, music critic; C. T. Congdon and Richard Hildreth. To the energy of Dana, Pike, and the city editor, F. J. Ottarson, the paper owed its prompt and full intelligence. By 1854 it employed fourteen local reporters, twenty American correspondents, eighteen foreign correspondents, and a financial staff under George M. Snow (Parton, pp. 391-4u). During the late fifties the Tribune attained a national influence far surpassing that of any rival. Its total circulation on the eve of the Civil War, daily, weekly, and semi-weekly, was 287,750. This covered the whole country outside the South. The power of the paper was greater than even this circulation would indicate, for the weekly was the preeminent journal of the rural North, and one copy did service for many readers. As James Ford Rhodes has said, for great areas the Tribune was "a political bible." Many elements entered into its influence, but the greatest was the passionate moral earnestness of Greeley himself, his ability to interpret the deeper convictions of the Northern public, and the trenchant clarity and force of his editorials.

The effort which the Tribune had expended in the forties on numerous causes was concentrated in the fifties upon the Free-Soil movement. Greeley objected to slavery on both moral and economic grounds. At first he held mild views, but his opinions underwent a steady intensification. He opposed the Mexican War, indorsed the Wilmot Proviso, and in 1848 supported Zachary Taylor as the only candidate who could prevent Cass's election to the presidency. Two years later he showed coolness to the compromise measures, declaring to the South that he would let "the Union be a thousand times shivered rather than that we should aid you to plant slavery on free soil" (Tribune, February 20, 1850). The fight over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill aroused Greeley to his greatest eloquence. His editorial, "Is It a Fraud?" (February 15, 1854), was a magnificent answer to the Democratic claim that the measures of 1850 had involved a recognized repeal of the Missouri Compromise. He advocated "determined resistance" to the execution of the Kansas- Nebraska Act and assisted Gerrit Smith, Eli Thayer, and others in arming the Kansas Free-Soilers. He applauded forcible resistance to the Fugitive-Slave Act as the best method of obtaining its repeal (June 3, 1854). Having declared in 1852 that "if an anti-slavery Whig must give up his anti-slavery or his Whiggery, we choose to part with the latter," Greeley was among the first editors to join the Republican party, and attended the national organization meeting at Pittsburgh, February 22, 1856. He was disgusted with Seward because he failed to seize the leadership of the " uprising of the Free States" (Tribune, November 9, 1854), and warm in his advocacy of Fremont's candidacy for the presidency. In the critical year 1857 his union of moral fervor with shrewd practicality is seen at its best. Of the Dred Scott decision he said, it "is entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room" (Tribune, March 7, 1857), and he praised John Brown while condemning his raid. He insisted, however, upon the importance of the Union, showing no patience with Garrison's secessionist views, and he strongly attacked Know-Nothingism. He sought only the attainable. In 1854 he had dissolved, through political pique, his alliance with Thurlow Weed and Seward, and in 1860 was a free agent. As a delegate from Oregon at the Republican National Convention he joined with the Blairs to defeat Seward by urging the nomination of Edward Bates of Missouri, but on the night before the balloting advised the Massachusetts delegates to support Lincoln.

In these decades Greeley's restless energy was expended in numerous directions, some ill-advised. Though not of rugged health, he seemed indefatigable, sleeping but five or six hours daily, writing much, traveling widely, making speeches, and attending political conferences. For three months in 1848-49 he was a member of Congress, where he introduced a homestead bill and aired the scandal of excessive mileage payments. During 1851 he was in Europe for three months, acting as juryman at the Crystal Palace Exhibition, testifying before a parliamentary committee, and hastily touring the Continent. On entering Italy his first observation was characteristic that the country badly needed subsoil ploughs. Revisiting Europe in 1855, he derived much amusement from a two days' incarceration on a debt charge in a Paris prison. In the summer of 1859 he made a journey to the Pacific Coast, toured California, and returned by way of Panama. These travels furnished material for newspaper letters and the volumes, Glances at Europe (1851) and An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in -----the Summer of 1859 (1860). In addition to these writings he published a volume of lectures called Hints Toward Reforms (1850), and edited a compilation from official records entitled History of the Struggle for Slavery Extension or Restriction in the United States (1856). For years he was a constant lecturer before lyceums, young men's associations, and rural groups, appearing in some winter seasons twice a week. Far less creditable was his thirst for political office. He would have welcomed reelection to Congress in 1850, would have stooped to take the lieutenant-governorship in 1854, and in 1861 was bitterly disappointed by his failure to secure Seward's seat in the United States Senate. In 1863, again a candidate for the Senate, he was again defeated by Thurlow Weed's opposition. He was an unsuccessful candidate for the House of Representatives in 1868 and 1870, and for the state comptrollership in 1869, but won a seat in the state constitutional convention of 1867. These political adventures by no means enhanced his dignity or influence.

Few Americans were more intimately in the public eye than he, and none commanded such a mixture of admiration with affectionate amusement. The oddity of his appearance, with his pink face of babylike mildness fringed by throat-whiskers, his broad-brimmed hat, white overcoat, crooked cravat, shapeless trousers, and white socks, his shambling gait and absent-minded manner, was exaggerated by every caricaturist. His squeaky voice and illegible handwriting became themes of familiar humor. His eccentricities of manner, which sometimes shocked precise men like Bryant, his naivete on many subjects, and his homely wisdom on others, appealed to the millions. Some of his phrases, like "Go West, young man," were universally current. By signing many editorials and by frequently appearing in public he gave his work a direct personal appeal unusual in journalism, and his private life was the subject of much curiosity. He cared nothing for money, and though in later years he received $10,000 annually, this and most of his Tribune stock slipped from him. His charities were endless, and some impostors received thousands of dollars from him (Proceedings at the Unveiling of a Memorial to Horace Greeley, 1915, p. 95). Buying in 1853 a fifty-four acre farm in Chappaqua, New York, he spent many week-ends there, interesting all Tribune readers in his swamp reclamation and crop experiments, and finally publishing What I Know of Farming (1871). Of the seven children born to him, only two daughters, Gabrielle and Ida, lived to maturity; the bereavements made Mrs. Greeley neurasthenic; her housekeeping was characterized by Margaret Fuller as "Castle Rackrent fashion"; and though Greeley's devotion never wavered, his home life was comfortless. He made and kept many friends, especially among women who, like the Cary sisters and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, valued him for his inner and not outer qualities.

The Civil War brought Greeley new tests of sagacity and firmness, which he failed to meet as creditably as he did all tests of courage and patriotism. · From the beginning he was accused of vacillation, though his position had more consistency than appeared on the surface. His primary demand was that no concessions be made to slavery. He sternly opposed the Crittenden Compromise, preferred disunion to any "complicity in slavery extension," and, once hostilities opened, regarded the extinction of slavery as an irrevocable object. His doctrine in 1861 was that if a real majority of Southerners wished to go from the Union they should be allowed to do so, but that the revolt was one of "a violent, unscrupulous, desperate minority, who have conspired to clutch power" (Recollections, p. 398; Tribune, November 9, 16, 1860; November 19, 1861). When war began he supported it with energy, though the unfortunate cry, "Forward to Richmond!" (June 28, 1861), was raised by Dana, not by Greeley. He quickly allied himself with the radical anti-slavery element led by Sumner, Stevens, and Chase, opposing the President's policy of conciliating the border states and demanding early emancipation. Though other newspapers accepted the modification of Fremont's emancipation order, Greeley did not, insisting that Congress or the President resort to a general liberation of slaves. His editorial on emancipation, "The question of the Day" (Tribune, December 11, 1861), declared that "rebels" should have been warned at the outset that they would lose their slaves, that they had no rights to consideration, and that t)1e Union could not "afford to repel the sympathies and reject the aid of Four Millions of Southern people." His rising impatience with Lincoln's policy culminated in his famous signed editorial, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions" (August 20, 1862). This arraigned Lincoln as remiss in executing the Confiscation Act, as unduly influenced by "certain fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States" (the Blairs), and as offering a "mistaken deference to Rebel slavery." On September 24 the Tribune hailed Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as recreating a nation. Greeley's radicalism involved his journal in bitter warfare with not only the Democrats but also with the Seward-Weed moderates, and the fight, extended to state politics. In 1862 he was acclaimed the principal leader of New York Republicans, but his poor judgment of men and fluctuating principles caused him to lose influence in political circles (De A. S. Alexander, A Political History of the State of New York, III, 1909, p. 91).

Greeley's popular reputation and influence were injured in 1864 by his hesitation to support Lincoln and in 1864-65 by his peace activities. He favored postponing the Republican National Convention on the ground that the party was not united behind Lincoln (letter to New York Independent, February 25, 1864), and declared that Chase, Fremont, Ben Butler, or Grant would make as good a president, while the nomination of any of them would preserve the salutary one-term principle (Tribune, February 23, 1864). As late as August 18 he believed that Lincoln was already beaten, and wrote a friend that " we must have another ticket to save us from utter overthrow" (New York Sun, June 30, 1889). Not until September 6 did he state in the Tribune that "we fly the banner of Abraham Lincoln for the next Presidency," one dubious story asserting that this announcement followed Lincoln's private differ to appoint Greeley his next postmaster-general.

Even more ill-advised was Greeley's course in regard to peace. During 1863 he advocated mediation by a foreign power, and communicated on the subject with C. L. Vallandigham and the French minister, telling Raymond, " I'll drive Lincoln into it" (J. F. Rhodes, History of the Unite d States, 1893, IV, 222). In July 1864, he attempted to bring about direct peace negotiations. He wrote to Lincoln that he had learned that two emissaries from Jefferson Davis were in Canada with "full and complete powers for a peace"; declared that "our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace ; shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood"; and urged Lincoln to make a frank offer of peace (J. G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 1890, IX, 186). Lincoln shrewdly prevailed upon the reluctant Greeley to go to Niagara Falls to open the negotiations. Greeley exceeded his instructions, but found that the Confederates were without proper powers from their government and asked for further directions. When Lincoln thereupon closed the affair with the ultimatum that he would gladly consider any official proposition which embraced the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery, Greeley sent him a reproachful letter, for he believed that the President should have left the door open (Greeley, The American Conflict: ... Its Causes, Incidents, and Results, II, 1866, p. 664). On August 9 he wrote Lincoln that if the "rebellion" could not be promptly crushed the nation faced "certain ruin," begging him to make a fresh peace effort, and making the astounding proposal that if peace could not be made, there be an armistice for one year, "each party to retain, unmolested, all it now holds," and the blockade of the South to be lifted (Nicolay and Hay, IX, 196-97). These and similar views, expressed publicly and privately, created a wide-spread feeling that Greeley's judgment and nerve were deplorably weak.

Greeley's radical political views extended to Reconstruction. Believing in full negro equality, he indorsed not only the Fourteenth but also the Fifteenth Amendment and favored the congressional policies. In 1866 he was again a lion of the state Republican convention, controlled by anti-Johnson radicals. But the intemperate zeal with which the Tribune supported Johnson's impeachment owed more to John Russell Young, the managing editor, than to Greeley, then absent on a final Western trip. Greeley was also liberal enough to favor general amnesty, and called, as in his fine speech at Richmond on May 14, 1867, for the erasure of all sectional antagonism. He seconded the movement this year for Jefferson Davis's release from Fortress Monroe, and on May 13 signed his bond in Richmond. Noisy attacks followed, thousands of subscribers to Greeley's two-volume compilation, The American Conflict, cancelled their orders, the weekly Tribune lost more than half its circulation, and an effort was made in the Union League Club to reprimand him. The Tribune rejoiced in Grant's election, and for two years supported him with uniform cordiality. But, because of his support of the one-term principle and for two other reasons, one rooted in disapproval of Grant's public policies and the other in New York state politics, Greeley steadily cooled toward Grant. As a leader of the Reuben E. Fenton wing in New York politics, he viewed with hostility the rise of the Conkling-Cornell machine under Grant's protection, and resented what he felt to be Grant's unfair apportionment of federal patronage. Conkling's defeat of the Greeley-Fenton group in the state convention of 1871 led to an open split. At the same time Greeley became convinced that the Grant administration was demoralized and corrupt, indifferent to civil-service reform, mistaken in its Santo-Dominican policy, and illiberal toward the South. On May 6, 1871, the Tribune expressed doubt of the wisdom of renominating Grant on September 15 declared flatly against renomination. When independent Republicans pressed the movement for a new party in the congressional session of 1871-72, Greeley encouraged them. He wrote a friend on March 13, 1872, that he would carry the fight against Grant to its bitter end, though "I know how many friends I shall alienate by it, and how it will injure the Tribune, of which so little is my own property that I hate to wreck it" (J. Benton, ed., Greeley on Lincoln, with Mr. Greeley's Letters to Charles A. Dana and a Lady Friend, 1893, p. 211). His career was approaching its tragic climax.

Before the Civil War the Tribune had been Horace Greeley; after the war there was no such close identity. The paper had become a great institution of which his control was but partial. Disbursements by 1871 exceeded a million dollars annually, the whole staff approached 500, and the stock was held by twenty proprietors (Greeley's anniversary article, Tribune, April 10, 1871). Both Greeley's influence and that of the Tribune diminished after the war; the rise of the Associated Press, the multiplication of good local newspapers, and the disappearance of the great slavery issue, reduced their power. Personal editorship was declining. But from time to time Greeley still wrote editorials with his old fire, in what E. L. Godkin called "an English style which, for vigor, terseness, clearness, and simplicity, has never been surpassed, except, perhaps, by Cobbett" (Rollo Ogden, Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin, 1907, I, 255).

As the Liberal Republican movement first developed, Greeley discouraged mention of his name for the presidency; but as the revolt spread and there seemed a likelihood of successful coalition with the Democrats, his lifelong desire for political advancement made him receptive. The reform element in the movement favored Charles Francis Adams or Lyman Trumbull; the politicians who were promoting a coalition favored David Davis or Greeley (A. K. McClure, Old Time Notes of Pennsylvania, 1905, II, 334). When the convention met in Cincinnati on May 1, Greeley had astute supporters, notably Whitelaw Reid and William Dorsheimer, on the scene. The contest narrowed to a struggle between Adams and Greeley, the managers of the latter sprung an effective stampede, and to the consternation of Schurz and other reformers, Greeley was nominated, with B. Gratz Brown as associate. The convention refused to make either nomination unanimous and many delegates departed, feeling wit!) Samuel Bowles. that the ticket had been made by a combination of political idiots and political buccaneers (G. S. Merriam, The Life and Times of Samuel Bowles, 1885, II, 212). Greeley was indorsed by a dispirited Democratic national convention at Philadelphia in July and some state coalitions were effected, but many Democrats bolted because of his former abuse of the party. The low-tariff element represented by the Nation was disaffected, while Schurz joined Greeley only after a reproachful correspondence with him. In an exceptionally abusive campaign, Greeley was attacked as a traitor, a fool, an ignoramus, and a crank, and was pilloried in merciless cartoons by Nast and others; he took the assaults much to heart, saying later that he sometimes doubted whether he was running for the presidency or the penitentiary. In answer to the "bloody-shirt" argument, he brought forward as his chief issue a plea for the reconciliation of North and South by the removal of all political disabilities and the union of both sections for common reforms. In his letter of acceptance he eloquently expounded the idea that both sides were "eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm" (Tribune, May 22, 1872). Retiring from his editorship, he made an active speaking campaign in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, his addresses to the huge crowds being notable for their intellectual strength (James G. Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, II, 1886, p. 534). The October elections made it clear that he could not be successful in November. Yet the magnitude of the defeat was a surprise. Greeley carried only six border and Southern states and received only 2,834,125 of the popular vote against 3,597,13; cast for Grant. Among the chief factors in this disaster were the elaborate Republican organization, the distrust of Greeley by most financial interests, the impossibility of reconciling many Democrats, and the wide popular feeling that his judgment of both men and policies was hopelessly weak. Yet his candidacy had results of permanent value in actually doing much to close the "bloody chasm."

The tragedy of Greeley's death immediately followed the election. After his exhausting campaign tour he had watched with little sleep by the bedside of his wife, who died October 30. He was profoundly hurt by the feeling that he was "the worst beaten man who ever ran for high office." The final stroke came when, on returning to the Tribune, he found that the reins there had passed firmly into the hands of Whitelaw Reid, who had no intention of surrendering them, and that he had practically though not nominally lost the editorship which had been his lifelong pride (Charles A. Daria, "The Last Blow," N. Y; Sun, November 30, 1872). His mind and body both broke, and he died insane on November 29. A shocked nation paid him in death the tribute he had never received while living. His funeral in New York on December 4 was attended by the President, Vice-President, cabinet members, governors of three states, and an unequaled concourse of spectators. His failings were forgotten, while the services he had done the republic as its greatest editor, perhaps its greatest popular educator, and certainly one of its greatest moral leaders, were universally recalled.

[Greeley wrote an autobiography, Recollections of a Busy Life (1868; new eds., 1873, 1930), which offers not only a narrative of the main facts in his career, but also a frank revelation of the forces which influenced his tastes and thought, and which is admirable in its simplicity and concreteness. The best biographies are: W. A. Linn, Horace Greeley: Founder and Editor of the New York Tribune (1903); James Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley, Editor of the New York Tribune (1855, 1869, 1872, etc.); and L. D. Ingersoll, The Life of Horace Greeley, Founder of the New York Tribune (1873). Some new facts are added in Don C. Seitz, Horace Greeley, Founder of the New York Tribune (1926). Among treatments from a special point of view are Chas. Southern, Horace Greeley and Other Pioneers of American Socialism (1892), and F. N. Zabriskie, Horace Greeley, the Editor (1890). An estimate of Greeley's place in the history of American thought may be found in Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, II, 1927, pp. 247-57. The recollections of associates may be found in C. T. Congdon, Reminiscences of a Journalist (1880); C. A. Dana, "Greeley as a Journalist," in E. C. Stedman and E. M. Hutchinson, A Library of Amer. Lit., VII (1889); and J.C. Derby, Fifty Years Among Authors, Books, and Publishers (1884). Lives of John Hay, C. A. Dana, and Whitelaw Reid, and E. D. Ross, The Liberal Republican Movement (1919) should also be consulted. The state of New York published in 1915 the Proc. at the Unveiling of a Memorial to Horace Greeley at Chappaqua, New York, February 3, I9I4- The files of the New York Tribune are indispensable to a study of his life.]

A. N.


GRIMES, James Wilson, 1816-1872, statesman, lawyer.  U.S. Senator, voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.  Governor of Iowa, 1854-1858.  Supported by Whigs and Free Soil Democrats.  Elected as Republican Senator in 1859.  Re-elected 1865.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 767; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 631; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 9, p. 617; Congressional Globe)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

GRIMES, James Wilson, statesman, born in Deering, Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, 20 October, 1816; died in Burlington, Iowa, 7 February, 1872. He was graduated at Dartmouth in 1836, and in the same year went west and began to practise law in Burlington, Iowa, then in what was known as the " Black Hawk Purchase," in the territory of Michigan. From 4 July, 1836, till 12 June, 1838, it was part of Wisconsin territory, and in 1837-'8 Mr. Grimes was assistant librarian of the territorial library. After the formation of Iowa Territory he was a delegate to its assembly in 1838 and 1843, and in 1852, after its admission to the Union, was a member of the legislature. He was governor of the state in 1854-'8, having been elected by Whigs and Free-Soil Democrats, and while holding the office did much to foster Free-Soil sentiment in his state. On 28 August, 1856, he wrote an official letter to President Pierce protesting against the treatment of Iowa settlers in Kansas. He was elected to the U. S. Senate as a Republican in 1859, and re-elected in 1865. His first speech, delivered on 30 January, 1860, was a reply to Senator Robert Toombs, who had accused Iowa of passing laws in violation of the rights of sister states, and after this he spoke frequently, and was known as a hard-working member of the Senate. In 1861 he was a delegate to the Peace Convention. He was a member of the committee on naval affairs from 24 January, 1861, till the end of his service, and was its chairman from December, 1864. He strongly advocated the building of iron-clads, and the abandonment of stone fortifications for harbor defence. Mr. Grimes was noted for his independence of character, which frequently brought him into conflict with his party associates in the Senate. Thus, although he favored a vigorous prosecution of the war, he considered President Lincoln's enlargement of the regular army in 1861 a dangerous precedent, and later he opposed a high protective tariff. In the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, Mr. Grimes was one of the few Republican Senators who voted "not guilty," and this act brought upon him a storm of condemnation which lasted but a short time, owing to the evident fact that his vote had been strictly in accordance with what he considered his duty. Mr. Grimes had a stroke of paralysis in 1869, and in April of that year went abroad, resigning his seat in the Senate on 6 December. He returned in September, 1871, apparently improved, but died soon afterward of heart disease. Mr. Grimes founded a professorship at Iowa College, at Grinnell, and gave money for scholarships there and at Dartmouth, receiving the degree of LL. D. from both colleges. He also established a free public library in Burlington, Iowa. Sec " Life of James W. Grimes," by William Salter (New York, 1876).  Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 767.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 4, Pt. 1, p. 630;

GRIMES, JAMES WILSON (October 20, 1816- February 7, 1872), lawyer, legislator, governor of Iowa, and United States senator, was born at Deering, Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, the youngest of eight children. His parents, John and Elizabeth (Wilson) Grimes, were intelligent, independent farmers of Scotch-Irish stock. He entered Dartmouth College in August 1832, at the age of sixteen, but left at the close of the first term of  his junior year, in February 1835. In 1845 he was awarded the degree of A.B. as of the class of 1836. After leaving college, he read law in the office of James Walker at Peterborough, New Hampshire, but shortly set forth to seek his fortune in the West. On May 15, 1836, he became a resident of Burlington, Iowa. Here he entered the profession of the law at the age of nineteen and soon became active in public life. In September of that year he acted as secretary of the commission which made two important treaties witl1 the Sac and Fox Indians. The following year he was appointed city solicitor. Elected in 1838 to the first Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Iowa, he served as chairman of the committee on judiciary. He served again in 1843 as a member of the sixth Legislative Assembly, and in 1852 as a member of the fourth General Assembly of the state, where he was a leader in the promotion of railroads. At this time he was listed as a farmer, being interested in stock-breeding and agriculture. He was a charter member of the Southern Iowa Horticultural Society, and for a time served as editor on the staff of the Iowa Farmer and Horticulturist. On November 9, 1846, he had married Elizabeth Sarah Nealley. In the practise of law he was associated with Henry W. Starr.

Grimes was a man of commanding presence. "Careless of appearance, and somewhat rough and ungainly in early life, he grew with years in suavity, and grace, and dignity of bearing." Always, "he abhorred pretension and indirection" (Salter, post, p. 390). He had been reared a Whig and later adhered to that party both from preference and from conviction. Nominated for the office of governor by the Whigs, he was elected on August 3, 1854, after an energetic and fatiguing campaign. He stood for the revision of the state constitution and the establishment of banks and advocated better schools, internal improvements, and the enactment of homestead laws which would give to foreign-born settlers the same rights as were granted to native-born. He upheld the inviolability of the Missouri Compromise; and in his inaugural address on December 9, 1854, made it plain that he would do everything in his power to combat the further spread of slavery. Placing "business above politics, and the state above his party," Grimes, with a sense of institutional values, helped to remake Iowa. While he was in office the constitution of the state was revised and the capital removed from Iowa City to Des Moines; the State University was located permanently at Iowa City; schools free to all children were placed on a public-tax basis; a prohibitory liquor law was enacted; a State Historical Society was established; and institutions were created for the care of the insane, the deaf and dumb, and the blind. By the year 1856 he regarded the old parties and old issues as dead; and in that year spoke with force and deep conviction in behalf of the new Republican party, declaring that the great issue before the country was the extension or non-extension of slavery into the territories. It has been said that he, more than any one else, "made Iowa Republican, and allied it with the loyal States" (Salte, post, p. II6).

On March 4, 1859, he first took his seat in the United States Senate. He was appointed to the committee on pensions and private land claims; and on January 24, 1861, became a member of the committee on naval affairs, of which he was chairman from December 8, 1864, until the end of his senatorial career. He was instrumental in keeping the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and was one of the first to recognize the necessity of an adequate fleet and the advantages of iron-clad ships. He was also chairman of the committee on the District of Columbia; and in the latter part of his senatorial career served on the committees on patents and the Patent Office, public buildings and grounds, and appropriations. He was associated with a group of men who during the Civil War created a detective service to sift;:mt disloyal persons in the public service and elsewhere.

During the impeachment trial of President Johnson in 1868, Grimes displayed an integrity which cost him his political power and probably hastened his death. Though he considered many of the President's acts as highly deplorable, he did not believe that they constituted "high crimes and misdemeanors" and he seriously doubted the wisdom of a policy of impeachment. The strain of the trial brought on a stroke of paralysis, and when the time came for voting on the impeachment he had to be carried into the Senate chamber. He voted "Not guilty," while James Harlan [1820-1899, q.v.], the other senator from Iowa, voted "Guilty." One ballot the other way would have given a two-thirds majority, and the President would have been retired from office. A storm of political abuse broke upon Grimes; even the town of Burlington viewed his conduct with disfavor.

He returned to Congress when it reassembled in December 1868, but his spirit and strength were gone. In April 1869 he was ordered to Europe for a rest. There he suffered another stroke, and on August 11, sent to the governor of Iowa his resignation as senator, to take effect December 6. When he returned to America in September 1871, he found public sentiment once more in his favor. He died a few months later at his home in Burlington.

[B. F. Shambaugh, The Messages and Proclamations of the Governors of Iowa (7 vols., 1903-05). II, 3-112; collection of pamphlets from Grimes's library, in the library of the State Historical Society of Iowa; Wm. Salter, The Life of James W. Grimes (1876); Eli C. Christoferson, "The Life of James W. Grimes," MS. in the library of the State Historical Society of Iowa; G. T. Chapman, Sketches of the Alumni of Dartmouth College (1867); D. E. Clark, History of Senatorial Elections in Iowa (1912); Sioux City Daily Journal, February 9, 1872.



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