R: Ramsey through Root

See below for annotated biographies of anti-slavery Whigs. Source: Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography.

RAMSEY, Alexander, 1815-1903. Republican U.S. Senator and governor from Minnesota. Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery. U.S. Congressman (Whig Party) elected 1842, serving until 1847, from Pennsylvania. First Territorial Governor of Minnesota, 1849-1853. Governor of state 1860-1863. Elected U.S. Senator 1863, serving until 1875. Appointed Secretary of War in 1879.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V., p. 168; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 341-342; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 341-342:

RAMSEY, ALEXANDER (September 8, 1815- April 22, 1903), governor of Minnesota, United States senator, secretary of war, was born near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the son of Elizabeth Kelker and Thomas Ramsey. His ancestry was Scotch and German. As a youth Ramsey, who was orphaned at the age of ten, was employed in the store of a grand-uncle, was clerk in the office of register of deeds, and worked for a time as a carpenter, meanwhile pursuing his studies as best he could. At the age of eighteen he entered Lafayette College, but he left before completing his course to study law. After his admission to the bar in 1839 he practised law at Harrisburg and became a zealous worker in the interests of the Whig party. In 1840 he was secretary of the Pennsylvania electoral college, and the year following, chief clerk of the House of Representatives. From 1843 to 1847 he represented his district in Congress. In 1848; as chairman of the Whig central committee of Pennsylvania, he labored diligently for the election of Zachary Taylor, who, after his inauguration, rewarded Ramsey with a commission as governor of the newly organized territory of Minnesota. When Ramsey assumed his new duties, on June 1, 1849, he found himself governor of a large territory, of which only a small portion, containing a few thousand white inhabitants, was open to settlement, the remainder being Indian country. After declaring the territorial government established, he ordered an election and when the first legislature assembled in September he read a message abounding in practical suggestions for the benefit of the territory, many of which were later adopted. The outstanding event of his territorial administration was the negotiation in 1851 of treaties of cession with the Sioux, with Ramsey as one of the two government commissioners, which opened an immense area in southern Minnesota to settlement. He was later charged with fraud in the conduct of the negotiations; but the United States Senate, after an investigation, completely exonerated him (Senate Executive Document 61, 33 Congress, 1 Session). His territorial governorship ended in 1853, with the appointment of a Democratic governor under President Pierce, and he retired to private life in St. Paul, devoting much of his attention to judicious investments in real estate. He was mayor of St. Paul in 1855. In 1857 he was defeated by only a few votes as Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota, soon to be admitted as a state. Two years later, however, he was elected to that office by a decisive majority, and he was reelected in 1861. During his administration the legislature, following his recommendations, materially reduced state expenses, simplified county government, and took effective measures to safeguard the state's school lands against premature sale at low prices. Ramsey's official duties were greatly complicated by the responsibilities connected with the Sioux outbreak of 1862 and the Indian war following it and with providing troops for the Civil War. He was in Washington when Fort Sumter was fired on, and made the first offer of armed troops to Lincoln. Ramsey retired from the governorship in July 1863 to take his place in the United States Senate, to which he had been elected the preceding January. His senatorial career, which was extended by a reelection in 1869 to twelve years, was marked by the industry and practical ability that had characterized his administrations as governor. He served on several important committees, and as chairman of the committee on post offices and post roads he made important contributions to postal reform. From 1879 to 1881 he was secretary of war under President Hayes, and in 1882 he was made chairman of the commission to carry out the provisions of the Edmunds bill to suppress polygamy in Utah. Upon his resignation from the commission in 1886 he retired permanently to private life. He was president of the Minnesota Historical Society from 1849 to 1863 and from 1891 to 1903 and was the author of several papers in the Minnesota Historical Collections. On September 10, 1845, he married Anna Earl Jenks. They had three children, two of whom died in childhood. Ramsey is described by a contemporary as "the finest specimen of a physical man in the Northwest" (T. M. Newson, Pen Pictures of St. Paul,. 1886, p. 123). He was clear-headed, cautious, and judicious, above all a man of practical sense. He was a shrewd politician and an excellent judge of human nature, with a gift for making friends. Although he was not an orator, his public addresses were forceful and direct. One of the first counties established in Minnesota bears his name.

[Sources include: J. H. Baker, Lives of the Governors of Minn. (1908); E. D. Neill, The History of Minn. (4th ed., 1882); J. F. Williams, A History of the City of St. Paul (1876); C. C. Andrews, History of St. Paul (1890), pt. 2; W.W. Folwell, A History of Minn., volumes I and II (1921-24); "Memorial Addresses in Honor of Governor Alexander Ramsey," Minn. Historical Society Colts., volume X, pt. 2 (1905); Minneapolis Journal, April 23, 1903. The Minn. Historical Society has a collection of Ramsey's papers.]

S.J. B.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, pp. 168:

RAMSEY, Alexander, secretary of war, born near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 8 September, 1815. He was educated at Lafayette college, and in 1828 became clerk in the register's office of his native county. He was secretary of the Electoral college of Pennsylvania in 1840, the next year was clerk of the state house of representatives, was elected to congress as a Whig in 1842, and served till 1847. He was chairman of the state central committee of Pennsylvania in 1848, and was appointed first territorial governor of Minnesota in 1849, holding office till 1853. During this service he negotiated a treaty at Mendota for the extinction of the title of the Sioux half-breeds to the lands on Lake Pepin, and two with the Sioux nation by which the U. S. government acquired all the lands in Minnesota west of Mississippi river, thus opening that state to colonization. He also made treaties with the Chippewa Indians on Red river in 1851 and 1853. He became mayor of St. Paul, Minn., in 1855, was governor of the state in 1860-'3, and in the latter year was elected to the U. S. senate as a Republican, holding his seat in 1863-'75, and serving as chairman of the committees on Revolutionary claims and pensions, on post-roads and on territories. He became secretary of war in 1879, succeeding George W. McCrary, and held office till the close of Hayes's administration. He was appointed by President Arthur, in 1882, a member of the Utah commission, under the act of congress known as the Edmunds bill (see EDMUNDS, GEORGE F.), continuing in that service till 1886. In 1887 he was a delegate to the centennial celebration of the adoption of the constitution of the United States. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, pp. 168.



RANDALL, Alexander Williams (October 31, 1819-July 26, 1872), lawyer, sixth governor of Wisconsin, 1858-1861, politician, administrator. Acting in 1848 with the Van Buren free-soil Democrats, and a little later with the "Barnburner" faction which in 1854 generally went "Free-soil," he was elected to the state Assembly. For a few months, under appointment by the first Republican governor, he filled an unexpired term as judge of the Milwaukee circuit. In 1857 Randall was elected governor, although Carl Schurz, Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, was defeated. He was reelected in 1859, and was in office when the Civil War began in 1861. Advocate for Black voting rights. Raised troops for Union Army. Postmaster General, 1866-1869.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 344-345:

RANDALL, ALEXANDER WILLIAMS (October 31, 1819-July 26, 1872), lawyer, governor of Wisconsin, politician, administrator, was born at Ames, Montgomery County, New York, a son of Phineas Randall, a lawyer, native of Massachusetts, and Sarah (Beach) Randall, a native of New York state. Alexander received a thorough academic education at Cherry Valley Academy. After a period of legal study under his father, he removed in 1840 to the new village of Prairieville (afterward Waukesha), in Wisconsin Territory. There he practised law successfully but soon became absorbed in public affairs. At first, like his father, he bore the Whig label. Soon he showed Democratic leanings and in 1845 President Polk appointed him postmaster in his village, an office that paid a very low salary but offered important political advantages. The next year he was chosen a delegate to the state constitutional convention where he gained prominence through his successful championship of a resolution submitting separately the question of negro suffrage. This action, highly unpopular, kept him out of politics long enough to make him a seasoned lawyer and a sagacious leader. Acting in 1848 with the Van Buren free-soil Democrats, and a little later with the "Barnburner" faction which in 1854 generally went "Free-soil," he was elected to the state Assembly where he quickly gained a remarkable ascendancy. For a few months, under appointment by the first Republican governor, he filled an unexpired term as judge of the Milwaukee circuit. In 1857 he was elected governor, although Carl Schurz, Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, was defeated. Reelected in 1859, he was in office when the Civil War broke.

Randall proved one of the noted "war governors." In his message of January 10, 1861, he predicted a conflict and urged preparedness. After Lincoln's proclamation of April 15, he instantly enlisted a regiment of militia, which was ready to go forward in six days. The executive office became the army headquarters for the state, the governor's fiery zeal and exceptional organizing ability serving to unite all loyal elements in enthusiastic support of the nation. Randall also contributed notably, along with the other leading governors, to Lincoln's plans for the prompt mobilization of the national resources. So energetically did he proceed in Wisconsin that when he left the executive office, nine months later, the state had already supplied nearly 25,000 troops. Like many other political leaders, Randall, having missed a senatorship, desired a military appointment, but Lincoln sent him as minister to Rome. The next year he was back, still intent upon a military appointment. Again he missed that objective, but being made first assistant postmaster general in 1863, he gave full sway to his genius for political organization in preparing the ground for Lincoln's triumphant reelection. Andrew Johnson received him into his cabinet as head of the Post-Office Department, where he remained till the close of that stormy administration, to the last one of Johnson's most ardent defenders. His friendship for the widely hated President sufficed to send him back to the practice of law. He preferred, however, not to return to Wisconsin, but settled in Elmira, New York. There he remained active in his profession for a time, but his death from cancer ended his career at the early age of fifty-two. He had married in 1842 Mary C. Van Vechten of New York state, who died in 1858. Five years later he married Helen M. Thomas of Elmira, New York, who survived him.

Randall was endowed with a sound, keen, and quick, though not profound, intelligence, and was handsome of face and figure. He was effective and even eloquent in address, and he always gave the impression of perfect adequacy in any situation. A consistent and orderly worker, he rose very early and performed the day's drudgery before office hours. That method provided leisure for conferences, visits, and the joviality of which he was exceptionally fond. He was a formidable opponent in the court room and on the hustings, yet kindly in disposition, rarely making personal enemies. From a party viewpoint he was extraordinarily "mobile," but although he was often charged with political opportunism, his party shiftings were determined more on principle than on expediency. He performed much useful work at Washington, but he will be longest remembered as Wisconsin's dynamic war governor.

[The best biographical sketch of Randall, albeit somewhat too laudatory, is that by Tenney, in H. A. Tenney and David Atwood's Memorial Record of the Fathers of Wisconsin (1880). See also: C. S. Matteson, The History of Wisconsin (1893); C. R. Tuttle, An Illustrated History of the State of Wisconsin (1875); "Reminiscences of Alex. W. Randall," Milwaukee Sentinel, November 14, 1897; and R. G. Thwaites, Civil War Messages and Proclamations of Wisconsin War Governors (1912). U.S. Ministers to the Papal States (1933), ed. by Leo F. Stock, contains Randall's correspondence as minister to Rome. Randall's manuscripts, letter copy books, and other papers, during the governorship, are in the State Historical Library]

J. S-r.



RAYMOND, Henry Jarvis, (January 24, 1820-June 18, 1869), editor, politician, U.S. congressman. His affiliation was with the Free-soil group in the party led by William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed. Raymond played a considerable part in the Anti-Nebraska movement. In February 1856 Raymond attended the Pittsburgh meeting that founded the national Republican party, and wrote its statement of principles. Raymond's lieutenant-governorship was an important factor in electing Abraham Lincoln president in 1860. Supported the abolition of slavery after July, 1861. In 1864 Raymond was one of the Republican leaders in the nation; he wrote most of the platform of the Republican convention at Baltimore and played the chief part in Andrew Johnson's nomination for vice-president, as Lincoln's agent. He voted for the Freedman's Bureau Bill and he opposed the Civil Rights Bill, but voted for its substance in the Fourteenth Amendment.

(Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928)
Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 408-412)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 192-193:

RAYMOND, Henry Jarvis, journalist, born in Lima, Livingston County, New York, 24 January, 1820: died in New York City, 18 June, 1869. His father owned and cultivated a small farm on which the son was employed in his youth. He was graduated at the University of Vermont in 1840, studied law in New York, and maintained himself by teaching in a young ladies' seminary and writing for the " New Yorker," a literary weekly edited by Horace Greeley. On the establishment of the "Tribune " in April, 1841, Mr. Raymond became assistant editor and was well known as a reporter. He made a specialty of lectures, sermons, and speeches, and, among other remarkable feats, reported Dr. Dionysius Lardner's lectures so perfectly that the lecturer consented to their publication in two large volumes, by Greeley and McElrath, with his certificate of their accuracy. In 1843 he left the "Tribune" for the "Courier and Enquirer," and he remained connected with this journal till 1851, when he resigned and went to Europe to benefit his health. While on the staff of the "Courier and Enquirer" he formed a connection with the publishing-house of Harper Brothers, which lasted ten years. During this period a spirited discussion of Fourier's principles of socialism was carried on between Mr. Raymond and Mr. Greeley, and the articles of the former on this subject were afterward published in pamphlet-form. In 1849 he was elected to the state assembly by the Whigs. He was re-elected in 1850, and chosen speaker, and manifested special interest in the school system and canal policy of the state. The New York " Times " was established by him, and the first number was issued on 18 September, 1851. In 1852 he went to Baltimore to report the proceedings of the Whig National Convention, but was given a seat as a delegate, and made an eloquent speech in exposition of northern sentiment. In 1854 he was elected lieutenant-governor of the state. He was active in organizing the Republican Party, composed the " Address to the People" that was promulgated at the National Convention at Pittsburg in February, 1856, and spoke frequently for Fremont in the following presidential campaign. In 1857 he refused to be a candidate for governor of New York, and in 1858 he favored Stephen A. Douglas, but he finally resumed his relations with the Republican Party. In 1860 he was in favor of the nomination of William H. Seward for the presidency, and it was through his influence that Mr. Seward was placed in the cabinet. He was a warm supporter and personal friend of Mr. Lincoln in all his active measures, though at times deploring what he considered a hesitating policy. After the disaster at Bull Run he proposed the establishment of a provisional government. In 1861 he was again elected to the state assembly, where he was chosen speaker, and in 1863 he was defeated by Governor Edwin D. Morgan for the nomination for U. S. Senator. In 1864 he was elected to Congress, and in a speech on 22 December, 1865, maintained that the southern states had never been out of the Union. He sustained the reconstruction policy of President Johnson. On the expiration of his term he declined renomination, and he refused the mission to Austria in 1867. He assisted in the organization of the " National Union Convention" which met at Philadelphia in August,1866, and was the author of the" Philadelphia Address " to the people of the United States. In the summer of 1868 he visited Europe with his family, and after his return resumed the active labors of his profession, with which he was occupied till his death. As an orator Mr. Raymond possessed great power. As a journalist he did good service in elevating the tone of newspaper discussion, showing by his own example that it was possible to be earnest and brilliant without transgressing the laws of decorum. He wrote " Political Lessons of the Revolution" (New York, 1854); "Letters to Mr. Yancey" (1860); "History of the Administration of President Lincoln "(1864); and "Life and Services of Abraham Lincoln; with his State Papers, Speeches, Letters, etc." (1865). See Augustus Maverick's 'H. J. Raymond and the New York Press for Thirty Years " (Hartford, 1870). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 192-193.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 408-412:

RAYMOND, HENRY JARVIS (January 24, 1820-June 18, 1869), editor, politician, was born at Lima, New York, the son of Jarvis and Lavinia (Brockway) Raymond. His father, whose ancestors had migrated in the previous century from Connecticut, where the family had long been settled (Samuel Raymond, Genealogies of the Raymond Families of New England, 1886), was a farmer, comfortably off; the son was educated at the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary and at the University of Vermont, where he graduated with high honors in 1840. Like most of his honors, they cost more than they were worth; he contracted at college the habit of overwork that contributed to his early death. He had taught a country school and had some idea of teaching in the South, but his rea l interest was already journalism. He went to New York, supported himself by free-lance writing, and presently got a regular job from Horace Greeley [q.v.], to whose weekly, the New Yorker, he had contributed while still in college.

Raymond's first employer was to be his bitterest rival throughout most of his life. The temperamental difference between the two is illustrated by their later judgment of the New Yorker: Greeley despised it as weak and ineffective; Raymond admired its "fair examination of both sides"- an exception in the journalism of the time, which was passionately partisan and was to become more so as the slavery question sharpened animosities. In the spring of 1841 Greeley founded the New York Tribune and took Raymond with him as his chief assistant. Here Raymond was thoroughly indoctrinated in the new journalism which the elder James Gordon Bennett [q.v.] had invented and Greeley adapted to the taste of the "moral element"; he became brilliantly successful, and a close friendship which he formed with George Jones, 1811-1891 [q.v. ], then in Greeley's business office, led the two to project a paper of their own.

They had no capital then, however; so Jones moved to Albany and Raymond went over in 1843 to James Watson Webb's Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer. His reputation grew, not only as a newspaperman but also as an orator and Whig politician; in 1849 he was elected to the state assembly and "leaped into prominence in the week he took his seat" (Alexander, post, 11, 159). He was reelected the next year and became speaker in January 1851. His alignment with the Free-soil group in the party led by William H. Seward and Thurlow Weed led to a break with his employer, General Webb, in the spring of that year. He was already managing editor of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, which had appeared in the previous June, but though he held this position till 1856 he never had much time to give to it. In 1848 he and Jones had almost succeeded in buying the Albany Evening Journal from Weed; now they prepared to establish the New York Daily Times (so-called until 1857) with Raymond as editor and Jones in charge of the business office.

The first issue of the Times (September 18, 1851) declared that " we do not mean to write as if we were in a passion,--unless that shall really be the case; and we shall make it a point to get into a passion as rarely as possible." This and similar statements were interpreted as a bid for the support of conservative Whigs, alienated from the Tribune by Greeley's political and social radicalism; but they also reflected Raymond's innate moderation of opinion and expression. In a period when the American press was given to intemperate personal controversy and usually to partisan distortion of the news, he longed for the time when men should be governed by cool reason and judgment instead of prejudice and passion. From this habit of mind sprang what his biographer Maverick calls "his unfortunate tendency to temporize, in all circumstances except those of pressing emergency" (Maverick, post, p. 170), which ultimately ruined him as a politician. But the same quality made his paper, as E. L. Godkin wrote in the Nation after his death (June 24, 1869, p. 490), "nearer the newspaper of the good time coming than any other in existence" in its impartiality of reporting and temperance of discussion.

The Times was immediately successful; it appealed not only to those who disliked violence and personalities, but also to the many who were repelled by the Herald's lack of "principle" and the Tribune's excess of it. Greeley fought the new competitor hard, calling Raymond a "little villain" when he got a state advertising contract that Greeley wanted; but within four years he confessed privately that the Times had more than twice the Tribune’s city circulation. Raymond's moderation, however, debarred him from any such influence as Greeley wielded, especially among the farmers, in an age when prejudice and passion were steadily getting the better of cool reason and judgment.

At the Whig national convention of 1852 Raymond won renown by a spectacular defiance of the Southern oligarchy, but the party's failure in the campaign of that year disgusted him and he wrote to Seward that he meant "to navigate the Da1ies into a position of independent thought and speech" (F. W. Seward, post, II, 196). But he could not bring himself to leave the organization; and two years later, when the Kansas-Nebraska Bill upset political alignments, he argued that the Free Soilers should bore from within the Whig machine instead of founding a new party. They did this successfully in New York, where Raymond played a considerable part in the Anti-Nebraska movement that imposed its views on the Whig convention. But the paramount state issue that year was prohibition; Greeley had made it and expected the nomination for governor but Weed, who controlled the convention, passed him over in favor of an up-state nonentity. Greeley then begged for second place on the ticket but Weed, arguing that an up-state dry should be balanced by a city wet, gave Raymond the nomination for lieutenant-governor.

The strategy was sound as far as it went, but Weed elected his state ticket at the price of mortal offense to the most powerful editor of the time. "No other name," said Greeley, "could have been ... so bitterly humbling to me" (Weed and Barnes, Life of Thurlow Weed, II, 280); and the consequence was the break with Seward and Weed which ultimately brought Greeley to the Republican National Convention of 1860 ready to support any presidential candidate who might beat Seward. Raymond's lieutenant-governorship was accordingly an important factor in making Abraham Lincoln president; but in itself it was of small value to him or the paper, and it meant the breaking of a promise which Jones had prudently exacted when the Times was founded, that he would no longer seek office. He never had Greeley's ludicrous and pathetic lust for any office, however small; but, less fortunate than Greeley, when he tried for office he usually got it, in the end with disastrous consequences.

The Whig party was breaking up; in February 1856 Raymond attended the Pittsburgh meeting that founded the national Republican party, and wrote its statement of principles. Thereafter the Times was steadily Republican (though never abolitionist till war had begun) and Raymond's activity in the new party was interrupted only in 1859, when he went to Italy to report the Franco-Austrian War. In 1860 he worked hard for Seward at the Chicago convention but gave energetic support to Lincoln in the campaign. When the cotton states began to secede he supported the compromise proposals of the winter; at the same time, in a series of open letters to W. L. Yancey of Alabama (published as Disunion and Slavery, 1860), he attacked secession and subjected the issues of the time to an analysis that is still cogent.

The war once begun, the Times was Lincoln's most steadfast supporter in New York. Raymond could have been a general, but knew he had no military talent; twice drafted, he offered substitutes, but was often at the front as a newspaperman. He was again speaker of the Assembly in 1862 and unsuccessfully tried for the United States senatorship in the following year. The year 1864 saw him one of the Republican leaders in the nation; he wrote most of the platform of the Republican convention at Baltimore and played the chief part in Andrew Johnson's nomination for vice-president, apparently as Lincoln's agent (A. K. McClure, Abraham Lincoln and Men of War-Times, 1892, pp. 425 ff.). His skilful management in the convention earned him the chairmanship of the national committee, but the prospect was not bright. On August 22 he wrote to Lincoln that "the tide is setting strongly against us" on account of military reverses and a conviction that Lincoln would continue the war till slavery was abolished. Never in favor of abolition till July 1861, Raymond had always regarded it as subsidiary to the preservation of the Union; so he now proposed a peace offer "on the sole condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the Constitution,-all other questions to be settled in a convention of the people of all the states" (Nicolay and Hay, post, IX, 218-19). The purpose, unlike that of Greeley's contemporaneous peace efforts, was purely political; Raymond thought the offer would be rejected and Lincoln's position strengthened accordingly. But Lincoln saw that it would not do and talked him out of it. The victories of Sherman and Sheridan reelected Lincoln; and Raymond was elected to the House of Representatives.

"He entered Congress with a prestige rarely if ever equalled by a new member" (Alexander, post, III, p. 137); and his career there was the one great failure of his life. He had been close to Lincoln and was closer still to Johnson; when Congress reconvened in December 1865, with its Radical leaders bitterly hostile to Johnson's reconstruction policy, Raymond became the administration leader in the House. But a man who could see both sides and preferred accommodation to violence had no more chance against Thaddeus Stevens than Kerensky against Lenin. Blaine's comments (Twenty Years of Congress, 1886, II, 139) suggest that Raymond was further handicapped by overconfidence, and by the jealousy of veteran members for so highly advertised a newcomer. At any rate, he completely missed the significance of Stevens' proposal of the joint committee on reconstruction and offered no objection, either in the caucus or in the House; thereby losing "the only real opportunity he ever had of administering a severe blow, if not a defeat," to Stevens (B. B. Kendrick, The Journal of the Joint Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction, 1914, p. 141). Even the exclusion of the Southern members on December 4 failed to rouse him, and the Times of the following day betrayed a complete lack of realization that Stevens was master of the reconstruction committee. Awakening too late, Raymond spoke in the House on December 21, attacking Stevens' secessionist doctrine as ably as he had once attacked Yancey's, and as ineffectually. When the test came (January 9) on the Voorhees resolution declaring secession an impossibility, only one other Republican (and that a personal friend) stood by Raymond. It may be that the stars in their courses had fought against him, but he had not given them much of a tussle. Thereafter he could not agree even with Johnson; he voted for the Freedman's Bureau Bill and had trouble explaining his support of the President's veto; he opposed the Civil Rights Bill, but voted for its substance in the Fourteenth Amendment. It was this course chiefly that made men call him a "trimmer"; and led Stevens to remark, when Raymond wanted a pair for some division in the House, that he would have no difficulty in pairing with himself.

Beaten in Congress, Johnson tried to organize against the Radicals a Union party of Conservative Republicans and War Democrats. Raymond, when he first heard of the projected National Union Convention, was afraid it would fall into the hands of "former Rebels and Copperheads"; but Weed, Seward, and the President talked him into attending it, and supporting it in the Times. As in 1854, he opposed the formation of a new party and called for support of all congressional candidates committed to the immediate admission of loyal Southerners. Unfortunately, most of the Republican nominations had already been captured by the Radicals, and many of the Democratic nominations by Copperheads.

At the Philadelphia convention (August 1866), which he reluctantly attended, the chairman of the Republican National Committee could not help being the most prominent figure; especially as he wrote the declaration of principles which the convention set before the country. It was a sound piece of constitutional reasoning, but prejudice and passion had got the upper hand. Raymond's program was too much for some, too little for others; it needed all his skill to keep harmony in the convention. "Let us set aside feeling and go to business," he begged a wrangling committee; but the country chose to set aside business and go to feeling. After Johnson's disastrous "swing around the circle" the Radical reaction set in, and Raymond was the first victim.

He was expelled (September 3) from the national committee; and two weeks later, declining renomination for Congress, admitted his "evident and signal failure" in rallying the Unionists (Maverick, post, p. 189). The gleeful Greeley called him a Judas and a Copperhead, and profited by his unpopularity. Raymond had never used the Times as an organ of personal advancement, an abnegation almost unparalleled in his day; but it suffered with him, losing (though only temporarily) thousands of readers to the Tribune. He and Weed still hoped to form a Union bloc in the state; but at the Albany convention of Conservatives and Democrats in September the Tammany delegation outgeneraled them, nominating John T. Hoffman for governor. The Conservatives were left out on a limb; Weed clung to it, supporting Hoffman, but Raymond soon dropped off. The first intimation that he would bolt the Albany ticket provoked the Democratic press to violent attacks, which Greeley reprinted under the heading, "Shocking Cruelty to a Fugitive Slave" (New-York Tribune, September 19, 1866). He bolted it none the less, and presently was complaining that the "President's party" had generally fallen into the hands of Copperheads. The country shared his view, and the fall election put an end to Raymond's dream of a moderate and Unionist Congress. A Times editorial from another hand, about that time, observed that, "Great changes in the fate of nations are never achieved by men of the juste milieu order" (September 16, 1866, p. 4). The reference was to the rise of Bismarck, but the man who wrote it must have had his mind on the fall of Raymond.

Raymond recognized a fait accompli and did little more kicking against the pricks. The Times finally broke with Johnson on financial issues and the campaign of 1868 saw the paper back in the party, but with an independence of spirit that commended it to such young men of the new generation as Henry Adams and John Hay. Raymond began to devote himself to less partisan issues; he commenced the attacks on the "Tweed ring" which his partner Jones later finished so brilliantly, and by his advocacy of tariff reduction, sound money, and civil-service reform set his paper in courses which it followed long after his death. Still young, and cured of his political ambitions, he seemed only on the threshold of greater achievement. His personal affairs, too, were going better; in 1869 he was reunited with his wife, Juliette Weaver of Winooski, Vermont, whom he had married on October 24, 1843, and who had been living in Europe for some years. But he had weakened himself by habitual overwork, and an emotional crisis brought on the cerebral hemorrhage that killed him. Of his seven children, two sons and two daughters survived him.

"Nobody has done more, we doubt if anybody has done as much, for the elevation of the profession," wrote Godkin after his death (Nation, June 24, 1869, p. 490). Raymond's contribution to journalism was the substitution of decency for personal invective and fairness for black-and-white partisanship. He had not Bennett's originality or Greeley's force, but he was a technical newspaperman of the first rank. He was one of the earliest and greatest of the great local reporters, with a prodigious speed and accuracy that became legendary; his eye-witness battle pictures of Solferino and Bull Run are models of clarity and vividness; his editorials were lucid and persuasive, but they usually lacked the smashing force that some of his contemporaries derived from conviction of their own utter rightness and the wickedness of those who held divergent views. He once said that when he wrote a sentence he could not help seeing before he got to the end how only partially true it was. This trait, and lack of a realistic appraisal of public opinion, were his fatal weaknesses as a politician. His misfortune was not only that he was a temperamental non-partisan in an age of bitter partisanship, but that he was a temperamental non-partisan incurably addicted to party politics.

The charm of his urbane, accomplished, and affable personality was felt by every one-except Gideon Welles, who calls Raymond a "whiffler" and "unscrupulous soldier of fortune," and the Times a "profligate and stipendiary sheet" (Diary of Gideon Welles, 1911, volume II, 87, 104, 523). This abuse, echoed by no other memoirs of the period, may be a reflection of Raymond's demand in 1861 for Welles’s removal on the ground of "indolence, indifference, and inadequacy." The obituaries in the New York papers reflect a deep feeling of personal loss among the men who had worked with him and against him. This is noteworthy in Greeley's editorial (Tribune, June 19, 1869). […].



RICE, Alexander Hamilton, 1818-1895. Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Boston, Massachusetts. Four term Congressman, December 1859-March 1867. Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, pp. 232-233; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 534; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 534-535:

RICE, ALEXANDER HAMILTON (August 30, 1818-July 22, 1895), manufacturer, congressman, governor of Massachusetts, was the son of Thomas and Lydia (Smith) Rice. Born at Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts, where his father was proprietor of a paper mill, he attended public and private schools in and near Newton, obtaining at the same time considerable training in his father's business. At seventeen he entered a drygoods store in Boston as a clerk, but was forced to return home shortly on account of illness. Two years later he was employed in Boston by Wilkins & Carter, wholesale dealers in paper and publishers of music books and dictionaries. He joined the Mercantile Library Association, where he found books to study and, at its meetings, stimulating friends. His ambition was stirred, and with the encouragement of J. H. Wilkins, one of his employers, he entered Union College in 1840. A disfigurement of his upper lip, the result of being thrown from a horse, not only delayed his entrance into college but also prevented him from going into law as he had intended. In time, however, the scar on his lip became practically unnoticeable, while he completely overcame the impediment in his speech which had been caused by the injury. He graduated from Union in 1844 with highest honors, and the following year returned to Boston as a member of the firm by which he had previously been employed. He later headed the concern, which in 1889 came to be the Rice-Kendall Company, manufacturing paper in Newton with warehouses and offices in Boston. At the time of his death he was also president of the Keith Paper Company at Turner's Falls, and of the American Sulphate Pulp Company, and a director of the Montague Paper Company. His other business interests included the Massachusetts National Bank, the American Loan and Trust Company (Boston), and the Mutual Life Insurance Company (New York).

Rice entered politics in 1853 as a Whig member of the Common Council of Boston. Reelected in 1854, he was made its president. He was one of the organizers of the Republican party in Massachusetts, and he was that party's first mayor of Boston (1856 and 1857), though elected on the "Citizen's" ticket over the "Know Nothing" candidate. During his terms as mayor, improvements in the Back Bay section were inaugurated, the City Hospital was established, 'and the city's public institutions were organized under a single board. He returned to politics as a Republican congressman (1859-67), being assigned to the Committee on Naval Affairs, of which he was chairman in 1866. From 1876 to 1878 he was governor of Massachusetts. During his three terms he was much interested in social legislation, but a plan for the reorganization of the state charities presented during this period by a special commission was rejected by the legislature. The hospitals for the insane at Danvers and Worcester were completed while he was in office. He commuted, on the grounds of youth, the death sentence of Jesse Pomeroy, the notorious murderer. His stand against change in the new local-option law on the grounds that there were no evidences of flagrant evils resulting from it and that it should be tested further before the passage of other legislation brought upon him unjust criticism from many prohibitionists, but his geniality, combined with thoughtfulness, discernment, and, sound judgment, won for him quite general favor.

He was a member of many learned societies and a trustee of many important public institutions, while his broad interests and commanding oratory made him much in demand as a speaker on public occasions. He was twice married: first, August 19, 1845, to Augusta E. McKim of Lowell, who died in 1868, having borne two sons and two daughters; and; second to Angie Erickson Powell of Rochester; New York, He died after a long illness at the Langwood Hotel in Melrose.

[Bostonian, November, December 1895; Bay State Monthly, February 1884; New-England Historical and Genealogical. Register, January 189 6; S. F. Smith, History of Newton, Massachusetts (1880); J. C. Rand, One of a Thousand (1890); D. P. Toomey, Massachusetts of Today (1892); Boston Morning Journal, January 2, 1878, July 23, 1895; Boston Transcript, July 22, 1895.)

R. E. M.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, pp. 232-233:

RICE, Alexander Hamilton, governor of Massachusetts, born in Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts, 30 August, 1818. He received a business training in his father's paper-mill at Newton and in a mercantile house in Boston, and, after his graduation at Union college in 1844, established himself in the paper business at Boston. He became a member of the school committee, entered the common council, was chosen president of that body, and in 1855 and 1857 was elected mayor of Boston on a citizens' ticket. During his administration the Back Bay improvements were undertaken, the establishment of the Boston city hospital was authorized, and on his recommendation the management of the public institutions was committed to a board composed in part of members of the common council and in part chosen from the general body of citizens. He served several years as president of the Boston board of trade, and has been an officer or trustee of numerous financial and educational institutions. He was elected to congress by the Republican party for four successive terms, serving from 5 December, 1859, till 3 March, 1867. He served on the committee on naval affairs, and, as chairman of that committee in the 38th congress introduced important measures. He was a delegate to the Loyalists' convention at Philadelphia in 1866, and to the Republican national convention in 1868. He was governor of Massachusetts in 1876, 1877, and 1878. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, pp. 232-233.



RIDDLE, Albert Gallatin (May 28, 1816-May 16, 1902), lawyer, congressman. “He was an ardent Whig and was against slavery. Upon the nomination of Zachary Taylor, he issued the call for a mass meeting at Chardon that inaugurated the Free-Soil party of Ohio. Soon afterward, he was nominated by the Whigs and Free-Soilers of his district for the state House of Representatives, was elected, and became at once the recognized leader of these two groups in the House from 1848 to 1850.”

(Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 591)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

RIDDLE, Albert Gallatin, lawyer, born in Monson, Massachusetts, 28 May, 1816. His father moved to Geauga County, Ohio, in 1817, where the son received a common-school education, studied law, was admitted to the bar in 1840, practised law, and was prosecuting attorney from 1840 till 1846. He served in the legislature in 1848–9, and called the first Free-Soil Convention in Ohio in 1848. In 1850 he moved to Cleveland, was elected prosecuting attorney in 1856, defended the Oberlin slave-rescuers in 1859, and was elected to Congress as a Republican, serving from 4 July, 1861, till 3 March, 1863. He made speeches then in favor of arming slaves, the first on this subject that were deliver in Congress, and others on emancipation in the District of Columbia and in vindication of President Lincoln. In October, 1863, he was appointed U.S. consul at Matanzas. Since 1864 he has practised law in Washington, D.C., and, under a retainer of the State Department, aided in the prosecution of John H. Surratt for the murder of President Lincoln. In 1877 he was appointed law-officer to the District of Columbia, which office he now (1888) holds. For several years, from its organization, he had charge of the law department in Howard University. Mr. Riddle is the author of “Students and Lawyers,” lectures (Washington, 1873); “Bart Ridgely, a Story of Northern Ohio.” (Boston, 1873); “The Portrait, a Romance of Cuyahoga Valley” (1874); “Alice Brand, a Tale of the Capitol" (New York, 1875); “Life, Character, and Public Services of James A. Garfield” (Cleveland, 1880); “The House of Ross” (Boston, 1881); “Castle Gregory.” (Cleveland, 1882); “Hart and his Bear” (Washington, 1883); “The Sugar-Makers of the West Woods” (Cleveland, 1885); “The Hunter of the Chagrin" (1882); “Mark Loan, a Tale of the Western Reserve” (1883); “Old Newberry and the Pioneers” (1884); “Speeches and Arguments” (Washington, 1886); and “Life of Benjamin F. Wade’’ (Cleveland, 1886). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, p. 248.

American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 591:

RIDDLE, ALBERT GALLATIN (May 28, 1816-May 16, 1902), lawyer, congressman, author, was the son of Thomas and Minerva (Merrick) Riddle and the grandson of Thomas Ridel or Riddell who emigrated from Ireland as a child and died in Monson, Massachusetts. The grandson was born there, and the next year the family removed to Geauga County, Ohio. When Albert was only seven years old his father died. When he was twelve he was apprenticed to a well-to-do farmer; but he was not inclined toward farming and in 1831 worked with his two elder brothers as a carpenter. His ambition, though, was for something else, and during the following two years he spent part of his time in study. In 1835 he went to Hudson, where he entered school, and later he attended for a year the academy at Painesville. There he became interested in oratory and debating. He began the study of law under the direction of Seabury Ford in the spring of 1838, and after a period of intensive application to his work he was admitted to practice in 1840. He proved himself a successful political speaker in the Harrison campaign of 1840, and three weeks after his admission to the bar he was nominated for the office of prosecuting attorney, was elected, settled at Chardon, and served six years. He was an ardent Whig and very bitter against slavery. Upon the nomination of Zachary Taylor, he issued the call for a mass meeting at Chardon that inaugurated the Free-Soil party of Ohio. Soon afterward, he was nominated by the Whigs and Free-Soilers of his district for the state House of Representatives, was elected, and became at once the recognized leader of these two groups in the House from 1848 to 1850. In January 1845 he married Caroline Avery of Chardon. They had seven children. He removed to Cleve land in 1850. In 1859 he acted as counsel for the defense in the Oberlin-Wellington (Rescue case (for argument see History of the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, 1859, comp. by J. R. Shiperd). He won the respect and confidence of his fellows and was very attentive to business. He distinguished himself in many arguments in Congress, among them on the bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. The first battle of Bull Run was fatal to his congressional career, for in connection with it he made certain confidential critical statements that gained publicity and were used against him. He did not seek reelection in 1862. He again devoted himself to the law, but in the autumn of 1864 he accepted a consulate in Cuba as a convenient pretext for making an examination into the plans and workings of the blockade runners. This service he performed in a satisfactory manner. He then established himself in the practice of law in Washington. He claimed that, by a just construction of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution, women were entitled to vote. He was law officer for the District of Columbia from !877 to 1889.

He was a successful writer as well as orator. His first publication was a series of eight lectures delivered before the law department of Howard University, Law Students and Lawyers (1873). His first novel, Bart Ridgeley (1873), was commented on as the best American novel oi the year. The ensuing year appeared The Portrait and in 1875 Alice Brand, a story of Washington after the war. He prepared many of the biographical sketches in a History of Geauga and Lake Counties (1878). In 1880 he published The Life, Character, and Public Services of John A. Garfield. Old Newbury and the Pioneers was published in 1885 with some family and local history, his Life of Benjamin F. Wade in 1886, and Recollections of War Times in 1895. He did much newspaper 'Work and wrote many short stories. He died in Washington, D. C., and was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery.

[History of Geauga: and Lake Counties, ante, but sketch not signed by self; Pioneer and General History of Geauga County (1880); Who's Who in America, 1901-02; Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); G. T. Ridlon, History of the Ancient Ryedales (1884); Cleveland Leader, May 16, 1902.]

H. L.



ROBERTS, Jonathan Manning, 1771-1854, Upper Merion County, Pennsylvania, U.S. Senator, U.S. Congressman, opponent of slavery. He was an enthusiastic Whig and strongly opposed to slavery. He was a delegate to the Free-soil Convention at Buffalo, New York, that nominated Martin Van Buren for president in 1848. Called for the prohibition of slavery from Missouri in the Senate.

(Appletons’, 1888, Vol. V, p. 274; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 8, Pt. 1, p. 9; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, p. 274:

ROBERTS, Jonathan Manning, investigator, born in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, 7 December, 1821; died in Burlington, New Jersey, 28 February, 1888, studied law, was admitted to the bar at Norristown, Pennsylvania, in 1850, and practised his profession for about a year, but abandoned it and engaged in commercial pursuits. These proving financially successful, he found time to gratify his desire for metaphysical investigations. He also took an interest in politics, being an enthusiastic Whig and strongly opposed to slavery. He was a delegate to the Free-soil Convention at Buffalo, New York, that nominated Martin Van Buren for president in 1848, and subsequently canvassed New Jersey for that candidate. When the so-called spiritual manifestations at Rochester, New York, first attracted public attention, Mr. Roberts earnestly protested against the possibility of their having a supernatural origin. After several years of patient inquiry he came to the conclusion that they were facts that could be explained on scientific principles and resulted from the operation of natural causes. This conviction led to his establishing an organ of the new faith at Philadelphia in 1878 under the title of “Mind and Matter.” His fearless advocacy of his peculiar views involved him in litigation and caused his imprisonment. Finding the publication of a journal too great a tax on his resources, he abandoned it, and devoted the rest of his life to study and authorship. Among his manuscript, of which he left a large amount, is “A Life of Apollonius of Tyana” and “A History of the Christian Religion,” which he completed just before his death. Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1888. Vol. V, p. 274.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 2, pp. 9-10:

ROBERTS, JONATHAN (August 16, 1771- July 21, 1854), congressman and senator from Pennsylvania, was born near Norristown, Pennsylvania, the son of Jonathan and Anna (Thomas) Roberts and the descendant of John Roberts, a Welsh Friend who emigrated to Pennsylvania in William Penn's time. On that portion of his, origin al plantation known as "Swamp Vrass," in Upper Merion Township, Montgomery County, his great-grand-son passed his childhood. The boy received private tutoring, learned farming, and acquired a fondness for books under the guidance of his mother, who taught him to appreciate the ancient Stoics. After apprenticeship to a wheelwright, he returned to farming, and he and his brother reported, " in seven years we could commands even thousand dollars, and had greatly increased our stock and improved our land" (Auge, post, p. 73). Nurtured upon the excitements of th e whiskey and house tax rebellions and breathing naturally the atmosphere of violent partisanship characteristic of that period, he equipped himself carefully for polemical politics and joined the Republicans in wresting control of Montgomery County from the Federalists. He helped to make up the majority of two in the lower house of the Assembly, 1799-1800, confronting the Senate Federalist majority of one. His next activity was in the state Senate, 1807-n, from which he was carried, along with other "war hawks," into the federal Congress, 1811 to 1814. There he confidently faced a war with the traditional enemy, " I repose safely in the maxim, 'Never to despair of the Republic.'" While the vote for war with Great Britain was pending, he prevented delay through indefinite adjournment by cannily proposing to suspend members' pay while adjourned, and at a crucial moment he called for the previous question (Annals of Congress, 12 Congress, 1 Session, cols. 1337-38, 1340) This stand, perforce, severed his religious connections with the Friends; but political connections grew apace. His close relations with Madison were revealed in his controversial letters defending the administration in the Aurora. As a committeeman on ways and means he guarded the national purse strings and took the role of floor defender of the secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, against Cheves, Calhoun, and Lowndes. At Gallatin's instance he visited Governor Snyder to urge veto of a Pennsylvania bank bill. Meanwhile, he had married in 1813 Eliza Hite Bushby of Washington. They had nine children. Soon, in February 1814, factional warfare deprived Michael Leib [q.v.] of his seat in the Senate, and the Pennsylvania legislature placed Roberts in it. There he marveled at the peaceful years ensuing, "I never knew a time so politically tranquil. . . . There is nothing indicative of that acrimony we have long been accustomed to" (Roberts to Monroe, June 9, August 22, 1818, in possession of Historical Society of Pennsylvania). But Roberts' existence speedily became normal, for from his cordial disapproval of Jackson's Florida foray sprang a lifelong antipathy between them. The Maine-Missouri question also brought conflict, for Roberts stoutly defended a plan of his own to prevent the introduction of any more slaves into Missouri (Annals of Congress, 16 Congress, I Session, cols. 85-86, 116-17, 119-28, 335-46).

After leaving the Senate in 1821, he endeavored to diminish Jackson's presidential chances, being "very decided" (Life of Gallatin, post, p. 588) that the Democracy needed Gallatin as a candidate in 1824 and serving in the Pennsylvania House, 1823-26, to stem the tide of Jacksonianism. The economic advancement of his own state he also held dear, advocating internal improvements, serving on the canal commission, and attending pioneer tariff conventions. After membership upon Biddle's bank board in 1836 he naturally gravitated into the Whig camp, supporting Clay, and he nominated Tyler for vice-president at the Harrisburg convention in 1839. Characteristically, when made collector of the port of Philadelphia he balked over the spoils system, and the president removed him in 1842. With this bold engagement the active political warfare of this sturdy Roman was concluded. He died on his farm in Montgomery County.

[Manuscript memoirs willed to his grandson, Jonathan Roberts of Atlantic City; letters to Madison, Monroe, and Gallatin in Library of Historical Society Pennsylvania, and Library of Congress; Moses Auge, Lives of the Eminent Dead (1879); Henry Adams, History of the U. S., volume VII (1891) and The Life of Albert Gallatin (1872); H. R. Mueller, The Whig Party in Pennsylvania (1922); Historical Sketches. A Collection of Papers Prepared for the Historical Society of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, volume III, IV (1905-ro); Letters and Other Writings of James Madison (1865), volume III.]

J. P.N.



ROBINSON, William Stevens, (December 7, 1818-March 11, 1876); journalist, in 1848 he served as secretary of the Free-Soil Convention which met in Worcester. His outspoken opinions on slavery and Massachusetts politics cost him his position, and he returned to Lowell, Massachusetts to start the Lowell American, which he conducted for nearly four years, becoming recognized as one of the most radical of Massachusetts anti-slavery journalists.

(Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 2, p. 58).

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 289-290:

ROBINSON, William Stevens, journalist, born in Concord, Massachusetts, 7 December, 1818; died in Malden, Massachusetts, 11 March, 1876. He was educated in the public schools of Concord, learned the printer's trade, at the age of twenty became the editor and publisher of the "Yeoman's Gazette " in Concord, and was afterward assistant editor of the Lowell "Courier." He was an opponent of slavery while he adhered to the Whig Party, and when the Free-Soil Party was organized he left the "Courier," and in July, 1848, took charge of the Boston "Daily Whig." His vigorous and sarcastic editorials increased the circulation of the paper, the name of which was changed to the " Republican "; yet, after the presidential canvass was ended, Henry Wilson, the proprietor, decided to assume the editorial management and moderate the tone of his journal. Robinson next edited the Lowell "American," a Free-Soil Democratic paper, till it died for lack of support in 1853. He was a member of the legislature in 1852 and 1853. In 1856 he began to write letters for the Springfield "Republican" over the signature " Warrington," in which questions of the day and public men were discussed with such boldness and wit. that the correspondence attracted wide popular attention. This connection was continued until his death. From 1862 till 1873 he was clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. "Warrington," by his articles in the newspapers and magazines, was instrumental in defeating Benjamin F. Butler's effort to obtain the Republican nomination for governor in 1871, and in 1873 he was Butler's strongest opponent. Besides pamphlets and addresses, he published a "Manual of Parliamentary Law" (Boston, 1875). His widow published personal reminiscences from his writings entitled "Warrington Pen-Portraits," with a memoir (Boston, 1877).—His wife, Harriet Hanson, born in Boston, Massachusetts, 8 February, 1825, was one of the intellectual circle of factory-girls that composed the staff of the " Lowell Offering." She is a sister of John W. Hanson. She contributed poems to the Lowell "Courier" while Mr. Robinson was its editor, and from this introduction sprang a friendship that resulted in their marriage on 30 November, 1848. She was his assistant in his editorial work, and was as devoted as himself to the anti-slavery cause. She has also taken an active part in the woman's rights movement, and in 1888 was a member of the International council of women at Washington. D. C. Her works include "Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement" (Boston, 1881); "Early Factory Labor in New England" (1883); and " Captain Mary Miller," a drama (1887). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, pp. 289-290.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 2, p. 58:

ROBINSON, WILLIAM STEVENS (December 7, 1818-March 11, 1876); journalist, was born in Concord, Massachusetts, the sixth and last child of William and Martha (Cogswell) Robinson, and a descendant of Jonathan Robinson of Exeter, New Hampshire, who died in 1675. After attending the town school, he learned the printer's trade and in 1837 joined his brother in the office of the Norfolk Advertiser of Dedham, a strong temperance paper. In 1839 he became editor of the Yeoman's Gazette, later The Republican, of Concord, a Whig paper, and as an ardent Whig he attended, as delegate, the Whig Convention in Baltimore in 1840. Two years later he became assistant editor of the Lowell Courier and Journal, acting for a time as its Washington correspondent. In 1845 he went to Manchester, New Hampshire, to edit The American, but soon returned to the Lowell Courier, in which connection his strong anti-slavery views began to attract marked attention among the radicals of Massachusetts. His vigorous condemnation of slavery and caustic comments on Massachusetts politics and politicians finally cost him his position, and in 1848 he removed to Boston to succeed Charles Francis Adams [q.v.] as editor of the Boston Daily Whig, later the Boston Daily Republican, which he conducted through the presidential campaign of 1848. The same year he served as secretary of the Free-Soil Convention which met in Worcester. Again, however, his vigorous opinions on slavery and Massachusetts politics cost him his position, and he returned to Lowell to start the Lowell American, which he conducted for nearly four years, becoming recognized as one of the most radical of Massachusetts anti-slavery journalists. In 1852, and again in 1853, he was elected to the Massachusetts legislature, and in the latter year served as clerk of the constitutional convention. Following the failure of the Lowell American in 1854, he joined the editorial staffs of The Commonwealth and the Boston Telegraph and violently opposed the rising tide of Know-Nothingism in Massachusetts. In 1856 his "Warrington" letters on Massachusetts politics and politicians began to appear in the Springfield Republican and at once attracted state-wide attention because of their thorough knowledge of Massachusetts politics and their frank personal comment on the public men of the state. Similar letters over the pen name "Gilbert" were contributed to the New York Tribune, on which paper Robinson was offered an editorial berth in 1859 which, feeling that his best work could be done in Massachusetts, he refused.

The friend of Charles Sumner, John A. Andrew, Henry Wilson, John G. Whittier, and other Massachusetts radicals, he was early associated with the fortunes of the Republican party in the state, and in 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, he aided in editing The Tocsin, a campaign paper "published by an association of Republicans who are in earnest, and who will be heard" ("Warrington" Pen-Portraits, post, p. 94). In 1862 he was chosen as clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, a position which he held for eleven years, during which he became known as the "Warwick" of Massachusetts politics. In 1863 he was made secretary of the Republican state committee, which important office he occupied until 1868, writing many of the addresses and memorials of the committee during these critical years of war and reconstruction. The strength of Robinson's political power in Massachusetts was most evident, perhaps, in 1871 and 1872 when he successfully led the opposition against Benjamin F. Butler [q.v.] in the latter's efforts to gain the governorship of Massachusetts. It was due to Butler's machinations, he believed, that he finally lost his clerkship in 1873. He then served for a short time on the staff of the Boston Journal, but in 1874 increasing ill health caused him to make a European trip, following which he returned to complete and publish Warrington's Manual (1875), a handbook of parliamentary law. He died the following year at his home in Malden, Massachusetts.

Robinson is described as "a lymphatic, shut-in man, smiling only around the mouth, which is carefully covered with hair to hide the smile; short, thick-set, with his head ... set ... directly on his shoulders; high forehead; slightly bald; thin hair; ruddy of face; ... the keenest political writer in America, and the best political writer since 'Junius' " (quoted in "Warrington" Pen-Portraits, p. 128). On November 30, 1848, he married Harriet Jane Hanson [see Harriet Jane Hanson Robinson], one of the literary mill girls of Lowell and for many years a leader in the woman suffrage movement in Massachusetts, a cause in which Robinson himself took much interest. They had four children, of whom three survived their father.

[Memoir in "Warrington" Pen-Portraits (1877), ed. by Harriet J. H. Robinson; New England Historical and Genealogical Register, October 1885, July 1890; Springfield Republican, March 13, 1876.]

W.R.W.



ROCKWELL, Julius, jurist, born in Colebrook, Connecticut, 26 April, 1805; died in Lenox, Massachusetts, 19 May, 1888. He was a representative in Congress from 2 February, 1844, till 3 March, 1851, having been elected as a Whig for four successive terms.

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, p. 295:

ROCKWELL, Julius, jurist, born in Colebrook, Connecticut, 26 April, 1805; died in Lenox, Massachusetts, 19 May, 1888. He was graduated at Yale in 1826, studied at the law-school, was admitted to the bar in 1829, and settled in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in the following year. He was elected a member of the Massachusetts Legislature in 1834, its speaker in 1835-'8, and then served as bank commissioner for three years. He was a representative in Congress from 2 February, 1844, till 3 March, 1851, having been elected as a Whig for four successive terms. He was a delegate to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention in 1853. On Edward Everett's resignation of his seat in the U. S. Senate, Mr. Rockwell was appointed to fill the vacancy, and served from 15 June, 1854, till Henry Wilson was elected by the legislature and took his seat on 10 February, 1855. He was a presidential elector on the Fremont ticket in 1856, was again elected to the state house of representatives in 1858, and was chosen speaker, which office he had held when in the legislature before. In 1859 he was appointed one of the judges of the Superior Court of Massachusetts, serving till 1871, when he resigned, ne has since resided in Lenox, Massachusetts, and been connected with various banks. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. V, p. 295.



ROLLINS, Edward Henry, 1824-1889. Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from New Hampshire. He performed important services in the merger of Know-Nothings, Free Soilers, Whigs, and anti-slavery Democrats into a coherent and enthusiastic party. The even balance of party strength and the fact that New Hampshire elections came in the spring made the state a pivotal one in national affairs and the work of Rollins attracted much attention. He was chairman of the Republican state committee from 1856 to 1861, resigning in the latter year because of his election to Congress.
Served in Congress July 1861-March 1867. U.S. Senator 1877-1883. Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, pp. 312-313; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 2, p. 120; Annals of Congress; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 18, p. 787; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 2, p. 120:

ROLLINS, EDWARD HENRY (October 3, 1824-July 31, 1889), politician, legislator, railroad financier, was born at Rollinsford, New Hampshire, eldest of the six children of Daniel and Mary (Plumer) Rollins. On both sides of the family he was of good colonial stock, his father being a descendant of James Rawlins who called to New England in 1632, and settled at Ipswich, Massachusetts. Edward spent his youth on his father's farm and once declared that no one knew better "the sorrows of hill-farm husbandry than I did until my twenty-first year." His early education was scanty, and while he began preparation for Dartmouth, lack of means obliged him to relinquish his ambition for a college education. He was an omnivorous reader, however, and overcame many of his early handicaps, writing and speaking with facility and vigor. After leaving home he spent several years as clerk in a Concord drug store, school-teacher, and employee of a wholesale drug firm in Boston. In 1847 he bought a drug business in Concord, N. H, with which he was associated until 1861. On February 13, 1849, he married Ellen Elizabeth West.

His business prospered, his store became a rendezvous for local politicians and party workers, and the proprietor, an anti-slavery Whig, was soon a rising politician. He was a state committeeman for the Whig party in its moribund years, 1850-53, and passed via the Know-Nothing route into the new Republican organization. He was elected to the lower house of the legislature in 1855 and became speaker a year later. He performed important services in the merger of Know-Nothings, Free Soilers, Whigs, and anti-slavery Democrats into a coherent and enthusiastic party. The even balance of party strength and the fact that New Hampshire elections came in the spring made the state a pivotal one in national affairs and the work of Rollins attracted much attention. He was chairman of the Republican state committee from 1856 to 1861, resigning in the latter year because of his election to Congress.

He served three consecutive terms in the House and proved himself a conscientious committeeman, a stalwart supporter of war measures, and an indefatigable worker for the interests of his state and constituents. After the expiration of his third term he was again elected chairman of the state committee, serving from 1868 to 1872, and exercising a great influence on campaigns and policies when no longer a member. A textbook on party methods and practices could be written from his experiences in keeping New Hampshire in the Republican column. A profound believer in Republican principles, opposed to conciliation with the South, a conservative with scant tolerance for reform in any guise, but personally honest and fearless, he was distinctly a product of the era. He was a skilful manager of caucuses and conventions, an adept distributor of patronage and spoils, but emerged unsmirched from the political scandals of the period.

In 1869, through the influence of Oakes Ames [q.v.], a personal friend, he became assistant treasurer of the Union Pacific Railroad and secretary of its board of directors; two years later he was promoted to the post of treasurer. He had no connection with the Credit Mobilier organization but his relationship to the railroad company caused increasing opposition to his candidacy for the United States Senate, and after his election for the term 1877-83 he deemed it advisable to sever it. In the Senate he followed much the same course he had pursued earlier in the House. His failure to secure a reelection, due to the popularity of the doctrine of rotation which he had clone much to foster and to the increasing restiveness of other leaders under the dominance of the Rollins machine, was a severe disappointment and led to his gradual retirement from active politics.

On his return to Concord he became increasingly active in New Hampshire business affairs, heading the banking firm of E. H. Rollins & Sons. From 1886 to 1889 he was president of the Boston, Concord & Montreal Railroad. A paralytic stroke from which he never recovered was probably the result of severe work over a long period of years. He retained an interest in farming, was a breeder of choice live stock, and did much for the agricultural improvement of the state. He died at Isles of Shoals, New Hampshire, survived by four children, one of them being Frank West Rollins [q.v.].

[J. O. Lyford, Life of Edward H. Rollins (1906), based on Rollins' correspondence and other papers; J. R. Rollins, Records of Families of the Name Rawlins or Rollins, in the U.S. (1874); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); Granite Monthly, September 1877; Concord Evening Monitor, August 2, 1889; Independent Statesman (Concord), August 1, 8, 1889.]

W.A. R.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, pp. 312-313:

ROLLINS, Edward Henry, senator, born in Somersworth (now Rollinsford), New Hampshire, 3 October, 1824. Several of his ancestors, who were among the first settlers of New Hampshire, served in the Revolutionary army, and his great-grandfather, Ichabod, was an active patriot and a member of the state convention that resolved itself into an independent government on 5 January, 1776. His name was given to the portion of Somersworth in which he resided. Edward Henry was educated in Dover, N. H, and South Berwick, Maine, became a druggist's clerk in Concord and Boston, and subsequently entered business there on his own account. In 1855-'7 he was a member of the legislature, serving in the last year as speaker, and he was chairman of the New Hampshire delegation to the National Republican Convention of 1860. He served in congress from 4 July, 1861, till 3 March, 1867, and was a firm opponent of the measure that was adopted in July, 1864, doubling the land-grant of the Union Pacific railroad company, and making the government security a first instead of a second mortgage upon the road. From 1868 till 1876 he was secretary and treasurer of the company, and from 4 March, 1877, till 4 March, 1883, he was U. S. senator. He was a founder of the First national bank in Concord, is an owner of Fort George island, Florida, and is now (1888) president of the Boston, Concord, and Montreal railroad company. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, pp. 312-313.



ROLLINS, James Sidney, 1812-1888, lawyer, soldier. Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Missouri. After Mexican War (1846), opposed extension of slavery into the new territories. Served as Congressman July 1861-March 1865. Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume, V, p. 313; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 2, p. 121; Annals of Congress; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 18, p. 788; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 2, pp. 121-122:

ROLLINS, JAMES SIDNEY (April 19, 1812-January 9, 1888), congressman, was born at Richmond, Kentucky, the son of Anthony Wayne Rollins, a native of Pennsylvania and prominent physician, and Sallie (Rodes) Rollins. His grandfather, Henry Rollins, was a native of Ireland. James Sidney attended Richmond Academy, spent two years at Washington College; and graduated in 1830 with highest honor s from the Indiana University. Rejoining his family in Columbia, Missouri, he read law for a time in the offices of Abiel Leonard, then served in the Black Hawk War. In 1834 he completed his legal education at Transylvania University. He develop ed a large practice, but the routine and delay of the law irked him, and as early as 1836 he turned to public affairs. By inheritance and by conviction a Whig, he edited the Columbia Patriot and in 1838 was elected to the legislature from a strongly Whig county. As a legislator he achieved marked distinction in the decade 1838-48. His lifelong interests were education and public improvements. He sponsored in 1839 legislation which gave form and substance to the state university, while his effective and eloquent leadership of the cause of hi g her education resulted in public grants and in private donations which secured the location of the institution at Columbia. Through successive sessions he urged upon politically hostile and indifferent colleagues the desirability of internal improvements, of wider educational opportunities, and of social legislation. He was an ardent supporter of Clay, and by 1848 he had become the recognized leader of the Missouri Whigs, the minority party in the state. As candidate for governor in 1848 he secured the largest vote ever cast for a Whig. He echoed no popular slogans and had no effective political organization, but his eloquence and presentation of issues attracted many followers.

After several years of successful practice, Rollins returned in 1854 to the legislature, when the issue of slavery in the territories was a threat to the maintenance and integrity of his party. Although a slave-owner, he believed and maintained that it was the right and duty of Congress to prohibit slavery in the territories He was again a candidate for governor in 1857, receiving the support of former Whigs, Native Americans, and many Benton Democrats (Weekly Jefferson Inquirer, May 2, 1857). His defeat by 230 votes ended a brilliant but futile party leadership of twelve years. As the crisis of 1860 approached, he supported the Bell-Everett ticket and became a candidate for Congress. As a border-state moderate in a slave-owning constituency he was willing fully to recognize the complaints of the South but refused to sanction secession. Both he and John B. Henderson, his opponent, emphatically disavowed any antislavery sentiment, and Rollins won. He was reelected easily in 1862, as a Conservative-Unionist. Primarily concerned with preserving the Union, with or without slavery, he had the confidence of Lincoln and gave the government loyal and courageous support. He opposed confiscation, the Emancipation Proclamation, military government, and had grave doubt of the compensated emancipation plan for loyal slaveowners in Missouri. "I am for the Constitution and the Union as our fathers made them-I want no change" (Congressional Globe, Appendix, 37 Congress, 3 Session, p. 106). By 1865, however, he realized that slavery must be abolished, and he supported the resolution submitting the Thirteenth Amendment. Singularly free from the intolerance and fanaticism of some border state politicians, he opposed the proscriptive and punitive spirit and measures both in Missouri and in the nation.

In 1866 a crisis in the affairs of the University induced Rollins to reenter the legislature where he remained until 1872. The institution was in a dismal plight. The Republican majority was hostile toward it; the resources were almost exhausted, and public opinion generally indifferent. He met the difficult situation with tact and enthusiasm, and, by judicious concessions, was instrumental in securing the enactment of five significant statutes, 1867-72, relating to the University and to the newly created College of Agriculture. By these measures the institution was placed upon a solid and permanent foundation. Opposed to radical Republicanism, he aided in the restoration of the state Democracy in 1867-68, although he was never in complete accord with the Democratic party. His conciliatory policy, wisely dictated in behalf of educational legislation, was unpopular with many. With Carl Schurz and B. Gratz Brown he was a leader in the Liberal Republican movement. His lifelong ambition to be governor was finally frustrated in 1872 when the former Confederate element defeated him in the Democratic state convention. He retired from active politics in that year. Of tall and commanding presence, with resonant voice and facile rhetoric, he captivated his audiences and was easily one of the first citizens of the state for half a century. He died after a lingering illness, survived by his wife, Mary E. Hickman, whom he had married on June 6, 1837, and by seven of their eleven children.

[Sources include: W. B. Smith, las. Sidney Rollins Memoir (I89I), containing selections from his speeches and letters; History of Boone County, Missouri (1882); W. E. Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics (2 volumes, 1933); Missouri Republican, January 10, 1888; Rollins Papers in' the possession of Rollins' son, C. B. Rollins, Columbia, Missouri]

T. S. B.

Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, pp. 313:

ROLLINS, James Sidney, lawyer, born in Richmond, Madison county, Kentucky, 19 April, 1812; died near Columbia, Missouri, 9 January, 1888. After graduation at the University of Indiana in 1830 and at the law-school of Transylvania university, Kentucky, in 1834, he practised law in Boone county, Missouri. He served on the staff of General Richard Gentry during the Black Hawk war, and in 1836 became an editor of the Columbia “Patriot,” a Whig journal. From 1838 till 1844, and again in 1854-'6, he served in the Missouri house of representatives, and he was a member of the state senate from 1846 till 1850, boldly opposing the extension of slavery into the territories. He was defeated as the Whig candidate for governor in 1848 and 1857. Mr. Rollins was a delegate to the Baltimore convention of 1844, which nominated Henry Clay for president, and was active in the canvass that followed. He was elected to congress as a Conservative, taking his seat in the special session that was called by President Lincoln, serving from 4 July, 1861, till 3 March, 1865. In 1862 he introduced a bill to aid in the construction of a railroad and telegraph line from the Missouri river to the Pacific, which, with a few amendments, became a law in July, 1862, and under its provisions the Union Pacific, Central Pacific, and Kansas Pacific railroads were built. He voted for the adoption of the thirteenth amendment to the constitution, although at the time he was one of the largest slave-owners in Boone county. He was a delegate to the Philadelphia Union convention in 1866, and in that year served again in the legislature of Missouri, where he introduced and secured the passage of a bill to establish a normal department in the state university. He was appointed a director of the Union Pacific railroad company, but resigned, and again served in the state senate, introducing a bill to establish an agricultural and mechanical college. He was also the author of many important measures that were passed by the legislature to advance the interests of the state university, and from 1869 till 1887 was president of its board of curators, which in 1872 declared him “Pater Universitatis Missouriensis.” Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, pp. 313.



ROOT, Joseph M., 1807-1879, Brutus, New York, lawyer, U.S. Congressman, Mayor of Sandusky, Ohio. Whig Congressman and later Free Soil Member of the U.S. House of Representatives in the Thirty-First Congress.

(Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).



ROOT, Joseph Pomeroy (April 23, 1826-July 20, 1885), physician, diplomatist, “he was chairman of the Free-State Executive Committee, and in August 1857 was elected to the Kansas Senate under the Topeka constitution.”

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 2, p. 150; Topeka Capital, July 22, 1885; Weekly Commonwealth (Topeka), July 23, 1885; The U.S. Biographical Directory, Kansas Volume (1879); J. P. Root, Root Genealogical Records (1870)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 2, p. 150:

ROOT, JOSEPH POMEROY (April 23, 1826-July 20, 1885), physician, diplomatist, son of John and Lucy (Reynolds) Root, was born in Greenwich, Massachusetts. His father was descended from John Roote who settled in Farmington, Connecticut, about 1640. After his early schooling was completed; he attended the Berkshire Medical College; Pittsfield, Massachusetts, graduating in 1850. The following year he moved to New Hartford, Connecticut, and in September married Frances Evaline Alden, by whom he had five sons. He joined the practice of politics to that of medicine, and was elected as a Whig to the Connecticut legislature in 1855. Moved by his social and political convictions to throw himself into the anti-slavery movement, he joined a company of emigrants (the Beecher Bible and Rifle colony) starting for Kansas in March 1856. He settled at Wyandotte, and at once began an active part in the affairs of the distracted territory. He was chairman of the Free-State Executive Committee, and in August 1857 was elected to the Kansas Senate under the Topeka constitution. He was one of the pioneer corps who located the public road from Topeka to Nebraska City, and he was sent East as an agent to obtain arms and aid for the free-soilers.

He contributed editorially to the Wyandotte papers, the Register (1857) and the Gazette (1858). In December 1859 he was elected lieutenant- governor of the new state on the Republican ticket. In 1861 he was chosen one of the officers of the first annual meeting of the Kansas State Temperance Society. During the Civil War he was surgeon of the 2nd Kansas Cavalry (as it was finally designated) and was medical director of the Army of the Frontier. In 1866 he presided over the Republican state convention. On September 15, 1870, President Grant appointed him minister to Chile, an act which recognized his services and at the same time eliminated him from active participation in state politics. He presented his credentials on December 2, 1870, and since diplomatic duties were not pressing, he gave much time to a general interest in Chilean affairs. He traveled extensively. Once he crossed the Andes into Argentina and reported the trip to the Department of State in the form of a treatise on the cause of earthquakes. Later he accompanied the minister of foreign affairs to southern Chile to investigate the Indians. Improvements in transportation fascinated him; he was enthusiastically in favor of an intercontinental railroad, he urged subsidies by the United States to West-Coast steamship lines, and he undertook on his own account to have Chile establish a system of towboats in the Straits of Magellan.

Root won great popularity with the Chileans for his efforts during a frightful smallpox epidemic in 1872. He served on the Santiago Board of Health and contributed his services to hospitals and private patients, laboring to improve the sanitary treatment of the disease. In recognition of his work a street in Santiago, the "Calle de Root," was named for him. He was recalled in June 1873 to make a place for Cornelius Logan [q.v.]. In 1874 he was elected a vice-president of the Temperance Convention which forced the Republican convention to adopt an anti-liquor plank. Governor St. John appointed him surgeon-general of Kansas. In 1876 he published Catechism of Money, advocating green-backism; in this same year he was named a member of the Chilean Centennial Commission. In 1884 he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention. Except for two years. (1877-79) when he was on the staff of a sanitarium at Clifton Springs, New York, he lived at Wyandotte until his death. He took a lively interest in the Kansas Historical Society and contributed several manuscript writings to its archives, among them a memoir of his experiences in Kansas in 1856.

[Topeka Capital, July 22, 1885; Weekly Commonwealth (Topeka), July 23, 1885; The U.S. Biographical Directory, Kansas Volume (1879); J. P. Root, Root Genealogical Records (1870); H. C. Evans, Chile and Its Relations with the U.S. (1927), p. 96, where Root's given name appears incorrectly as Thomas; Trans. Kansas State Historical Society, 1901-02 (1902); D. W. Wilder, The Annals of Kansas (1886); Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the U. S., 1871-73; Root's dispatches (3 volumes) in the Archives of the Department of State.]

G. V. B.

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

Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volumes I-VI, Edited by James Grant Wilson & John Fiske, New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1888-1889.