Ear-Ewi: Earle through Ewing

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


EARLE, Edward, abolitionist, Worcester, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1840-41.


EARLE, John Milton, 1794-1874, Leicester, Massachusetts, businessman, abolitionist, statesman, political leader.  Active in anti-slavery movement.


EARLE, Mary, abolitionist, Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Yellin, 1994, pp. 80, 8n, 84)


EARLE, Phoebe, abolitionist, Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Yellin, 1994, p. 80)


EARLE, Thomas, 1796-1849, Worcester, Massachusetts, Society of Friends, Quaker, abolitionist leader, journalist, lawyer, political leader, member Liberty Party, Philadelphia, PA.  Edited Pennsylvania Freeman.  Petitioned Congress to amend U.S. Constitution to compensate slaveholders in the South who freed their slaves.  Vice presidential candidate for abolitionist Liberty Party. Manager, American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), 1839-1840. (Bonner, 1948; Drake, 1950, p. 149; Dumond, 1961, p. 297; Goodell, 1852, p. 471; Pennsylvania Freeman, April 23, 1840; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 288-289; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 1, p. 597; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 7, p. 231)

EARLE, THOMAS (April 21, 1796--July 14, 1849), lawyer, was the son of Pliny Earle [q.v.], a manufacturer of wool-carding machinery, and Patience (Buffum) Earle, who resided at Leicester, Massachusetts. After attending the common schools and Leicester Academy, he passed several years in his father's employ, but as business was not prosperous he went to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1816, where he became a clerk in a store. In 1817 he remove d to Philadelphia, and engaged in the commission business there for six years. He had no liking or capacity for a mercantile career, however, and in 1824 commenced the study of law. Meantime, in July 1820, he had married Mary Hussey of Nantucket, Massachusetts. On his being admitted as an attorney, April 2, 1825, he opened a law office in Philadelphia, at the same time engaging in literary and political work. His journalistic abilities were quickly recognized and he became editor successively of the Columbian Observer and The Standard. In the course of his legal studies he discovered that the Constitution of Pennsylvania was extremely defective and needed amendment. This he urged in the local newspapers, but it was not until he had acquired a proprietary interest in The Mechanics' Free Press and Reform Advocate and devoted its columns to the subject, that the public became aroused. His continued agitation at length procured the calling of the constitutional convention of 1837, to which he was a delegate. He took a leading part in its deliberations and many of the amendments which he advocated were accepted and embodied in the new constitution. Two reforms, however, which he ardently advocated, the democratization of the judiciary, and the extension of the suffrage to colored people, were rejected after long and acrimonious debate. His views on the franchise procured for him the lasting displeasure of a large section of the Democratic party, thereby destroying all chances of future political preferment. In 1840 at a convention of "Friends of Immediate Emancipation" held at Albany, New York, he was selected as candidate of the Liberty party for vice-president of the United States with James G. Birney [q.v.] for president, but he was repudiated by the abolitionists in whose name the Liberty party had made the nomination, and his name did not appear upon the ticket. He had been all his life an avowed opponent of slavery, and for a time was editor of The Pennsylvanian, the anti-slavery newspaper in the state. Henceforth, he took no active part in public affairs, but devoted himself to literary pursuits. He had in his earlier days published an Essay on Penal Law in Pennsylvania (1827) and a pamphlet, The Right of States to Alter or Annul Charters (1823). These were followed by his Treatise on Railroads and Internal Communications (1830), the first book written in the United States on this subject. His last completed work was The Life, Travels and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy (1847). He was an excellent linguist, well acquainted with French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and during his later years was engaged on the compilation of a "Grammatical Dictionary of the French and the English Languages" and a translation of Sismondi's Italian Republics, both of which were unfinished at his death.

[Pliny Earle, The Earle Family (1888); J. T. Scharf and T. Westcott, History of Philadelphia 1609-1884 (1884); North American and U. S. Gazette (Philadelphia), July 16, 1849; American Courier (Philadelphia), July 21, 1849.]

H. W. H. K.


EARLE, William B., abolitionist, Worcester, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1841-51.


EASTON, Reverend Hosea, 1787-1837, African American, clergyman, author, abolitionist (Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 4, p. 185)


EDGERTON, Sidney, 1818-1900, abolitionist congressman, first territorial governor of Montana,   (Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 20)

EDGERTON, SIDNEY (August 17, 1818-July 19, 1900), Abolitionist, congressman, first territorial governor of Montana, was born in New York of old New England ancestry. His parents were Amos and Zerviah (Graham) Edgerton. His father died while Sidney was an infant, and the boy h ad to educate himself. He studied and taught and in1844 went to Akron, Ohio, w here he again taught school and studied law. In 1846 he graduated from the Cincinnati Law School. Beginning his public life as an Abolition is  he was a delegate to the Free-Soil Convention of 1848, and continued his fight on slavery during the years following. In 1856 he was delegate to the first Republican National Convention. Elected to Congress in 1858, he served two terms. His efforts were directed toward the abolition of slavery in the territories, in the District of Columbia, and on the public property of the Unite d States. As a Union man he felt the need of holding the West to the East. He was an ardent advocate of a transcontinental railroad and voted for every measure which he thought would promote its construction.

When the territory of Idaho was organized, March 3, 1863, President Lincoln offered the position of chief justice to Edgerton. He took office at Bannack in eastern Idaho (now in Montana) and the he remained in char g e of the eastern judicial district of the territory. This assignment was distasteful to him for he felt that as chief  justice he should have a district nearer the capital. The court had no marshal and no power to enforce its decisions. With bands of road agents infesting the country, Edgerton gave his approval of the vigilantes who were trying to exterminate them. The co unties east of the Bitter Root Mountains, dissatisfied with their connection with Idaho, sent Edgerton to Washington to work for a separate territory. He was well acquainted with James M. Ashley, chairman of the House committee on territories, with other congressmen, and with Lincoln. Following the approval of the act forming Montana (May 26, 1864), Lincoln appointed Edgerton governor, legal provision for a temporary government being made May 27. His territory had been overrun by bandits and the majority of its population were opposed to the Union. It was his work to organize government among a hostile people and establish obedience to law. With firmness and tact he undertook the task and during the year of his administration made progress. He foresaw in Montana a great commonwealth and he urged the building of roads and the founding of schools. He was unable to conclude his program, since the succession of Johnson to the presidency led to his resignation.

Edgerton was a man of unusual intellect, pleasing personality, and notable oratorical ability. He had great courage and frankness. He was an Abolitionist when abolition was unpopular, and an agnostic among a people thoroughly devoted to Christianity. He married Mary Wright in 1849 and to them were born eight children. After 1865 he devoted himself to the practise of law, but he did not lose interest in public affairs. When Mark Hanna invited him as a member of the first Republican Convention to sit in the one of 1900, Edgerton declined, stating that there was little in common between the principles held by him and the "fore ordained work" of the latter convention (Great Falls News, July 5, 1900).

[Wilbur F. Sanders, "Life of Governor Sidney Edgerton," in Rocky Mountain Mag., February 1901, and Martha Edgerton Plassmann, "Biography Sketch of Sidney Edgerton, in Contributions to the Historical Society of Mont. III (1900), are sympathetic but fair. See also Biography Directory of the American Congress, 1774-1927 (1928).]

P. C. P.


EDMUNDSON, William, Society of Friends, Quaker, Germantown, Pennsylvania, early Quaker opponent of slavery (Drake, 1950, pp. 8-10, 14-15, 37, 51; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 7, 432)


EDWARDS, Dr. Reverend Jonathon, 1745-1801, clergyman, anti-slavery activist, college president.  Wrote, The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade, 1791.  Son of noted theologian, Jonathan Edwards.  (Bruns, 1977, pp. 290, 293-302, 317, 340; Dumond, 1961, pp. 47, 345; Goodell, 1852, pp. 28, 92, 111, 127, 130; Locke, 1901, pp. 41, 90, 103, 183, 186, 187, 191; Zilversmit, 1967, pp. 107, 153; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 311-312; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 37; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 7, p. 334)

EDWARDS, JONATHAN (May 26, 1745-August 1, 1801), theologian, the second son of his more celebrated father of the same name, was born in Northampton, Massachusetts. At the age of six he went with his father to Stockbridge and lived there among the Mohican Indians, to whom his father was missionary, and learned their language. In January 1758, his father moved with his family to Princeton, New Jersey, to become president of the College of New Jersey, but died in the following March, his wife, the noted Sarah (Pierpont) Edwards, dying in October of the same year. Thus orphaned, the son was enabled by friends to prepare for the college at Princeton, from which he graduated in 1765. During his course he had a deep religious experience, and made profession of his faith. For a year after graduation he studied theology with his father's friend, Joseph Bellamy [q.v.], at Bethlehem, Connecticut, and for another year preached here and there. He then accepted a tutorship at Princeton. After two years of teaching he became, in January 1769, pastor of the White Haven Church of New Haven, Connecticut. The year after his settlement he married Mary Porter, who was drowned in 1782. In December 1783, he married Mercy Sabin.

"In person," says his grandson, "Dr. Edwards was slender, erect, and somewhat above the ordinary stature. His complexion was dark; his features bold and prominent; his hair raven black; his eye keen, piercing and intelligent to a remarkable degree." The portrait prefixed to his Works indicates that his features and expression were harsh and severe; yet he was a man of tender feelings, generous to the poor, with a special interest in the negroes and a hatred of slavery and the slave-trade. His experience in his first pastorate was not unlike that of his father, for he was unable to heal the divisions that existed at the time of his coming, and two years later the church split on the same issue of the Halfway Covenant which had made trouble for his father at Northampton. The particular point in question was whether the children of those who were not members of the church should be baptized, a practise to which both the Edwards were opposed. The larger part of his church remained under his pastorate for a number of years, but there came a new access of dissatisfaction owing to the Revolution and to the growth of liberal opinions among his people, and the church dwindled, so that in January 1795 he was dismissed from his charge, on the ground that the church was no longer able to maintain a pastor, though it bore witness to his high character and ability. A year later he became pastor at Colebrook, Connecticut, where he was able to give time to literary work. After some three years at Colebrook, he accepted the presidency of Union College, Schenectady, New York, but, as in his father's case at Princeton, his presidency was short; for he died only two years after taking up the work. Like his father he preached on the first Sunday of the year of his death from the text, "This year thou shalt die."

The similarity of his career to that of his father corresponds to a similarity in their mental qualities. Both were silent and reserved men, somewhat morbidly religious, and devoted to the development of doctrine by the keenest and most uncompromising logic, though not without personal tenderness of feeling. Yet their doctrine, for all its severity, had in it an important progressive element, not generally appreciated as such, which later contributed largely to the more humane teachings known as "progressive orthodoxy." The father took a great step forward by maintaining, in opposition to the older Calvinism, that men could repent if they would, though the will itself was determined from above. The particular contribution of the son to the "improvements" on the older Calvinism was the "governmental" theory of the atonement, as opposed to the previous "satisfaction" theory. This newer theory was not entirely original with him, but gained acceptance mainly through his presentation of it. It declared that the sacrificial sufferings of Christ were not to be understood either as the payment of a debt due to God, or as the infliction on Christ of precisely those sufferings which would otherwise have been endured by those who were forgiven for his sake; they were rather the demonstration, by means of a willing victim, of the moral government of the world, whereby God could without inconsistency forgive freely such as repented and put their trust in Christ. This theory was based on a conception of God as a benevolent moral governor, rather than as an arbitrary sovereign, developed by the elder Edwards. Two important consequences were drawn by the son and his fellow-workers from these conclusions: first, that Christ died for all men and not simply for the elect; second, that neither the sin of Adam nor the righteousness of Christ were imputed to men, moral qualities not being thus transferable. These points, along with the declaration of the ability of men to repent formed the distinctive characteristics of the New England Theology over against the older "Triangle" of inability, imputation, and limited atonement.

In addition to his discussion of the atonement, Edwards published a defense of eternal punishment and also a defense of his father's theory of the will, a treatise on the Mohican language, and a number of short theological articles. He also edited a number of his father's manuscripts for publication. He lacked the imagination and originality of the elder Edwards, but he had a powerful mind, and gave a great impulse to the development of a more progressive type of thought in theology.

[The chief sources of information are the memoir by his grandson, Tryon Edwards, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, D.D., Late President of Union College, with a Memoir of his Life (2 vols., 1842); and the funeral sermon in the collected edition of his Works (2 vols., 1850). For a discussion of his theological thought, see F. H. Foster, A Genetic History of the New England Theology (1907). See also Wm. B. Sprague, Annals American Pulpit, vol. I (1857), p. 653.]

B. W. B.


EINHORN, Rabbi David, 1809-1879 Bavaria, abolitionist, rabbi. (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 319)

EINHORN, DAVID (November 10, 1809-November 2, 1879), rabbi, son of Maier and Karoline Einhorn, was born in Dispeck, Bavaria. He received a traditionally intensive Jewish education in the school of the village of his birth and in the Talmudic Academy of Furth. After an abrupt plunge from this circumscribed, compact, and medieval scholastic world into the comparative liberalism of the Universities of Erlangen, Wurzburg, and Munich, he emerged a religious radical. For ten years his frankly avowed views debarred him from an appointment as rabbi in Germany. When he was appointed rabbi in 1842, he found himself in constant opposition to the opinions and practises of the orthodox majority of his flock. This led in 1851 to his leaving Germany for Pesth, Hungary. There a reactionary government, confusing religious with political liberalism, closed his temple two months after he had taken office.

There being little prospect in Europe for a rabbi of his radical religious ideas, he turned his eyes to the United States. After four years of waiting, during which he published his system of Jewish theology, Das Prinzip des Mosaismus und dessen Verhaeltnis zum Heidenthum und Rabbinischen Iudenthum (Leipzig, 1854), he sailed for America in 1855, to become the religious leader of the Har Sinai Synagogue in Baltimore. There his unwavering moral courage and loyalty to the truth as he saw it were notably shown in his attacks on slavery. Though these were launched in German, a language which he regarded as the official tongue of reform Judaism in America, they drew down on him the angry resentment of some of his fellow citizens, and a few nights after April 19, 1861, the night of the Baltimore riot, he had to flee the city under guard to avoid attack from the mob. His congregation would have welcomed him back on condition that he did not refer in the pulpit to the subject of slavery, but he refused all compromise and settled in Philadelphia, where he was soon elected rabbi of Keneseth Israel Congregation. His stand against slavery led to his election as an honorary member of the Union League Club of Philadelphia. In 1866 he was called to New York, as minister of Congregation Adath Jeshurun, merged in 1874 with an orthodox congregation under the new name of Congregation Beth El, where he officiated until he retired from active service in July 1879. Four months later he died.

His literary output in America was considerable. In 1856 he founded Sinai, a monthly German magazine devoted to reform Judaism. He issued this for seven years until, as he wrote, "it died in the battle against slavery." Through this organ he waged vigorous controversy with some of his colleagues, both orthodox and reform. In 1856 he published Olath Tammid, a reform modification of the traditional Jewish prayer book, with a German translation. This subsequently became the basis of the Union Prayer Book, the official liturgy of reform Judaism in America. Ten years later, in Philadelphia, he published Ner Tamid, Die Lehre des Judenthums dargestellt fur Schule und Haus. A collected volume of his sermons was published in 1880 by his son-in-law, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler. (In 1844 Einhorn married Julie Henrietta Ochs, of a prominent family in Kreuznach.) He was a leading figure at the Philadelphia Conference of Reform Rabbis in 1869 and at several Jewish Reform conferences in Germany.

As his writings consistently show, he was essentially a theologian, forthright and unyielding in the opinions which he expressed with ardent eloquence. His appreciation of Judaism was rationalizing rather than romantic, universal rather than national. As with most of the other early leaders of reform Judaism in America, who were born and trained in Germany, his religious revolt reflected the liberal politico-cultural ideology current in the newly awakening Germany of the early nineteenth century. By his forceful application of this ideology in the domain of Judaism, David Einhorn became the leading theologian of the reform Judaism of his generation in the United States.

[Besides Einhorn's own works mentioned above, see David Einhorn Memorial Volume (1911), by Kaufmann Kohler, containing a biography by Kohler, reprinted from the Year Book of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, XIX (1909), 215-70, and a memorial oration by Emil G. Hirsch; Pubs. of the American Jewish Historical Society, No. 5 (1897), 147-52; Adolf Brull, Dr. David Einhorn und seine Bedeutung  fur das Judentum (Frankfurt, 1882); David Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism (1907); Jacob Voorsanger, The Chronicles of Emmanu-El (1900); Jos. Leiser, American Judaism (1925); F. de Sola Mendes, "America, Judaism" in Jewish Encyclopedia (1901), vol. I.]

D. de S.P.


ELLSWORTH, Oliver, 1745-1807, founding father, statesman, lawyer, chief justice, political leader, opponent of slavery.  Was a drafter of the United States Constitution.  United States Senator from Connecticut, 1789-1796.  Third Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1796-1800.  Ellsworth argued before the Continental Convention against the foreign slave trade.  In order to gain Southern support for the passage of the Constitution, he endorsed the Three-Fifths Compromise on the Enumeration of Slaves.  (Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 335-336)

ELLSWORTH, OLIVER (April 29, 1745- November 26, 1807), statesman, chief justice, the second son of Capt. David and Jemima (Leavitt) Ellsworth, was born in Windsor, Connecticut, to which town his great-grandfather Josiah Ellsworth had come from Yorkshire, England, about the middle of the seventeenth century. Of his childhood practically nothing of certainty is known. His father, who had- set his heart upon Oliver's becoming a minister, gave him the best that the time had to offer in the way of an education. Prepared for college by the Reverend Joseph Bellamy of Bethlehem, he entered Yale in 1762, only to leave that institution for Princeton at the end of his sophomore year. Tradition has perpetuated many stories to account for his leaving Yale, some of which would indicate that his departure was not altogether voluntary;. the one sure bit of information concerning it is found in President Clap's journal (July 27, 1764), "Oliver Ellsworth and Waightstill Avery, at the desire of their respective parents, were dismissed from being members of this college" (Brown, post, p. 16). Whatever the cause of the episode, it apparently produced no permanent ill-feeling. All of Ellsworth's sons who grew up were graduated from Yale, he himself was afterwards a fellow of the corporation, and in 1790 the college conferred upon him the degree of LL.D.-as did Princeton and Dartmouth in 1797. After two years at Princeton, Oliver, now a B.A., returned home and took up the study of theology with the Reverend John Smalley of New Britain. This study did not long continue, however, for within a year he turned to law. For the next four years he studied that subject, doing some teaching in the interval, and being admitted to the bar in 1771. The following year he married Abigail Wolcott of East Windsor.

Legal business came to him so slowly at first that he found it necessary to support himself by farming and even wood-chopping, financial aid from his father apparently having ceased when he definitely gave up fitting himself for the ministry. Too poor to keep a horse, on day s when the court was sitting he was forced to walk from his farm to Hartford and back, a round trip of twenty miles. During the first three years of his practise the returns from his profession, by his own admission, amounted to only three pounds Connecticut currency per annum (Henry Flanders; The Lives and Times of the Chief Justices, 1858, 2 series, p. 62). In 1775, after having already represented Windsor in the General Assembly, he moved to Hartford. From this time his rise at the bar was exceptionally rapid. Noah Webster, who in 1779 came to Ellsworth's office to study law, said that he then had usually from one thousand to fifteen hundred cases on his list, and that there was hardly a case tried in which Ellsworth did not represent one side or the other. This large practise, coupled with the general success of his advocacy, brought him recognition as one of the leaders of the Connecticut bar, and enabled him to lay the foundation of what, by shrewd and careful management, became a large fortune. His position made it inevitable that he should be connected with the courts of his state in ways other than merely as a lawyer. He was appointed state's attorney for Hartford County in 1777, and three years later became a member of the Governor's Council. In 1784 this Council was constituted a supreme court of errors of which Ellsworth, by virtue of his office, became one of the judges. Shortly thereafter he was made a judge of the superior court, in which position he continued to serve for the next four years, his resignation from the Council and the office of state's attorney taking place in 1785. It is indicative of the high regard in which he continued to hold the judicial offices of his native state, that after his return from France, he should have been willing again to accept a place on the Governor's Council, and that in the last year of his life, after having already been chief justice of the United States, he should have consented to act as the first chief justice of the new state supreme court of appeals-a consent which ill health forced him to withdraw before he had ever actually entered upon the duties of the office.

Ellsworth was connected with the revolutionary activities of his state almost from the beginning. Shortly after the outbreak of open hostilities in Massachusetts, Connecticut had instituted her Committee of the Pay Table, a commission of five to supervise the expenditures rendered necessary by the state's war measures. Ellsworth was one of the five. Early in 1776 he was sent to General Washington at Cambridge to seek repayment of the money Connecticut had advanced to her men in the Continental Army; later in the same year he was intrusted with a similar mission to General Schuyler in an attempt to recover other moneys which the state had paid to troops employed in Canada. In 1779 he was chosen a member of the important Council of Safety which, with the governor, was in practical control of all military measures. As early as 1777 the General Assembly had appointed him one of the delegates to represent the state in the Continental Congress; chosen annually, he continued to serve in that capacity for six years, declining a further appointment in 1783. Long before he had even started for Philadelphia, Congress had made him one of a committee of five to investigate the failure of the Rhode Island expedition. The day after he took his seat in Congress (October 8, 1778) he was named a member of the committee on marine affairs. Hardly more than two weeks later he was appointed to the committee on appeals, which listened to appeals brought from the Admiralty courts of the various states, and which "was always composed of the ablest lawyers in the House" (Van Santvoord, post, p. 202). Ellsworth became a member of the committee just in time to sit upon the hearing of the appeal in the noted case of Gideon Olmstead and the British sloop Active. Details of his activity in the Congress are obscure. In a general way we know that he was a hard worker, able and conscientious, and that he continued to serve on one committee or another as long as his term lasted. Thus in 1780 he was on the committee appointed to consider the best method of carrying out Washington's plan of supplying the army by requisitions of specific articles laid on the different states. With Hamilton and Madison for colleagues he served on two committees, one of which was concerned with the matter of neutrality agreements, and the other of which was so broad in its scope that its work practically amounted to a consideration of a permanent system of administration. Towards the end of his last term, when the unpaid and mutinous soldiers surrounded the building in which the Congress was sitting, he served with Hamilton and Peters on the committee sent by that body to urge upon the executive council of Pennsylvania the calling out of the state militia.

When Connecticut finally decided to send delegates to the Constitutional Convention, Ellsworth, Roger Sherman, and William S. Johnson were selected to represent the state. The part played by this delegation as a whole in the business of the Convention, especially in the matter of the so-called "Connecticut compromise," is clear enough; the exact influence and importance of the individual members is not so clear. By one writer or another each of the three delegates has been given the credit for having brought about the compromise. Ellsworth's motion that "the rule of suffrage in the 2nd branch be the same with that established by the articles of confederation" (Farrand, post, I, 468), undoubtedly started the discussion that preceded the compromise, and during the debate he seems to have borne the brunt of the attack of the large-state men; but the accuracy of the statement that "to the resolute efforts and persevering energy of Oliver Ellsworth, more than to any other man in the Convention, is the country indebted for the final compromise of the Constitution which gave to each state an equality of representation in the Senate" (Van Santvoord, post, pp. 226-27), may well be questioned. Though it is extremely difficult to gauge the influence of Ellsworth or of any other one man in the Convention, he unquestionably took an active part. His amendment to substitute the words "United States" for the word "national" in a certain resolution then under consideration (G. Hunt and J. B. Scott, The Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, 1920, 131-32) seems to have fixed the title which was thereafter used in the Convention to designate the government. He objected to the payment of representatives out of the federal treasury and proposed payment by the states. He favored the three fifths ratio in counting slaves as a basis of both taxation and representation; strangely enough, also, he stood out against the abolition of the foreign slave-trade. He was one of the committee of five, of which Rutledge was the chairman, which prepared for the Convention the fir st official draft of a constitution. His work for the new Constitution did not end at Philadelphia. In the convention which met at Hartford in January 1788 to consider its acceptance or rejection by Connecticut, he spared no effort in explaining it and urging its adoption. His " Letters of a Landholder," printed in the Connecticut Courant and the American Mercury (November 1787- March 1788) and widely circulated, were written with the same object of ratification in view.

Chosen by Connecticut as one of its first two senators under the Constitution, he represented his st ate in the United States Senate for a period of seven years, resigning from that body in the spring of 1796 after he had been appointed chief justice. It was in the Senate that the capabilities of Ellsworth appeared to their best advantage. For the work of organization and of practical detail made necessary by the newness of the government, he seems to have been peculiarly fitted. There can be no question as to the predominant position he enjoyed in the Senate; meager as the details are, they are sufficient to show him as an outstanding figure. A hundred years later the memory of his prestige was still alive in Senate traditions-"If we may trust the traditions that have come down from the time of the Administrations of Washington and Adams, when the Senate sat with closed doors, none of them
[Webster, Clay, Calhoun] ever acquired the authority wielded by the profound sagacity of Ellsworth" (G. F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, 1903, vol. II, p. 45) Among other things he reported the first set of Senate rules and considered a plan for printing the journals; he reported back from conference the first twelve amendments to the Constitution which Congress submitted to the states; he framed the measure which admitted North Carolina, and devised the non-intercourse act that forced Rhode Island into the Union; he reported a bill for the government of the territory of the United States south of the Ohio; he drew up the first bill regulating the consular service; he was on the committees to which were referred Hamilton's plans for funding the national debt and for the incorporation of a bank of the United States, both of which he vigorously seconded. Undoubtedly his most important single piece of work was done in connection with his chairmanship of the committee appointed to bring in a bill organizing the federal judiciary. "That the Judiciary Bill which came from this Committee was, to a large extent, drafted by Ellsworth is now well established" (Warren, post, p. 59). Sections 10 to 23 of the original draft bill are in his handwriting; Maclay of Pennsylvania, himself one of the committee, records that "this vile bill is a child of his, and he defends it with the care of a parent" (E. S. Maclay, The Journal of Willia1n Maclay, 1890, pp. 91-92); Madison also, in two different letters, assigns it to Ellsworth (Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, vol. IV, 1865, pp. 220- 21,428). All in all, his work in the Senate made him, as John Adams later said, "the firmest pillar of his [Washington's] whole administration" (C. F. Adams, The Works of John Adams, vol. X, 1856,p. II2).

Ellsworth was commissioned chief justice of the United States (March 4, 1796) after the Senate had refused to confirm the previous appointment of Rutledge, and after Cushing, the senior associate judge, had declined the honor. For about three years and a half he was actively engaged in the duties of his office, which at that time included the arduous task of riding the federal circuits. His short term of office, coupled with the fact that he was immediately followed by the great Marshall, has been advanced by some of his biographers as the reason for his failure to take a higher rank among the chief justices. The real reason would seem to lie elsewhere. Our available sources of information unite in presenting him as a great lawyer; but neither his reported opinions nor the weight of other evidence justify us in calling him a great judge. His decisions, neither many nor long as they have come down to us, are marked by strong common sense, but hardly by great legal learning. He himself seems to have been conscious of his lack of this latter quality, as also of the inadequacy of his previous training and preparation for his new position, and "he accordingly took a severe course of study and reading" (Brown, post, p. 242). He was primarily the advocate rather than the jurist, a champion of the cause he happened to be supporting. This characteristic, which undoubtedly contributed much to his success at the bar, and which showed to very great advantage in his work in the Congress, in the Convention, and in the Senate, could hardly be brought to bear in purely judicial business.

The last notable public service that Ellsworth performed was as commissioner to France in 1799-1800. The mission began inauspiciously, and resulted in no more than partial success. There was decided opposition to it at home because of the harsh treatment which France had recently accorded Pinckney and his associates. Ellsworth, even if he did not share the popular resentment, at least manifested no enthusiasm towards President Adams's new attempt to come to an understanding with France. Reluctantly, and merely "from the necessity of preventing a greater evil," he accepted his commission (February 1799); yet he dreaded the mission and did what he could to postpone it. Consequently it was not until November 3 that he and his colleague Willi am R. Davie [q. v. J left Newport on the frigate United States, to join William Vans Murray [q.v.] in France. After a boisterous passage of more than three weeks they put into Lisbon, rested there a fortnight, and then again set sail, only to be driven off the course by storms and obliged to land near Corunna in Spain. Thence they proceeded overland to Paris, which they did not reach until March 2, 1800. The hardships suffered by Ellsworth during these four months permanently affected his health (Geo. Gibbs, Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, 1846, II, 434). It was thought by some of his friends in America that his mind also had been impaired by his physical breakdown, and that this was the reason why no better terms were secured in the French convention (Ibid., pp. 460,461, 463). After protracted negotiations with Napoleon which lasted into October, the American ministers were obliged to accept an agreement which conformed to neither their earlier hopes nor their instructions. Ellsworth himself was far from satisfied with it, though he regarded it as sufficient in that it kept the United States out of a not improbable war with France (Ibid., p. 463). When Davie and Oliver Ellsworth, Jr., who had been his father's secretary at Paris, and who now bore the latter's resignation of his office of chief justice, left England for America toward the end of October, Ellsworth himself was unable to accompany them. Through the winter he remained in England, traveling by easy stages from pl ace to place, and making an ineffectual effort to regain his health. He left England in March, landed at Boston, where he rested for a few days, and then proceeded to his home in Windsor and, as far as national affairs were concerned, into retirement.

Timothy Dwight describes Ellsworth as "tall, dignified, and commanding" (Travels; in New England and New York, vol. I, 1821, p. 302). "He was particular as to his personal appearance, and never hurried a t his toil et" (H. R. Stiles, History and Genealogies of Ancient Windsor, vol. II, 1892,p.217). By the judgment of his fellows he was a good, and at times a brilliant, conversationalist; yet unlike almost all of his contemporaries in similar stations he was not given to voluminous correspondence. He had an insistent habit of talking to himself, even in the presence of others. His one vice was the taking of snuff, a practise to which he was greatly addicted. It is related by his daughter that "when he was more than ordinarily engaged in thinking, or in writing, he would take out his box at frequent intervals and go through the form of taking a pinch, and would then drop most of the snuff in little piles on the carpet near him. His family sometimes judged of the intensity and depth of his meditations by the number of these piles of snuff around his chair" (Ibid., p. 218). Naturally moderate and conservative, he nevertheless at times manifested a tenacity of purpose that bordered on obstinacy. Aaron Burr said of him, "If Ellsworth had happened to spell the name of the Deity with two d's, it would have taken the Senate three weeks to expunge the superfluous letter" (Brown, post, p. 225). Deeply religious, he was throughout his life not only active in the work of his own (Congregational) church, but he also kept up a lively intellectual interest in religious and theological questions, to, the study of which he turned more and more after his retirement. He had always been free from the bigotry of Puritan New England; his sufferings and illness did not make him an ascetic. In h is very last years, after he had "begun to die" as he wrote one of his friends, agriculture as well as theology occupied his mind, and he published regularly in the Connecticut Courant the "Farmer's Repository," a very practical column on agricultural topics. He was a politician as well as a statesman, and at times was not averse to using the methods of politicians to accomplish his purposes. It is on this basis that his seeming connection with an alleged plot to break up the Union can be explained (G. Hunt, Disunion Sentiment in Congress in 1794, 1905; Brown, post, pp. 228-- 30).

[In addition to the works already named, see Wm. G. Brown, The Life of Oliver Ellsworth (1905); G. Van Santvoord, Sketches of the Lives and Judicial Services of the Chief-Justices (1845); Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (3 vols., 1911); Charles Warren, "New Light on the History of the Federal Judiciary Act of 1789," in Harvard Law Review, November 1923. In the letters, diaries, autobiographies and other writings of many of the contemporary statesmen there is much scattered material on Ellsworth. A number of his own unpublished letters and papers are in existence, some in the New York Pub. Lib., and others in the possession of several of his descendants. A list of these descendants with their addresses will be found in A Memorial of the Opening of the Ellsworth Homestead, a booklet issued by the Connecticut D. A. R. in 1907. The printed decisions of Ellsworth are in Kirby, Connecticut Reports, and in Dallas, U.S. Reports.]

G. K.W.


EMBREE, Elihu, 1782-1820, Quaker, abolitionist (former slaveholder). Published anti-slavery newspaper, Manumission Intelligencer, in 1819 in Jonesboro, then The Emancipator, founded 1820.  These may have been the first American periodicals solely devoted to the anti-slavery cause.  Member of the Manumission Society of Tennessee.  Embree also supported racial equality. Opposed the admission of Missouri as a slave state.  (Drake, 1950, pp. 127-128; Dumond, 1961, pp. 95, 136, 166; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 36, 130, 276-277, 310, 571-572; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 7, p. 478)

EMBREE, ELIHU (November 11, 1782-December 4, 1820), Abolitionist, was the son of Thomas and Esther Embree, who removed from Pennsylvania about 1790 to Washington County in the territory that soon became the state of Tennessee. He and his brother, Elijah, were among the earliest iron manufacturers of this region, but unlike his brother, Elihu achieved no notable success in the business world. There was much of the idealist in him, and he became one of the early leaders of the anti-slavery movement. In eastern Tennessee, where he lived, as well as in neighboring communities of the southern Appalachian re g ion, hostility to the institution of slavery was strong. Thomas Embree, a Quaker minister, had addressed the people of Tennessee as early as. 1797 in advocacy of gradual Abolition (Knoxville Gazette, January 23, 1797). In 1815, under th e leadership of Charles Osborn and John Rankin, the Manumission Society of Tennessee was organized. A short time before this, Elihu Embree, who for some years had been a deist and a slaveowner, had embraced the Christian religion, freed his slaves, and joined the Society of Friends. He became a member of this Manumission Society. When Osborn and Rankin with other anti-slavery men left the slave states, Embree regretted their going and the consequent "loss of so much virtue from these slave states, which
held too little before." He determined to carry on the work in Tennessee and he succeeded to their leadership. In March 1819 he began the publication at Jonesboro of the Manumission Intelligencer. This weekly paper, a complete file of which seems not to be in existence, was probably the first periodical in the United States devoted wholly to the anti-slavery cause. In April 1820, Embree changed his publication to a monthly and its name to the Emancipator. Within a few months it had a subscription list of about two thousand; it was being "extensively circulated in the United States"; and its first two issues had to be reprinted for late subscribers (Knoxville Register, November 28, 1820). In its columns Embree took the position "that freedom is the inalienable right of all men." He replied to those who feared that racial equality would follow Abolition that he had "never been able to discover that the author of nature intended that one complexion of the human skin should stand higher in the scale of being, than another." In vigorous terms he condemned slavery and the slave-owner. He called upon the enlightened master voluntarily to set free his slaves. He memorialized the Tennessee legislature to abolish the institution of slavery, "a shame to any people." He denounced those states that sought to exclude free negroes from within their boundaries. When Missouri sought admission into the Union as a slave-state, "Not another foot of slave territory," was his reply. Although the Emancipator died with its young and militant editor, Benjamin Lundy's Genius of Universal Emancipation was in a sense its successor, and hostility to slavery continued in eastern Tennessee.


EMERSON, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882, author, poet, abolitionist. Wrote antislavery poetry. (Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 343-348)

EMERSON, RALPH WALDO (May 25, 1803-April 27, 1882), essayist, poet, was born in Boston of a line which on his mother's side ran back to the early eighteenth century through mercantile men--coopers, distillers-and holders of real estate, but which on his father's side can be traced through preachers to the first colonial generation. His father, William Emerson [q.v.], was descended from the Reverend Peter Bulkeley [q.v.], first minister of Concord, Massachusetts, who came from England in 1634. Bulkeley's granddaughter married Joseph Emerson whose father. Thomas, came from England in the ship Elizabeth Ann in 1635, and settled at Ipswich, Massachusetts. Edward, son of Joseph and Elizabeth (Bulkeley) Emerson, married Rebecca Waldo, and from this union came the Reverend Joseph Emerson of Malden, an industrious scholar who "prayed every night that none of his descendants might ever be rich." His wife was Mary Moody, daughter of the Reverend Samuel Moody, a man of heroic zeal, who went by the name of Father Moody of Agamenticus (Maine). Their son, the Reverend William Emerson of Concord, was a conspicuous patriot at the outbreak of the Revolution, dying as a chaplain near Rutland, Vermont, in 1777; he built the Old Manse at Concord. His son, William Emerson [q.v.], father of the poet, preached first at Harvard, Massachusetts, but went to Boston in 1799 as minister of the First Church. He had never been especially moved to preach, being possessed of literary ambitions and a certain "levity" which he said wove itself into the web of his whole life; but his son remembered him as a stern if kindly man, and his sermons seem not to have been especially latitudinarian. He loved letters; he polished his sermons for style; in Boston he edited a literary review of some pretensions and of no little distinction. His wife, the poet's mother, was Ruth Haskins of Boston, daughter of the merchant John Haskins, and a woman of pronounced piety -a trait which expressed itself at the same time in a lovely serenity and in an unrelieved severity.

Emerson in his boyhood was serious and somewhat withdrawn from the world of play. Disliked by many neighbor boys for his "lofty carriage of the head," he found sufficient entertainment in books and in the society of his family, where indeed he was often set down as frivolous. From the time he was eight the household maintained itself with difficulty, for in 181l his mother was left a widow with six children under ten, and the problem of rearing this brood was one of which both she and they were kept acutely conscious. Emerson was particularly attached to his brothers William, Edward Bliss, and Charles Chauncy, the two latter of whom were considered by relations of the family to be quite his equals in intellectual promise; and all four of them were deeply indebted hot only to their mother but to their aunt, Mary Moody Emerson [q.v.]. "Aunt Mary," a very frequent visitor at the Emersons', was fanatically devoted to the cause of her nephews' education. They were "born to be educated," she said; and her contribution to this process was one to which Ralph, at least, never tired of paying tribute. She combined with a formidable piety which savored of the old dogmatic days a penetrating critical and skeptical talent; positively overbearing when she expressed an opinion, she yet was eager that her nephews should be scholars, orators, and poets, and she knew how to stimulate their intelligences in those directions. She was a writer whose pungent style Emerson always admired. She was a person almost without a rival in her generation for force and picturesqueness. It is probably not fantastic to say that in her struggles to meet the old thought with the new she prepared her famous nephew for the part he was to play as creator and illuminator of a modern faith.

Emerson's education began before he was three, when he was sent to a dame school or nursery conducted by Mrs. Whitwell. A little later he became a pupil at Lawson Lyon's grammar school, and in 1813 he entered the Boston Latin School under Benjamin Apthorp Gould [q.v.], spending a part of each day at a private school where he was taught writing. In 1814, when the family was forced by high prices in Boston to take refuge under Dr. Ezra Ripley's roof in Concord, the boy had a taste of village teaching; but the next year he was taken back to Boston, where he spent two years in preparing himself for college. He entered Harvard in August 1817 as "president's freshman," or messenger, being paid for this service with free lodgings in the president's house. He also waited on table at the Commons and tutored in his spare time, and during the winter vacations acted as usher at his uncle Samuel Ripley's school in Waltham. As a student, during the four years he spent at Cambridge, he was by no means docile or regular. His reading was often independent of the requirements; he made no especial impression upon his contemporaries; and afterwards he was to go on record as believing that college had done little for him on the whole. Yet he did draw a good deal from three of his professors, George Ticknor in modern languages, Edward Everett in Greek, and Edward Tyrrel Channing [qq.v.] in English composition. He was an enthusiastic member of a literary society, the Pythologian Club; from the year 1820, his third at Harvard, dates the earliest extant volume of those journals which were to be his constant companions for more than fifty years and into which was to go all the literary material of his lectures, essays, and published books. The Journals, his best biography whether at this period or in the period of his prime, show him now as a youth of several minds: still very much under the influence of his Aunt Mary, whose letter she copies carefully as if they contained a kind of gospel, yet excited al so by new ideas and phrases met in a wide variety of books, and already mortified by religious doubt. If Harvard did little for Emerson, it was at least there that his mind commenced its characteristic and beautiful activity.

Graduating as class poet in 1821, he saw before him a future of school-teaching and at last, in view of what his ancestors had been, of preaching. But his literary ambitions were very strong; he had been seized with a passion for eloquence, and it seemed to him not impossible that he might one day be a professor of rhetoric and elocution. He began, however, merely as an assistant to his older brother William, who, at his mother's house, conducted a finishing school for the young ladies of Boston. After two years he took sole charge, maintaining the school for another year and a half. It was an unhappy time for him. He did not consider himself a success at teaching, though some of his pupils did; his journals are filled with expressions of discouragement and self-doubt; and he seems already -to have had misgivings on the score of his call-whenever it should come-as a leader of the faithful. When his family moved in 1823 to Canterbury, four miles from Boston, he experienced relief in the neighborhood of nature and wrote the poem which begins, " Goodbye, proud world! I'm going home." There in 1825 he closed his school, having earned a considerable sum of money and come to a resolution to attempt the ministry, and went to Cambridge to enter the Divinity School.

He had indulged in enough introspection to know that he would never write "a Butler's 'Analogy' or an 'Essay' of Hume." "My reasoning faculty," he told himself in his journal, "is weak." What he did see in himself was a certain strength of " moral imagination." This, combined with such oratorical powers as he could develop, would make his life, he hoped, an effective instrument. As for the dog mas he would be expected to defend, he had more doubts than ever now, but went ahead-to be an orator if nothing el se. It is perhaps significant that his studies at the Divinity School were desultory. He had been there only a month when poor health forced him to leave and do work on a farm in Newton; and during the next year and a half the necessity of teaching school, joined with attacks of rheumatism and lung trouble, prevented him from being more than a listener at the lectures. Nevertheless he was "approbated to preach" by the Middlesex Association of Ministers on October 10, 1826, and delivered his first sermon five days after at Waltham. His health then grew worse again, so that he was forced to spend the ensuing winter in Georgia and Florida. Home in the spring, he settled himself for a year in Divinity Hall, whence he issued occasionally to preach in various churches of Boston and the towns of New England. While so employed at Concord, New Hampshire, in December 1827, he met Ellen Louisa Tucker. She was the daughter of Beza Tucker, a Boston merchant, and seventeen years old; "beautiful by universal consent," Emerson told one of his brothers, but already touched with consumption. A year later he was engaged to marry her.

In March 1829 he was elected by the Second Church of Boston to serve as colleague of the Reverend Henry Ware. Within a few weeks he assumed full charge, and on September 30 he married Ellen Tucker, whose death from consumption seventeen months later (February 8, 1831) closed what had been his tenderest and most loving relationship to date, the relationships with his brothers only excepted. Meanwhile he was making a success of his ministry, so soon nevertheless to end. His sermons were distinguished by the sincerity and directness of their language and by a content, more ethical than theological, which charmed the younger members of the congregation. Many of the ideas which in the Essays were destined to stir and shock the world were latent here, though as yet not radically presented. He remained on excellent terms with the church until the summer of 1832, when he broke with it, and with the ministry in general, over the Lord's Supper, which he had decided he could administer only if the bread and wine were left out. When the church could not agree, he retired from Boston to think the matter over, returned to preach a sermon in which he made his position once more clear, and offered his resignation. After much debate and with great reluctance it was accepted; and Emerson was free again to indulge in dreams of literary greatness. As for the ministry, he would undoubtedly have abandoned it before long on general principles, though general principles did not enter into the discussion he had carried on so gently with his church. He had been uncomfortable over prayer; and he had recently remarked in his journals: "I have sometimes thought that in order to be a good minister it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated."

Emerson was now in his thirtieth year, and still far from mature. But the decade which followed saw him come to his full powers and into an appreciable measure of the fame which he was to enjoy in his prime. His first move, and one which was to be of incalculable advantage to his mind, was in the direction of Europe. Later on he was to make a great deal of Concord, insisting that it was a sufficient universe in itself; and indeed much of his force he owes to his proud provincialism; but the taste which he now got of an older continent was always vivid upon his tongue. His health threatening to give way once more, he sailed in December 1832 for the Mediterranean, landing at Malta and making soon for Italy, where at Rome he met a friend of Carlyle and secured a letter of introduction to him. He had recently been struck by some unsigned articles in the British reviews, and had taken the pains to discover the name of their author; the destination of all his wanderings, then, was Scotland, and his fo11dest hope was that he might have conversation with this new mystic who drew so much wisdom from German sources. In Florence he saw Walter Savage Landor; in London, which he reached through Paris, he saw Coleridge and John Stuart Mill; in Scotland, whither he hurried in the summer of 1833, he found Carlyle at last, and spent an afternoon and night at Craigenputtock. "Next morning," said Carlyle, "I saw him go up the hill; I didn't go with him to see him descend. I preferred to watch him mount and vanish like an angel." Carlyle was neither the first man nor the last to feel something angelic in the nature of Emerson and to hit upon such language for describing him; but he yielded to no one in the quality of his devotion. A correspondence lasting almost forty years sprang out of this encounter between men so different in most re spects that they filled hundreds of pages in explaining themselves to each other, yet so much alike in their passionate search for new truths that each could always rest secure in the consciousness of an audience at least of one across the Atlantic. When Emerson returned to Boston after a visit to Wordsworth in the Lake Country he had seen the three persons in Europe he most wanted to see. Through Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth, and ultimately therefore through German idealism, he had arrived in his reading at the set of ideas he would promulgate if the opportunity ever occurred. Plato, the Neo-Platonists, the Sacred Books of the East, and his own native culture had made their several contributions also; but it was these contemporaries who had awakened him. Now he had seen them with his own eyes, had discovered them to be after all not hopelessly beyond the reach of his emulation, and had gained from them the confidence to go ahead on local ground.

His education was now in one sense complete. He had only to absorb and apply the ideas with which he had become acquainted; he had only to Jive henceforth in constant companionship with the authors whom he had found to be his affinities. In Goethe and the German idealists, and in the English poets and essayists through whom the transcendental point of view was achieving its expression, Emerson like the rest of his generation discovered a refreshing, an apparently inexhaustible source of ideas stimulating both to the reason and to the imagination. Unitarianism had merely opened the New England mind and removed from it some of its more rigorous dogmas; the republicanism of the last century, stemming from French roots, had merely swept clear the social ground for future speculation and experiment; the line of British philosophers which ran back through Hume, Berkeley, and Locke had merely made skepticism possible. Emerson grew up in the Unitarian fold, breathed republicanism as his native air, and admired both Hume and Berkeley; but an essential thing remained to be done, and that was to affirm in new accents the beauty, the dignity, and the infinite importance of the human soul, to announce under what sign man should conquer the great world that had been emptied for him to enter.

His equipment for this task came to him from his reading and from the relationship he began now quite deliberately to cultivate with nature. He had expressed his indebtedness to many authors, and the Journals by themselves attest the breadth of his literary experience; but there were certain books to which he was always to return. Montaigne, whom he read in Cotton's translation, he loved both early and late, valuing him for his candor, his calm, and for that aspect of his skepticism which made him not so much a believer in nothing as a believer in all things-an insatiable seeker after life in each of its innumerable forms. For Emerson too was an eager observer of the world; if he was to deny the ultimate importance of appearances, he was to insist also upon the value of knowing appearances in themselves. Only upon the clear-sighted vision of such a skeptic as Montaigne could any significant idealism be reared. So with Plato, whom Emerson appreciated, as Pater did later, for the accuracy and sanity with which he had described the very world he seemed to deny. The dualism of Plato and the doctrine of ideas exercised of course an incalculable influence on Emerson's idealism; but Emerson put an equal estimate upon Plato's understanding of men, and he never tired of praising his master for the realism of his style, a quality which had also endeared Montaigne to him. A third writer, Swedenborg, he read with a certain caution because of the theology there, but with continued excitement because in Swedenborg he found a vocabulary and a procedure which fitted the direction of his own exploring thought. From Swedenborg he learned to speak naturally of "forms" and "correspondences," to see man always at the center of nature, and to work at the problem of relating man's mind to the bewildering pageant of nature's phenomena. From Swedenborg and others, incidentally, he seems to have got the notion of forms ascending spirally through degrees which some have taken as anticipating the theory of evolution.

His reading of Swedenborg had given him a metaphysical approach to nature. His visit to Wordsworth, whose poetry he had known long before, confirmed him in his feeling that he should establish an original relationship with the visible universe. The bookish mystic who returned from Europe was ever afterward to spend an allotted portion ·of each day in the woods or along the rivers of his native province; and he was by slow degrees, opening his eyes upon beauties strange and new, to effect a marri age between his thoughts and his sensations, between his reading and his experience, which would issue at last in an exciting doctrine communicable-since the soul is identical in all men-to his contemporaries. In the meantime, however, there was the problem of a profession.

He resumed his preaching for a while. Every Sunday during the next four years he occupied some pulpit or other, and as late as 1847 he still preached occasionally. But now also he commenced his lifework as a lecturer, speaking on natural history before the Mechanics' Institute of Boston, where he proceeded to declare the moral and psychological correspondences between Nature and the mind of man. In 1835 he gave six lectures on biography in Boston, following them up in the winter with a series of t en on English literature. This was the first of five annual series which he delivered in the metropolis before audiences that grew more enthusiastic with every hearing. The next year the subject was "The Philosophy of History"; then "Human Culture"; then "Human Life"; and then "The Present Age." The material for these addresses came out of the Journals, which now reach the highest point of their interest; and the addresses in turn furnished the basis for the text of the Essays, to be published a few years later. Emerson followed the most capricious side of his genius when he came to the act of composition. The Journals would receive his thoughts as they occurred to him; the lectures would consist of these thoughts collected in any order that seemed to him most effective at the moment; the Essays were- often very little altered from the lectures, though paragraphs and pages might be transferred at will from one context to another. It was never, indeed, the order that counted with his audience. The sentences by themselves were " thunderbolts," each one striking in its proper place as if no other sentence had ever been spoken. Emerson's auditors, like his readers later, grew accustomed to a succession of thrills.

His private life was receiving its permanent outline during these years. The deaths of his brothers Edward and Charles in 1834 and 1836 removed his two most intimate relations; but in 1834 he went with his mother to live in Concord, the seat of his forefathers and thereafter always to be his home; and here in September 1835 he brought a second wife, Lydia Jackson of Plymouth-renamed by him, for purposes of euphony, Lidian Emerson. The house he bought for her on the edge of the village was his until he died; here he quickly settled into the daily routine writing in the morning, walking alone in the afternoon, and talking with friends or with the family in the evening-which nothing but lecture tours could interrupt. Here he made new friends: Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott ("He excites me, and I think freely"), Henry David Thoreau, Jones Very, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Here Thoreau lived a s a kind of housekeeper from 1841 to 1843, and again in 1847 while Emerson traveled in Europe. Here Emerson did the better part of his reading-often a random exercise, " for the lustres " of style and apothegm rather than for system s of thought-and here he learned the secret of his writing: strict attention to every fancy or speculation as it ca me along, and quick determination to set it down on a page of his journal, where an index would enable him to find it as soon as he needed it. In this house was born in 1836 the first of his four children, Waldo, the beloved boy whose death five years later he was to mourn in one of his best poems, "Threnody." Emerson loved children, as he was loved by them, and gave much time to his own; he recorded their saying s, and he did not at all object to their presence in his study while he worked.

The year 1836 was notable for a number of reasons. In this year Emerson saw Carlyle's Sartor Resartus through an American edition and published his own first book, Nature, on which he had been at work for at least three years. It was far from a popular success, but it was effective where it should have been, in the minds of those who were beginning to think as Emerson did. It was both welcomed and damned as the first clear blast on New England's Transcendental horn. The time had come, said Emerson, to begin life over. "Why should not we enjoy an original relation to the universe? ... There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship." The soul of man, prime as it is in the universe and possessed of powers through which God may immediately be known, still depends upon nature for its nourishment. Nature, being the dress God wears, or the shadow He casts upon the senses, is indispensable for several reasons: it has commodity, or use; it has beauty, which is the cause of delight and the origin of art; it has language, since facts as symbols speak more eloquently to man than his own words do; and it has discipline, because nature is always moral-and so, in the course of man's efforts to understand and conform, teaches and improves him. All this in explanation of Emerson's preliminary announcement that a new world was possible to man, and of his demand that it be created out of man's awakened instincts. The demand, indeed, had already been made by a group of persons, including Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and James Freeman Clarke, which Emerson had helped to form earlier in 1836, and which continued to meet for discussion until 1843. Its members were called Transcendentalists, and though Emerson never accepted the term as adequately descriptive of himself, he defended those who deserved it and was always ready to associate the word with all that was fruitful and forward in contemporary speculation.

In August of the following year he had an opportunity to apply the ideas of Nature in a strategic place. Asked to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard, he responded with The American Scholar, delivered in Cambridge August 31, 1837, which James Russell Lowell considered "an event without any former parallel in our literary annals," and which Oliver Wendell Holmes called "our intellectual Declaration of Independence." It was nothing more than a translation of Nature into specific terms; let us, he said, as scholars establish an original relation to the universe of philosophy and the arts; let us have done with Europe and all dead cultures, let us explore the possibilities of our own new world. This closing injunction was preceded by an analysis of the scholar's function. The scholar is Man Thinking; his duty is first to know nature, whence all power and wisdom come, then to make himself one with the mind of the past through books, and at last to express himself in action. He should trust himself, for the world is to be asked to trust him. " He is the world's eye. He is the world's heart." And performing as he does the "highest function of human nature," he is to sustain himself at an altitude, never deferring to "the popular cry" but remaining both an aristocrat of the soul and a servant to good men. Hardly had the stir over this address died down when Emerson delivered a heavier shot in his discourse before the graduating class of Divinity College, Cambridge, July 15, 1838. For now it was as if he had decided to clear his mind once for all of any remaining conviction that the Church as constituted was the place for scholars and prophets. He declared it dead and helpless, and called upon the future ministers who sat before him to consider what kind of awakening they must undergo before they could hope to touch the living world. He granted the supreme importance of the religious sentiment; he even granted the importance of the Church, with its precious institutions of Sabbath and pulpit; and he admitted that among the clergy of the day there were exceptions to the generalization he had been forced to make. But, he said, it remained in general true that modern Christianity, by neglecting the soul, by attempting merely to communicate an old revelation, by refraining from exploration of the spiritual resources now as always existing in the moral constitution of man, had ceased to do its proper work. He counseled the graduating class to seek a new revelation proper to the times, to cultivate solitude and self-reliance, and to understand that only in the soul was redemption ever to be sought. The general ideas which underlay the speech, together with its indictment of the ministerial profess ion, produced naturally a shock. Emerson was attacked in the press, and though liberal Christians did not definitely attack him they agreed that they could never go with him
so far. Emerson, unhappy at being the center of a storm, fear ed for a time that his career both in the church and in the lyceum was finished. It was not, however, as the attendance at his next series of Boston lectures demonstrated. People came to hear him even when they did not expect to agree. At Harvard, however, he was persona non grata for almost thirty years.

The group of thinkers and talkers which Emerson had helped to bring together in 1836 had planned a magazine, to be called, perhaps, The Transcendentalist. This plan was never realized; but in July 1840, partly as a result of the first effort, The Dial commenced publication with Margaret Fuller as literary editor and Emerson as one of the star contributors. The Dial continued for two years to express the "highest" thought of New England, running sometimes into extravagances of utterance which earned the ridicule of those untouched by Transcendentalism and the passion for reform. It was a day of reforms, as Emerson himself has humorously recorded, and The Dial was an open forum for their promulgation. Emerson's own interest was in the poetry and metaphysics which found their way into. its pages rather than in the "practical" aspects of its program; and when at the end of its second year he somewhat reluctantly assumed the editorship he threw his weight upon the philosophical side of the balance. The Dial, however, had only two more years to live. When it died in 1844 it was set down as a failure, if a magnificent one. Emerson was perhaps more intimately concerned with a new group he was organizing at about this time for the purposes of conversation, a group which anticipated the Concord School of Philosophy in its aims and conduct.

Around the year 1840 Emerson was engaged in a struggle to define his position with reference to the reforms which had sprung up on all sides. His instinct was to place himself above them, in a region where the principle of compensation would render all such discussion premature and futile; but in spite of himself he was drawn into the arena from time to time. The largest question, of course, was slavery. At first he reminded his friends that this reform like all others must come from within the individuals affected; the negro must elevate himself, and Emerson doubted his capacity to do so. Before long, however, he was addressing meetings of Abolitionists-not always with enough passion, the zealots said. In 1838 he wrote a letter of protest to President Van Buren on the occasion of the removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia. Reforms nearer home he was never quite able to take seriously. He attended meetings at which Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and others laid the plans for Brook Farm in 1840, but failed to catch fire. So did he keep hands off of "Fruitlands," projected by Alcott and some English friends a little later. He did attempt a Jew reforms within his own household; he ennobled himself with manual labor for a while; he invited the maids to eat with the family, and was perhaps not sorry when they refused; he took up vegetarianism until he found it of little use. In general it may be said that his attitude towards the schemes so abundant in his clay for making over the visible world was the attitude of a poet and philosopher; his game was the intellect, and his goal the triumph of invisible-though none the le ss potent-ideas.

His fame as a lecturer grew as he widened his operations year by year. This was the only way he could make money, and expenses were always increasing. His trips extended now into the West, and the physical effort of traveling was more and more felt. He complained of the "long, weary absences" from his house, his books, his children. What was worse, he suspected the profession. "I live in a balcony or on the street," he wrote; and there were days when he dismissed the whole business as a form of vulgarization. "Are not lectures a kind of Peter Parley's story of Uncle Plato, and a puppet show of the Eleusinian mysteries ?" Yet there were few among his listeners to complain that he talked down to them. The sentences came forth in the same order and with the same emphasis that soon were to distinguish the printed Essays. The tall, slender man with th e brown hair, the intensely blue eyes, the aquiline, angelic features and the abstracted, impersonal smile stood almost motionless as he spoke; and he spoke a doctrine which, however flattering to mankind, it took the closest attention to understand.

This now familiar doctrine, amplified from Nature and applied to the concerns of the individual soul, received its final form in the first Volume of Essays, published in the spring of 1841. The second volume, appearing three years later, combined with the first to consolidate a reputation which, until then local or personal, soon spread through Europe and America. Matthew Arnold has testified to the effect of the Essays at Oxford in the forties; and there is no end of testimony that in mid-century America Emerson was felt to be the bringer of a new religion which somehow squared with the times even while it supplied a method for criticizing them. The young especially were his devoted readers, and from this period on his house in Concord was to be the destination of ardent pilgrims. He himself did not rest. In 1845 he delivered a course of lectures on "Representative Men." In 1846, after persistent requests by his publish er, he issued a volume of Poems (published in time for Christmas, but dated 1847), to be followed twenty-one years later by a second volume, May-Day and Other Pieces. He had always thought verse to be the most perfect mode of utterance, and he had always referred to himself as a poet. Now he offered evidence whereby he might be judged. The judgment has taken some time to become mature, but it is no longer to be doubted that in a few of his pieces he reached a mark which only Whitman, Poe, and Emily Dickinson reached in America during the nineteenth century. Many of his poems are bad; all but two or three are imperfect; but at his happiest he managed a high, rapturous, piercing, and melodious note the only parallel to which is the note of his best prose. It is intellectual poetry that he writes; he moves most naturally in the gnomic rhythm, being all but unsurpassed in the shining force which he can give to an aphoristic couplet, a prophetic quatrain. At its best, however, it is intellectual poetry burning with what he called "aromatic fire." It is the work of a passionate intellect saturated in Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and the lyric masters of the seventeenth century. "Threnody" is one of the most moving elegies in the English language; "Brahma" is perfect in the metaphysical mode; "The Problem," "The Rhodora," "Woodnotes," "Give All to Love," "Bacchus," "Concord Hymn," "Terminus," and the "mottoes" prefixed to the Essays are all in their various ways adequate to express the extraordinary, the demonic energy of the man.

In 1847 he went to lecture in England and found himself famous there. His addresses were particularly successful; but he valued more than this success the opportunity to talk once more with the Carlyles, whom he visited in Chelsea. After a round of social events which made him the acquaintance of Sir William Hamilton, De Quincey, Harriet Martineau, Macaulay, Lyell, Thackeray, Dickens, Clough, Tennyson, Froude, and many other notables, he went on to Paris in 1848, returning thence to America with a better opinion of the French than he had had before but with an especial admiration for most things English. His lectures on England the ensuing season were the basis of English Traits, published eight years later (1856). The book is full of praise for an old, a rich, and an essentially liberal, humane people. We could not do without English achievements, says Emerson, in letters, religion, government, and trade. Yet he is not sparing in his criticism of a certain contemporary inertia-something he had learned about from Carlyle-which expressed itself in spiritual sluggishness and in a pervasive materialism. He is subtle, sensitive, and often accurate in his appraisal of the national mind; and always in the book he is easily readable. He now extended the circuit of his lectures as far west as the Mississippi; for twenty years he was to make a western tour every winter, speaking oftentimes for as little as ten dollars an evening, and facing audiences in Illinois, for instance, which walked out of the hall after ten minutes of talk which they did not find funny enough. Humor was everywhere in his discourse, but not in the form of jokes. On the whole he was respected wherever he went, and always there was a devoted band of listeners; but the work was wearing. Even this early he talked of growing old, though the full confession still waited to be made. Meanwhile he was giving lectures, on "The Conduct of Life," which were among the most popular and effective he ever gave, and which when published under the same title in 1860 were declared by Carlyle to be the best of all his works.

In 1849 he reprinted Nature together with a collection of Addresses and Lectures. In 1850 appeared Representative Men, and the next year he made a contribution to some Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, recently dead by drowning off Fire Island. In 1855 he was sent a copy of Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman of New York. His letter to Whitman acknowledging the volume and greeting this strange, new poet "at the beginning of a great career" has been cited as proof of his extraordinary receptiveness to talent wherever he found it. Certainly the poems of Whitman were different from his own, and poles away from his chaste if radical temperament; certainly it was a sign of his own genius that he could recognize that of the younger man, and a sign too of his character that he could be 'so generous. The most interesting thing about the incident, however, is the fact that Whitman sent Emerson the book; it might have been expected that the Homer of Manhattan would look askance at the Plato of Concord. Whitman, as a matter of fact, was one of those numerous men of the mid-century who fell under Emerson's influence and remained under it while they lived. It was through reading the Essays that he came into possession of his own secret, that he grew confident of his own powers. Emerson's disciples, Thoreau among them, were like that-not disciples at all. Emerson indeed rejected the word, saying that he would bring men not to him but to themselves.

Society and Solitude, published in 1870, had all been written before 1860, but the chief occupation of Emerson's mind during the fifties was politics. He had protested with other men of Massachusetts against the annexation of Texas and the Fugitive-Slave Law; n0w his Journals were filled with comment upon the great issue which was dividing the country. In 1856 he spoke at Concord concerning Brooks's assault on Sumner in the Senate. As the war in Kansas took on ominous proportions he was one of those who advocated sending arms in support of the anti-slavery faction, and when John Brown arrived at Concord in 1857 Emerson became one of his champions. He made a number of anti-slavery speeches which drew hisses from the crowd, and once he was roared down, but his blood for once was up, and he did not care. When the Civil War began he remarked: "Sometimes gunpowder smells good." When he went to lecture at Washington in 1862 he was pleased to be able to discuss the progress of the war with Lincoln, Seward, and the rest.

In the years immediately preceding the war Emerson had formed about him a new group of men, or rather a group with a new name. The Saturday Club, which grew out of a habit he had of meeting certain friends in Boston for occasional dinners, soon flourished as a literary association; at its monthly gatherings he was to take comfort as he got older in the companionship of Longfellow, Hawthorne, Motley, Dana, Agassiz, Holmes, Lowell, and others. He was also to derive a peculiar pleasure from the Adirondack Club, whose members went on outings with him among the mountains he so loved to praise. The impression would be justified that he was a particularly social man. Such, however, was not the case; or at any rate he was social with a difference. All who knew him agreed that he was charming, but his charm still expressed itself at a certain distance. In his Journals are many complaints of his own "coldness." The term seems to have been an exaggeration; yet for him it did well enough as a description of his serenely self-reliant temper, a temper nourished in solitude and disciplined by contemplation. Eager as he was for conversation, he himself often supplied less of it than did his hearers; he talked slowly and sometimes with difficulty, and he disliked to laugh.

In 1866 he read to his son Edward Waldo a poem he had written called "Terminus":

It is time to be old,
To take in sail.
The god of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds
And said: "No more!
No farther shoot
Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.
Fancy departs: no more invent;
Contract thy firmament
To compass of a tent."

He had become aware that his original effort was over and his instinct, as usual, was right. After 1866 he did nothing that was strictly or even partly new, though he kept on with his lecturing and in some measure with his writing. Harvard at this late date signified her reconciliation with him by giving him the honorary degree of LL.D. (1866); in 1867 he was invited to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration there; and in 1870, being asked to offer a course of academic lectures, he eagerly responded with a series on "Natural History of Intellect," a subject which had long interested him and which, since it concerned the problem of connecting thoughts with things, was only another form of the one subject he had dealt with from the beginning.

Tired from this and other exertions, Emerson was taken in 1871 for a six weeks' outing in California, a band of friends ushering him there in a private Pullman. He was delighted and overawed; yet young John Muir the naturalist, living in a cabin in the mountains, saw Emerson and decided that he must be only the ghost of his former self. He was imperturbably silent, and at times seemed scarcely to know where he was. From this time on the decline in his powers was regular if not rapid. Outwardly calm and smiling, inwardly he grew blank; it became more and more difficult for him to find the words he needed; in conversation he would forget the names not only of persons but of things, so that he had to paraphrase and pantomime-a fork would be asked for with a gesture of the hand, and an umbrella would be called "the thing that strangers take away." He still lectured or read from old manuscripts but one of his young worshippers, John Burroughs, going with Walt Whitman to hear the great man speak at Baltimore in 1872, wrote afterwards to a friend: "Nothing can be more irrelevant or pitiful than those lectures he is now delivering." His literary work henceforth was of less than the first importance. In 1870 he had written the introduction for a new edition of Plutarch's Morals; in 1874 he published an anthology, called Parnassus, of the poems in English to which he was most attached; and in 1876 came out one more collection of essays, Letters and Social Aims, but only after James Elliot Cabot had been called in to solve the muddle of the manuscripts.

In July 1872 he suffered a blow in the burning of his house at Concord. James Russell Lowell and other friends contributed $17,000 to a fund that would make good. the loss and give the old poet a long-needed vacation from  lecturing. He sailed soon for Europe, where now for the last time he saw Carlyle and where he met Hermann Grimm, Taine, Turgenev, Browning, Max Muller, Jowett, and Ruskin. After he had satisfied an old desire to see the Valley of the Nile he returned in 1873 to Concord, where as the bells of the village rang welcome he was met at the station by townspeople and schoolchildren who escorted him under a triumphal arch of flowers to his house; in his absence it had been completely restored. The rest of his life passed tranquilly at home. He read occasional addresses to audiences which remembered the former man rather than attended to this one; with the assistance of Cabot he prepared two further volumes for the press; but in general he slid into a serene and dignified senility. At the grave of Longfellow in March 1882, he could not remember the name of the man who was being buried. A few weeks later he himself was stricken with pneumonia, and when he died in April he was buried near Thoreau, his brilliant and independent pupil, who had preceded him in death by twenty years.

A series of posthumous volumes completed the publication of Emerson's writings. His correspondence with Carlyle was edited a year after his death by Charles Eliot Norton. Lectures and Biographical Sketches appeared in 1884, Miscellanies in the same year, and Natural History of Intellect in 1893. His correspondence with John Sterling, Carlyle's friend, came out in 1897; Letters from Ralph Waldo Emerson to a Friend (Samuel Gray Ward), in 1899; Correspondence between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Hermann Grimm, in 1903; and Records of a Lifelong Friendship, his correspondence with William Henry Furness, in 1910. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Centenary Edition, 1903-04), based upon the Riverside Edition of 1883-93, left nothing to be desired except the Journals; these appeared in ten volumes between 1909 and 1914.

Emerson's fame both at home and abroad rests securely upon the fact that he had something of permanent importance to say, and that he said it with a beautiful freshness which does not permit his best pages to grow old. His Transcendental excesses are easily forgotten, but it is not possible to forget his manner of announcing that men are exalted creatures, that instinct is to be obeyed, and that the soul is a sensible reality. Let men but stand erect and " go alone," he said, and they can possess the universe. With all his idealism, he emerges from the cloud of serious thinkers who surrounded him in New England by virtue of a durable style, a gift of observation, and a sense of humor. His style is at its best not alone in the Essays, Representative Men, and certain chapters of Nature; it rises to perhaps its finest height in the concluding paragraph of the chapter on "Illusions" in The Conduct of Life, and it makes its sudden appearance in many other places. His ability to understand and describe people is seen in such pieces of contemporary history as Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England, in English Traits, and in the biographical sketches he left of Thoreau and his Aunt Mary. His sense of humor is almost everywhere present, informing, refining, and enlightening his utterance and revealing itself if in no other way through an inspired choice of homely words. He is not accepted as a philosopher by the more rigorous members of the profession; yet no one denies him power and permanence as an author of some sort, though Matthew Arnold, lecturing on him in America after his death, sought to prove that he had missed being among the greatest men of letters. Arnold's strictures passed over the fact of Emerson's peculiar effectiveness in prose; and he did the poems also an injustice. The best of them are among the best, the most electrical, in modern English. It remains to be said that the impact of his shining, energizing personality is still strong. Few Americans have been more picturesque; none holds a s91ider position in the history of American life.

[A Bibliography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by Geo. Willis Cooke, is comprehensive as far down as it comes (1908); for later publications see the bibliography by H. R. Steeves in the Cambridge History of American Lit., vol. I (1917), and the several annual bibliographies of American literature. The fullest and best biography is the Memoir in two volumes by Emerson's literary executor, Jas. Elliot Cabot (1887). This should be supplemented by Edward Waldo Emerson's Emerson in Concord (1 889), the most intimate of all the accounts. Biographies by other contemporaries and acquaintances are : Geo. Willis Cooke, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1881); Alexander Ireland, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1882), dealing principally with Emerson in England; Moncure D. Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad (1882); Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Men of Letters Series, 1884); and The Genius and Character of Emerson; Lectures at the Concord School of Philosophy (1885), ed. by F. B. Sanborn. David Greene Haskins, Ralph Waldo Emerson: His Maternal Ancestors (1887), throws light upon an often neglected aspect of Emerson's origins. The Journals (10 vols., 1909-14) are indispensable as autobiography; the best biography based upon full knowledge of them is by 0. W. Firkins (1915). The most adequate treatments by European authors are: M. Dugard, Ralph Waldo Emerson: Sa Vie et son OEuvre (Paris, 1907) and Paul Sakmann, Emerson's Geisteswelt (Stuttgart, 1927). His books have been translated into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, and the Scandinavian languages.]

M. V-D.


ENDICOTT, William, 1809 – 1881, abolitionist, of Danvers, Massachusetts, he wrote often for abolition papers. A lineal descendant of John Endecott, the first and longest-serving Governor of Massachusetts, he pursued the craft of morocco dressing, but left it to follow humanitarian pursuits.  In 1831, he was on a ship that was shipwrecked off the Fiji Islands, but miraculously, he survived to write a short book about it published 42 years after his death, called “Wrecked among Cannibals in the Fijis,” describing the cannibalistic acts he witnessed firsthand.  When he returned from Fiji, he became an inspector at the Salem Courthouse, where he worked until his death in 1881. (Letters of William Lloyd Garrison: No Union with the Slaveholders, 1841-1849, page 316; Alfred P. Putnam, “History of the Antislavery Movement in Danvers,” Danvers Historical Collections, 30:22-23, 1942.)


ENDICOTT, William, 1826-1914, abolitionist, of Beverly, Massachusetts, financial manager for abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison.  Also a descendant of Governor John Endecott, and the son of a respectable dry goods merchant in Beverly, he could not attend college for health reasons and chose instead a business career.   He became a wealthy merchant, known as an innovator in department-store-style merchandising and he developed extensive connections with prominent Bostonians.  As his wealth grew, he served as a trustee and/or treasurer of many of Boston’s financial, cultural, and charitable institutions.  He also took active interest in politics, local and national, which included participating in efforts to keep Kansas free of slavery, lending money to William Lloyd Garrison, taking care of Garrison’s financial affairs, and serving on a committee to create in 1885 the famous statue of Garrison that is on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue Mall in Boston’s Back Bay. (“With Eclat: the Boston Athenaeum and the Origin of the Museum of Fine Arts,” Hina Hirayama, Google E-book, p.168,)


ENGLISH, James Edward, 1812-1890, statesman, businessman.  Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Connecticut 1861-1865 as War Democrat.  Governor of Connecticut, 1867-1870.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery (Appletons’, 1888, Vol. II, p. 358; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 165; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 7, p. 527; Congressional Globe)

ENGLISH, JAMES EDWARD (March 13, 1812-March 2, 1890), manufacturer, representative, and senator, governor of Connecticut, was born in New Haven, one of a family of nine children. His father, James English, was a shipowner, and had been a customs officer under President Jefferson. His mother, Nancy Griswold, came of a family prominent in Connecticut local history. At the age of eleven, James Edward was bound out to a farmer in Bethlehem, Connecticut, where he worked two and a half years. After this experience he was sent for two years to a private school, and then was apprenticed to Atwater Treat, a carpenter in New Haven. Under the latter's guidance, he became a designer and contractor. On reaching the age of twenty-three, with Harmonious M. Welch, he established a lumber company, English & Welch, in New Haven. He proved to be a successful business man and made money rapidly. With his growing capital he bought the Jerome Clock Company, originally of Bristol, Connecticut. The company was later merged with the New Haven Clock Company. English also became interested in real estate and banking. His affairs prospered so consistently that by middle life he was one of the richest men in the state. On January 25, 1837, he married Caroline Augusta Fowler of New Haven. She died in 1874, and some years later, October 7, 1885, he took as his second wife, Anna R. Morris of New York. He was chosen representative to the Connecticut Assembly in 1855, and state senator in 1856 and 1858. In 1861 he was elected to Congress, where he entered the group of "War Democrats" supporting the Lincoln Administration. He spoke but few times in the House, and his remarks upon those occasions were quite brief. In 1862 he opposed the issue of legal tender notes, preferring to have the government raise money by taxation (Congressional Globe, 37 Congress, 2 Sess., p. 887). During 1863 he spoke occasionally on tariff matters, to secure terms favorable to Connecticut brass and clock manufacturing interests (Ibid., 37 Congress, 3 Sess., pp. 1317, 1320). In 1864-65 he was one of the few Democrats to support the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. He became governor of Connecticut in 1867, was reelected in 1868, and again in 1870. Perhaps his most outstanding policy as governor was a plan for local option, to give individual towns in the state the right to decide the liquor question for themselves. In the National Democratic Convention of 1868 English received some consideration as a candidate for the presidency. In 1875 he was appointed by Governor Ingersoll to fill a vacancy in the Senate caused by the death of Orris S. Ferry. Though in politics he professed to be a Democrat of the Jeffersonian type, in reality he was an independent, voting as circumstances seemed to direct, and striving neither for office nor private advancement. He was, however, more business man than politician. Leaving the Senate in the spring of 1876, he devoted the latte r part of his life to his private business in and about New Haven. He was a large stockholder in several important companies, such as the New Haven Clock Company, and the Bristol Brass Company. He owned several business blocks in New Haven, including the building occupied by the First National Bank. From his large fortune he gave liberally to deserving institutions, donating at one time a large sum for the improvement of East Rock Park. He died in New Haven at the age of seventy-eight, being survived by his widow, and one son, Henry F. English, who in memory of his parents made a gift of a building for the use of the New Haven Colony Historical Society.

[E. E. Atwater, History of the City of New Haven (188 7); F. C. Norton, The Governors of Connecticut (1905); Pro c. New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1893; Biography Dir. American Congress (1928); Genealogy and Family History, State of Connecticut (1911); New Haven Evening Reg., March 3, 1890.]

J.M.M.


EQUIANO, Olaudah (Olauda Ikwuano), c. 1745-1797, African American, author, merchant, explorer, former slave, abolitionist. Wrote autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavas Vassa, the African, 1789, England.  (Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 101, 184, 382, 394, 395; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Vol. 7, p. 547; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Vol. 4, p. 260).


EVARTS, WILLIAM MAXWELL (February 6, 181 8- February 28, 1901), lawyer, and statesman, was the son of Jeremiah [q.v.] and Mehitabel (Sherman) Barnes Evarts, who we e married in 1804. His father was a graduate of
Yale College, a lawyer, and editor of the Panoplist, an orthodox Congregational magazine. His mother was the daughter of Roger Sherman [q.v.], states man of the American Revolution. Born at 22 Pinckney St., Boston, Evarts was prepared for college at the Boston Latin School, and entered Yale College in 1833. He was one of the founders of the Yale Literary Magazine, and was graduated with honors in the "famous class" of 1837, along with Edwards Pierrepont, Samuel J. Tilden, and Morrison R. Waite. The following winter he read law in the office of Horace Everett, at Windsor, Vermont, and then attended the Dane Law School of Harvard College. In the autumn of 1839 he entered the office of Daniel Lord, of New York City, as a law student and remained there until his admission to the bar of New York on July 16, 1841. On August 30, 1843, he married Helen Minerva Wardner in Windsor, Vermont. By her he had twelve children, nine of whom were living at his death.

For about one year from October 1841, he maintained his own law office at 60 Wall St., and then formed a partnership with Charles E. Butler, the beginning of a great law firm with which he was associated for sixty years, with Charles F. Southmayd, Joseph H. Choate, and Charles C. Beaman [qq.v.] as colleagues. In 1842, at the age of twenty-four, he was junior counsel under John J. Crittenden and Thomas F. Marshall in the defense in the New York courts of Monroe Edwards, a notorious Kentucky forger. He spoke an hour and a half in his opening for the defense and, although Edwards was convicted, Evarts's effort drew from Senator Crittenden the prediction that the highest honors of the profession were within his grasp. Political articles in The New World by Evarts, during this same period, caused Prof. Felton to describe his political pen as one of the most powerful in the country. His talents were publicly recognized by his appointment in 1849 to be assistant United States attorney for the southern district of New York, an office which he held until 1853. Two incidents led up to the turning point in his career. In 1850 he made a speech in Castle Garden which later was brought forward as evidence of a supposed deplorable leaning in favor of slavery. His speech was in support of the constitutionality of the Fugitive-Slave Law, and dealt with the dilemma presented by abhorrence of slavery and the constitutional recognition of it as an institution. Though called a "Hunker Whig," he nevertheless in 1855 gave $1,000, one-fourth of his whole fortune, to aid the Abolition cause through the Emigrant Aid Company. The opportunity had arrived, he said, "to contend successfully against slavery without violating the laws or sacrificing the Constitution and the Union." His position became clear to the public when, in January 1860, he was engaged to represent the State of New York in the Lemmon Slave Case (20 New York, 562), in opposition to Charles O'Conor for the State of Virginia. He successfully maintained the principle that under the United States Constitution, a slave brought from a slave state (Virginia) into a non-slave state (New York) by sea, and there landed with the intention of embarking upon a new voyage to another slave state (Texas) was thereby made free.

The two careers of Evarts, professional and public, thus intertwined at their beginning, remained so until his retirement. His legal skill led him into cases of great public import, and many of his public employments were legal in their requirements. His public and political career, begun as assistant United States attorney, was continued when in May 1860 he went, in the interest of Seward, as chairman of the New York delegation to the Republican National Convention which nominated Lincoln. On the appointment of Seward as secretary of state in March 1861, Evarts was put before the New York legislature as a candidate for the United States Senate, but Ira Harris was elected. On the outbreak of the war he took part in the formation in New York of the Union Defense Committee, of which he was secretary. In April 1863, he was sent on a government mission to England to put an end, if possible, to the building and equipment of vessels for the Confederate navy. He returned to the United States in July, and went again on a similar errand in December, remaining in Europe this time until June 1864. In 1867 he was a delegate to the New York State constitutional convention, in which he served as a member of the judiciary committee. From July 15, 1868, to March 1869, he was attorney-general in President Johnson's cabinet. As president of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York at its organization in 1870, and for ten successive years thereafter, he led movements for law reform and against the political corruption of the "Tweed Ring," which made this private office a quasi-public one. Had it not been for the aggressive opposition of Senator Roscoe Conkling, he would probably have been appointed chief justice of the United States by President Grant on the death of Chief Justice Chase in 1873. His college classmate and colleague at the Geneva Arbitration, Morrison R. Waite, was appointed. This was the second time that the chief justiceship had been almost within his grasp, for, on the death of Taney, his appointment to that office had been strongly urged upon President Lincoln. Evarts was secretary of state for the whole period of President Hayes's term of office, 1877- 81; and immediately thereafter he went as delegate of the United States to the Paris Monetary Conference. The New York legislature elected him United States senator on January 20, 1885, for the term beginning in March.

Evarts's legal career ran parallel to and was interspersed between the events of his career as a statesman. In 1857 he won the case of People vs. Draper (15 New York, 532), which sustained the right of the legislature to create a new metropolitan police district including three counties. In 1861 he was of government counsel in the case of the Savannah privateers, charged with piracy; in February 1863, he made the chief argument for the government in a prize case (2 Black, 635) which originated in New York; and in 1867 he was employed by the government in the prosecution of Jefferson Davis for treason. In 1866, 1868, and 1870, he argued in the United States Supreme Court the Bank Tax Case (3 Wallace, 573), the Legal Tender Case (8 Wallace, 603) and the Cotton Tax Case (not reported). An argument of Evarts's that has received the highest praise was that before the Mixed Commission on British and American Claims, in August 1873, for the British claimants in the Springbok Case (J. B. Moore, A Digest of International Law, VII, 1906, pp. 728-29) involving the difficult questions of continuous voyage and ultimate destination of ships and cargoes in time of war. Wharton described it as one of the ablest expositions of international law which has ever appeared, and John Bassett Moore said that "no one but a great lawyer with a profound apprehension of the principles of international law could have made such an argument." It is a far cry from such an effort to the case of Theodore Tilton vs. Henry Ward Beecher, in which, in May 1875, Evarts made the chief summation for the defense. His address required eight court days. A case of great importance was that of Story vs. the New York Elevated Railroad Company (90 New York, 122) in which Evarts in 1882 successfully maintained the position that the owners of property abutting on streets through which elevated roads were built, could compel remuneration for the injury to their property caused by those structures. In 1885, in the Matter of Jacobs (98 New York, 98), Evarts successfully attacked the constitutional validity of the Tenement House Cigar Law. His last appearance in court was in June 1889, in the case of Post vs. Weil (us New York, 361). In spite of failing eyesight, he wrote with his own hand a brief of eighty-two pages on the abstruse questions of real property involved, and won the case.

To the above record must now be added the fact that, to use the phrase of the late Frederic R. Coudert, Evarts was "the hero of the three great cases of our generation-the Johnson impeachment, the Tilden election case of 1876, the Geneva arbitration case." On February 24, 1868, President Johnson was impeached by the House of Representatives for high crimes and misdemeanors. Eleven articles of impeachment were presented at the bar of the Senate on March 4, and the trial by Chief Justice Chase and the Senate, which began on March 30, lasted until May 26. The leader of counsel for the managers was Benjamin F. Butler. Evarts was most active for the defense, owing to the illness of Attorney-General Stanbery during the trial. He also made the chief closing argument, beginning on April 28 and ending on May 1, an address of one hundred eighty pages. "His eloquent and solemn appeal," says Sherman Evarts, "lifted the whole proceeding from the murky atmosphere in which it had had its origin, to a region of lofty and patriotic wisdom ... it arrayed with great force and learning the arguments upon the only serious question of law in the case-that arising from the tenure of office act" (Lewis, post, VII, 229). Largely through the efforts of Evarts, the two-thirds vote required by the Constitution for conviction was not obtained.

Evarts's participation in the case of the Savannah privateers and in the prize cases, and his two missions to England during the Civil War, together with his other wide experience in public and professional life, perfectly equipped him for service as counsel in the Geneva Arbitration of 1871-72. Under the Treaty of Washington, May 8, 1871, all claims against Great Britain by citizens of the United States who during the Civil War had suffered loss through activities of Confederate cruisers built, equipped, or manned in England, were referred to arbitration. The United States was represented by Charles Francis Adams (arbitrator), J. C. Bancroft Davis (agent), and Caleb Cushing, Morrison R. Waite, and William M. Evarts (counsel). The last made a notable oral argument, August 5, 6, 1872, on the question of "due diligence," in reply to the printed argument of Sir Roundell Palmer (Lord Selborne). The latter had already formed a favorable opinion of Evarts as a result of an acquaintanceship begun in 1863; and in his memoirs he speaks of him in the highest terms, emphasizing his courtesy and conciliatory attitude. Evarts's name, he says, "was appended to the Case and other documents, of which we so much disliked the tone; but it did not stand alone; it was preceded by that of Mr. Cushing, and followed by that of Mr. Waite" (Personal Memorials, vol. I, 1898, p. 248). The meaning of this statement is brought out by a couplet in Selborne's alphabetical verses descriptive of the chief actors at Geneva, which reads: "

E, keen but high-minded, would courteous have been,
If his name were not written two others between" (Ibid., I, 277).

In the third of the great triad of cases, the Hayes-Tilden presidential election dispute, Evarts was chief counsel for the Republican party. In the presidential canvass of 1876, both parties made claim to the electoral vote in whole or in part in four states. There being no constitutional or legislative provision for such an emergency, Congress created a commission of fifteen to decide the questions in dispute. Arguments of counsel were made before this commission in February 1877, and Evarts made oral arguments on the Florida, Louisiana, and Oregon cases. Having been criticized for accepting employment in what was considered to be wholly a partisan cause, he took the high ground that it was his duty as a citizen to do so, and that, whatever the consequences, the decision must be in accordance with the Constitution, which gave to the states the exclusive power to regulate the casting and counting of votes and to declare the result of the canvass, leaving to the electoral college the power only of counting the electoral votes certified by the states. His view prevailed, and Hayes was declared elected.

As a statesman, Evarts was adequate to every test that was offered, but no large achievement can be placed to his credit. He came into the Senate when he was sixty-six years of age. If his health had held good, he could, with his long training and experience in affairs of public interest, have made for himself a distinguished place in that body. Soon after he took office, his sight began to be impaired. In 1889 he went to Karlsbad to consult a specialist, but no help was found, and his infirmity increased until he was totally blind. Thereafter he lived in retirement. On August 30, 1893, he and his wife celebrated their golden wedding. In 1897 he suffered an attack of grippe, which left him so weakened that thereafter he was confined to his house; and on February 28, 1901, at the age of eighty-three, he died at his home in New York City.

In personal appearance, Evarts somewhat resembled Rufus Choate. He was extremely spare, and "thin as a lath," but erect and dignified in bearing. He appeared to be exceedingly frail, but had great powers of endurance, as shown by his
performance in the Tilton-Beecher trial from which he was not absent once during its course of nearly six months. In one of his pictures he looks like Lincoln. His prominent forehead and nose gave to his face the appearance of massive strength. His eyes were penetrating and severe at times, but his expressive mouth made his countenance refined. He should be likened to an eagle rather than to a hawk. Like Charles O'Conor he habitually wore a frock coat and a high hat tilted a little backward on his head. He was noted as an orator, and could adapt his style to all occasions. His son compiled an impressive collection of his professional arguments, political and patriotic speeches, commemorative addresses, and after-dinner speeches. In the latter, Evarts showed a merry and spontaneous humor, debonair yet dry, and genial yet subtle. His speaking in this vein "rose to th e level of the fine arts." He had the "dangerous gift of facility in speech," but his exalted character, both personal and professional, and his earnestness in dealing with serious matters, made him master of a solemn and forceful eloquence suggestive of the best efforts of Daniel Webster. His set speeches and professional arguments possessed one characteristic which is still a tradition. He clothed his thought " with sentences as long as the English language can supply," and with great involution and circumlocution of oratorical style drove on "a whole flock of several clauses, before he came to the close of a sentence." Withal, he was noted for remarkable clearness of statement. Choate said of him that he was the quickest witted man that he had ever met on either side of the water, and Southmayd, another law partner, emphasized his powers of apprehension, "which would mentally anticipate and complete the situation before the narration of facts was finished."

[Arguments and Speeches of Wm. Maxwell Evarts (3 vols., 1919), ed., with an introduction, by his son, Sherman Evarts; article by Sherman Evarts in Wm. D. Lewis, Great American Lawyers, VII (1909), 203-44; memorials in the Report of the Twenty-Fourth Annu.al Meeting of the American Bar Assn. (1901), pp. 624-28, and by Jas. C. Carter in Annual Reports... of the Assn. of the Bar of the City of New York, 1902, pp. 101- 02; Theron G. Strong, Landmarks of a Lawyer's Lifetime (1914), ch. 8; Obit. Record Grads. Yale University ...1900-JO (1910), p. 19; New York Times and New York Daily Tribune, March 1, 1901.]

F.C. H.


EWING, THOMAS (December 28, 1789-October 26, 1871), senator from Ohio, cabinet officer, was the second son of George and Rachel (Harris) Ewing. In his "Autobiography" he states that he attached "little importance to remote ancestry"; yet he could trace his lineage back to a Capt. Ewing of lower Loch Lomond, Scotland, who, serving under William of Orange at the battle of the Boyne (1690), was presented with a sword by his sovereign in recognition of conspicuous bravery. Thomas Ewing, a son of this ancestor, came to America from Londonderry, Ireland, and settled in Greenwich, New Jersey, about I718. At the beginning of the Revolution, George Ewing enlisted in the 2nd New Jersey Regiment, in which he held the rank of first lieutenant. During the course of the war, he suffered financial reverses and at the termination of hostilities decided to migrate westward. His son Thomas was born near West Liberty, Ohio County, Virginia. About 1793 the Ewings moved to Waterford on the Muskingum and in the spring of 1798 removed to what is now Ames Township, Athens County, Ohio. Here, on the outskirts of civilization, young Thomas spent his boyhood. He was taught to read by an elder sister and by his own extraordinary efforts acquired a fair elementary education. Books were his delight, and, encouraged by his parents, the boy eagerly read everything he could lay his hands upon. Before he was eight years old he had read the entire Bible and in his autobiography he says that he once walked twenty miles to borrow a translation of Virgil's AEneid. The establishment of a circulating library in Ames Township stimulated his insatiable craving for knowledge, while his tenacious and ready memory enabled him to retain the information he acquired. In order to secure funds for a college education, he sought employment in the Kanawha salt works. In the course of two or three years he saved enough from his scanty earnings to free his father's farm of debt, and with the meager surplus enrolled in Ohio University at Athens. His funds were soon exhausted and he was compelled to return to the salt works. Once more he saved his earnings, returned to resume his studies at Ohio University, and in1815 he and his classmate John Hunter, received the first B.A. degrees ever granted by that institution.

After graduation he studied law in the office of General Philemon Beecher at Lancaster, Ohio, and in August 1816 was admitted to the bar. He rapidly acquired a reputation as one of the best equipped and most successful lawyers in the West. For several years he served as prosecuting attorney of Fairfield County and in that capacity was instrumental in freeing the district of counterfeiters. In 1823 he was defeated for the state legislature but in 1830 was elected to the United States Senate where his keen intellect earned for him the sobriquet of "Logician of the West" (Randall & Ryan, post, VI, 8). As a Whig senator he vigorously assailed the Democratic administration, supported the protective tariff policy of Clay, advocated the re-charter of the United States Bank, denounced President Jackson's removal of deposits and his "Specie Circular," opposed the confirmation of Martin Van Buren as minister to England, but voted for the revenue collection bill known as the "Force Bill." He also advocated reduced postal rates, brought about a revision of the land laws, a reorganization of the Post-Office Department, and a bill for the settlement of the Ohio-Michigan boundary. In January 1836 he was defeated for reelection by William Allen and resumed his practise at Lancaster.

He was appointed secretary of the treasury by President Harrison in 1841, retained this office after the death of Harrison and the succession of Tyler, and as secretary of the treasury helped to draft bills for the re-charter of a national bank. After President Tyler had twice vetoed such measures, Ewing resigned along with the other members of the cabinet. He returned to the practise of law; and it was following his resignation that his reputation as a lawyer was established. Among his more elaborate written professional arguments were those in the case of Oliver vs. Pratt et al., involving the title to half the land now occupied by the municipality of Toledo, Ohio; the Methodist Episcopal Church division case; the McIntire Poor School vs. Zanesville; and the McMicken Will Case, which involved large bequests for education (12 Wallace, viii).

On the inauguration of Zachary Taylor as president, Ewing was appointed secretary of the recently created Department of the Interior, which was still unorganized. In his first report, he recommended the erection of a mint near the California gold mines and the building of a railroad to the Pacific. On the death of President Taylor, July 9, 1850, and the accession of Millard Fillmore, a division in the Whig party caused a change in the cabinet. Thomas Corwin was appointed secretary of the treasury and Ewing was appointed to complete the unexpired term of Corwin in the Senate. During this term in the Senate Ewing differed with Clay in his proposals to solve the problems arising as a result of the Mexican War. He opposed the Fugitive-Slave Law and was in favor of the unconditional admission of California as a state. In 1851 he retired from public life, although he never completely lost interest in public affairs.

In 1861 he was appointed a delegate to the Peace Convention and throughout the Civil War he rendered loyal assistance to Lincoln's administration. At the time of the Trent affair he wrote President Lincoln: "There is no such thing as contraband of war between neutral ports" and urged the release of Mason and Slidell. His conservatism caused him to oppose the reconstruction policy of Congress, and during his last years he acted with the Democratic party. He gave President Johnson much good advice and cautioned him against removing Stanton as secretary of war. When Stanton was removed in 1868, President Johnson submitted Ewing's name for the vacancy; but the Senate never acted upon the recommendation (J. F. Rhodes, History of the United States, vol. VI, 1928, pp. 210-22).

Ewing was a man of great physical strength, over six feet in height, with broad shoulders, a massive frame, and a head of unusual size. His keen, logical mind, his incisive style both in speaking and in writing, his wide range of reading, and his wealth of information made him a lawyer of the first rank and a forceful leader in his day. In public and private life he was a man of strong convictions and an inflexible will, powerful as a friend or as an antagonist, dignified yet sociable in his relations with men, and a stanch believer in the "good old days." In September 1871 Archbishop Purcell of Cincinnati received him into the Catholic Church. On January 7, 1820, Ewing married Maria Wills Boyle by whom he had six children, among them Hugh Boyle Ewing and Thomas Ewing, Jr. [qq.v.]. He also adopted, in 1829, William T. Sherman [q.v.], the son of his friend, Judge Charles Sherman, and appointed him to West Point in 1836.

[See "The Autobiography of Thomas Ewing," ed. by C. L. Martzolff, in Ohio Archaeology and Historical Pubs., XXII (1913), 126 ff.; "Diary of Thomas Ewing, August and September, 1841," in American History Review, October 1912; Ellen Ewing Sherman, Memorial of Thos. Ewing of Ohio (1873); P. K. and M. E. (Williams) Ewing, The Ewing Genealogy with Cognate Branches (1919); E. W. R. Ewing, Clan Ewing of Scotland (1922); Biography Dir. American Congress (1928); G. I. Reed, Bench and Bar of Ohio, I (1897), 75 ff.; E. O. Randall and D. J. Ryan, History of Ohio (1912), vols. III-V; Cincinnati Enquirer, October 26, 27, 1871; Cincinnati Commercial, Cincinnati Daily Times and Chronicle, October 27, 1871. At Ewing's death the U. S. Supreme Court paid him the unusual honor of publishing in their reports an account of his life (12 Wallace, vii-ix).]

R. C. M.


EWING, THOMAS. (August 7, 1829-January 21, 1896), soldier, lawyer, congressman from Ohio, the fifth child of Thomas [q.v.] and Maria Wills (Boyle) Ewing, was born in Lancaster, Ohio. He received his early education in Ohio and at the age of nineteen became one of the private secretaries of President Taylor in whose cabinet his father was secretary of the interior. After a year spent in this position and two more as a claims clerk in Washington, he entered Brown University. In 1855 he attended the Cincinnati Law School and, after admission to the bar, began practising in that city. On January 8, 1856, he married Ellen Ewing Cox, the daughter of Reverend William Cox, of Piqua, Ohio, and during the same year he and his wife moved to Leavenworth, Kansas, where he became a member of the firm of Ewing, Sherman & McCook.

As an ardent anti-slavery man, Ewing was largely instrumental in revealing the fraudulent voting for state officers at the election held on January 4, 1858, under the Lecompton constitution. The public indignation aroused by these disclosures prevented the admission of Kansas as a slave-state. (Ewing later wrote an article, "The Struggle for Freedom in Kansas," published in the Cosmopolitan Magazine, May 1894.) In 1861 he represented Kansas in the Peace Convention and in January of the same year was chosen the first chief justice of the supreme court of the new state. He resigned his judicial office in September 1862 and recruited the I 1th Kansas Volunteers, of which he was appointed colonel. After participating in several severe engagements in Arkansas he was promoted brigadier-general in March 1863. From June 1863 to February 1864 he was in command of the "District of the Border," which comprised Kansas and the western tier of counties in Missouri. In his efforts to exterminate the guerrilla bands which infested this area, Ewing issued his famous Order No. 11, depopulating the counties of Missouri. In March 1864 he was assigned to the command of the St. Louis District. When General Sterling Price invaded Missouri the following September, Ewing was ordered to check and delay the progress of the Confederate forces in their march on St. Louis. He encountered their advance columns in a narrow defile and, disputing every inch of ground, slowly retired to Fort Davidson, a small earthwork adjacent to Pilot Knob. On September 27 Price attacked him but was repulsed with great losses. Ewing soon found his position untenable, however, because the enemy placed batteries on the mountain sides and began to shell the fort. Under cover of darkness Ewing spiked all his guns but two, blew up the magazine and his valuable stores, and started to retreat toward St. Louis. During the next thirty-nine hours his forces marched sixty-six miles, hotly pursued by the foe. At Harrison he entrenched behind railroad ties and for three days held the enemy at bay until relieved by reinforcements from Rolla. "Thus closed a campaign of a week of stubborn fighting, on a comparatively small scale, but still rarely excelled during the war" (Reid, post, I, 835). In February 1865 Ewing resigned his commission and soon afterward was brevetted major-general for his services at Pilot Knob. During the next few years he resided in Washington, D. C., where he practised law. President Johnson offered him the positions of secretary of war and attorney-general but Ewing declined both.

In 1870 he returned to Lancaster, Ohio, and during the next twelve years was a conspicuous leader of the Greenback wing of the Democratic party. From 1877 to 1881 he represented the Lancaster district in Congress and as a member of that body was the leader in the movement for preservation of the Greenback currency; advocated the remonetization of the currency; and took a prominent part in the support of legislation to stop the employment of federal troops and supervisors at state elections. His candidacy for the governorship in 1879 on the Democratic ticket was the last of the Greenback movement in Ohio, and, although he was defeated, his brilliant campaign attracted the attention of the country. In 1881 he retired from Congress and politics and removed to New York City where he practised law during the remainder of his life. He was one of the founders of the Ohio Society of New York and was its fir s t president. As a soldier he displayed marked military judgment, courage, and gallantry. His easy and gracious manner made a deep impression on every one he met; while his lofty ideals, his sincerity, his integrity, and his eloquence made him an effective popular leader.

[E. O. Randall and D. J. Ryan, History of Ohio (1912), vol. IV; Official Records (Army), 1 series XXXII, XXXIV, XLI, XLVIII; Biography Dir. American Congress (1928); G. I. Reed, Bench and Bar of Ohio (1897), I, 114 ff.; Whitelaw Reid, Ohio in the War (1868), I, 834 ff.; P. K. and M. E. (Williams) Ewing, The Ewing Genealogy with Cognate Branches (1919); E.W. R. Ewing, Clan Ewing of Scotland (1922); John Sherman, Recollections of Forty Years (2 vols., 1895); Cincinnati Times Star, January 21, Cincinnati Enquirer, January 22, 1896.]

R.M.



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