N: Nell through Nye

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


NEAL, Elizabeth, delegate to the (Garrisonian) Anti-Slavery Society, Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, Eastern Branch, Philadelphia (Dumond, 1961, p. 286)


NEALL, Daniel, Jr., Society of Friends, Quaker, member of the Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania, member of the Association of Friends for Advocating the Cause of the Slave. 

(Drake, 1950, pp. 118, 154, 156; Yellin, 1994, pp. 286, 292-293)


NEALL, Daniel, Society of Friends, Quaker, member of the Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania, member of the Association of Friends for Advocating the Cause of the Slave. 

(Drake, 1950, pp. 118, 154, 156)


NEALL, Elizabeth, abolitionist, Executive Committee of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

(Yellin, 1994, pp. 84, 301-302, 307, 316, 332-333)


NEALL, Rebecca Bunker, abolitionist, member of the New England Non-Resistance Society (Yellin, 1994, pp. 292-293)


NEEDLES, Edward, Pennsylvania, Society of Friends, Quaker, president of the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. (Drake, 1950, p. 153)


NEEDLES, Mary, abolitionist, Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society (PFASS), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Yellin, 1994, pp. 74, 80)


NELL, Lavinia, African American, abolitionist (Yellin, 1994, p. 58n40)


NELL, Louisa, African American, abolitionist (Yellin, 1994, p. 58n40)


NELL, William Cooper, 1816-1874, African American, abolitionist leader, author, civil rights activist, community leader.  Wrote Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812.  First African American to be appointed a clerk in the U.S. Post Office.  Active in equal rights for African American school children in Boston, Massachusetts. 

(Mabee, 1970, pp. 98, 105, 116, 124, 126, 150, 157, 164, 165, 166, 171-181, 291n24, 295, 337; Rodriguez, 2007, p. 54; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 489; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, p. 413; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 8, p. 429)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, p. 413:

NELL, WILLIAM COOPER (December 20, 1816-May 25, 1874), negro writer, was born in Boston. He was the son of William G. and Louisa M. Nell, the latter a native of Brookline, Massachusetts, and the former of Charleston, South Carolina. The father, a tailor by trade, was steward on the ship General Gadsden when she escaped from the British brig Recruit in July 1812, and became a member of the General Colored Association of Massachusetts in 1826. Young Nell attended one of the separate primary schools, which had been established for negro children in Boston in 1820, and subsequently graduated with honors from the Smith School, of grammar grade, opened in 1835. He looked on while the white children were given prizes which he, although of equal scholarship, was debarred from receiving on account of his color.

This incident made a deep impression on him and henceforth he worked unceasingly for equal school rights to all children irrespective of the color of their skins. He read law for a time in the office of William I. Bowditch but, on the advice of Wendell Phillips, refrained from applying for admission to the bar, an act that would have entailed the taking of an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, which, in Phillips' opinion, compromised with the slave power. Nell then became affiliated with the antislavery movement as an organizer of meetings, at some of which he spoke acceptably. He also made himself useful by carefully preserving data and documents that would be helpful to the cause. In 1840 his name headed the list of signers of the first petition presented to the Massachusetts legislature asking for the opening of the public schools to negro children. For many years thereafter he was to agitate this reform, since it was not until April 28, 1855, that a law was passed abolishing the separate schools for colored children.

In the meantime he had developed into a journalist and author. During 1851 he assisted Frederick Douglass [q.v.] in the publication at Rochester, New York, of the North Star. In May of the same year he issued a pamphlet entitled Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812. This was followed in 1855- by a larger volume, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, to which Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an introduction. In this book Nell paid a tribute to Crispus Attucks [q.v.], the first martyr of the Revolution, for whom, on March 5, 1851, he had unsuccessfully petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to erect a monument. In it he also dwelt on the injustice of making only free white persons eligible for positions in the federal service. When, however, John G. Palfrey was named postmaster of Boston in 1861 he ignored this restriction and appointed Nell one of his clerks; thus he became the first colored man to hold a post under the federal government. This position he filled until the time of his death. A wife survived him.

[William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: the Story, of His Life, Told by His Children (4 volumes, 1885-89); S. J. May, Some Recollections of Our Anti-Slavery Conflict (1869); W.W. Brown, The Rising Sun (1874); John Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace (1914); Vernon Loggins, The Negro Author: Her Development in America (1931); Liberator, December 18, 1846, February II, 1848; C. G. Woodson, The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written During the Crisis I8oo-186o (1926); Boston Daily Globe, May 26, 1874; Boston Transcript, May 26, 29, 1874.]

H. G. V.


NELSON, David, 1793-1844, Tennessee, abolitionist leader, Army surgeon, clergyman.  Pastor in the Presbyterian Church, Danville, Kentucky, in 1828.  President of Marion College, Palmyra, Missouri.  Advocate of compensated emancipation. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 491; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, p. 414; Dumond, 1961, pp. 92, 135, 199, 223; Mabee, 1970, p. 35; Rodriguez, 2007, p. 617). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, p. 414:

NELSON, DAVID (September 24, 1793-October 17, 1844), Presbyterian clergyman, educator, abolitionist, was born near Jonesboro, Tennessee, one of a family of Presbyterian ministers. His parents, Henry and Anna (Kelsey) Nelson, of English and Scotch extraction respectively, had migrated to East Tennessee from Rockbridge County, Virginia. David studied under the Reverend Samuel Doak [q. v.] at Washington College, two miles from his home. Upon his graduation at the age of sixteen he determined to become a physician, and after an apprenticeship to Dr. Ephraim McDowell [q.v.] at Danville, Kentucky, he went to Philadelphia for further study. He began his active practice as surgeon in the War of 1812 with an expeditionary force that invaded Canada, and later served with Andrew Jackson's army in Alabama and Florida. After peace was declared he returned to Jonesboro, and during the ensuing decade built up a lucrative practice in his profession.

While studying medicine, Nelson had been captured by the naturalistic doctrines then rife among members of his profession, and had become "an honest, unreflecting deist." He was big, fun-loving, and attractive; he drank and played cards to an extent distressing to his family, and after settling in Jonesboro, he eloped at the age of twenty-two with the charming young daughter of David Deaderick, a prominent merchant. She appears to have been sincerely religious, however, and he r influence, together with several years of reflection upon his deistical principles, brought him back to the Presbyterian Church. His return from deism to Calvinism he later recorded in a powerful tract, The Cause and Cure of Infidelity, written in 1836, of which more than a hundred thousand copies were distributed by the American Tract Society, and many thousands more by tract societies in England. with time his convictions deepened; in April 1825 he was licensed to preach by the Abingdon Presbytery, and six months later he gave up his medical practice and was ordained as an evangelist. From 1827 to 1829 he was one of the editors of the Calvinistic Magazine and in 1828 he succeeded his brother, Samuel Kelsey Nelson, as pastor of the Presbyterian church at Danville, Kentucky. Though careless in dress and eccentric in manner, he was a pulpit orator of great ability (R. J. Breckinridge, in Sprague, post, p. 687) and became one of the notable preachers of his day in his denomination.

In 1831 he founded and became president of Marion College, near Palmyra, Missouri, "for the training of pious young men," converts of the Great Revival of 1830. The next year the "modern abolition" movement invaded the Presbyterian Church in the West. At Western Reserve College, Theodore D. Weld, abolition revivalist extraordinary, started among the faculty an antislavery discussion whose repercussions were heard throughout the Western Reserve. The next year among the students at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati he inspired a debate on slavery that converted the student body and disrupted the school. At St. Louis, Missouri, Elijah P. Lovejoy [q.v.] echoed the perilous agitation in the columns of the St. Louis Observer, the Presbyterian paper for the Far West. Nelson's convictions had led him, before he went to Missouri, to free his own slaves, and now, surrounded as he was by the agitation, he could no.t remain unmoved: at the Presbyterian General Assembly of 1835, in Pittsburgh, Theodore Weld found him ready for the abolition gospel. Together with more than one-fourth of his fellow delegates, he "pledged himself openly to the Cause" (Emancipator, Boston, June 16, 1835).

Nelson was no faint-hearted reformer. A month after his return to Marion College he accepted a regular agency from the American Anti-Slavery Society, and in 1836, from the pulpit of his Presbyterian church in Palmyra, he called upon the slave-holders of his congregation to repent their sins and free their slaves. He was straightway· expelled from Marion College and from Missouri, not escaping mob violence on the way, and the faculty of Marion College published a manifesto, nervously asseverating their loyalty to the institutions of the community. At Quincy, Illinois, he now founded a new college, a "manual labour institution," where students were to support themselves by building their own dwellings and raising food for their sustenance on the college farm. The school did not survive its first year, and Nelson again took up agency work for the American Anti-Slavery Society. As anti-slavery lecturer in western Illinois, he was only moderately successful, partly on account of increasing disability from epilepsy. Intermittently he labored for the slave until 1840, when his health gave way completely. He died at Oakland, Illinois, four years later.

[A short biography of Nelson is the second American edition (n.d.) of his Cause and Cure of Infidelity; and a biographical sketch, with reminiscences of several colleagues, appears in W. B. Sprague, Annals American Pulpit, volume IV (1858). Contemporary events are recorded in the Calvinistic Magazine, 1827-28; St. Louis Observer, 1835-36; Alton Observer, 1837; Philanthropist, 1836-40; and Minutes of the Agency Committee, American Anti-Slavery Society, 1835-40. An obituary appears in Presbyterian of the West (Springfield, Ohio), November 21, 1844. D. L. Leonard, The Story of Oberlin (1898).]

G.H.B.


NELSON, Thomas Henry (c. 1823-March 14, 1896), lawyer, diplomat,

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, p. 424-425

NELSON, THOMAS HENRY (c. 1823-March 14, 1896), lawyer, diplomat, was born near Maysville, Kentucky, an elder brother of William Nelson [q.v.], and the son of Dr. Thomas W. Nelson and Frances (Doniphan) Nelson of Mason County, Kentucky, in whose home the Clays, the Crittendens, and other members of the old Kentucky aristocracy were familiar guests. After completing his studies in the Maysville schools, he went in 1844 to Rockville, Indiana, where he studied and practised law for six years, and then moved to Terre Haute, which became his permanent home. In 1855 he formed a law partnership with Abram Adams Hammond, who afterward became governor of Indiana, and in 1856 a partnership with Isaac N . Pierce. In his active law practice in western Indiana and eastern Illinois he met as a legal opponent, and presently as a friend, Abraham Lincoln. He became a leader of the Whig party, and was one of the founders of the Republican party in the Middle West. Several times he was a delegate to state and national conventions. Only once, however, was he a candidate for a public office: in 1860 he made a joint canvass with Daniel W. Voorhees in a campaign for Congress, and his rival won the election. On June 1, 1861, Nelson was appointed minister to Chile by his old friend Lincoln.

Tall and soldierly in bearing, distinguished in appearance, vigorous in action, a brilliant and compelling orator, skilful in public affairs, gifted with a contagious friendliness, he exerted his best efforts to win the friendship of Chile for the United States, and was notably successful, even while he was bringing American claims outstanding against Chile to a speedy and satisfactory settlement. Perhaps the high point of Chilean enthusiasm for Nelson was reached after the terrible fire in the Church of Campaign in Santiago on December 8, 1863, in which about 2,000 persons perished. On this occasion Nelson, with other Americans, showed great heroism in rescuing several individuals. The people of Santiago devoted the following Fourth of July to a celebration to do him honor. In 1865, when hostilities broke out between Chile and Spain, Chile believed that the United States would become her ally. Nelson labored tirelessly to bring about a peaceful settlement between the two warring countries, but was not authorized to involve the United States as a belligerent. The people of Chile were much disappointed, even resentful, but the Minister's policy of neutrality was subsequently indorsed by the State Department.

Returning to the United States in 1866, he campaigned vigorously in favor of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In 1869 he was appointed minister to Mexico, and served there ably and faithfully until 1873, although no outstanding incident marked this period of service. The death of his wife, Elizabeth (Key) Nelson, in Mexico City in 1872 was a severe blow to him. The daughter of Colonel Marshall Key, a Kentucky political leader, she was possessed of great charm, intelligence, and many accomplishments, and since her marriage in 1844 had taken an important part in her husband's career. (See the article on Mrs. Nelson written by William Cullen Bryant, in the Annual Cyclopedia for 1872.) After his resignation from the diplomatic service, Nelson returned to Terre Haute, where he again practise d law and took a prominent part in politics. He died there in 1896, survived by two of his six children.

[A Biography History of Eminent and Self-Made Men of the State of Indiana (1880), volume II; H. C. Bradsby, History of Vigo County, Indiana, with Biographical Selections (1891); Osgood Hardy, "When the Monroe Doctrine Was Forgotten," in Chile (New York), March 1930; C. C. Oakey, Greater Terre Haute and Vigo County (1908), volume I; U. S . Dept. of State, Diplomatic Correspondence, Chile, volumes XVIII-XXIII, Mexico, volumes XXXVIX LVIII; Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the U.S., 1863 (pt. 2 ), 1864 (pt. 4), 1866 (pt. 2), 1870, 1871, 1872 (pt. 1), 1873 (pt. 1); Thomas H. Nelson, Official Letter Books, 1861-65 (MSS.), MSS. Div., Library of Congress; "Report and Accompanying Documents ... on the Relations of the United States with Mexico," House Report No.701, 45 Congress, 2 Session; F. F. Hamilton, Ancestral Lines of the Doniphan, Frazee, and Hamilton Families (1928); Sunday Journal (Indianapolis), March 15, 1896. Date of birth, given in secondary accounts as August 12, 1824, is incompatible with date of September 27, 1824, given for birth of his brother William.]

I. L. T.


NESMITH, James Willis, 1820-1885, jurist, lawyer.  U.S. Senator from Oregon.  U.S. Senator 1861-1867.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, pp. 494-495; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, pp. 430-431; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, pp. 430-431:

NESMITH, JAMES WILLIS (July 23, 1820- June 17, 1885),. pioneer, lawyer, soldier, legislator, was born in New Brunswick, Canada, while his parents were visiting there. Descended from James Nesmith, a Scotch-Irish founder of Londonderry, New Hampshire, he was the son of William Morrison Nesmith, of Washington County, Maine, and Harriet Willis, who died before he was a year old. His father's extensive holdings in New Brunswick were destroyed in 1825 by a forest fire from which the family barely escaped, the step-mother dying from resulting exposure. James then lived with various relatives in New England, learning at a tender age to earn his own living. Winters he attended common-schools desultorily, and as a strapping boy worked near Cincinnati for some years where he had his last chance at schooling. But he loved books, mastered their contents almost without effort, and retained what he had learned, an aspiring spirit in a superb body. At seventeen or eighteen he drifted to Missouri, then to western Iowa, and spent the season of 1842 working as a carpenter at Fort Scott, Kansas. From there he joined the Great Emigration of 1843 which established the Oregon colony. He was a natural leader of men, for he was handsome, rugged, democratic, and fun-loving. He was elected orderly sergeant of the Emigrating Company. In Oregon he read some law, was elected supreme judge under the provisional constitution in 1845, was a member of the legislature later, was commissioned captain of volunteers in the Cayuse War in 1848 and in the Rogue River War of 1853, and colonel in the Yakima War of 1855-56. In the years 1857-59 he was superintendent of Indian affairs.

In 1860, as a Douglas Democrat, he gained one of two United States senatorships owing to a combination of Republicans and Douglas men in the legislature against the Lane followers, Edward Dickinson Baker, Republican, winning the other. Powerful in debate, whole-hearted in defense of the Union, Nesmith was a tower of strength to the Lincoln cause. He took an independent stand as a Democrat to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment and he came to the administration's rescue in several critical situations. But fallible judgment betrayed him into supporting McClellan for the presidency in 1864, and this mistake, together with his ardent friendship for Andrew Johnson, virtually terminated his political course. In 1873, as a purely personal triumph, he was elected to Congress, and in 1876 he had the votes to be chosen senator but lost the prize. He had married in 1846 Pauline Goff and settled on a farm at Rickreall, Oregon, which was thereafter his home, and there he was buried. Though most men loved him, others hated or feared him. Few were indifferent. He nourished bitter animosities, and George H. Williams, for preventing Nesmith's confirmation as minister to Austria, later found himself checkmated by Nesmith when Grant wished to make him chief justice of the Supreme Court. But he was essentially genial, humorous, and kindly.

[There are important Nesmith letters in the Deady Collection, Oregon Historical Society An intimate sketch by Harriet K. McArthur, his daughter, is in the Trans ... Oregon Pioneer Association, 1886. See also: Nesmith's address, Ibid., 1875, "A Reminiscence of the Indian War, 1853," Quarterly Oregon Historical Society, June 1906, and his reports as superintendent of Indian affairs. Other sources include: G. H. Williams and W. D. Fenton, "Political History of Oregon from 1853 to 1865," Quarterly Oregon Historical Society, March, December 1901; W. C. Woodward, "Rise and Early History of Political Parties in Oregon," Quarterly Oregon Historical Society, March 1912; R. C. Clark, History of the Willamette Valley, Oregon (1927), volume I; C. H. Carey, History of Oregon (1922) 

J. S.


NESMITH, John (August 3, 1793-October 15, 1869), merchant, manufacturer, inventor,

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, p. 431:

NESMITH, JOHN (August 3, 1793-October 15, 1869), merchant, manufacturer, inventor, was born in the part of Londonderry, New Hampshire, that is now Windham, son of John and Lucy (Martin) Nesmith. The father, a successful farmer, was a grandson of Deacon James Nesmith, one of the Irish. Presbyterians who settled Londonderry. John, after scanty schooling, was apprenticed at fourteen to John Dow, a merchant of Haverhill, Mass. Having learned the business, he returned to Windham where with his brother Thomas (1788-1870) he opened a general store. The two also worked up a profitable trade in buying and selling linen thread, then manufactured in the neighborhood by the Irish descendants. In 1822 they opened a second store, in Derry. They might have continued to be country merchants but in the thirties, attracted by the opportunities developing at Lowell, Massachusetts, they sold their New Hampshire interests and bought the estate on which Judge Edward St. Loe Livermore had lived in the confluence of the Merrimack and Concord rivers, and to which he had given the name "Belvidere." There the Nesmiths laid out streets and house lots on which were built many of the most pretentious residences of a fast-growing community. Their own houses were large, solidly constructed, and in good taste. Of the brothers, John Nesmith, positive, aggressive, and yet public-spirited, became the more prominent in business and politics. Educating himself broadly, he studied the sciences and made himself an expert mechanic. He operated woolen-mills at Lowell, Dracut, and Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and at Hookset, New Hampshire; he invented machines for shawl fringing and for weaving wire fence; and he inaugurated a system of using several New Hampshire lakes as storage basins to regulate the flow of the Merrimack River. As a member of the Essex Company he was one of the founders of the city of Lawrence.

As a young man he served a term in the New Hampshire legislature. His interest in the antislavery and temperance movements made him later in life an active member of the newly formed Republican party, and as a presidential elector he voted twice for Abraham Lincoln. In 1862 he was elected lieutenant-governor of Massachusetts. Declining a renomination in 1863 he was appointed collector of internal revenue for his district, an office which he held until just before his death. His enthusiasm for the temperance cause was intense and practical. He gave liberally to the local charities. He was interested in the arts of design, a generous patron of the portrait painter Thomas B. Lawson, for several years re si dent at Lowell. His death was said to be due to his suddenly wearing out after a life of unusual physical and mental activity. Re solutions of the Massachusetts State Temperance Society, of which he was a vice-president, stated: "We tenderly remember his benignant countenance and gentle manly bearing, his form somewhat bowed with the weight of age but his heart aglow with the sensibilities of youth." He had marri ed three times: in June 1825, Mary Ann, daughter of Samuel Bell [q.v.], of Chester, New Hampshire; in 1831, Eliza Thom, daughter of John Bell, of Chester; in October 1840, Harriet Rebecca, daughter of Aaron Mansur, of Lowell. He had nine children.

[See: L. A. Morrison, The History of Windham (1883); C. C. Chase's "Lowell," in D. H. Hurd, History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts (1890), volume II; Illustrated History of Lowell and Vicinity (1897), published by the Courier-Citizen Company; F. W. Coburn, History of Lowell and Its People (1920), volume II; J .C. Chase, History of Ch ester, New Hampshire (1926); obituaries and editorials in the Lowell Daily Citizen and Lowell Courier, October 15, 1869. The author of this sketch was given access to letters and other manuscript material in the possession of the family.]

F. W. C.


NEWBERRY, John Stoughton (November 18, 1826-January 2, 1887), lawyer, manufacturer, U.S. congressman,

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, pp. 444-445:

NEWBERRY, JOHN STOUGHTON (November 18, 1826-January 2, 1887), lawyer, manufacturer, congressman, was born at Sangerfield, Oneida County, New York, the son of Elihu and Rhoda (Phelps) Newberry. He was a descendant of Thomas Newberry who emigrated from Devonshire, England, to Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1634. Oliver and Walter Loomis Newberry [qq.v.] were John's uncles. Elihu moved from Oneida County westward, finally settling at Romeo, Michigan, where John prepared for college. Later he entered the University of Michigan, took high rank as a student, and graduated in 1847.

Having acquired a practical knowledge of civil engineering, he spent two years with the Michigan Central Railroad. Then, after a year of travel, he entered a law office in Detroit, and was admitted to the bar in 1853. He was soon recognized as an expert in admiralty cases and in 1857 published Reports of Admiralty Cases in the Several District Courts of the United States. In 1855 he married Harriet Newell Robinson, who died in 1856 leaving one son; on October 6, 1859, he married Helen Parmelee Handy and to this union were born two sons. From his majority he had supported and voted the Whig ticket, but upon the formation of the Republican party he joined forces with it and thereafter remained a stanch supporter. President Lincoln appointed him provost-marshal of Michigan in 1862, with the rank of captain of cavalry, an office which he held until 1864, during which time he organized two drafts. Familiar with the needs of the army, he was one of a company of Detroit capitalists who established in 1862 or 1863 the Michigan Car Company to build freight cars for the Union forces; of this company he became president, continuing as such until 1880. Although this venture led him to abandon the practice of law, it developed into a highly profitable enterprise and formed the basis of his large personal fortune, estimated at his death to be from three to four million dollars. The firm soon h ad branches in London, Ontario, and St. Louis, and employed some five thousand men. In 1878, with James McMillan [q. v.], who was associated with the Michigan Car Company, he formed the firm of Newberry & McMillan, capitalists. As the car-building enterprise prospered, so did his other ever-widening business ventures. He helped organize a corporation to build the Detroit, Mackinac & Marquette Railroad. He also established the Vulcan Furnace Company at Newberry, Michigan. As investor he held large interests in banks, factories, and centrally located Detroit real estate. So wide and varied were these holdings that at his death he was a director in almost every local industry.

With the exception of his term as provost marshal, he held public office but twice. In 1862 he was elected to the Detroit board of education, and in 1878 he won the Republican nomination fo r representative to Congress from the First District, and was elected. He served on several important committees and was chairman of the committee on commerce. After one term he retired, feeling that his business interests demanded his full attention. A Congregationalist in his youth, he later joined the Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian Church, where he was noted for regular attendance and his stanch support of church activities. He was interest ed in philanthropic projects and one of his last undertakings was the establishment, together with James McMillan, of the Grace Homeopathic Hospital, to which Newberry gave $100,000. His will contained bequests of $650,000 to institutions and charities.

[J. G. Bartlett, Newberry Genealogical (1914); Cyclopedia of Michigan (1890); Charles Moore, History of Michigan (191 5); Henry Hall, America's Successful Men of Affairs, volume II (1896); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); Detroit Free Press, Jan. J, 1887; Evening News (Detroit), January 3, 1887.]

J.J.S.


NEWCOMB, Harvey, 1803-1863, clergyman, strong advocate for Black and Native American rights, editor author.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 502; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, p. 450; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 16, p. 328). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, p. 450:

NEWCOMB, HARVEY (September 2, 1803-August 30, 1863), Congregational clergyman, editor, and author, a descendant of Captain Andrew Newcomb who was in America as early as 1666, was born in Thetford, Vermont, the son of Simon and Hannah (Curtis) Newcomb. In 1818 the family moved to Alfred, New York, where Harvey taught school for eight years. Turning his attention to journalism, he became the owner and editor of the Western Star of Westfield, New York (1826-28), editor of the Buffalo Patriot, an anti-Masonic paper (1828-30), and of the Pittsburgh Christian Herald, a paper for children (1830-31). The following ten years were devoted to writing books for children and young people.

Without a college or seminary training, but with the preparation afforded by his years of teaching and writing, Newcomb turned toward the ministry. He was licensed in 1840 and supplied the Congregational church in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, during the two following years. On October 6, 1842, he was ordained pastor of the church in West Needham, now Wellesley, Massachusetts, where he remained till July 1, 1846, when with twenty-six of his parishioners he withdrew and founded the church at Grantville, now Wellesley Hills. Returning to journalism in 1849 he was assistant editor of the Boston Traveller for a year and of the New York Observer for two years. He then settled in Brooklyn, where he conducted a private school for young ladies and engaged in authorship and in Sunday-school and mission work. In 1859 he became pastor of a church in Hancock, Pennsylvania, and remained a s such till ill health forced his retirement to Brooklyn, in which city he died.

Newcomb had a genius for assimilating and imparting information and his literary output is estimated at as high as 178 volumes, some of which were published anonymously. He had an intelligent conception of Bible study and in some respects anticipated the historical criticism of a later generation. He probably, also, came as near as any author of his day to adapting his writings to the mental capacity of children and young people. His series of nineteen Sunday school question books had a circulation of 300,000 copies, and his fourteen volumes of church history had wide popularity. His How to be a Man (1847) and How to be a Lady (1846; 8th ed., 1850) had a circulation of 34,000 copies each. A series on the Indians of North America and missionary work among them was abandoned at the end of the second volume for lack of popular interest in the subject. His most important work was his Cyclopaedia of Missions (1854), in which the enterprises of all denominations and the fields occupied were fully described, together with the histories of individual miss ions and missionaries. His writings are characterized by taste, judgment, wide and accurate information, and an intense desire to benefit humanity. He was an ardent and zealous worker, but in his contact with people his zeal sometimes outran his tact, a factor which tended to make his pastorates of short duration. He was deeply interested in city mission work and has been called the father of the mission Sunday school. He wrote constantly for the press and was a frequent contributor to such papers as the Boston Recorder, the Puritan Recorder, and the New York Evangelist. His contributions to the Youth's Companion cover a period of many years. He left in manuscript an interesting autobiography. On May 19, 1830, he was married to Alithea A. Wells by whom he had two sons and two daughters.

[J . B. Newcomb, Genealogical Memoir of the Newcomb Family (1874); B. M. Newcomb, Andrew Newcomb and His Descendants (1923); Congregational Quarterly, October 1863; E. H. Chandler, History of the Wellesley Congregational Church (1898); G. K. Clarke, History of Needham, Massachusetts, I7II-I9II (1912); New York Observer, September 3, 1863.)

F. T. P.  


NEWELL, William Augustus (September 5, 1817-August 8, 1901), congressman and governor of New Jersey,

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, pp. 459-460:

NEWELL, WILLIAM AUGUSTUS (September 5, 1817-August 8, 1901), congressman and governor of New Jersey, was born in Franklin, Ohio, the son of James Hugh and Eliza D. (Hankinson) Newell of Freehold, New Jersey. His parents had temporarily moved to Ohio but returned to New Jersey when he was three years of age. He attended school at New Brunswick, New Jersey, and was graduated from Rutgers College in 1836. He received the M.D. degree from the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania in 1839 and began the practice of medicine with his uncle at Manahawkin, Ocean County, New Jersey. He went to Imlaystown and about 1844 settled at Allentown, New Jersey, where he built up a large and lucrative practice. The same year he began practice his attention was called to a shipwreck off the coast near his home, and, appalled at the loss of life when thirteen bodies were brought ashore, he began to experiment with lines and with a mortar to reach a wrecked vessel in the hope of preventing future accidents. He was so far successful that, eight years later when serving in Congress, he had plans for a life-saving service, which gave impetus to the establishment of a federal life-saving service that was adapted for the entire sea and lake coasts (Remarks of William A. Newell ... August 3, 1848, 1848; Letter from William A. Newell ... to Hon. William J. Sewell, 1898, with useful citations). He served two terms in Congress as a Whig, from 1847 to 1851, and then resumed practice in Allentown.

In 1856 he had identified himself with the American party and was elected governor of New Jersey; he served two terms from 1857 to 1861. In these critical years he led in the unification of the interests of the American and Republican parties in the state. By 1860 he had become a Republican and was a delegate to the Republican convention at Chicago. Under Lincoln's administration he was appointed superintendent of the life-saving service in New Jersey. He was for a period examining surgeon of drafted soldiers in his state. In 1865 he returned to Congress for one term. He was defeated for reelection as he was in several later efforts to be elected to the House and to the Senate as well as to the governorship. Nevertheless he continued to keep a firm hold on party patronage in the state. In 1875 he became president of the New Jersey state board of agriculture, and his efforts were important in the establishment of the federal agricultural bureau. In 1880 President Hayes appointed him governor of Washington Territory, in which office he served four years. Then he was appointed Indian inspector for the same territory. He practised a year in Olympia and was resident surgeon in the soldiers' and sailors' home there. He returned to Allentown, New Jersey, in 1889, where he continued to practise until the time of his death. He was married in early life to Joanna Van Deursen of New Brunswick, New Jersey, who di ed while he was governor of Washington Territory. They had three children.

[Information from Mrs. Wm. S. Meek, Elizabeth, New Jersey; The Biographical Encyclopedia of N. J . (1877); The New Jersey Coast (2 volumes, 1902); Biographical Dir. American Congress (1928); Who's Who in America, 1901-02; C. M. Knapp, New Jersey Politics during the Period of the Civil War (1924); C. A. Snowden, History of Wash. (1909), volume IV; Newark Evening News, August 8, 11, 1901.]

A.V-D.H.  


NICHOLAS, John, 1756(?)-1819, jurist.  Democratic Member of U.S. Congress from Virginia, 1793-1801.  Opposed slavery as Member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 511; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, p. 483; Locke, 1901, pp. 93, 160; Annals of Congress). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, p. 483:

NICHOLAS, JOHN (1756?-December 31, 1819), member of Congress from Virginia, brother to George, Wilson Cary, and Philip . Norborne Nicholas [qq.v.], and son of Robert Carter [q.v.] and Anne (Cary) Nicholas, was born in Williamsburg, Virginia. Almost nothing is known of his early life, but being the second son of the Treasurer of the Colony, he doubtless received every advantage that the little provincial capital afforded. It appears that he attended the College of William and Mary, studied law, and practised for a time in Williamsburg, but his career was interrupted by the outbreak of the Revolution, which occasioned the removal of his family to the comparative safety of an estate in Hanover County. Though at some time during his career John lost the use of one of his eyes, he appears to have continued his studies or his practice during the war, and to have taken no part in military operations. In 1781, on the death of his father, his family removed from Hanover to Albemarle County. It is not clear that John followed them to their new home, for we presently find him located in Stafford County, where he married Anne Lawson, daughter of Gavin Lawson, by whom he had eleven children. In 1793 he was elected to the Federal House of Representatives and, being thrice reelected, served until 1801. He came to be recognized as one of the leading supporters of the Republican cause on the floor of the House. He was effective in debate, and his speech advocating repeal of the Sedition Act was published in 1799 as a Republican pamphlet and later included by Alexander Johnson in his collection of Representative American Orations (1884, I, 83-95). Nicholas appears to have suffered financially as a consequence of his public service, and in 1799 desired to give up his seat in Congress but consented to serve another term in the interest of the Republican cause. It was presumably due to this economic situation that he finally retired from public life in 1801 and two years later removed to Geneva, Ontario County, New York (Manning J. Dauer, "The Two John Nicholases," American Historical Review, January, 1940, 338-53). In his new home he engaged in agricultural pursuits and in 1806 was elected to the state senate, which place he held until 1809. From 1806 until 1819 he acted as judge of the court of common pleas of Ontario County. He died at his home in Geneva on December 31, 1819, and was interred in Glenwood Cemetery. Little is known of his private life except that he was a devout member of the Episcopal Church.

[There is a meager account of John Nicholas in the Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); and another Alexander Brown, The Cabells and their Kin (1895), pp. 200-01. See also: Louise P. da Bellet, Some Prominent Virginia Families (n.d.), volume II; Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, July 1901; Ori, Clark, A Funeral Address, Delivered at the Interment of the Hon. John Nicholas I820 (n.d.); Richmond Enquirer, January 15, 1820.)

T.P.A. 


NICHOLS, Clarina Irene Howard (January 25, 1810-January 11, 1885), reformer, editor, publicist,

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, pp. 490-491:

NICHOLS, CLARINA IRENE HOWARD (January 25, 1810-January 11, 1885), reformer, editor, publicist, was born in Townshend, Windham County, Vermont, of English and Welsh ancestry. She was the daughter of Chapin and Birsha (Smith) Howard and the grand-daughter of Levi Howard or Hayward who removed to Townshend from Milford, Massachusetts, about 1775. She became a teacher in public and private schools and is said to have founded a young ladies' seminary in Herkimer, New York, about 1835. On April 21, 1830, at Townshend she was married to her first husband, Justin Carpenter. On March 6, 1843, she was married, also at Townshend, to George W. Nichols who was the publisher of the Windham County Democrat at Brattleboro. His illness forced her, soon after their marriage, to take the financial and editorial control of his paper. It was in these columns that she began the work for woman's rights that marked the whole of her long career. She wrote editorials from 1843 to 1853, when the paper was discontinued. A series of articles, published in 1847 and addressed to the voters of Vermont, dealt with the property disabilities of women and were important in influencing the passage, in 1848, of the Vermont law to secure to a wife the real estate owned at marriage or thereafter acquired by gift, devise, or inheritance even against the debts of the husband, with the corollary right of disposing of her property by will as if "sole." In 1850 she began speaking for woman's suffrage in her native state, in New Hampshire, and in Massachusetts. In September and October 1853 she traveled 900 miles in the state of Wisconsin as agent of the woman's state temperance society. As a result of her work and that of others, a law was passed by the Wisconsin legislature to secure to the wives of drunkards their own earnings along with the custody and earnings of their minor children.

In October 1854, with her two eldest sons, she joined a company of 225 emigrants to Kansas. She went directly to Lawrence and at once began lecturing and speaking on woman's rights. Her husband followed with another party but died a few months after his arrival. She returned to Vermont to settle his estate and, while in the East, lectured on Kansas and its problems. In the winter and spring of 1856 she also wrote for the Herald of Freedom, published at Lawrence, Kansas, a series of articles dealing with women's legal disabilities. Upon her return to Kansas in 1857 with her daughter and her youngest son she went to Wyandotte County, where for some years she made her home. When in 1859 the constitutional
convention for Kansas met at Wyandotte, she, knitting in hand, the only woman present, sat through its sessions, "watching every step of the proceedings, and laboring with members to so frame the Constitution as to make all citizens equal before the law" (History of Woman Suffrage, post, UI, 704). After the Kansas woman's rights association was formed in 1859, as its representative she attended the session of the first state legislature at Topeka in 1860 and by invitation addressed both houses. For the two years preceding this legislative session she had spoken in the towns and hamlets of Missouri that lay along the Kansas border. In 1860 and 1861 she lectured in Wisconsin and Ohio. From December 1863 to March 1866 she was in Washington, D. C., writing in the military and revenue departments, and acting as matron in the home for colored orphans. She returned to Kansas in 1869 and two years later removed to Mendocino County, Cal. She died in Potter Valley. "A good writer, an effective speaker, and a preeminently brave women," she was "gifted with that ra rest of virtues, common sense." She "may be said to have sown the seeds of liberty in three states in which she resided," Vermont, Kansas, and California (History of Woman Suffrage, post, III, pp. 764-65).

[History of Woman Suffrage, ed. by E. C. Stanton, S. B. Anthony, and M. J. Gage, esp. volumes I, III (1881- 87); Annals of Brattleboro, ed. by M. R. Cabot, volume I (1921); Gazetteer .. . of Windham County, Vermont, comp. by Hamilton Child (1884), p. 304; P. W. Morgan, History of Wyandotte County, Kansas (19II), volume I; records in office of secretary of state, Montpelier, Vermont; clipping from Ukiah (Cal.) City Press, January 16, 1885, in library of the Kansas State Historical Society]

L. K. M. R.


NICHOLS, George Ward (June 21, 1831-September 15, 1885), promoter of art education and music in Cincinnati, author, Union officer with General W.T. Sherman.  From a full diary which he kept while in the service, Nichols immediately compiled a volume entitled The Story of the Great March (1865), which had a sale of 60,000 copies within a year.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, p. 494:

NICHOLS, GEORGE WARD (June 21, 1831-September 15, 1885), promoter of art education and music in Cincinnati, was born in the village of Tremont, Mount Desert, Me., the son of John and Esther Todd (Ward) Nichols. His father and grandfather were sea-captains. In 1835 the family moved to Boston, Mass., where George received a public-school education. He appears to have entered journalism promptly upon leaving school. Later he went to Kansas and was active in the political and military struggle which attended the organization of that state. In 1859 he spent some time in Europe, principally in Paris, where he studied painting under the direction of Thomas Couture, and upon his return was art editor on the New York Evening Post, writing also for magazines. On April 25, 1862, he entered the Union army as a captain, and served at first on the staff of Fremont. Subsequently (1863), he was detailed to assist the provost-marshal general's department in Wisconsin, after which duty he was a recruiting officer until 1864, when he was made aide-de-camp on the personal staff of General Sherman. He accompanied Sherman on his march to the sea and was with him until the conclusion of the war. Upon his resignation he was brevetted lieutenant-colonel of volunteers.

From a full diary which he kept while in the service, Nichols immediately compiled a volume entitled The Story of the Great March (1865), which had a sale of 60,000 copies within a year, besides being reprinted in English newspapers and being translated (it is said) into Spanish, French, and German. Perhaps hoping to repeat this success-which, however, resulted from the fame of Sherman's exploits rather than from Nichols' literary skill-he utilized the same matter in the composition of a war-novel, The Sanctuary (1866). This artless story, conventional in motivation and stilted in language, attracted no widespread attention and was soon completely forgotten.

Shortly after the close of the war, Nichols went to Cincinnati with Sherman, and there met Maria Longworth, aunt of Nicholas Longworth, 1869-1931 [q.v.], whom on May 6, 1868, he married. From this time Cincinnati was his home, and he quickly made himself felt there as an energetic, commanding force, promoting the cultural development of the city. He had much to do with the founding of the School of Design, which was at first a part of the University of Cincinnati and was later transferred to the Art Museum. Convinced that a large and profitable field awaited the employment of trained artists and craftsmen in industry, he busied himself in advancing the cause of art education. In 1877 he published Art Education Applied to Industry, and in 1878 Pottery: How it is Made, its Shape, and Decoration. These are straightforwardly written and well-arranged manuals, on the whole skilfully adapted to their purpose. His most conspicuous and important service to the arts, however, lay in another direction. The Harmonic Society of Cincinnati under his presidency and management gave a series of concerts which were so successful as to suggest a more elaborate undertaking, and in 1872 the May Festival Association was organized with Nichols at its head. The first musical festival took place in 1873, and he continued to direct the affairs of the Association until 1880, during which time three festivals were held. Meanwhile, in 1879, with the aid chiefly of Reuben R. Springer [q.v.], he established the College of Music of Cincinnati and became its first president, a position which he held until his death from pulmonary tuberculosis. He was a born "promoter," with remarkable executive capacity, determination, and self-confidence, with the result "that his career often seemed to those about him too full of his own individuality for the most comfortable enjoyment of easy social friendship" (Cox, post, p. 25). Yet it may be said, in general, that Cincinnati owes its importance as a musical center very largely to his audacity and diligence.

[Cincinnati Enquirer and Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, September 16, 1885; Cincinnati Times-Star, September 15, 1885; Circulars, Papers and Annual Meeting of the Ohio Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion During the Year 1885 (1887); J. D. Cox, in Memorial Services in Honor of George Ward Nichols . .. March 4, 1887 (1887); C. T. Greve, Centennial History of Cincinnati (1904), volume I; The Biographical Cyclopedia and Portrait Gallery with an Historical Sketch of the State of Ohio, volume IV (n.d.); Harper's Weekly, September 26, 1885; local records, Town of Mount Desert, Me.]

R. S.


NILES, Hezekiah (October 10, 1777-April 2, 1839), newspaper editor, Niles' Weekly Register.  Niles devoted many editorials to the institution of slavery, which he declared should be abolished, though gradually. While in Delaware he was an officer of the state abolition society.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, pp. 521-522:

NILES, HEZEKIAH (October 10, 1777-April 2, 1839), editor, was born at Jefferis' Ford, Chester County, Pennsylvania, whither his parents had gone for safety just before the battle of the Brandywine. His father, Hezekiah Niles, a plane-maker of Philadelphia, had married Mary Way of Wilmington, Del., and moved to the latter place. Both were of the Quaker faith, though the father was "disowned" a few years after going to Wilmington. Though definite record is lacking, it is probable that the younger Hezekiah attended the Friends' School in Wilmington. At seventeen he was apprenticed to Benjamin Johnson, a printer of Philadelphia, with whom he worked for three years, until 1797, when he was released because of his master's lack of funds. Niles's first writing was done in Philadelphia; in 1794 he published in newspapers several essays favoring  protection, and in 1796 arguments against Jay's Treaty. He married Ann, daughter of William Ogden, of Wilmington, May 17, 1798, and they had twelve children. She died in 1824, and two years later Niles married Sally Ann Warner, by whom he had eight children. At the time of his second marriage he was  described by an acquaintance as "a short stout-built man, stooping as he walked, speaking in a high key, addicted to snuff, and with a keen gray eye, that lighted up a plain face with shrewd expression" (J. E. Semmes, John H. B. Latrobe and His Times, 1917, p. 184).

Upon returning to Wilmington in 1797 Niles assisted in publishing an almanac and did job printing. After two years he formed a partnership with Vincent Bonsal, but the partnership was dissolved because of losses incurred in the publication of The Political Writings of John Dickinson (2 volumes, 1801). In 1805, following the failure of a short-lived literary magazine, the Apollo, Niles moved to Baltimore and became editor of the Baltimore Evening Post. This paper supported the Jeffersonian party in all of its policies; it was sold in June 1811, and Niles immediately issued the prospectus for his Weekly Register (later Niles' Weekly Register) which after seven years of publication had over 10,000 subscribers. This paper he edited and published until 1836, with the assistance of his son, William Ogden Niles, from 1827 to 1830, and on it his reputation is based. In these twenty-five years he made it the strongest and most consistent advocate of union, internal improvements, and protection to industry, in the country. Niles was probably as influential as any in the nationalist economic school which sponsored the American System after the War of 1812. He was the intimate associate of Mathew Carey and Henry Clay. He was a principal mover in the protectionist conventions at Harrisburg in 1827 and at New York in 1831; for the former he wrote the address to the people of the United States; of the latter he was the chief secretary (Niles' Weekly Register, August 11, October 13, 1827; November 5, 1831). In each instance he gave spirit and form to the work of the convention, and utilized, besides, his remarkable talents and opportunities as a propagandist in its behalf. His opinions and advocacies developed as he advanced. He opposed the recharter of the first Bank of the United States in 1811, believing it to be unconstitutional and a harmful monopoly. But he espoused the recharter of the second Bank of the United States in Jackson's administration, declaring that it had become a necessity to prosperity. In politics, Niles was a Jeffersonian until 1816 or 1817, when he described himself as a no-party man. On January 10, 1824, he wrote: "I cannot believe that either [Jackson or Calhoun] will be elected, and should regret votes thrown away. I esteem both, personally and politically; and though my private wish is rather for Mr. Adams, I shall be content to accept any other than Mr. Crawford" (Darlington Collection, post). When Jackson came into office in 1829, Niles differed sharply with his policies, and became a Whig.

Niles devoted many editorials to the institution of slavery, which he declared should be abolished, though gradually. While in Delaware he was an officer of the state abolition society. In his arguments for the protective tariff, he exerted himself with much ingenuity to win the agricultural interest to his side. His writing was characterized by vigor and decision. He was a tireless worker, and supplied statistical evidence where many in his group were content with eloquence. Besides a number of pamphlets, he published the Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America (1822). He never held national office, but in Wilmington was twice town clerk and twice assistant burgess; in Baltimore he served two terms in the first branch of the city council. He was elected and reelected (1818-19) grand high priest by the Masonic Order in Maryland. He was a leading figure in the Baltimore Typographical Society. He died in Wilmington.

[R. G. Stone, Hezekiah Niles as an Economist (1933); biographical notices in Niles' National Register (as it was then called), April 6, 13, 1839; Philadelphia North American, April 4, 1839; Baltimore Patriot and Commercial Gazette, April 3, 1839; " Village Record, West Chester, Pennsylvania, Notae Cestrienses, No. 34," in Genealogical Soc. of Pennsylvania Colls. The Register is the best source for his opinions and activities. See also H Clay and Darlington collections in MSS. Div., Library of Congress; E. T. Schultz, History of Freemasonry in Md., II (1855); J. S. Futhey and Gilbert Cope, History of Chester County, Pennsylvania (1881); Edward Stanwood, American Tariff Controversies in the Nineteenth Century (1903), volume I.]

B.M.


NILES, Nathaniel, 1741-1828, lawyer, jurist, theologian.  U.S. Congressman from Vermont, October 1791-March 1795.  Voted against Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.  Leading his party in Vermont, he fought against slavery and against banks.

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 521; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, p. 523; Annals of Congress, 2 Congress, 2 Session, p. 861). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, pp. 523-524:

NILES, NATHANIEL (April 3, 1741-October 31, 1828), inventor, theologian, preacher, politician, and man of business with a somewhat less happy dash of the poet, was born at South Kingston, R. I., the son of Samuel and Sarah (Niles) Niles and the grandson of Samuel Niles [q.v.]. His parents were cousins german. Like his father and grandfather, Nathaniel was sent to Harvard College but because of illness he left that institution after his first year. Later (1765), with his brother Samuel, he entered the College of New Jersey where he graduated in 1766. His many interests proved at first somewhat of a handicap; he could not decide upon his life work. For a time he studied medicine, then law, and finally turned to theology under the direction of Joseph Bellamy. Though he preached in several New England towns, he was never ordained. Shortly before the Revolution he settled in Norwich, Conn., where he married Nancy, the daughter of Elijah Lathrop, a prosperous trader and manufacturer. He entered Lathrop's factory and is said to have invented an improved type of wool card and to have discovered a new method of applying water power to the drawing of wire from bar iron. These inventions, however, seem to have left no mark upon American industry. Meanwhile he was preaching frequently at Norwich and elsewhere. Several of his sermons he published. He also found time for politics, serving in the Connecticut legislature for three sessions (1779-81). Toward the end of the Revolution he bought a large tract of land in Orange County, Vt., and in 1782 or 1783, he abandoned his business career to move with several friends into the northern forest. They were the first settlers in what became the township of West Fairlee.

The rest of his strenuous life Niles spent in Vermont, preaching frequently, attending the sick when physicians were not available, writing on theology, but devoting himself primarily to the management of his land and to politics. His position as the largest proprietor in the neighborhood, his undoubted intelligence, his positive and democratic ideas, his forceful and aggressive character, all contributed to his success in politics. From 1784 to 1814, when at the age of seventy-three he retired to his farm, he was almost always in office, on occasion filling two positions simultaneously. For eight terms he sat in the lower house of the Vermont legislature. From 1784 to 1787 he was a member of the supreme court of the state; hence his title of judge by which he was called thereafter. For many years he was a member of the Council, a popularly elected executive and legislative body. From 1791 to 1795 he sat in the federal House of Representatives. He took a leading part in the state convention of 1791 which ratified the federal Constitution, and in another of 1814 which revised the fundamental laws of the state. Unlike most New England clergymen he was a Jeffersonian Democrat. Leading his party in Vermont, he fought against slavery and against banks; he gave vigorous support to the second war with England and as vigorous condemnation of the Hartford Convention. His influence, however, was not widespread for the Federalist triumph in Vermont in 1794 kept the state Democrats out of national office for many years.

In 1793 he was made trustee of Dartmouth College, a position he held until 1820. Characteristically he took his duties with the utmost seriousness. In temperament and in religious and political ideas he was in sharp contrast to President John Wheelock. He early became convinced that the college was suffering under the latter's direction and he soon headed the opposition in the board of trustees. When matters came to a crisis in 1815, he joined with his Federalist fellow members to oust the president and to defend the institution against the state authority. Besides his sermons he published numerous theological articles. His one attempt at poetry, an ode called The American Hero, was written in celebration of the battle of Bunker Hill. Set to music it gained wide popularity during the Revolutionary War. Posterity will not regret that thereafter Niles turned his talents to other fields. Despite weak health in his youth his physical and mental vigor was remarkable; even in extreme age he spent long hours renewing his knowledge of Latin. He left nine children, five of them by his second wife, Elizabeth Watson of Plymouth, Mass., whom he married on November 22, 1787.

[J. A. Vinton, The Vinton Memorial (1858); F. M. Caulkins, History of Norwich, Conn. (2nd ed., 1866); A. M. Hemenway, The Vt. History Gazetteer, volume II (1871); W. B. Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, volume I (185'7-); J. M. Comstock, A List of the Principal Civil Officers of Vt. (1918); J. G. Ullery, Men of Vt. (1894); J. K. Lord, A History of Dartmouth Coll. (1913); E. B. Huntington, A Genealogical Memoir of the Lo-Lathrop Family (1884); Vt. Watchman and State Gazette (Montpelier); November 18, 1828.]

P.D.E.


NOBLE, John Willock (October 26, 1831- March 22, 1912), soldier, lawyer, secretary of the interior.  In 1855 he moved to St. Louis, but, shortly becoming convinced that, as a Free-Soiler and a Republican, he could not succeed in the pro-slavery atmosphere there, he moved to Keokuk, Iowa, where from 1856 to 1861 he acquired an extensive law practice and shared with Samuel Freeman Miller the leadership of the state bar. 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, pp. 539-540:

NOBLE, JOHN WILLOCK (October 26, 1831- March 22, 1912), soldier, lawyer, secretary of the interior, was born at Lancaster, Ohio, the son of John and Catherine (McDill) Noble, Pennsylvania Presbyterians who had migrated early to Ohio. After attending the public schools of Cincinnati, he spent three years at Miami College, before his graduation with honors from Yale in 1851. The year following he received his law degree from the Cincinnati Law School but continued to study in the office of Henry Stanbery before his admission to the bar. In 1855 he moved to St. Louis, but, shortly becoming convinced that, as a Free-Soiler and a Republican, he could not succeed in the pro-slavery atmosphere there, he moved to Keokuk, Iowa, where from 1856 to 1861 he acquired an extensive practice and shared with Samuel Freeman Miller the leadership of the state bar. In August 1861 he enlisted in the 3rd Iowa Cavalry and during the Civil War served with distinction in every grade from lieutenant to colonel, seeing service in various western campaigns and in raids into the lower South. He also acted as judge-advocate-general of the Army of the Southwest. "For gallant and meritorious services" he was brevetted brigadier-general in 1865. On February 8, 1864, he married Lisabeth Halsted, of Northampton, Mass., a woman of marked intellectual power and a leader in early social welfare movements.

In 1865 Noble returned to St. Louis. His subsequent career was divided between professional and public interests. At the instance of his former teacher, Stanbery, he was appointed in 1867 United States district attorney for the eastern district of Missouri. During three years of hard work and of harder fighting Noble prosecuted with intelligence and thoroughness numerous violators of the internal-revenue laws. The chief offenders were certain of the whiskey and tobacco interests and their corrupt and entrenched governmental allies, a notorious combination which defrauded the government of huge sums. Against this group, the forerunner of the Whiskey Ring, Noble fought with some success and set in operation forces which eventually exposed the ramifications of the system. In 1870 he resumed practice and won immediate success. His clients included large corporate and railroad interests of the Southwest. He was very effective both in trial and in appellate practice, despite a too frequent reliance upon oratory. He declined in 1872 the position of solicitor-general. He was considered well qualified for the secretaryship of the interior to which Harrison named him in 1889 (St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 4, 1889). As an esteemed Grand Army man and as an exponent of the orthodox Republican view that the surplus collected largely under the tariff laws should properly be distributed in pensions, Noble favored a policy of great liberality and repeated in his reports many of the platitudes concerning the old soldier. He absolutely refused, however, to sanction the highly irregular and illegal administrative activities and rulings of "Corporal" James Tanner, the commissioner of pensions. A sharp difference arose over the policy of reratings, and the two men clashed frequently. Harrison supported Noble in the controversy, and Tanner, "insubordinate in the last degree," finally resigned (W. H. Glasson, Federal Military Pensions in the United States, 1918).

The pension act of 1890 received Noble's cordial approval, although its administration was beset with fraudulent claimants, political sentimentalists, and astute claim attorneys whom he found impossible to control. With reference to the timber lands, his practice was to dispose of the thousands of cases in the Land Office by a more liberal interpretation of the land laws in favor of the settler (Report of the Secretary of Interior, 1889, 1891). In this manner the cases were rapidly settled but probably many fraudulent claims received approval. In 1890 Noble strongly supported the views of the American Forestry Association and the Division of Forestry and was responsible for the introduction of the forest reserve sections in the revision of the land laws in 1891 C John Ise, The United States Forest Policy, 1920). Harrison acted immediately and withdrew for national forests millions of acres of valuable lands. The act of 1891 remains Noble's most significant achievement. At his retirement from office in 1893, the general administrative functions of the department were efficiently conducted. Politically, he was generally regarded as a follower of the president rather than of Blaine. He was austere and forma! in his official relations but friendly and democratic in his personal contacts. Upon his return to St. Louis he reentered his profession but found it difficult to regain his practice. Concerning his public life he ruefully declared, "I spent my whole fortune living up to the office. My house cost me more than my salary. . . . I thought I was doing well but when I came home I had no practice and came near starving" (I. H. Lionberger, "Glimpses of People and Manners in St. Louis," 1920). A mining interest provided him with necessary resources. He was not again active in political affairs but remained an interested and benevolent figure at veterans' gatherings and college reunions. He died in St. Louis after a month's illness.

[L. D. Ingersoll, Iowa and the Rebellion (1866); B. E. Fernow, A Brief History of Forestry (1907); I. H. Lionberger, "Glimpses of People and Manners in St. Louis" (1920); J. T. Scharf, History of St. Louis City and County (2 volumes, 1883); D. L. McMurry, "The Bureau of Pensions during the Administration of President Harris on," Miss. Valley Historical Rev., December 1926; annual reports of the secretary of the interior, 1889-92; Who's Who in America, 1912-13; Obit. Record of Yale Grads., 1911-12.]

T.S.B.


NORTHUP, Solomon, born 1808, free African American man.  Northup was kidnapped by slavers in Washington City in 1841 and illegally forced into slavery for 12 years.  In 1853, he was rescued by Northern abolitionists and returned to his family in Washington.  Northup wrote Twelve Years a Slave in that same year.  He worked as a member of the Underground Railroad to help escaped slaves to flee to Canada.  His book was published by Northern abolitionists, and was used prominently in the abolitionist cause.  The date of his death is unknown.  His book was made into a major motion picture by the same name in 2013.  (Northup, 1853; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 47, 55).  


NOTT, Charles Cooper (September 16, 1827-March 6, 1916), jurist, He was an active Republican and in 1860 was one of the committee responsible for bringing Lincoln to New York to deliver his Cooper Institute speech. A friendship between the two men began at this time. Shortly thereafter Nott secured from Lincoln the manuscript of his address which, with Cephas Brainerd, he published with notes in September 1860.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, pp. 579-580:

NOTT, CHARLES COOPER (September 16, 1827-March 6, 1916), jurist, was born at Schenectady, New York, the son of Joel B. and Margaret Cooper Nott. His paternal ancestors were of early Connecticut stock but for two generations the family life had been interwoven with that of Union College of which Nott's grandfather, Eliphalet Nott [q.v.], had been president, and in which his father was professor of chemistry. It was but natural that the boy's education, uneventful in its earlier phases, should culminate in his graduation from the college in 1848. For two years thereafter he studied law in Albany and was admitted to the bar in 1850. He then moved to New York City where he practised successfully until the outbreak of the Civil War. He was a fairly active Republican and in 1860 was one of the committee responsible for bringing Lincoln to New York to deliver his Cooper Institute speech. A friendship between the two men began at this time. Shortly thereafter Nott secured from Lincoln the manuscript of his address which, with Cephas Brainerd, he published with notes in September 1860. After the outbreak of the war he entered the Union army under an appointment by General Fremont as captain in the Fremont Hussars. He later served in the 5th Iowa Cavalry and in the New York volunteers. He finally became colonel of the 176th New York Regiment. In June 1863 he was captured at Brashear City, La., and remained a Confederate prisoner for thirteen months. He did not see further active service and emerged from prison seriously impaired in health. He returned to the practice of law in New York.

The entire course of Nott's later life was determined by his appointment by President Lincoln as judge of the United States Court of Claims on February 22, 1865. He remained a member of that tribunal for forty years, retiring December 31, 1905, and from the time of his promotion by President Cleveland in 1896 he served as chief justice. When Nott took office the Court of Claims was still in its formative period and his life was spent in aiding in the establishment of a system of jurisprudence under which the claims of a contractual or business nature of the citizen against the federal government might be recognized and enforced. The record of his labors is found in opinions spread through forty-eight volumes of the Cases Decided in the Court of Claims. No small part of Nott's service to the Court lay in his reporting of its decisions. From 1867, when the publication of regular reports began, until 1914, Nott served as reporter. Until 1872 he was aided in this labor by Judge Samuel H. Huntington and from that date on by his brother- in-law, Archibald Hopkins. This long series of his reports is broken only in 1882-83 when his illness necessitated a year's absence from all official duties.

During his adult years Nott was a fairly voluminous contributor to the press and to more substantial publications. Much of his writing was done anonymously in the form of editorials and reviews. His longer works include: A Treatise on the Mechanics' Lien Laws of the State of New York (1856); Sketches of the War (1863); Sketches in Prison Camps (1865); The Seven Great Hymns of the Medieval Church (1865); and The Mystery of the Pinckney Draught (1908). Nott was married on October 22, 1867, to Alice Effingham Hopkins, the daughter of Mark Hopkins [q.v.], president of Williams College. Of this marriage there were born a son and a daughter. He died at the home of his son in New York City on March 6, 1916.

[See Who’s Who in America, 1914-15; New York Times, New York Herald, March 7, 1916.]

R.E.C.


NOTT, Eliphalet (June 25, 1773-January 29, 1866), college president, Presbyterian clergyman, inventor. As early as 1811, in baccalaureate addresses, he advocated the abolition of slavery; he often served as moderator in church trials; the religious revival of 1838 inspired some of his most memorable sermons, which added further to his reputation as a preacher.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, pp. 580-581:

NOTT, ELIPHALET (June 25, 1773-January 29, 1866), college president, Presbyterian clergyman, inventor, was born in Ashford, Conn., the son of Stephen and Deborah (Selden) Nott. His father proved himself a failure in each of his undertakings, but his mother was a woman of superior culture. She instructed the boy in the rudiments, and he prepared for college under the supervision of his brother Samuel [q.v.], pastor of the Congregational church at Franklin, Conn. At sixteen, he taught in the district school at Franklin. A year later, he became principal of the Plainfield Academy, and studied Latin, Greek, theology, and mathematics with the Rev. Dr. Joel Benedict, pastor of the local Congregational church. In 1795 he entered Rhode Island College (Brown University), and without completing a full year there, was admitted to the degree of master of arts upon passing a special examination. On June 26, 1796, he was licensed to preach by the New London Congregational Association. In the following month,  July 4, 1796. he married Sarah Maria, eldest daughter of Joel Benedict.

Commissioned by the Domestic Missionary Society of Connecticut, he set out for the wilderness of upper New York State, and in the fall became pastor of the Presbyterian church at Cherry Valley. Here he founded an academy which he conducted successfully while discharging the obligations of his pastoral office. His reputation as a preacher grew, and in 1798 he removed to Albany, where, on October 13, he was ordained and installed as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. At Albany, he established himself as a peculiarly gifted preacher, learned, eloquent, and convincing, and was soon considered one of America 's greatest pulpit orators. Among the most celebrated of his published sermons was A Discourse ... Occasioned by the Ever to be Lamented Death of General Alexander Hamilton (1804), delivered at the invitation of the Common Council of Albany. His interest in education expressed itself in his persistent efforts to reform the antiquated public-school system of Albany. As a result of his recommendations, first outlined in March 1803, the Albany Academy was finally incorporated, in 1813. On March 11, 1804, his wife died, and on August 3, 1807, he married Gertrude (Peebles) Tibbitts, widow of Benjamin Tibbitts of Troy. After her death, early in 1840, he married Urania E. Sheldon of Utica, August 8, 1842.

Meanwhile, in 1804, he had succeeded Jonathan Maxcy [q.v.] as president of Union College, Schenectady, of which he had been a trustee since 1800. He found the college laboring under a heavy debt, while its income was far less than its necessary expenditures. His executive abilities were manifest at once in his admirable, far-sighted program. The state legislature responded to his appeal, March 30, 1805, by authorizing four lotteries for the purpose of raising the sum of $80,000 for the college, and the following year Nott secured a loan of $15,000 from the state to defray pressing current expenses. Eight years later, when the drawing finally took place, the college realized but $76,- 000. By this time, there was an urgent need for a larger sum, and again Nott appealed to the legislature, which on April 13, 1814, made an additional grant of $200,000, to be raised in the same manner. After waiting eight year~ without results, Nott took up on himself the management of the lotteries, and with such success that he was able to extricate the college from its embarrassments. By heroic personal efforts, he placed the endowment fund upon a secure basis. The building program we nt forward satisfactorily, the college developed rapidly from within, and achieved a high reputation for the excellence of its instruction. His form of control enabled the students to enjoy a larger measure of self-government than was customary in American colleges at that time. Among his innovations was the introduction of the scientific course as an alternative to the traditional classical curriculum.

His interest was not confined to the affairs of the college; as early as 1811, in baccalaureate addresses, he advocated the abolition of slavery; he often served as moderator in church trials; the religious revival of 1838 inspired some of his most memorable sermons, which added further to his reputation as a preacher. He was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Education at its second meeting, held in 1850 at Philadelphia. As an instructor of youth, he saw the dangers of intemperance, and became one of the most active and influential advocates of temperance in his time. His addresses on the subject,  Ten Lectures on the Use of Intoxicating Liquors (1846), Lectures on Temperance (1847), Lectures on Biblical Temperance (1863), were published and circulated widely. Another of his publications which went through numerous editions was Counsels to Young Men on the Formation of Character (1840 ). His Miscellaneous Works had appeared in 1810. In addition to his prodigious labors as an educator, he experimented with the properties of heat. The results of his research are recorded in some thirty patents, granted for applications of heat to steam boilers and generators. Among his inventions was the first base-burning stove for the use of anthracite coal.

Nott's extraordinary influence over men-exemplified in his influence over the New York legislature led him sometimes to accomplish his purposes by indirect means that laid him open to the accusation of double-dealing (Francis Wayland, quoted in Francis and H. L. Wayland, A Memoir of the Life and Labors of Francis Wayland, 1867, I, 90-92). In 1851, after a legislative inquiry concerning the financial condition of Union College, he was accused, in many newspapers, of misappropriating college funds. Upon examining the books of the institution, an Assembly commission reporting in February 1852 completely vindicated him of all charges of dereliction. As a fitting sequel to this unpleasant affair, he donated in 1854 to the endowment fund $600,000 of his own fortune. His active career was terminated by a paralytic stroke, which forced him, in 1859, to relinquish some of the duties of his office. He presided at commencements, however, until 1862. At his death, in 1866, he had been president of Union for sixty-two years, an unprecedented period in the annals of higher education in America.

[Cornelius Van Santvoord and Tayler Lewis, Memoirs of Eliphalet Nott (1876); American Jour. of Educ., March 1863; H. L. Ellsworth, A Digest of Patents issued by the U. S. from I790 to January I839 (1840); G. P. Schmidt, The Old Time College President (1930); J. T. Backus, Address at the Funeral of the Rev. Dr. Nott (1866); Albany Evening Journal, January 29, 1866.]

R.F.S.


NOYES, William Curtis (August 19, 1805-December 25, 1864), New York lawyer. Originally a Whig, he became a Republican upon the dissolution of the former party (1856). He was defeated for the office of state's attorney general in 1857, though running ahead of the party ticket. As a stanch Republican, he publicly attacked the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and Fugitive Slave Law. He was a delegate to the Peace Conference in Washington (1861), where he labored to harmonize conflicting views between the sections. His unionist convictions are summed up in the title of an address, which he delivered in 1862 to support the Emancipation Proclamation: One Country! One Constitution! One Destiny!

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 7, Pt. 1, p. 592:

NOYES, WILLIAM CURTIS (August 19, 1805-December 25, 1864), New York lawyer, was born in Schodack, New York, the son of George and Martha (Curtis) Noyes and a descendant of James Noyes who came to New England in 1633. He received a common-school and academy education, and at the age of fourteen years entered as a student the law office of Welcome Esleeck of Albany. He completed his studies in the office of Storrs & White of Whitesboro, was admitted to the bar as attorney in 1827 and as counselor in 1830. He practised law successively in Rome and Utica and became district attorney of Oneida County before his thirtieth year. In 1838 he removed to New York and rapidly advanced to the front ranks as an advocate.

Lacking a college education, he possessed the capacity to educate himself. He gradually built up a remarkable library, valued at $60,000, consisting of about five thousand law books and two thousand general works, all of which he bequeathed to Hamilton College on his death. He possessed a taste for miscellaneous reading and was a profound student of the law. His success as an advocate was enhanced by his exhaustive researches into the law and facts of his cases. He reduced his briefs to writing, memorized his speeches, and delivered them as though unpremeditated. In the "Huntington case" his masterly analysis of moral insanity secured the conviction of Huntington, a Wall Street broker on trial for forgery, who had set up a plea of insanity. Another notable suit was the Rose Will case (4 Abbott's Court of Appeals Decisions, 108), in which Noyes ably presented the history and doctrine of charitable uses. His greatest triumph occurred in the suit of the Mechanics' Bank vs. New York & New Haven R.R. Co. (13 New York Reports, 599). In this trial in the New York court of appeals Noyes defended the stockholders of the railroad against the claim that they should be deprived of their holdings without compensation, because the transfer agent of the railroad had issued fraudulent stock to a third party.

Although he was sincerely interested in public affairs and politics, he was never a politician in the ordinary sense. Originally a Whig, he became a Republican upon the dissolution of the former party (1856). He was defeated for the office of state's attorney general in 1857, though running ahead of the party ticket. As a stanch Republican, he publicly attacked the Kansas-Nebraska Bill and Fugitive Slave Law. He was a delegate to the Peace Conference in Washington (1861), where he labored to harmonize conflicting views between the sections. His unionist convictions are summed up in the title of an address, which he delivered in 1862 to support the Emancipation Proclamation: One Country! One Constitution! One Destiny! In 1857, with Alexander W. Bradford and David Dudley Field he was appointed to codify the state laws, and in this work engaged chiefly in the revision of the penal code, which he completed just before his death. Though the code was rejected in New York, it was adopted at a later elate by several western states. Noyes was a consistent Christian and philanthropist. For years he supported a home missionary without hinting of it to others. He was on the executive committee of the American Temperance Union, and was chosen president of the New England Society three clays before he died. He was twice married, first to Anne Tracy, who bore him three children, and second to Julia A. Tallmadge, to whom two children were born. He was survived by one daughter of each marriage.

[H. E. Noyes and H. E. Noyes, Genealogical Record of ... James, Nicholas and Peter Noyes (1904), volume II; 43 Barbour's Supreme Court Reports (New York), 649-73; S. W. Fisher, William Curtis Noyes, a Baccalaureate Discourse (1866); American Annual Cyclopedia .. 1864 (1865); David McAdam and others, History of the Bench and Bar of New York, volume I (1897); C. A. Alvord, printer, Library of William Curtis Noyes (1860); Charles Warren, A History of the American Bar (1911); New York Herald, December 27, 1864; letters from Noyes to G. C. Verplanck, April 18, 1840 and 1842, March 31, 1846, November 21, 1859 (MSS.), New York Historical Soc.]

A. L. M.


NYE, James Warren, June 10, 1814- December 25, 1876, governor of Nevada Territory, supporter of the Free-Soil movement.

(G. H. Nye and F. E. Best, A Genealogy of the Nye Family (1907); Frank Leslie's Illus. Newspaper, March 20, 1858, September 14, 1872; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936 Volume 7 pt. 1 p. 600)

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

NYE, James Warren, senator, born in De Ruyter, Madison County, New York, 10 June, 1814: died in White Plains, New York, 25 December, 1876. He was educated at Cortland Academy, Homer, New York, leaving it in 1832 to study law in Troy, New York. After being admitted to the bar, he practised in his native county, gained a reputation as an effective speaker before a jury, was chosen district attorney, and in 1840 was elected county judge, serving eight years, he was a Democrat in politics up to the time of the Barn-burner Campaign. In 1848 he was an unsuccessful candidate for Congress as a Free-Soil Democrat. Moving to Syracuse, New York, he practised there till 1857, when he went to New York City, having been appointed the first president of the Metropolitan Board of Police, which office he held till about 1860. He was a member of the Republican Party from its formation, and was identified with its Radical wing. He was a witty and eloquent platform orator, and during the canvass of 1860 did effective service for his party in a tour through the west in company with William H. Seward. In 1861 President Lincoln appointed him governor of Nevada Territory, where he counteracted the influence of the Pro-slavery Party and, with Thomas Starr King, of San Francisco, did much to keep the Pacific States and Territories in the Union during the early period of the Civil War. On the admission of Nevada as a state, in 1865, he was elected U. S. Senator, and drew the short term, and in 1867 was re-elected. He was noted for his humor and conversational powers. After he retired from public life his mind became impaired.  Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume IV, p. 547.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936 Volume 7 pt. 1 p. 600:

NYE, JAMES WARREN (June 10, 1814- December 25, 1876), governor of Nevada Territory, United States senator, was the son of James and Thankful (Crocker) Nye and a descendant of Benjamin Nye who emigrated from England to settle in 1635 at Lynn, Massachusetts. Born at De Ruyter, Madison County, New York, James grew up amidst the severe limitations of poverty. He secured secondary schooling at Homer Academy, however, and then studied law in Hamilton, New York, where he practised for some years. He was surrogate of Madison County, 1844-47, and judge of the county court, 1847-51. In 1848, running for Congress as a Free-Soil or "Barnburner" Democrat, he was defeated by the Whig candidate, William Duer. In 1851 he removed to Syracuse, continuing to enjoy a successful practice. Six years later, in 1857, he became one of the police commissioners of the metropolis under an act of that year amending the city charter.

When Fort Sumter was fired upon, Nye became an enthusiastic supporter of Lincoln, using his remarkable gift as a stump orator in behalf of the administration, and he was soon appointed governor of the newly created territory of Nevada. Upon arrival in Carson City, Nevada, July 8, 1861, he was confronted with the difficult task of organizing the territory. The bulk of the population was included in what had been Carson County, Utah Territory. Without friction, Nye absorbed the government of the old county into that of the new territory, and guided the latter swiftly into the position of an effective governmental organization, a task the more difficult because the $30,700 a year in greenbacks, voted by Congress for support of the territory, was worth hardly more than half its face value.

When in 1864 Nevada was advanced to statehood, and Nye County, newly created, was named for him, Nye logically became a candidate to represent the new state in the United States Senate and was elected in company with William M. Stewart [q.v.]. The two cast lots in the state Senate for the long term, Nye drawing the short term. Reelected to the Senate in 1867 after a hot contest with Charles E. DeLong, he served with honor on important committees, always stanchly loyal to the Republican party which had sent him to Washington. He concluded his term on March 3, 1873, having been defeated for reelection by John Percival Jones [q.v.]. This was his last political office. About two years later he sailed from San Francisco for New York, apparently in good health, but during the voyage he lost his mind, and after living many months under this cloud he died on December 25, 1876, at White Plains, New York.

Nye was of medium height, weighed nearly two hundred pounds, but was well built, with small hands and feet. His dancing black eyes, expressive features, and shoulder-length snow white hair gave him in his later years a striking appearance, while his genial humor, quick repartee, and natural gift for oratory gave him power in social as well as in political life. The name "Gray Eagle" was bestowed upon him in recognition of his abundant life and vitality. The friend of Captain Jim of the Washoe Indian tribe as well as of President Lincoln, he swapped stories with both. He was a prolific user of Bible quotations, though not always in anecdote of the choicest character. In Fabius, New York, he had married Elsie Benson, and they had two children.

[G. H. Nye and F. E. Best, A Genealogy of the Nye Family (1907); Frank Leslie's Illus. Newspaper, March 20, 1858, September 14, 1872; History of Nev. (1881), ed. by Myron Angel; H. H. Bancroft, History of Nev., Colo., and Wyo. (1890); Biographical Directory American Congress (1928); Daily Territorial Enterprise (Virginia City, Nev.), December 29, 1876; New York Times, December 28, 1876; Daily Alta California, May 24, 27, 1875, December 29, 1876, January 19, 1877.)

J.E.W.  



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