Rea-Riv: Read through Rives

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


READ, James, abolitionist, founding member, Electing Committee, Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, April 1787

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V; Basker, 2005, pp. 92, 102; Nathan, 1991). 


READ, John Meredith, (July 21, 1797- November 29, 1874), jurist, “U. S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 1837-'44, solicitor-general of the United States, attorney general of Pennsylvania, and chief justice of that state from 1860 until his death. He early became a Democrat, and was one of the founders of the Free-soil wing of that party. This induced opposition to his confirmation by the U. S. Senate when he was nominated in 1845 as judge of the U. S. Supreme Court, and caused him to withdraw his name.” (Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 427).

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

READ, John Meredith, jurist, born in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania, 21 July, 1797; died in Philadelphia, 29 November, 1874. was graduated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1812, and admitted to the bar in 1818. He was a member of the Pennsylvania legislature in 1822-3, city solicitor and member of the select, council, in which capacity he drew up the first clear exposition of the finances of Philadelphia, U. S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 1837-'44, solicitor-general of the United States, attorney general of Pennsylvania, and chief justice of that state from 1860 until his death. He early became a Democrat, and was one of the founders of the Free-soil wing of that party. This induced opposition to his confirmation by the U. S. Senate when he was nominated in 1845 as judge of the U. S. Supreme Court, and caused him to withdraw his name. He was one of the earliest and staunchest advocates of the annexation of Texas and the building of railroads to the Pacific, and was also a powerful supporter of President Jackson in his war against the U. S. bank. He was leading counsel with Thaddeus Stevens and Judge Joseph J. Lewis in the defence of Castner Hanway for constructive treason, his speech on this occasion giving him a wide reputation. He entered the Republican Party on its formation, and at the beginning of the presidential canvass of 1856 delivered a speech on the " Power of Congress over Slavery in the Territories." which was used throughout that canvass (Philadelphia, 1856). The Republican Party gained its first victory in Pennsylvania in 1858, electing him judge of the supreme court by 30,000 majority. This brought him forward as a candidate for the presidency of the United States in 1860: and Abraham Lincoln's friends were prepared to nominate him for that office, with the former for the vice-presidency, which arrangement was defeated by Simon Cameron in the Pennsylvania Republican Convention in February of that year. He nevertheless received several votes in the Chicago Convention, notwithstanding that all his personal influence was used in favor of Mr. Lincoln. The opinions of Judge Read run through forty-one volumes of reports. His " Views on the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus" (Philadelphia, 1863) were adopted as the basis of the act of 3 March, 1863. which authorized the president of the United States to suspend the habeas corpus act. He refused an injunction to prevent the running of horse-cars on Sunday, since he could not consent to stop "poor men's carriages." Many thousand copies of this opinion (Philadelphia, 1867) were printed. His amendments form an essential part of the constitutions of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and his ideas were formulated in many of the statutes of the United States. Brown gave him the degree of LL. D. in 1860. Judge Read was the author of a great number of published addresses and legal opinions. Among them are " Plan for the Administration of the Girard Trust "(Philadelphia, 1833); 'The Law of Evidence" (1864); and "Jefferson Davis and his Complicity in the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln" (1866).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 427:

READ, JOHN MEREDITH (July 21, 1797- November 29, 1874), jurist, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the grandson of George Read [q.v.] of Delaware, and son of John [q.v.] and Martha (Meredith) Read. Graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1812, he was admitted to the bar on September 7, 1818, served as city-solicitor (1830-31) and member of the select-council (1827-28) of Philadelphia, and represented the city in the state legislature (1823-25). Endowed with talents of a high order and with exceptional family connections, punctual and methodical, and indefatigable in labor, he attained before he was forty a place high among the leaders of the city bar, when that bar was in its golden age. After serving as United States district attorney for eastern Pennsylvania from 1837 to 1841 (Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate, volume V, 1887), he was nominated by President Tyler an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (Ibid., volume VI, 1887), but his opinions on slavery prevented confirmation by the Senate. As a result, at least partly, of the recommendations of James Buchanan (The Works of James Buchanan, ed. by J. B. Moore, VI, 1909, p. 77), he was next appointed attorney-general of Pennsylvania, but occupied the position only a few months (June 23-December 18, 1846, 3 Pennsylvania, 5). Private practice claimed him thereafter until his election in October 1858 for fifteen years to the supreme court of the state, of which he became chief justice by seniority on December 2, 1872. His failing health increased the labors of his colleagues at the end of his term, and for this reason he retired upon its expiration. His judicial opinions were mines of information when they involved historical research; otherwise they were habitually terse and vigorous, characterized perhaps more by a strong sense of justice than by power of legal reasoning. He was known to call bedroom consultations in earliest morning hours and even to open court in mid-winter before daylight. According to a friendly and very competent contemporary, he was a faithful adherent to precedents and defender of vested rights, even to the point of undoing some innovations of his predecessors.

To Philadelphia Read gave on many occasions unstinted service. Ardent in friendships, zealous in advocacy of causes he espoused, a speaker of earnestness and power, he wielded an influence which counted heavily in the state. Despite early anti-slavery tendencies he approved the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War, but he opposed in the state convention of 1849 any extension of slave territory, joined in the creation of the Free-Soil party, and was an early adherent of the Republican party. His Speech ... on the Power of Congress over the Territories, and in Favor of Free Kansas, Free White Labor, and of Fremont and Dayton, Delivered ... September 30, 1856, at Philadelphia (1856) was widely used in the national campaign. The first Republican victory in Pennsylvania sent him to the state supreme court. Pennsylvania was indispensable to Republican success in 1860, and Read received mention in the state convention as a presidential candidate (Philadelphia North American and United States Gazette, February 23, 1860, p. 2), but Simon Cameron's ambitions stood in the way. Rhode Island gave him one vote in the first ballot of the convention. During the war he was one of the bare majority of his court who steadily sustained the legislation of Congress; and several of his opinions, separately printed, received wide circulation. His Views, sustained by Facts and Authorities, on the Suspension of the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus, published in January 1863, probably had some influence upon the passage by Congress of the Act of March 3, 1863.

Read was a man of dignity, kindness, courtesy, remarkable energy, and strong opinions, and very persistent in his purposes. The standards he set for himself as a lawyer and a citizen were exceedingly high, and he observed them. He was married on March 20, 1828, to Priscilla Marshall of Boston, by whom he had five children. She died in 1841 and on July 26, 1855, he married Amelia Thompson of Philadelphia, the daughter of Edward Thompson and widow of Theodore Thompson. She, with a son by his first wife, John Meredith Read [q.v.], survived him. His judicial opinions are in volumes 32 to 73 of the Pennsylvania State Reports. His other publications included, aside from unofficial prints of judicial opinions, various pamphlets. His most important reprinted opinions supported the constitutionality of the national draft act of March 3, 1863 (45 Pa., 238, at 284 and 300) and of the legal tender act (52 Pa., 9, at 71), and the operation of street cars on Sunday, as "the poor man's carriage" and therefore within the state constitutional exception of necessity and charity (54 Pa., 401, at 432).

[See: F. M. Eastman, Courts and Lawyers of Pennsylvania (1922), volume II; J. H. Martin, Martin ' s Bench and Bar of Philadelphia (1 883); E. K. Price, "An Obit. Notice of Chief Justice John Meredith Read," Proceedings American Phil. Society, volume XIV (1 876), which notes his influence in various fields of Pennsylvania Jaw; Proceedings of the R. W. Grand Lodge of Pa. ... December 28th, A.D., 1874 .. . in Reference to the Death of ... John Meredith Read (1875); obituary proceedings of the bar of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Legal Intelligencer (Philadelphia), December 4 and 11, 1874; H. P. Read, Rossiana (1908); F. W. L each, "Old Philadelphia Families," North American (Philadelphia), Magazine Section, February 9, 1908.]

F. S. P.


REALF, Richard, 1834-1878, abolitionist.  Supported militant abolitionist leader John Brown.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 434-435:

REALF, RICHARD (June 14, 1834-October 28, 1878), poet, abolitionist, was born at Framfield, Sussex, England. His father was a rural constable, probably Richard Realf (or Relfe); his mother was Martha (Highland). A precocious child, writing lines in verse before he was nine years of age, he early attracted the attention of people in higher grades of society, among them Lady Byron, and through such connections obtained greater educational advantages than might otherwise have come to him. At the age of seventeen he published some immature but promising poems under the title Guesses at the Beautiful (1852).

Following an unfortunate love affair he emigrated to America in 1854 and for the next two years was connected with the Five Points House of Industry in New York City. In the fall of 1856, stirred by the events in Kansas, he went west, where he acted as a newspaper correspondent. Hemet John Brown, 1800-1859 [q.v.], was a prominent member of Brown's convention at Chatham, Canada, in May 1858, and was chosen secretary of state in Brown's mysterious scheme of government for the new era of freedom he aimed to bring about. Realf did not remain to see the actual working out of Brown's plans, but sailed for England in the summer of 1850 he did not return until the following year when he did return it was to a Southern port and he seems at this time to have joined the Roman Catholic Church and even to have considered studying for the priesthood. He was still in the South when, in October 1859, John Brown led the attack on Harpers Ferry; nevertheless he was arrested, and before the Senate committee of investigation was questioned at length regarding his association with Brown.

In 1862 he enlisted in the 88th Illinois Regiment, in which he later received a commission and served to the end of the war. Afterwards he was for a time on reconstruction duty with a negro regiment in the South. In 1872 he entered upon newspaper work in Pittsburgh and remained there for about five years, achieving considerable reputation also as a public lecturer on temperance and on literary and patriotic subjects. An illness in the fall of 1877 caused almost complete blindness, and when he was able to leave the hospital friends provided the means for him to go to the Pacific Coast. He arrived in San Francisco, badly broken in health, in the early part of July 1878. He sought a position in the United States mint but had to be content for the time with a laborer's job. III health and accumulation of domestic troubles, which pursued him even to the Pacific Coast, drove him to contemplate suicide, and in an Oakland hotel, on October 28, 1878, he ended his struggle by poison. A poem written in sonnet form which was found by his bedside contained in its last two lines his farewell and his apologia :

"He loved his fellows, and their love was sweet-
Plant daisies at his head and at his feet."

His friend, Richard J. Hinton, describes Real£ as slight and graceful in figure, about five feet five inches in height, with a well-shaped head and fine features. His poems, scattered through many magazines and newspapers, were collected and published in 1898 as Poems by Richard Realf, Poet, Soldier, Workman. His verse is marked by fine rhythm and melody, and at times, particularly in his patriotic poems, has a passion akin to the recorded passion of his oratory. Through all his life, tragedy seemed to pursue him and his melancholy reflects itself in many lines of his verses. His domestic relations were most unhappy and entangled his career. He was married three times: in 1865 to Sophia Emery Graves, to whom he never returned after his military service in Mississippi, apparently believing her dead; in 1867, to Catherine Cassidy, whom he divorced in 1873, only to have the divorce set aside on a technicality after he had married his third wife, who bore him one child, then triplets. His search for consolation in religion seems to have been unavailing. In the end he gave up the struggle. His grave is in Lone Mountain Cemetery, overlooking San Francisco Bay.

[Sources include: R. J. Hinton, memoir, in Poems by Richard Realf (1898); Lippincott's Magazine, March 1879; Midland Monthly, August 1895, reproduced in The Agora (Lawrence, Kan.), November 1895; Realf's testimony before the Senate committee, Sen. Report No. 278, 36 Congress, 1 Session, pp. 90-113; information affording clues to Realf's parentage from Reverend Arthur Haire, Framfield, Sussex, and Reverend Clarence Gee, Delaware, Ohio; obituary in San Francisco Chronicle, October 30, 1878. In Mary E. Jackson's novel, The Spy of Osawotamie (1881), the character of Hayden Douglas is said by the author to impersonate Richard Realf.]

F. L.


REDPATH, James, 1833-1891, author, editor, abolitionist leader.  New York Tribune. Reported on the Kansas conflict 1854-1859, and conditions of slaves and slavery in the South. In 1859 he published his articles under the title, The Roving Editor, or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States.  In 1859 Redpath had been appointed commissioner of emigration in the United States by the Haitian president. He founded the Haitian Emigrant Bureau in Boston and New York, established a newspaper on the subject, and sent several thousand ex-slaves to the negro republic.

(Rodriguez, 2007, p. 358; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, p. 206; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 443-444; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 681-682; Annals of Congress; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 18, p. 257). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 443-444:

REDPATH, JAMES (1833-February 10, 1891), journalist, editor, lecture promoter, was born in Berwick on-Tweed, Scotland, the son of James Redpath, who was Scotch, and Marie Ninian Davidson Redpath, who was English. The father, a man of some education, wished James to become a clergyman, and (though the boy had a fancy for the printing business) began his education with that in view. At sixteen James collaborated with his father in the writing of a little volume, Tales and Traditions of the Border. About 1850 the Redpath family emigrated to Michigan and settled on a farm. James soon found work in a printing office at Kalamazoo, twenty miles distant. A few months later he went to Detroit, where his writing attracted the attention of Horace Greeley, who offered him a position on the staff of the New York Tribune. Thus at nineteen, young Redpath formed a connection which continued intermittently during thirty years thereafter. The political troubles in Kansas attracted his attention, and he made several visits to that disturbed territory between 1854 and 1859, each time writing a series of newspaper articles which attracted wide attention. He had by this time become a fiery abolitionist. For the better part of his life he was an energetic reformer-always seething with ardor in some cause or other, scornful of compromise, his enthusiasm giving interest and often brilliancy to his writing. Between 1854 and 1860 he traveled through the Southern states, studying slavery and writing articles, some of which were published in 1859 under the title, The Roving Editor, or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States. Several more of his books came from the press in those two years A Handbook to Kansas Territory (1859); Echoes of Harper's Ferry (1860); The Public Life of Captain John Brown (1860); and also A Guide to Hayti (1860), for he had pushed his research to that island and had decided that it would be a good asylum for Southern negroes.

In 1859 Redpath had been appointed commissioner of emigration in the United States by the Haitian president. He founded the Haitian Emigrant Bureau in Boston and New York, established a newspaper on the subject, and in the course of years sent several thousand ex-slaves to the negro republic. Later he became Haitian consul at Philadelphia and was instrumental in procuring recognition of Haitian independence by the government of the United States. During the Civil War he was a correspondent with the Union armies. At the close of the war he was made superintendent of education at Charleston, S. C., where he had much to do with reorganizing the school system of the state, especially colored schools. He likewise founded a colored orphan asylum, and in a little cemetery near Charleston established what was probably the first regular decoration of soldiers' graves in May of each year. Observing the need of an organized agency for the booking of lectures (which were important and popular functions in those days), Redpath established such a business in 1868, at first calling it the Boston Lyceum Bureau, later substituting his own name for "Boston." Among his early clients were Emerson, Greeley, Beecher, Thoreau, Sumner, Bayard Taylor, Wendell Phillips, Mary A. Livermore, and Julia Ward Howe. A little later he began booking humorists, such as Mark Twain, Josh Billings, and Petroleum V. Nasby, and poets, who read their own writings. When he added magicians such as Kellar and Herrmann, there was some criticism, but he insisted that they had a legitimate place in platform entertainment. Next he took on musical soloists and quartettes, and finally organized small opera companies, or groups which gave a varied entertainment. By 1879 Redpath had become much interested in Ireland, and during the next two years he made two journeys to that country, writing journalistic letters which vigorously denounced English rule and landlordism. A volume of these letters was published as Talks about Ireland in 1881. In 1886 Redpath became an editor of the North American Review but relinquished the place in the following year when he suffered a slight stroke of paralysis. On February 5, 1891, he was run over by a street car in New York City and died five days later. He had married, in 1888, Mrs. Caroline Chorpenning.

[C. F. Horner, Life of James Redpath and the Development of the Modern Lyceum (1926); Proceedings at a Farewell Dinner given by the Land League of New York to fas. Redpath, prior to his Departure for Ireland, Delmonico's, June I, 188I; obituaries in the New York newspapers, February rt, 1891. Redpath's own writings give a good picture of his crusading years.]

A. F. H.


REED, David (February 6, 1790-June 7, 1870), Unitarian clergyman, editor, opposed slavery.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 445-446:

REED, DAVID (February 6, 1790-June 7, 1870), Unitarian clergyman, editor, son of Reverend William and Olive (Pool) Reed, was born in Easton, Massachusetts, in which town his father was for twenty-five years the Congregational minister. He was a descendant of William Reade who came from England to Boston in 1635 and was one of the early settlers of Weymouth. David graduated from Brown University in 1810. For two years thereafter he was principal of Plymouth Academy, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, at the same time studying theology under Reverend Dr. Sanger of South Bridgewater. In 1813 he went to Cambridge and continued his theological studies at Harvard; the following year he was licensed to preach. From 1814 to 1821 he served churches in Maine, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and elsewhere, but declined to be permanently settled.

His contribution to his denomination and to the religious history of his time consisted in the establishment and publishing of a weekly periodical, and in the influence he exerted through this medium. Traveling about and coming into contact with conditions in different states, he became convinced that the liberal movement needed a weekly paper to disseminate information and to further the purification and greater effectiveness of the Christian faith. Accordingly, with the indorsement of William Ellery Channing and others, he founded the Christian Register, the first number of which appeared on April 20, 1821. The venture succeeded and in the issue of April 28, 1921, the paper commemorated the one hundredth anniversary of its first appearance. For some forty-five years Reed was its proprietor and for a considerable portion of this time, its editor, securing for its columns contributions from the leading Unitarians of the day. The period was marked by dissension in the Unitarian body, and also by extension in its organization and work, while the anti-slavery and other reforms were agitating the country at large. Living until after the Civil War, Reed exerted an influence which touched all these matters. He thought clearly, wrote with vigor, and was courageous in the support of the beliefs and measures of which he approved, thereby rendering service of value both to Unitarianism and to the cause of moral and civil welfare in general. On May 2, 1836, he was carried at Providence, R. I., to Mary Ann, daughter of Capt. Howell Williams, by whom he had three children.

[J. L. Reed, The Reed Genealogy. (copyright 1901); Historical Catalog of Brown University, 1764-1904 (1905); S. A. Eliot, Heralds of a Liberal Faith (1910), volume II; G. W. Cooke, Unitarianism in America (1902); F. L. Mott, A History of American Magazines (1930); Christian Register, June 11, 1870; Boston Evening Transcript, June 7, 1870.)

H. E. S.


REEDER, Andrew Horatio, 1807-1864, territorial governor of Kansas Territory, anti-slavery political leader, removed from office by President Franklin Pierce for not enforcing pro-slavery laws; elected territorial representative October 9, 1855 

(Dumond, 1961, p. 331; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 32, 45, 436-437; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, p. 211; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 462-463; Annals of Congress; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 18, p. 284). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 462-463:

REED, ANDREW, H.,

He was married in 1831 to Amelia Hutter of Easton, who with five of their eight children survived him. In appearance he was corpulent and erect, in manner generous and sincere, in business methodical and industrious.

He had neither sought nor held office before his appointment as governor of Kansas Territory on June 29, 1854. He was a successful lawyer and a reliable popular-sovereignty Democrat. He was, however, little fitted by experience or temperament to govern a frontier community in which bitter factions were struggling for mastery. Not until October 7 did he arrive at Fort Leavenworth, where he established temporary executive quarters. The proslavery Democracy of Missouri expected his cooperation, but he assumed an attitude of independence. In his first speech on Kansas soil he pledged himself to preserve law and order and to protect the ballot box. Accompanied by other officials he made a tour of inspection to acquaint himself with the territory and, incidentally, to invest in land. In November he called an election for delegate to Congress, and the proslavery candidate, John W. Whitfield, easily won a three-cornered contest. A census was taken the following winter, and a legislature was chosen on March 30, 1855. There was illegal voting on both sides, but the proximity of Missouri aided proslavery candidates. At Shawnee, whither the executive office had been removed, Reeder rejected returns of six districts from which protests had been received and ordered special elections. In April he went east to confer with party leaders and found the administration unsympathetic. Pierce suggested another appointment but Reeder declined. He returned to the territory and convened the first legislature on July 2 at Pawnee, in whose " town company" he was financially interested. After unseating antislavery members chosen at special elections, the general assembly passed a bill, over the governor's veto, reestablishing the seat of government at Shawnee and adopted a memorial requesting Reeder's removal. The president had already determined upon dismissal, and among other reasons cited his belated arrival in the territory and his speculation in land. He attended the Big Springs convention in September and wrote the report of the resolutions committee. This embodied a violent attack upon the legislature, which had passed a stringent slave code since his removal. The radical tone of the resolutions brought him the unanimous nomination as delegate to Congress. At separate elections in October he and Whitfield were chosen by their respective parties, but Congress eventually rejected both. In March 1856 the Free State "legislature" elected Reeder and James H. Lane [q.v.] to the federal Senate. The ex-governor was soon indicted for treason but, disguised as an Irish laborer, he escaped by way of the Missomi river and arrived in Illinois on May 27. His diary from May 5 to May 31 was later printed in the Transactions of th e Kansas State Historical Society (volume III, 1886). He was enthusiastically welcomed at Chicago, and on M ay 29 he addressed the Republican state convention at Bloomington. A month later he presided at the Cleveland convention for Kansas aid and throughout the summer and fall took an active part in the Fremont campaign. As a spokesman of the Free State party he exerted considerable influence in molding public opinion in the North.

At the close of the presidential contest he resumed the practice of law at Easton. In 1860 he headed the Pennsylvania delegation to the Chicago convention, and on the first ballot for vice-president he received fifty-one votes. There is some evidence that Lincoln tendered him a brigadiership in the regular army (War of the Rebellion: Official Records, Army, 1 series, LI, pt. 2, p. 98), but if so it was declined. He was chairman of the Pennsylvania delegation to the Baltimore convention in 1864.

[Kan. Historical Colls., volume III (1886) with his executive minutes and sketch of life; U. W. Condit, The History of Easton (copyright 1885); the Address of Gen. W. E. Doster on Hon. A.H. Reeder (1901); D. W. Wilder, The Annals of Kansas (1886); Kansas Weekly Herald (Leavenworth), September 15, 1854; New York Times, July 8, 1864.]

W. H. S.


REID, Whitelaw (October 27, 1837-December 15, 1912), journalist, diplomat. Endorsed Fremont in 1856, and ardently supported Republican principles. Following the Lincoln-Douglas debates he became an admirer of Lincoln, in 1860 advocated his nomination by the Republican party, and was influential in securing support for him among the Ohio delegates.

(Royal Cortissoz, The Life of Whitelaw Reid (2 volumes, 1921)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 482:

REID, WHITELAW (October 27, 1837-December 15, 1912), journalist, diplomat, was born near Xenia, Ohio. His paternal grandfather, James Reid, had come to America from County Tyrone, Ireland, but was of Scotch blood; his father, Robert Charlton Reid, was a farmer in modest circumstances. His mother, Marion Whitelaw Ronalds, also of Scotch descent, had been born at Ryegate, Vermont, removing to Ohio, shortly before her marriage. The family, which was devoutly Presbyterian, had traditions of culture on both sides, enjoyed music, and possessed a small library. Reid, who was delicate in health, was given to reading. From the district school he went to Xenia Academy and Miami University, where he was thoroughly grounded in Latin and studied Greek, French, and German. He showed a distinct literary bent and before graduation with honors from Miami in 1856 had begun to write for country newspapers. After a year as superintendent of schools in South Charleston, Ohio, he acquired an interest in the Xenia News, a weekly which he edited with much spirit for almost two years. He had spoken for Fremont in 1856, and ardently supported Republican principles. Following the Lincoln-Douglas debates he became an admirer of Lincoln, in 1860 advocated his nomination by the Republican party, and was influential in securing support for him among the Ohio delegates, though the state convention had indorsed Salmon P. Chase. After Lincoln's nomination he left the News, but served during the campaign as secretary of the Republican committee for Greene County.

At the beginning of 1861, eager for a broader field of activity, Reid secured an assignment from the Cincinnati Times to report the legislative session at Columbus. He wrote political correspondence also for the Cleveland Herald and the Cincinnati Gazette; and his dispatches to the latter paper, signed "Agate," at once attracted attention by their energy, vividness, and independence. His real career now began. During the spring he became city editor of the Gazette, but almost immediately went into the field as its war correspondent, making his headquarters in Washington and covering political as well as military affairs. His spurs were first won as correspondent and also aide-de-camp with Rosecrans in the West Virginia campaign. His reports from this front showed a shrewd appraisal of military events and the work of the military leaders, including McClellan, whose lack of aggressiveness he quickly recognized. Later he was at Shiloh and Gettysburg, his descriptions of these battles being regarded by officers who participated as remarkable for comprehensiveness, clarity, and accuracy as well as color and vigor. Edmund Clarence Stedman subsequently used Reid's account of Gettysburg as the basis for his poem on the battle. In the intervals of his field excursions he was in Washington ably interpreting the political background of the war. He became well acquainted with such civil leaders as Chase, Sumner, Henry Winter Davis, Garfield, Hay, and Greeley. He also served for three years, 1863-66, as librarian for the House, and for a shorter period as clerk of its military committee. His work as war correspondent closed with an account of a visit to Richmond immediately after its fall-he was one of the fir st three newspapermen to reach the city-and a description of the funeral of Lincoln. Few journalists attracted more attention during the conflict. A passionate Union man, he was at the same time independent in thought and statement, while he saw not only the immediate drama but its larger implications (Cortissoz, post, I, 57-n7). His combination of' invincible reserve with unusual ambition, self-confidence, and self-assertiveness led some to regard him as a selfish careerist.

Immediately after the close of hostilities, Reid made two extended tours of the South, the first in company with Chief Justice Chase, recording his observations in graphic newspaper letters later republished, with additions, under the title After the War (1866). This volume still possesses value for students of the period. In 1865 he invested in cotton land in Louisiana, hoping for quick and extensive profits. But he lacked the tastes and experience required for a successful planter. Crop and labor conditions were bad, and the venture proved unfortunate. After removal to Alabama, where his luck was somewhat better, he was glad in 1867 to withdraw his capital, return to the North, and reenter journalism. While busy as a planter he had begun an elaborate two-volume history called Ohio in the War, covering both the civil and military record of the state, 186o-65, which was published in 1868. He had never completely severed his connection with the Gazette, to which he now returned as stockholder as well as writer. He wrote editorials, helped otherwise in shaping its policy, and ably reported such important events as the trial of Andrew Johnson and the national conventions of both parties in 1868. Finally, in the fall of 1868 he joined the New York Tribune.

Horace Greeley [q.v.], who had followed Reid's work with approval, had made previous advances to him on behalf of the Tribune: he at once became second in command in editorial matters, and in 1869 succeeded John Russell Young [q.v.] as managing editor. He improved the foreign news service, giving the Tribune a special eminence in treating the Franco-Prussian War, and he enlarged the list of American contributors by such names as Mark Twain, Richard Henry Stoddard, and Bret Harte. At his invitation John Hay joined the editorial staff in 1870. The Tribune in 1870-72 grew more and more bitterly opposed to the Grant administration, and lent early and vigorous support to the Liberal Republican movement. When demands arose, chiefly in the West, for Greeley's nomination, Reid at first opposed the suggestion. He tried to dissuade Greeley from considering it; but when the editor proved ambitious to run, he attended the Cincinnati convention as a loyal supporter, and played an important part in the strategic moves which gave Greeley a majority of the delegates (E. D. Ross, The Liberal Republican Movement, 1919, pp. 94 ff.). On Greeley's temporary retirement from the Tribune Reid took charge, writing that the campaign policy would be "aggressive," and making the paper an effective Greeley organ. He also helped raise campaign funds. After the defeat of the Liberal Republican party he stepped aside and Greeley resumed the editorship, but not for long. When a combination of circumstances resulted in Greeley's collapse and withdrawal, swiftly followed by death, Reid played as disinterested a part as could have been expected. Charles A. Dana's allegations to the contrary apparently have no foundation though stated with great explicitness (Cortissoz, I, 237-53; John Bigelow, Retrospections of an Active Life, V, 1913, pp. 88, 89; J. B. Bishop, Notes and Anecdotes of Many Years, 1925, pp. 30-32). A brief struggle for the vacant editorship, with Reid and Schuyler Colfax as chief contenders, resulted (partly through financial support furnished by William Walter Phelps and others) in Reid's victory. At thirty-five he was head of the most powerful newspaper in America.

The following years were so busy that Reid often worked eighteen hours a day, and had a bedroom fitted up in the Tribune tower (Cortissoz, I, 230). The circulation of the weekly Tribune steadily declined, but he increased that of the daily to more than 50,000 in 1875, more than 60,000 in 1876. Reporting was kept at a high level: the Tribune covered the Whiskey Ring scandal, the Pacific Mail investigation, the overthrow of the Canal Ring, and other events with unrivalled comprehensiveness, while its verbatim reports of testimony at the Beecher-Tilton trial were made authoritative by the court. While still devoted to Republican principles, Reid and the Tribune maintained their fight against the Grant administration, vigorously aided in exposing its corruption, attacked the third-term movement, and demanded a reorganization of the party. However, he defended the admirable foreign policy of Hamilton Fish, who sent him a special word of commendation for the Tribune's position in the Cuban difficulties of 1873. The editorial page remained forcible and influential, and was more scholarly than in Greeley's day. The paper supported Samuel J. Tilden as a reform candidate for governor of New York in 1874, and did much to effect his election, but it frankly expressed distrust of the Democratic party as a whole, and in 1876 threw its influence behind Hayes. In the dispute over the election Reid took a moderate stand, and demanded an impartial investigation of the vote in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida; a fact which emphasized the brilliant stroke of the Tribune when under his direction it unraveled the famous "cipher dispatches," and thereby estopped the Democrats from using the cry of fraud. The Tribune gave general support to the Hayes administration, and tried to compose the quarrel between the "Stalwarts" and "Half-Breeds"; for this reason, while applauding specie resumption and the Southern policy, it deplored Hayes's civil service reform measures as extreme and certain to estrange the Grant-Conkling faction. But after the election in 1880 of Garfield, an old and close friend, Reid urged a defiant attitude toward the "Stalwarts," and encouraged Garfield in the measures which resulted in the resignation and discomfiture of Senator Roscoe Conkling [q.v.]. Both Hayes and Garfield offered Reid the ministership to Germany, but in the hope of greater honors he declined.

[Royal Cortissoz, The Life of Whitelaw Reid (2 volumes, 1921), an exceptionally full and careful work; D. C. Seitz, Horace Greeley (c. 1926); C. S. Olcott, The Life of William McKinley (2 volumes, 1916); W.R. Thayer, The Life and Letters of John Hay (2 volumes, 1915); Tyler Dennett, John Hay (1933); John Hay, Letters of and Extracts from Diary (printed but not published 1908); files of the N. Y Tribune; obituary, [bid., December 16, 1912; H. F. Keenan, The Money-Makers, a Social Parable, published anonymously in 1885, containing a fictional picture of Reid which scathingly emphasizes certain self-seeking characteristics. For Mrs. Reid, see obituaries in New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, April 30, 1931.]

A. N.


REMOND, Charles Lenox, 1810-1873, free African American, Boston, Massachusetts, orator, abolitionist.  Member and delegate of the American Anti-Slavery Society.  He attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840.  Agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.  First Black abolitionist employed as spokesman in anti-slavery cause (in 1838).  Recruited African American soldiers for the Union Army. 

(Dumond, 1961, p. 331; W. L. Garrison ... the Story of his Life Told by his Children (4 volumes, 1885-89); Leeman, pp. 302-310; Mabee, 1970, pp. 61, 64, 103, 104, 106, 122, 124, 131, 157, 161, 173, 177, 180, 252, 254, 258, 261, 264, 294, 320, 322-324, 335, 373; Pease, 1965, pp. 314, 335-342; Rodriguez, 2007, pp. 32, 45, 436-437; Wheaton, 1996; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 499-500; Annals of Congress; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 18, p. 335; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 9, p. 404). 

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 499-500:

REMOND, CHARLES LENOX (February 1, 1810-December 22, 1873), negro leader, was born free in Salem, Massachusetts. His parents were John and Nancy Remond. His father was born in Curacao, became a hairdresser in Salem, Massachusetts, and was admitted to citizenship in the Essex County court on May 2, 1811 (for copy of certificate see W. C. Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 1855, p. 319). The boy attended the local schools and had the advantage of an excellent education. Possessing the gift of eloquence, when quite a young man he spoke frequently and effectively at antislavery meetings and was the first negro to address public gatherings on behalf of abolition. In 1838 he was appointed an agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and with the Reverend Ichabod Codding canvassed Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine on behalf of the cause. In May 1840 he was named one of the delegates to represent the American Anti-Slavery Society at the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London. Sailing on a packet he was obliged to travel in the steerage on account of his color. On the following June 24 he delivered a terse and telling speech in Exeter Hall at the anniversary celebration of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. A mulatto and distinguished in appearance, he became a great favorite and was invited to all functions to which the other American white delegates were asked. After these returned to the United States he remained behind for almost a year and a half lecturing against slavery to large audiences in many important places in Great Britain and Ireland. He was commended for the pertinency of his facts, the cogency of his arguments, and the fire of his eloquence (for an example see speech to a Dublin audience in the Liberator, November 19, 1841).

Landing at Boston in December 1841, he brought with him an address of Irish people to their countrymen in America exhorting them to unite everywhere with the abolitionists. This document bore 60,000 signatures, the first being that of Daniel O'Connell. He returned to find himself outshone as a negro antislavery orator by Frederick Douglass [q.v.], who had just accepted a place as lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Although his star as a speaker was in eclipse and illness-at times curtailed his lecturing activities, he continued in the employ of the same organization until slavery was abolished. He also wrote some for the press. During the Civil War he became a recruiting officer for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the first regiment of colored troops to be sent into action from any Northern state. In 1865 he was appointed light inspector. Several years later he became a clerk in the custom house at Boston and served there until his death. He was a small spare man of wiry build. He had a long and deeply furrowed face with bushy eyebrows and an aquiline nose, and he wore his hair brushed up in a curious fashion. He was extremely sensitive and felt keenly the prejudice against colored people. He died a widower.

[W. L. Garrison ... the Story of his Life Told by his Children (4 volumes, 1885-89); W. W. Brown, The Rising Son (1874); John Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace (1914); S. J. May, Some Recollections of our Antislavery Conflict (1869); Boston Evening Transcript, December 23, 1873.]

H. G. V.


REMOND, Sarah Parker, 1826-1894, African American, abolitionist, orator, women’s rights activist, physician,  friend of abolitionist Abby Kelley.  Sister to Charles Lenox Remond. 

(Wheaton, 1996; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 499; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985, pp. 686-687; Annals of Congress; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 18, p. 337; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., & Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2013, Volume 9, p. 406)


RENTOUL, William S., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Church Anti-Slavery Society, Vice-President, 1861-64.


REVELS, Hiram Rhoades (September 1822-January 16, 1901), African American Methodist clergyman, United States senator, educator. In January 1870 he was elected to the United States Senate, succeeding Jefferson Davis, and served until March 4, 1871. Revels was a Republican, but was not a Radical.

Biographical  Directory American Congress (1928); J. W. Garner, Reconstruction in Mississippi (1901); W. H. Barnes, History of Congress; The Forty-first Congress of the U.S., 1869-1871 (1872)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 513:

REVELS, HIRAM RHOADES (September 1822-Jan. 16, 1901), Methodist clergyman, United States senator, educator, born of free parents in Fayetteville, N. C., was of mixed African and Croatan Indian descent. For some years he was a barber in Lincolnton, N. C., but in 1844 he went to Indiana and attended a Friends' school at Liberty. Soon afterward, he was at school in Drake County, Ohio, and later attended Knox College. In 1845 he was ordained minister in the African Methodist Church and subsequently carried on religious work among the negroes in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Settling in Baltimore, he served as pastor of a church there and also as principal of a school for negroes.

During the Civil War he assisted in organizing two negro regiments in Maryland; in 1863 he went to St. Louis to establish a school for freedmen, and there he aided in recruiting another regiment. The following year he became chaplain of a Mississippi regiment, served for a short time as provost marshal of Vicksburg, organized several negro churches in Jackson, and then engaged for two years in pastoral work in Kentucky and Kansas. In 1866 he settled at Natchez and in 1868 joined the Methodist Episcopal Church. That same year he was elected alderman. He entered politics reluctantly, fearing race friction and the possibility of a conflict with his religious activities, but he won the liking and respect of the white people of the state, and he was successful in divorcing his church work from politics. He was elected to the state Senate from Adams County, and in January 1870 he was elected to the United States Senate, succeeding Jefferson Davis, and served until March 4, 1871. Revels was a Republican, but he was not a Radical, and in the Senate adopted a conservative attitude. His service was dignified and, apart from the fact that he was a negro, unimportant.

After his retirement in 1871 he was elected president of Alcorn University, at Oakland, near Rodney, a recently opened institution for negroes, which position he filled with credit. In 1873 he was secretary of state ad interim of Mississippi. In 1874 Governor Ames dismissed him from the presidency of Alcorn and he returned to ministerial work, joining the Mississippi Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church the following year. In 1875, he was active in behalf of the Democrats in the state campaign which led to the overthrow of the Carpet-bag government, and defended his course in a strong letter to President Grant, printed in the Jackson Daily Times, November 10, in which he said that all good men had combined to defeat the Republicans. In 1876 he again became president of Alcorn and did much to restore the confidence of the negroes in it. In June of the same year he became editor of the Southwestern Christian Advocate. After his retirement he lived at Holly Springs and was actively engaged in religious work until his death, which occurred while he was attending a Church conference at Aberdeen. His wife, Phoebe A. (Bass), and two daughters survived him.

[Biog. Directory American Congress (1928); J. W. Garner, Reconstruction in Miss. (1901); W. H. Barnes, History of Congress; The Forty-first Congress of the U.S., 1869-187r (1872); Abbott's Monthly, January 1931; S. D. Smith, "The Negro in Congress," unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of N. C.; Official Minutes ... Upper Miss. Annual Conference of the M. E. Church, 1901; Southwestern Christian Advocate, January 31, 1901; Daily Democrat (Natchez), January 18, 1901.]

J. G. de R. H.


RHEA, John (1753-May 27, 1832), U.S. congressman, was born in County Donegal, Ireland.  From 1803 until 1823, excepting for the Fourteenth Congress 1815-17, he served in the federal House of Representatives. He opposed slavery and expressed sympathy for the "unfortunate" slave states.

(M. B. Hamer, "John Rhea of Tennessee," East Tennessee Historical Society Pubs., January 1932; J. G. M. Ramsey, Annals of Tennessee (1853)

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 524-525:

RHEA, JOHN (1753-May 27, 1832), congressman, was born in County Donegal, Ireland, the eldest of eight children of Joseph and Elizabeth (Mcllwaine) Rhea. His father, the third son of Matthew Rhea or Reah or Creah and a descendant of the house of Campbell, was a Presbyterian clergyman who in 1769 emigrated with his family to Pennsylvania, then to Maryland. In 1775 he bought lands in what is now eastern Tennessee, on which the family settled in February 1778. The son served as a soldier in the Revolution, and in 1780 he graduated from the College of New Jersey (Princeton). He was incorporator or trustee of three colleges across the Alleghanies, Washington College, Greeneville College, now Tusculum, and Blount College, now the University of Tennessee. As a clerk of the court of Sullivan County under North Carolina's jurisdiction, he opposed the rebellious state of Franklin movement and recorded the articles of agreement drawn up in March 1787 between North Carolina and the almost defunct state of Franklin. In 1789 he sat in the House of Commons of North Carolina as well as in a special convention of that state, in which he voted for the ratification of the federal Constitution. When Tennessee became a territory, he was licensed to practise law in the several territorial courts. In the convention that framed the first state constitution in 1796 and in the first two sessions of the legislature of the infant state he sat for Sullivan County.

From 1803 until 1823, excepting for the Fourteenth Congress 1815-17, he served in the federal House of Representatives. He was a typical Democrat, hostile to Great Britain, antagonistic to the renewal of the bank charter in 1811, and friendly to agricultural as against commercial interests. He favored a strict interpretation of the Constitution, and he "would not torture and twist it out of its proper shape" (Annals of Congress, 9 Congress, 1 Session, col. 928). Like Jefferson he decried "a consolidated government" (Knoxville Register, post). He advocated in 1814 annexation of the Canadas, destruction of naval armaments, and peace at home as well as abroad. On October 24, 1816, as one of three federal commissioners, he signed a treaty with the Choctaw Indians. His friendship for Andrew Jackson involved him in a tortuous correspondence; on January 6, 1818, Jackson wrote to President Monroe offering to conquer the Floridas if the President would signify his approval "through any channel (say Mr. J. Rhea)" (Bassett, post, p. 346). Rhea wrote to Jackson vaguely, possibly alluding to another matter, "I am gratifyed indeed that the plan of the President is satisfactory to you" (Ibid., p. 348); arid on the floor of the House in January 1819, he defended Jackson as "authorized by the supreme law of nature and nations the law of self -defence ... to enter the Spanish territory of Florida" (Annals of Congress, 15 Congress, 2 Session, pt. 1, col. 867). As a lover of freedom and as a humanitarian, he opposed the use of drafted labor on roads as a restraint on the liberty of free men. In January 1815 he supported the re-cession of the District of Columbia to Maryland and Virginia inasmuch as the constitutions of neither of these states provided for the cession of any citizens or for depriving them of their right to vote. He opposed slavery and expressed sympathy for the "unfortunate" slave states. Devoutly religious, as chairman of the committee on post office and post roads he opposed the delivery of mails on Sunday; he believed in a "Mighty Being who raises and depresses nations" (see however Ramsey, post, p. 663). He died a bachelor, leaving a large estate. He was buried at Blountville near his old home. His name is perpetuated in Rhea County and in Rheatown in Greene County, Tennessee.

[Manuscript genealogical notes by C. M. McClung in Lawson McGhee Library, Knoxville; family papers in and near Blountville, Tennessee; information from the secretary of Princeton University; Journal of the Convention of 1796 and of the first two sessions of the legislature of Tennessee (1852); The State Records of N. C., XX, 647, XXI, 193, 198, 209, 432, XXII, 36-53 (1902-07); American State Papers: Military Affairs, volume I (1832), 688-762; American State Papers: Indian Affairs, volume II (1834), 95; J. S. Bassett, Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, volume II (1927); M. B. Hamer, "John Rhea of Tennessee," East Tennessee Historical Society Pubs., January 1932; J. G. M. Ramsey, Annals of Tennessee (1853); Knoxville Gazette, May 6, 1809; Knoxville Register, June 18, 1822.]

M. B. H.


RHOADS, James E. (January 21, 1828-January 2, 1895), philanthropist, editor, first president of Bryn Mawr College. Opposed slavery. He devoted himself to philanthropic and educational work. The first cause was the work among the freedmen, whose education and guidance at the close of the Civil War was one of the greatest problems facing the nation.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 530-531:

RHOADS, JAMES E. (January 21, 1828-January 2, 1895), philanthropist, editor, first president of Bryn Mawr College, was born in Marple, Delaware County, Pennsylvania. He was named simply James Rhoads, and assumed the middle initial "E" rather reluctantly in order to avoid confusion with others of his name. The farm where he and his six brothers and sisters grew up had been in the possess ion of the Rhoads family since the time of the in settlement in America about 1690. His father, Joseph Rhoads, and his mother, Hannah (Evans), both belonged to families which had joined the Society of Friends in the seventeenth century in England, and had furnished leaders to the Society in Pennsylvania. Rhoads attended Westtown School, the leading Quaker school in the neighborhood of Marple, and studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his degree in 1851. A few years later, after serving 1852-54 as resident physician at Pennsylvania Hospital, he became a general practitioner in Germantown. On March 21, 1860, he married Margaret Wilson Ely, of New Hope, Pennsylvania, and the eldest of their three children was born in 1863.

It was said by those who knew him that Rhoads had too sympathetic and too selfless a nature to be able to endure for very long the demands of a large medical practice. In 1862 he suffered a slight paralytic stroke and after his return from six months' recuperation in Europe he did not attempt to resume his practice but devoted himself to philanthropic and educational work. The first cause which enlisted his efforts was the work among the freedmen, whose education and guidance at the close of the Civil War was one of the greatest problems facing the nation. Within a few years he also became deeply interested in the American Indians. With the inauguration of a new Indian policy by President Grant, the Society of Friends took a leading part in the educational and missionary work on the Indian reservations, and Rhoads was made secretary of the executive committee of the central organization. He was also for several years president of the Indian Rights Association which had its headquarters in Philadelphia.

From 1876 to 1884 he was editor of the Friends' Review, a weekly periodical published in Philadelphia. As a leader among the orthodox Friends it was natural that he should be named by Dr. Joseph Taylor, whom he had known for many years, as one of the original trustees of Bryn Mawr College, the institution for higher learning for women which Dr. Taylor proposed to found and to which he left the greater part of his fortune on his death in 1880. The site for the college, ten miles from Philadelphia, had been selected, and the buildings begun by Taylor himself, but after his death it remained for the trustees to choose the officers and settle the policy for the new institution. In 1883 Rhoads was appointed the first president and Miss M. Carey Thomas the first dean, and in 1885 Bryn Mawr College was opened. The distinctive features of the new college, which was the first institution of the kind outside of New England and New York, were the high standard of its entrance requirements, the inclusion in its plan of study of the "group system" which had just been introduced into Johns Hopkins University and which was designed to give to each student an opportunity for a certain degree of concentration in a selected field, and the graduate work, which was not offered at any of the other women's colleges. Rhoads was successful from the first in gathering a faculty distinguished in scholarship and active in research. Before retiring from the presidency in 1894 he saw the new college, well out of the experimental stage, recognized as one of the leading institutions of learning in the United States. He died very suddenly, at Bryn Mawr, in 1895.

[Henry Hartshorne, "Memoir of James E. Rhoads," Proceedings American Phil. Society, volume XXXIV (1895); Addresses Delivered at a M emorial Meeting Held in Honor of James E. Rhoads, LL.D. (Bryn Mawr College, 1895); Memorial Minute Respecting Our Late Friend, James E. Rhoads, Adopted by the Monthly Meeting of Friends of Philadelphia for the Western District (privately printed, 1895); Addresses at the Inauguration of Bryn Mawr College by President Rhoads and President D. C. Gilman of the Johns Hopkins University (1886); Friends' Intelligencer, January 12, 1895; Press, Public Ledger (both of Phila.), January 3, 1895; information as to certain facts from members of the family.]

H.T.M.


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

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

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

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

Rice entered politics in 1853 as a Whig member of the Common Council of Boston. Reelected in 1854, he was made its president. He was one of the organizers of the Republican party in Massachusetts, and he was that party's first mayor of Boston (1856 and 1857), though elected on the "Citizen's" ticket over the "Know Nothing" candidate. During his terms as mayor, improvements in the Back Bay section were inaugurated, the City Hospital was established, 'and the city's public institutions were organized under a single board. He returned to politics as a Republican congressman (1859-67), being assigned to the Committee on Naval Affairs, of which he was chairman in 1866. From 1876 to 1878 he was governor of Massachusetts. During his three terms he was much interested in social legislation, but a plan for the reorganization of the state charities presented during this period by a special commission was rejected by the legislature. The hospitals for the insane at Danvers and Worcester were completed while he was in office. He commuted, on the grounds of youth, the death sentence of Jesse Pomeroy, the notorious murderer. His stand against change in the new local-option law on the grounds that there were no evidences of flagrant evils resulting from it and that it should be tested further before the passage of other legislation brought upon him unjust criticism from many prohibitionists, but his geniality, combined with thoughtfulness, discernment, and, sound judgment, won for him quite general favor.
He was a member of many learned societies and a trustee of many important public institutions, while his broad interests and commanding oratory made him much in demand as a speaker on public occasions. He was twice married: first, August 19, 1845, to Augusta E. McKim of Lowell, who died in 1868, having borne two sons and two daughters; and; second to Angie Erickson Powell of Rochester; New York, He died after a long illness at the Langwood Hotel in Melrose.

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

R. E. M.  


RICE, Reverend David, 1733-1816, educator, clergyman, Virginia.  Presbyterian Church of Danville, Kentucky.  Co-founder of Hampden-Sydney College and Transylvania University.  Member of the Kentucky Abolition Society.  Opponent of slavery.  Wrote speech, “Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy.”  Rice wrote: “A slave is a human creature made by law the property of another human creature, and reduced by mere power to an absolute, unconditional subjection to his will…  A slave claims his freedom; he pleads that he is a man, that he was by nature free, that he has not forfeited his freedom, nor relinquished it… His being long deprived of this right, by force or fraud, does not annihilate it; it remains; it is still his right… If my definition of a slave is true, he is a rational creature reduced by the power of legislation to the state of a brute, and thereby deprived of every privilege of humanity… that he may minister to the ease, luxury, lust, pride, or avarice of another, no better than himself… a free moral agent, legally deprived of free agency, and obliged to act according to the will of another free agent of the same species; and yet he is accountable to his Creator for the use he makes of his own free agency.” 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, pp. 233-234; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 537; Dumond, 1961, pp. 90, 134-135; Locke, 1901, pp. 90, 117f, 166, 170, 183, 186; Martin, 1918; Sorin, 1971, p. 39; Annals of Congress; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 18, p. 407). 


RICHARDSON, Albert Deane (October 6, 1833-December 2, 1869), journalist. He served for short periods as adjutant-general of the Kansas Territory and secretary of the legislature and campaigned in support of the free soil movement. Journalist for the New York Daily Tribune during the Civil War.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 562-563:

RICHARDSON, ALBERT DEANE (October 6, 1833-December 2, 1869), journalist, was born in Franklin, Massachusetts, the younger of the two sons of Elisha Richardson by his second wife, Harriet Blake. The Richardsons had lived in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, for five or six generations. Albert's father, a farmer, had been a schoolmate of Horace Mann, was a friend and parishioner of Nathaniel Emmons, and lived his entire life within a few miles of the farm that he had inherited from his father. Albert's brother, Charles Addison Richardson, was for many years editor of the Boston Congregationalist. Albert attended the public schools and the Holliston Academy, felt no liking for farm work, and for a few terms taught schools in Medway and other nearby towns. Although he is represented as having been somewhat of a Horatio Alger hero, he did not breathe freely in the atmosphere of the old homestead, and when eighteen years old he set out for the West and got as far as Pittsburgh. There he taught school, worked on a newspaper, studied shorthand, wrote farces for Barney Williams, the actor, and-with some qualms of conscience-appeared a few times on the stage. In 1852 he went on to Cincinnati, where he remained for five years, writing for various newspapers and acquiring local renown as an able, alert, energetic writer. In April 1855 he married Mary Louise Pease of Cincinnati, by whom he had five children. His longing for Western adventure still unsatisfied, he took his family in 1857 to Sumner, Kan., near Atchison, but spent much of his time at Leavenworth, Lawrence, and Topeka as correspondent for the Boston Journal. He served for short periods as adjutant-general of the Territory and secretary of the legislature and campaigned in behalf of free soil. In 1859 he accompanied Horace Greeley and Henry Villard to Pike's Peak and returned by himself through the Southwest, which was then little known territory. Thereafter, until his death, he was connected with the New York Daily Tribune.

He gained great acclaim a year later by going to New Orleans as secret correspondent of his paper. It was a dangerous assignment, but Richardson acquitted himself well and returned safely after more than one close escape from lynching. He then became the chief correspondent for the Tribune in the theatre of war. On May 3, 1863, while attempting, with Junius Henri Browne of the Tribune and Richard T. Colburn of the New York World, to run past the Confederate batteries at Vicksburg in a tugboat, he was captured and spent the next eighteen months in various Confederate prisons. On December 18, 1864, he and Browne made their escape from Salisbury and four weeks later arrived at the Union lines near Knoxville, Tennessee Meanwhile his wife and an infant daughter, whom he had never seen, died at his parents' home in Massachusetts. In the spring of 1865 he went to California with Schuyler Colfax, Samuel Bowles, and Lieut.-Governor William Bross of Illinois. From his newspaper correspondence he compiled two books, The Secret Service, the Field, the Dungeon, and the Escape (1865) and Beyond the Mississippi (1866), which were sold by subscription and were enormously popular. His style was clear, concrete, and popular in tone. His Personal History of Ulysses S. Grant (1868) was written on Partonian lines and was much superior to the ordinary campaign biography. After his death his widow collected his fugitive writings as Garnered Sheaves (1871). His end came with tragic suddenness. In 1869 he became engaged to marry Abby Sage McFarland, who had recently been divorced from her husband, Daniel McFarland, a confirmed drunkard with pronounced paranoiac tendencies. On November 25, 1869, McFarland shot Richardson at  his desk in the Tribune office. Richardson died a week later at the Astor House. On his deathbed he was married to Mrs. McFarland, the ceremony being performed by Henry Ward Beecher and Octavius Brooks Frothingham. At the trial McFarland, a Fenian and a Tammany henchman, was acquitted amid a great demonstration of popular approval. Mrs. Richardson published several books and translated and adapted plays for Daniel Frohman, whom she had met in the Tribune office. She died in Rome December 5, 1900.

[J. A. Vinton, The Richardson Memorial (1876): biog. sketch by his widow in Garnered Sheaves (1871); The Trial of Daniel McFarland (1870), compiled by A. R. Cazauran; The Richardson-McFarland Tragedy (1870); New York Daily Tribune, November 26-December 6, 1869, and April 5-May 13, 1870.]

G. H. G.


RIDDLE, Albert Gallatin (May 28, 1816-May 16, 1902), lawyer, congressman. “He was an ardent Whig and was against slavery. Upon the nomination of Zachary Taylor, he issued the call for a mass meeting at Chardon that inaugurated the Free-Soil party of Ohio. Soon afterward, he was nominated by the Whigs and Free-Soilers of his district for the state House of Representatives, was elected, and became at once the recognized leader of these two groups in the House from 1848 to 1850.” Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, p. 591.

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

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

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

RIDDLE, ALBERT GALLATIN (May 28, 1816-May 16, 1902), lawyer, congressman, author, was the son of Thomas and Minerva (Merrick) Riddle and the grandson of Thomas Ridel or Riddell who emigrated from Ireland as a child and died in Monson, Massachusetts. The grandson was born there, and the next year the family removed to Geauga County, Ohio. When Albert was only seven years old his father died. When he was twelve he was apprenticed to a well-to-do farmer; but he was not inclined toward farming and in 1831 worked with his two elder brothers as a carpenter. His ambition, though, was for something else, and during the following two years he spent part of his time in study. In 1835 he went to Hudson, where he entered school, and later he attended for a year the academy at Painesville. There he became interested in oratory and debating. He began the study of law under the direction of Seabury Ford in the spring of 1838, and after a period of intensive application to his work he was admitted to practice in 1840. He proved himself a successful political speaker in the Harrison campaign of 1840, and three weeks after his admission to the bar he was nominated for the office of prosecuting attorney, was elected, settled at Chardon, and served six years. He was an ardent Whig and very bitter against slavery. Upon the nomination of Zachary Taylor, he issued the call for a mass meeting at Chardon that inaugurated the Free-Soil party of Ohio. Soon afterward, he was nominated by the Whigs and Free-Soilers of his district for the state House of Representatives, was elected, and became at once the recognized leader of these two groups in the House from 1848 to 1850. In January 1845 he married Caroline Avery of Chardon. They had seven children. He removed to Cleve land in 1850. In 1859 he acted as counsel for the defense in the Oberlin-Wellington (Rescue case (for argument see History of the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, 1859, comp. by J. R. Shiperd). He won the respect and confidence of his fellows and was very attentive to business. He distinguished himself in many arguments in Congress, among them on the bill to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. The first battle of Bull Run was fatal to his congressional career, for in connection with it he made certain confidential critical statements that gained publicity and were used against him. He did not seek reelection in 1862. He again devoted himself to the law, but in the autumn of 1864 he accepted a consulate in Cuba as a convenient pretext for making an examination into the plans and workings of the blockade runners. This service he performed in a satisfactory manner. He then established himself in the practice of law in Washington. He claimed that, by a just construction of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution, women were entitled to vote. He was law officer for the District of Columbia from 1877 to 1889.

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

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

H. L.


RILEY, Bennet, 1787-1853, soldier, territorial governor of California. 

(Rodriguez, 2007, p. 52; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Volume V, p. 254; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 608-609; Annals of Congress; American National Biography, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002, Volume 18, p. 512; Historical Register and Dict., U. S. Army (1903); C. K. Gardner, A Dict. of All Officers of the Army (1860); Official Army Registers, 1850-53; C. J. Peterson, The Mil. Heroes of the War with Mex. (10th ed., 1858).

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 608-609:

RILEY, Benet 

spent much of his time fighting Indians. He was brevetted major in 1823 for distinguished service in a battle with the Arikara Indians in Dakota Territory. In 1829 he convoyed a large merchant caravan from St. Louis, Missouri, to Santa Fe, N. Mex., and back again and received a sword from the legislature of Missouri in recognition of his services. During 1831 and 1832 he fought in the Black Hawk War. He was promoted to the rank of major on September 26, 1837, and to lieutenant-colonel on December I, 1839. From 1839 to 1842 he participated in the Seminole wars in Florida, where his energy and courage won for him the brevet of colonel. At the beginning of the Mexican War he commanded the 2nd Infantry, but was quickly advanced to the command of a brigade. He participated in the siege of Vera Cruz and distinguished himself at Cerro Gordo where he was brevetted brigadier-general. It was at Contreras on August 20, 1847, however, that he won lasting fame. His brigade formed part of a force under Persifor Frazer Smith [q.v.], which was sent around to the rear of the Mexican position, and Riley was designated to lead the assault. In his official report of the battle  General Smith says: "The opportunity afforded to Colonel Riley by his position was seized by that gallant veteran with all the skill and energy for which he is distinguished. The charge of his noble brigade down the slope, in full view of friend and foe, unchecked even for a moment, until he had planted all his colours upon their farthest works, was a spectacle that animated the army to the boldest deeds" (Scott and His Staff, post, p. 160). For his gallant conduct on this occasion he was brevetted major-general. He continued in command of his brigade to the end of the Mexican War. After the war he served in Louisiana and Missouri until the fall of 1848 when he was transferred with his regiment to California and assigned to the important command of the military department on the Pacific and became ex-officio provisional governor of California. In September 1849, he convened the constituent assembly at Monterey which drew up the first constitution for California and applied for admission into the Union. His able direction of affairs at this critical time greatly hastened the formation of the new state government to which he relinquished his authority in November 1849, when the first elected civil governor took office. On January 31, 1850, he was promoted to colonel of the 1st Infantry and ordered to join that regiment on the Rio Grande River, but owing to disability from cancer he was unable to comply with the order. He settled in Buffalo, New York, where he died leaving a widow, Arbella Riley, and five children.

[Records of the Pension Office, the Adjutant General and the Senate Committee on Pensions, Wash., D. C.; F. B. Heitman, Historical Reg, and Dict., U. S. Army (1903); C. K. Gardner, A Dict. of All Officers of the Army (1860); Official Army Registers, 1850-53; C. J. Peterson, The Mil. Heroes of the War with Mex. (10th ed., 1858); Gen. Scott and His Staff (1848); J. H. Smith, The War with Mex. (1919), volume II; Z. S. Eldredge, History of Cal., volume III (n.d.); Maryland Historical Magazine, September 1917; Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, June 10, 1853; N. Y. Times, June II, 1853.]

S. J. H.

RIEGER, Johann Georg Joseph Anton (April 23, 1811-August 20, 1869), pioneer Evangelical clergyman,

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 599-600:

RIEGER, JOHANN GEORG JOSEPH ANTON (April 23, 1811-August 20, 1869), pioneer Evangelical clergyman, was born in Aurach, Bavaria, Germany. He was left an orphan before he reached the age of eleven, and for a  time lived with an aunt in Epinal, France. From earliest childhood he had been destined for priest-hood in the Catholic Church, but absorbed some Lutheran doctrine as a boy while helping a classmate with his catechism lessons. An open avowal of his Protestant leaning brought such strenuous opposition on the part of his aunt that he fled in 1832 to Basel, Switzerland, where he found refuge in the home of a Reformed minister and was brought in contact with the mission house of that place. Four years later when a group of American Christians applied to the Basel headquarters for: German missionaries for the West, Rieger was chosen to go. He was among the first of the German missionaries who had the vision to introduce the use of English into the evangelical service.

His first mission field was at Alton, Illinois, where he arrived on November 28, 1836. During his ministry at this place, he lived at the home of Elijah Parish Lovejoy [q.v.], and assisted in the latter's abolitionist activities, but his most strenuous efforts in the direction of a spiritual revival were so meagerly rewarded that he left in August of the following year for Beardstown, Illinois, where he stayed until the spring of 1839. In this year he returned to Germany where he made the acquaintance of Minette Schemel, who returned to the United States with him in 1840 as his bride. They settled first at Highland, Illinois, where their two children were born and died. In 1840, when the Deutsche Evangelische Kirchen-Verein des Westen, later called the Evangelische Synode van Nord-Amerika, was formed, Rieger was recognized as one of the dominating figures in the movement. In October 1843, two months after he had moved from Highland to Burlington, Iowa, his wife died. He made a second trip to Germany in 1844 and married Henrietta Wilkins at Bremen on April 15, 1845. For two years after his return to the United States he sold literature for the Bible and Tract Society of New York and then moved to Holstein, Missouri, where his two small daughters fell ill of cholera and died.

His principal work during these years was done in connection with the establishing of the Evangelical Seminary, at Marthasville, Missouri, in 1850, after it had been housed in his own home for two years. His ministry of thirteen years at Holstein ended when he moved to Jefferson City in 1860. He became one of the trustees of the Lincoln Institute, a college for negroes, and did admirable work among the prisoners at the state penitentiary. He was universally beloved: Southerners left their valuables in the safe-keeping of this abolitionist preacher when Federal soldiers approached; rich and poor, black and white, Catholic and Protestant sought out the humble clergyman for advice. When he died the whole city went into mourning. His widow and seven children survived him.,

[Manuscript diary of Joseph Rieger in the possession of relatives; Edward Huber, "Pastor Joseph Rieger," Eighth Annual Report of the Society for the History of the Germans in Maryland (1894); Joseph Rieger, Bin Lebensbild aus der Evangelischen Kirche Nord-Amerikas (1871); Hugo Kamphausen, Gesch. des Religiosen Lebens in der Deutschen Evangel. Synode van Nord Amerika (1924); Albert Mucke, Gesch. der Deutschen Evangel. Syt1ode von Nord-Amerika (1915); J. W. Flucke, Evangelical Pioneers (1931); W. G. Bek, "The Followers of Duden, Joseph Rieger-Colporteur," Missouri Historical Review, January 1924; Missouri Democrat (St. Louis), August 31, 1869.)  

W.L.B-r.


RITNER, Joseph (March 25, 1780-October 16, 1869), governor of Pennsylvania. More independent than most contemporary executives of northern states, he denounced the gag law.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 629-630:

RITNER, JOSEPH (March 25, 1780-October 16, 1869), governor of Pennsylvania, was born in Berks County, Pennsylvania, the son of a German emigrant and ardent Revolutionary patriot, Michael Ritner. Six months' schooling and instruction in weaving constituted his formal education, but he taught himself English from books and after his marriage to Susan Alter in 1802 explored her brother's library of German treatises. His annual wage at farm labor rose from $80 to $120; and then he sought the Washington County frontier, where he developed a prosperous farm. In the War of 1812 he was a private. In his home community he became supervisor of roads, in building which he introduced the plow, and he participated in numerous Democratic caucuses. His thrifty habit of hauling freight and driving stock to Philadelphia in slack seasons made this stout countryman, with his massive head, strong face, and broad chest, a familiar sight along main-traveled roads; and his extensive family connections made him favorably known in ten German counties. During service to the Assembly, 1821-26, the speakership came to him twice, 1825 and 1826, unanimously the second time.

Aversion to secret societies made him the anti-Masonic gubernatorial candidate four times, 1829, 1832, 1835, 1838. His modest initial vote increased in 1832 with National Republican support, in spite of Democratic broads ides averring that this "Deist" propagated the principles of Paine's Age of Reason and that "a re spectable and well-known citizen saw Joseph Ritner on the Sabbath Morning, keep tally, while others were amusing themselves playing ball, in his meadow!" (Joseph Ritner a Deist, in Political Broadside Collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania). The split in 1835 among the Democrats over Jackson and the schools gave him his one term as governor, just when Pennsylvania was exceptionally upset. The ill-assorted coalition of Whigs and anti-Masons behind his election was at one on nothing but opposition to Jacksonianism. Warfare over bank deposits and the antiquated constitution, financial panic, canal and railroad lobbying, anti-abolitionist rioting, and the fanatic genius of Thaddeus Stevens, together taxed Ritner beyond his ingenuity. The hostile press incessantly abused his administration. Even nature opposed him, with a flood on the Juniata engulfing forty miles of costly canal construction, just when he was solicitous over canal appropriations. Yet he achieved something in the democratic movement. He obtained a large increase in the  permanent school appropriation and the number of common schools. Into a "schoolhouse-fund" he directed the $500,000 received from the federal government, to prevent the sacrifice of instruction to equipment. But he lost his campaign for a separate office of state school superintendent and for an "immediate and efficient means ... for the preparation of common school teachers" (Wickersham, post, p. 346). More independent than most contemporary executives of northern states, he denounced the gag law, practised and preached temperance, and investigated the new "manufacture of iron with mineral coal." He opposed Jackson's bank policy on economic as well as political grounds, impatiently awaiting the safe resumption of specie payments, and finding the event, as he wrote Biddle, "to me, personally, truly gratifying" (August  I, 1838, Etting Collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania). His real integrity of purpose was obscured by inability to limit canal appropriations, to prevent the chartering of banks wholesale, and to stop dictation to the state by "private companies and sectional jealousies." He long distrusted Stevens and tried vainly to break his hold on the anti-Masonic party, bt1t finally he named him canal commissioner and manager of his 1838 campaign. His party lost that virulent contest and brought upon him the "Buckshot War" and much loss of dignity. Nevertheless, as ex-governor, prestige returned. Whigs chose him to cast an electoral vote for Harrison in 1840, Taylor nominated him for director of the Mint in 1849, Republicans sent him in Pennsylvania's delegation to the Fremont convention in 1856, and the Civil War found him serving as an enthusiastic, though elderly, inspector of the educational institutions so near his heart.

[Letters of Ritner, Stevens, and Biddle, and Political Broadsides of 1832, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Gubernatorial Papers, Educational Building, Harrisburg; Life of Joseph Ritner, Farmer of Washington County (1835); Lives of D. R. Porter and Joseph Ritner (1838); Report of Proceedings in Relation to the Governor Jos. Ritner Monument (n.d.); W. C. Armor, Lives of the Governors (187.2); Commemorative Biographical Record of Washington County (1893); E. W. Biddle, Governor Joseph Ritner (1919); L. G. and M. J. Walsh, History. of Education in Pa. (1930); J. P. Wickersham, History of Education in Pennsylvania (1886); H. R. Mueller, The Whig Party in Pennsylvania (1922); S. W. McCall, Thaddeus Stevens (1899).]

J. P.N.


RIVES, John Cook (May 24, 1795-April 10, 1864), journalist,

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Volume 8, Pt. 1, pp. 635-636:

RIVES, JOHN COOK (May 24, 1795-April 10, 1864), journalist, was probably the son of George Rives of Franklin County, Virginia. At eleven years of age he we nt to Kentucky to live with his uncle, Samuel Casey. There he received a good frontier education before he went to Edwardsville, Illinois, to work as a clerk in a branch of the Bank of the United States. About 1824 he became cashier in a bank in Shawneetown. Meantime he read law and was admitted to the bar, but he never practised. For three years he worked in the office of the United States' Telegraph, where he won the esteem of Duff Green who recommended him to Jackson in 1829 as a devoted Democrat entitled to his confidence and friendship He was soon appointed to a clerkship in the fourth auditor's office and served there until on April 11, 1832, he became an employee of Francis Preston Blair [q.v.] of the Washington Daily Globe. In 1833 he became a partner of Blair and the financial manager of the Globe. With the exception of a farm that he created out of lands known as " the Bladensburg races," everything he touched made profits. Upon the dissolution of the Blair-Rives partnership in the Globe in 1849 Rives received over $100,000 for his share. He maintained an expensive country estate with several slaves for the benefit of his children, whom he wanted to rear on  a farm. He had the respect and confidence of the Democratic presidents horn Jackson to Buchanan. He  remained steadfastly an orthodox Democrat and spent his money freely for the party during presidential campaigns. Blair loved Rives so much that he entrusted his investments to him, and he is said to have asked for a dissolution of the firm of Blair and Rives to avoid any embarrassment to Rives, when Blair followed Van Buren into the Free-Soil party. Rives was one of the most philanthropic citizens of Washings ton, D. C., during his successful business career. Jn one year he gave over $17,000 to widows and orphans. As  an editor  he wrote in a facetious, forceful, and graphic style. He filled the  editorial columns of the Globe, when Blair felt indisposed to write. Blair attacked the powerful political enemies in a vitriolic fashion, while Rives in his short editorials damned the recalcitrant small fry of his party with faint praise. He often produced fake defenses purposely to ruin the disloyal Democratic politicians.

His great contribution was the Congressional Globe. His was the idea of reporting' the congressional debates impartially. For thirty years from December 2, 1833; to April 10, 1864, he published them, and his soil Franklin continued the work until the beginning of the Congressional Record in 1873 by act of Congress. In 1842 he became a partner of Peter Force [q.v.] in publishing the documentary sources of the American Revolution. He was a loyal Union man, opposed to slavery in principle, but he denied the right of the national government to force the abolition of slavery. He agreed with Clay on internal improvements and foreign affairs. His big rugged body and deep voice were remembered by those who once met him. He was six feet five inches high and weighed normally two hundred and forty pounds. At the age of thirty-eight he married Mary, one of his ' bindery girls. She died in 1859, the mother of seven children. By will the Globe was left to t',vo of the sons, Franklin and Jefferson, over $50,000 in bonds were divided among his other five children, and his farm was left to his family with the specification that it should revert to the government if his descendants refused to live on it  

[Blair Papers in possession of Gist Blair, Washington, D. C.; Blair-Rives Papers, Library of Congress; Records in Supreme Court Bldg., Washington, D. C. Records in Congressional Cemetery; Rives vault in Congressional Cemetery; W. B. Bryan, A History of the National Capital (1916), volume I; Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States from 1690 to 1872 (1873);  R. Wilson, Washington the Capital City (2 volumes, 1901); J. R. Childs, Reliques of the Rives (1929); Daily Globe (Washington), June 23, 1856.]  

W.E.S.



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