E: Earle through Ewing

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

EARLE, John Milton, 1794-1874, Leicester, Massachusetts, businessman, abolitionist, statesman, political leader, newspaper publisher, pioneer and leader in the anti-slavery/abolitionist movement.  Member of Whig and Free Soil parties.  Husband of abolitionist Sarah H. Earle. 

(Wilson, Henry, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, Vol. 2.  Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1872, 347)


EDGERTON, Sidney, 1818-1900, U.S. Congressman from Ohio, Chief Justice of the Idaho Territorial Supreme Court, and Territorial Governor of Montana, abolitionist.  Delegate to the Free Soil Convention in Buffalo, 1848.  Delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1856.  Elected to the U.S. Congress in 1858.  He served two terms. 

(Dictionary of American Biography, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 20; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).

Scribner’s Dictionary of American Biography, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 20;

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

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

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

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

P. C. P.


ELIOT, Thomas Dawes, 1808-1870, lawyer.  Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts, 1854-1855, 1859-1869.  Founder of the Republican Party from Massachusetts.  Opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill as a member of Congress.  Voted for Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery.  Active in the Free-Soil Party. 

(Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 325; Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. Congress 1774-1927 (1928); Congressional Globe).

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

ELIOT, Thomas Dawes, Congressman, born in Boston, Massachusetts, 20 March, 1808; died in New Bedford, Massachusetts, 12 June, 1870. He was graduated at Columbian College, Washington, D. C, in 1825, studied law in Washington and New Bedford, and was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar. After being a member of both houses of the legislature, he was elected to Congress as a Whig, to fill the unexpired term of Zeno Scudder, serving from 17 April, 1854, till 3 March, 1855, and making an eloquent speech on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which was published (Washington, 1854). He was prominent in the Free-Soil convention at Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1855, and on the dissolution of the Whig Party was active among the founders of the Republican Party in Massachusetts, he declined its nomination for attorney-general in 1857, but was afterward elected to Congress again for five successive terms, serving from 1859 till 1869. Mr. Eliot took an active part in the proceedings of the house, particularly in the legislation on the protection and welfare of the Negroes.  Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, p. 325.


EMERSON, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882, author, poet, essayist, transcendentalist, abolitionist. Wrote antislavery poetry.  Founder of the Transcendentalist Club.  Became active in the abolition movement in the mid-1830s.  Emerson opposed the annexation of Texas, and signed petitions to that effect.  Also against the forced removal of Cherokee Indians during the Van Buren administration.  He addressed meetings of abolition societies calling for emancipation, and aiding and defending fugitive slaves.  Called for disobeying immoral laws that supported slavery.  In 1851, in his speech opposing the Fugitive Slave Law, he declared “an immoral law makes it a man’s duty to break it at every hazard.”

(Sewell, 1976; p. 236; Sinha, 2016, pp. 328, 488-489, 519-520, 550, 557, 562; Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, pt. 2, p. 132; American Reformers: An H.W. Wilson Biographical Dictionary, New York, 1985; Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 1888, Vol. II, pp. 343-348).

Biography from Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography:

EMERSON, Ralph Waldo, author, born in Boston, Massachusetts, 25 May, 1803; died in Concord, Massachusetts, 27 April, 1882. He was the second of five sons of the Reverend William Emerson, minister of the 1st Church, Boston.

…he had given seven lectures in Freeman place chapel, Boston, and another in New York, and had also made addresses before the Anti-slavery Society in both cities. While in the ministry he alone had opened a church to abolition speakers, and his sympathies were always on the side of emancipation. In 1835 he countenanced Harriet Martineau in her outspoken condemnation of slavery, and in the height of her unpopularity invited her to his house. Again, in 1844, he spoke stirringly on the anniversary of West Indian emancipation, and scourged his countrymen for tolerating Negro servitude. His own plan was to buy the slaves, at a cost of $2,000,000,000, and he put faith in moral and spiritual influences to remove the evil, rather than in legislation. He never formally united with the abolition Party, but he encouraged it, and his influence was great. As the contest grew warmer, he rose to the emergency and took a more active part, even making campaign speeches for John G. Palfrey, who, having missed re-election to Congress on account of his anti-slavery course in that body, was nominated as Free-Soil candidate for governor of Massachusetts. The assault on Charles Sumner by Preston S. Brooks called forth another vigorous speech. In November, 1859, he said before the Parker fraternity that John Brown, were he to be hanged, would “make the gallows glorious, like the cross.” A few days afterward he spoke at a John Brown meeting at Tremont temple, with Wendell Phillips, and took part in another at Concord, and in still a third at Salem, Massachusetts. In January, 1861, also, he addressed the Anti-slavery Society at Boston, in the face of disturbance by a mob. Though he was not a chief agitator of the cause, these efforts, so alien to his retired habits as a student, poet, and meditative writer, made him a marked advocate of freedom.

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, pt. 2, p. 132;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the years immediately preceding the war Emerson had formed about him a new group of men, or rather a group with a new name. The Saturday Club, which grew out of a habit he had of meeting certain friends in Boston for occasional dinners, soon flourished as a literary association; at its monthly gatherings he was to take comfort as he got older in the companionship of Longfellow, Hawthorne, Motley, Dana, Agassiz, Holmes, Lowell, and others. He was also to derive a peculiar pleasure from the Adirondack Club, whose members went on outings with him among the mountains he so loved to praise. The impression would be justified that he was a particularly social man. Such, however, was not the case; or at any rate he was social with a difference. All who knew him agreed that he was charming, but his charm still expressed itself at a certain distance. In his Journals are many complaints of his own "coldness." The term seems to have been an exaggeration; yet for him it did well enough as a description of his serenely self-reliant temper, a temper nourished in solitude and disciplined by contemplation. Eager as he was for conversation, he himself often supplied less of it than did his hearers; he talked slowly and sometimes with difficulty, and he disliked to laugh. In 1866 he read to his son Edward Waldo a poem he had written called "Terminus":

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

M. V-D.


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


EWING, THOMAS (August 7, 1829-January 21, 1896), soldier, lawyer, congressman from Ohio. “As an ardent anti-slavery man, Ewing was largely instrumental in revealing the fraudulent voting for state officers at the election held on January 4, 1858, under the Lecompton constitution. The public indignation aroused by these disclosures prevented the admission of Kansas as a slave-state.”

Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936, Vol. 3, Pt. 2, p. 283; Sewell, 1976; pp. 207, 257)

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

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

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

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

R.M.



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