Part 5

Attached to this document were names that would have carried weight in many of the walks of the business and professional life of the metropolis. General Thomas Ewing, an honored member of the New York Bar, Samuel Thomas and Calvin S. Brice, of the more active fields of Wall Street and the railway world, C. W. Moulton, Col. W. L. Strong, one of the leading merchants of the city, Hugh J. Jewett, Wallace C. Andrews, Homer Lee, J. W. Harman, Warren Higley, Milton Sayler, Anson G. McCook, Col. Fogg, Mahlon Chance, J. Q. Howard, General Henry L. Burnett, and others who had acquired reputation at home, before making New York the scene of later operations and more recent successes. There was more than mere formal agreement in this compact; it was understood by all that such a society should come into being, and all were in one mind that then was the time for beginning.

Other attempts looking in the same direction had been made in times past, but had come to naught. Early in the days of the great war, many of the sons and daughters of Ohio, residing in this city, met at the Murray Hill Hotel, and took steps to give active aid to the soldiers in the field; but these weekly gatherings ended with the noble purpose that called them into being. In the first annual report of the Ohio Society, its first secretary, Homer Lee, gives a brief sketch of this effort, and of the things that followed in its wake. “The object,” says Mr. Lee, “was to send supplies, clothing, medicines, etc., to the soldiers at the front. A handsome silk and satin banner was made at a cost of some $500, upon which was a beautifully embroidered Coat of Arms of the State of Ohio, to be presented to the bravest Ohio regiment. As might have been expected there was much rivalry for the possession of this prize, as glowing descriptions of the beautiful souvenir were given by the newspapers at that time. The commanding officers were appealed to, but could not be prevailed upon to decide the question, because, as one officer put it ‘It could not easily be decided which was the bravest, where all the regiments by their valor and heroism had covered themselves with glory.’ At the close of the war the 7th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, of Cleveland, secured the prize.”

Another organization, somewhat similar in character and purpose, was called into being about the same time. It was the Ohio Soldier’s Aid Society, and Theron R. Butler, was its president, and Mr. John R. Cecil the treasurer. Its members made it their duty to call upon the Ohio soldiers in the New York hospitals, and to minister to their wants. In various forms of help, this society expended over fifteen thousand dollars, and performed many eminent services for the wounded and the sick, and like its companion organization above described, its days ended with the close of the war.

In 1877, the subject of an association of Ohio men was again discussed, when a number of gentlemen had been called together by the death of Chief Justice Chase, but it came to naught. Again, in 1874, some of the younger sons of the Buckeye State in this city, held various meetings and talked organization, but nothing came of the movement beyond talk. It was reserved for the call above quoted to produce enduring results, and to bring into being the flourishing society that has bound the Ohioans of New York together with bonds of enduring union.

When the twelve, and more, had signed the call and thus made it operative, a meeting was held in the office of General Ewing, No. 155 Broadway, on November 13, 1885. There was then no question of success, and the gentlemen present went to work in a mood to make that success of the most pronounced character. General Ewing was elected president pro tem., and Mr. David F. Harbaugh secretary pro tem. A committee of ten upon permanent organization were appointed, and consisted of the following gentlemen: C. W. Moulton, William Perry Fogg, Cyrus Butler, J. Q. Howard, Mahlon Chance, M. I. Southard, David F. Harbaugh, Warren Higley, Calvin S. Brice, and Joseph Pool. When an adjourned meeting was held, on the 20th of the same month, additions were made to this foundation committee, in the persons of Messrs. Carson Lake, John W. Harman, and Homer Lee.

The committee were already prepared with a report. They had drafted a provisional constitution, and prepared by-laws, and proposed that these should be printed and sent to the Ohio men in New York, to discover how many would favor the movement, and agree to support it. Such action was ordered, the new fundamental law of a society not yet organized was sent broadcast, and responses invited. One hundred subscribing names were made the requisite; they were furnished, and twenty-five in addition. Thus encouraged, there was a call from the President, and on the evening of January 13, 1886, over one hundred of the sons of Ohio were found together in the parlors of the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

The meeting was prolific of results. The Ohio Society of New York, was called into being. Officers were elected; arrangements made for the preparation of a constitution that would be in exact accord with the purposes there declared. The first officers there chosen constituted a corps which was of itself a guarantee of successful results. General Thomas Ewing was elected president; Whitelaw Reid, General Wager Swayne, Col. William L. Strong, Hon. Hugh J. Jewett, and Algernon S. Sullivan were chosen vice-presidents. Homer Lee was made recording secretary and Carson Lake, corresponding secretary; while Col. William Perry Fogg was assigned to the responsible position of treasurer. A governing committee consisting of Henry L. Burnett, chairman, Calvin S. Brice, Andrew J. C. Foye, A. D. Juilliard, George Follett, Stephen B. Elkins, Jerome D. Gillett, C. W. Moulton, Joseph Pool, were selected. The president and vice-president were directed to prepare the constitution; the invitations of certain hotels managed by Ohio men to use their parlors for gatherings until permanent quarters could be secured, were accepted; and the president-elect delivered a striking address upon assuming office, that throws so strong a light upon the purpose and spirit of the gathering, that the writer is tempted to quote somewhat freely therefrom.

“We have met to-night” said General Ewing, “as sons and foster sons of Ohio resident in New York City to complete the foundation of a new society in our National Metropolis. Full as this city is of organizations of men, she has, I think, none such as this. The ties of religion, charity, politics, science, art, literature and common occupation draw and hold people together in numberless associations which have filled Manhattan Island with splendid edifices. So, too, the sympathies of a common race and history have founded Societies of St. Patrick, St. Andrew, St. George and many others, at whose annual reunion, the wit, song and sentiment of the fatherlands warm the hearts of their sons in this land beyond the sea. And here, also, is an American society which has at several crises in the last fifty years exerted a considerable influence on public opinion, and the annual reunions of which are watched with eagerness everywhere throughout our land where the sons of New England, from their distant homes, look proudly and fondly back on their grand old mother.

“But the New England Society is composed of the sons of six States. This is a society of the natives or former residents of a single State—Ohio, the State first born of the American Republic. I do not say she was the first received into the Union, for Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee all preceded her. Vermont was admitted in 1791, Kentucky in ’92, Tennessee in ’96 and Ohio not until the 29th day of November, 1802. But these three older States begun life as Colonies of Colonies, each exclusively owned by and settled from its parent colony—Vermont from New York, Kentucky from Virginia, and Tennessee from North Carolina. ‘The territory northwest of the Ohio river’ was the first land ever owned by the United States. It was a vast and pathless wilderness—an Empire in embryo—when, in 1784, Virginia, with magnificent generosity, presented it to the Union. It was not until ten years later, when the savages, who had been allies of Great Britain throughout the War of the Revolution, were routed and subdued by Mad Anthony Wayne, that agricultural settlements, except under the shadow of block-houses, first became possible. Then the veteran soldiers of the Revolution, broken in fortune, but aflame with the love of liberty and triumphant from the long struggle for independence, flocked there from every one of the glorious thirteen; hewed out homes in the primeval forest, paid for lands in the long-dishonored certificates of indebtedness given for their service in the Revolutionary War, and thus founded the first State which sprung from the womb of the Republic.

“We are proud of Ohio,” continued the General, “for her heroic birth, her honorable achievements, and her glorious destiny. She ‘sits in the centre,’ belongs to no section, and is a bond of all. Her sons who meet here to-night are at home in New York. We do not come together as strangers in a strange land to seek relief from the depression of inhospitable influence. No; New York is not inhospitable. She is merely too big and too busy to note who comes or goes. Her gates landward and seaward, are thrown open to the world. She is a focus of all the great forces of American life. Much that is best and worst in it is developed here; and the struggle of a new comer for a footing is always severe, and generally unsuccessful. But New York is more truly cosmopolitan than any other city in the United States, or, perhaps, in the world; and there is little of race or sectional prejudice to bar the path of merit from whatever quarter it may come.

“We found this Society because we love Ohio, and would cherish her history, her traditions, her recollections of home and camp and forum. How often do we look back to the days and scenes of our life there to revive the sweetest influence and the dearest memories of existence.

“But we have aims for our Society beyond the culture of the memories and affections of other days. We hope to make it felt in this great field of thought and action as a generator of wholesome intellectual and moral forces. When this meeting was called for permanent organization there were one hundred and fifteen signers of our Constitution. Under the direction of a judicious Governing Committee, the number will doubtless be increased to several hundred. Our membership of non-residents will perhaps be equally large. We should make something more of such good and abundant material than a mere social club. I am far from insensible to the pleasures of convivial reunions, and hope our society may have many of them, and that I may long be of the number present. But we can have some good work out of it as well as plenty of recreation. For instance, with the aid of our western and southwestern brethern, who, like ourselves, have drifted into this fence corner of the Republic, we might help it to throw off its colonial subserviency to English politics and manners, and gradually Americanize it. We can thus repay in kind the debt of gratitude we owe the East for its missionary efforts a generation ago, when it was the seat of power in the Union, and the now imperial West was but a half subdued wilderness.

“Ere long we can command means, I hope, to fit up and maintain an accessible, commodious and permanent club house, the halls of which will be a pleasant rendezvous for members and their friends, where the ideas and policies of East and West may meet in intelligent and friendly encounter, and where sectional prejudice may be worn off in the attrition of social intercourse; where we may see files of the Ohio newspapers, and note the current of life at our old homes; where our brethern who come East may meet, or learn where to find their friends, and get information and help in their business; where Ohio men and women who are eminent or rising in any worthy field of effort may have cordial recognition and a helping hand, if needed; and where those who have unfortunately fallen in the struggle for a foothold here will not be forgotten. In conclusion, gentlemen, I venture to express the hope that our Society may be from the outset, and continue to the end, so aristocratic that wealth can not buy a membership for vice, and so democratic that none will be excluded by needless cost of membership from an association which their virtues and talents would adorn.”

The foundation was thus laid; the story of the superstructure will be deferred for the present.

GENERAL THOMAS EWING—FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE OHIO SOCIETY.

The connection of General Thomas Ewing with the founding of the Ohio Society of New York has been already shown. At this point some mention may profitably be made of the chief points in his public and professional career; as others of the same Buckeye group will be considered from time to time.

General Ewing came into the busy life of the world at a time, and under auspices, calculated not only to develop the best that was in him, but to call into active play the strongest elements of his nature. Ohio was in its youthful days; schools and culture had not yet reached that point where a finished education was the rule and expectation of the great mass of the youth as now. The freedom of pioneer life was around him, and while he learned the lessons of refinement and culture within his parental home, he was learning the lessons of self-reliance, courage and personal responsibility, from the outdoor environments of his day and neighborhood.

It was, also, a time when the great public questions of the day were debated from the stump, in the home circle, and at the caucus, and not left to the newspapers as at present. The young man was not merely a reader—he was compelled to think, and often talk for himself. He must know something of public life, and he usually had a personal acquaintance with the public men of his day and neighborhood. In the case of General Ewing, one of the chief men of Ohio history was a member of his own household—his father, Thomas Ewing, the Senator from Ohio, and Secretary of the Treasury in the cabinets of the elder Harrison and Tyler, and Secretary of the Interior under Taylor.

Thomas Ewing, the son, was born at Lancaster, Ohio, August 7, 1829. Not only was he the natural heir to the qualities that had made his father one of the great statesmen and lawyers of his day, but he could find back among the family names that of Findley Ewing, who distinguished himself under William of Orange, in the famous war of 1688, and was presented with a flag by that monarch, for gallant service at the siege of Londonderry; George Ewing, his grandfather, an ensign and lieutenant of the Revolutionary War; Neil Gillespie—a man of mark, in the early days of the Monongahela, and great-grandfather to James G. Blaine and himself; and his mother’s father, Hugh Boyle, who, in youth was driven from Ireland because of the part he had taken in the Emmet rebellion, and afterward served the State of Ohio for forty years, as clerk of the Supreme Court for Fairfield county.

The public life of young Ewing commenced at an early age. When but nineteen, he was appointed secretary of the commission to settle the still vexed question as to whether the boundary between Virginia and Ohio was the high water mark or the low water mark, on the north side of the Ohio River. A year later, he became one of the private secretaries of President Taylor, and after Taylor’s sudden death, entered Brown University at Providence, Rhode Island, from which he was graduated in 1854.

He had already chosen the profession of the law, as the work of his life, and immediately entered the Cincinnati Law School, from which he was graduated in 1855. The next year he married Ellen E. Cox, a daughter of Rev. Wm. Cox, a Presbyterian minister of Piqua, Ohio, celebrated for his eloquence and zeal, and in the fall of ’56 removed to Leavenworth, Kansas, which he had chosen as the opening point of his professional career. His partners in the first firm whose sign-board bore his name, were two gentlemen afterwards to win great distinction in a war then farther off in the minds of men than in the dread certainties of fact—General Dan McCook, who afterwards fell at Kenesaw, and William T. Sherman, whose recent death the world is yet lamenting. The name of the firm was Sherman, Ewing & McCook.

The success of Mr. Ewing was brilliant from the start. He had not only the magnetic presence by which friends are made, but the “natural genius for law” that made him a safe counsellor, a brilliant pleader, and a wary contestant in the varied fields of litigation. He was soon one of the recognized leaders of the bar of Kansas, and it was inevitable that he should soon be called to a commanding place in the field of politics as well. It was a time and place where no man could be silent, and when the most sluggish was compelled to become partisan. The young advocate from Ohio left no one in doubt as to which side he took in the struggle to make Kansas a free State. He bore an active and conspicuous part in the struggle on the side of freedom, and was one of the Republican leaders of the West. He represented Kansas in the Peace Conference, which assembled in Washington on the call of Virginia in 1860, and at the early age of twenty-nine was elected the first chief justice of the Supreme Court of his State—a position he ably held for two years, until the great rebellion swept him from the bench into the ranks of the Union army.

Some more detailed mention of General Ewing’s part in that great historic struggle to make Kansas a free State is needed, to fully explain the public service he rendered in those days of danger. In the fall of 1857, the Pro-Slavery constitutional convention of Kansas, formed the Lecompton constitution, of which only the slavery cause was submitted to popular vote. The question thus left to the people was whether they would accept a fundamental law with slavery, or without. Thus the voter was compelled to favor the Lecompton constitution if he voted at all—a constitution hateful to the Free State majority, as it had been framed by a fraudulently chosen convention, composed largely of residents of Missouri.

It was also provided in this document, that if the majority voted for it and rejected slavery, then the slaves already held in Kansas, should remain such for life.

At the same election, a separate vote was ordered for legislative and executive officers under the constitution. The hope of the pro slavery party was that the Free State men, who were in a great majority in the territory, would refuse to vote at all, because of their indignation at the tricky manner of the submission, and that therefore, the Democratic Congress would admit Kansas as a slave State completely officered by pro slavery men.

“It was an artful trap,” says one historian of those stirring times, “and the Free State Convention was caught in it by resolving that the party would wholly refrain from voting at that election. Thereupon Mr. Ewing bolted the convention, but only eight out of over a hundred delegates followed him. The bolters nominated a full State ticket and tickets in every county for all the offices, canvassed the Territory, and in spite of the bitterest opposition of the radical leaders and press, succeeded in bringing a large majority of the Free State party to the polls. They thus completely officered the proposed pro-slavery Government with tried and true Free State men—publicly pledged, if the State should be admitted, to immediately call another convention, form a Free State Constitution, and destroy the Lecompton Constitution and Government, root and branch. The pro-slavery leaders, finding themselves outnumbered at the polls, resorted to the most enormous and astounding frauds in the returns, and then officially proclaimed the election of the pro-slavery candidates. Thereupon Ewing went to the Territorial Legislature then in session at Lawrence, a majority of which were Free State men, and got a commission appointed to investigate and expose the election frauds. He was a member of the Board and conducted its proceedings with startling boldness and energy, resulting within a week in the discovery and seizure of the forged returns, which had been buried in a candle box under a wood pile at Lecompton on the premises of the United States Surveyor General, John Calhoun—the exposure of the forgeries—the indictment of the chief conspirators, Calhoun, McLean and others—their flight from Kansas never to return—and the abandonment by Buchanan’s administration, and his party in Congress of the Lecompton Constitution, which fell covered with execrations and infamy. This closed the long struggle to force slavery on Kansas, and the new State was thereupon admitted under a Free Constitution made by her own people.”

To pass from this struggle for freedom to the greater struggle in the wider field of the war that followed, was but a logical step to the young advocate who had devoted so much of his time to the cause that had won his heart. He first appears in that struggle as Colonel of the Eleventh Regiment of Kansas Volunteer Infantry, recruited and organized by him in the summer of 1862. He led his command in several severe engagements in Arkansas—at Cane Hill, Van Buren and Prairie Grove; and for gallant conduct in the last named battle, which was one of the fiercest of the war, was promoted to be a Brigadier-General on the 11th of March, 1863. He was soon after assigned to the command of the “District of the Border,” comprising the State of Kansas and the western portion of Missouri—a command of extreme administrative difficulty and great personal danger, which he held from June, 1863, to February, 1864, and in which he won the emphatic approval of President Lincoln and General Schofield, the Department Commander. His “Order No. 11,” issued while he held this command, directing the inhabitants of large portions of three border counties of southern Missouri to remove to the military posts or out of the border, was and still is severely criticised. It was the result of a peculiarly difficult situation, solvable in no other way.