Chapter VIII: Philanthropists and Reformers (2)
Garrison took his imprisonment calmly enough, but his old friend, John G. Whittier, was deeply distressed and appealed to Henry Clay to secure the release of the "guiltless prisoner." This Clay would probably have done, but he was anticipated by another friend of Garrison's, Arthur Tappan, of New York, who sent the money to pay the fine, and the young agitator was free again, after an imprisonment of forty-nine days. He had not been idle while in prison, but had prepared a series of lectures on slavery, which he proceeded at once to deliver. Then, on the first day of January, 1831, he began in Boston the publication of a weekly paper called the "Liberator," which he continued for thirty-five years, until its fight was won and slavery was abolished.
How well that fight was waged history has shown. In his first number he announced: "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, to speak, or write with moderation. No! No! Tell the man whose home is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch--and I will be heard."
And heard he was. The whole land was soon filled with excitement; the apathy of years was broken. From the south came hundreds of letters threatening him with death if he did not desist, and the state of Georgia offered a reward of $5,000 for his apprehension. In the north, anti-slavery societies were formed everywhere, and the movement grew with great rapidity, in spite of powerful efforts to crush it. There were riots everywhere. Garrison was dragged through the streets of Boston with a rope around his body and his life was saved only by lodging him in jail; Elijah Lovejoy was slain at Alton, Illinois, while defending his press; Marius Robinson, an anti-slavery lecturer, was tarred and feathered in Mahoning County, Ohio; in the cities of the south, mobs broke into the postoffice and made bonfires of anti-slavery papers and pamphlets found there. Quarrels and dissension in the anti-slavery ranks developed in time, but when the Civil War was over, the leaders of the Republican party united with Garrison's friends in raising for him the sum of $30,000, and after his death the city of Boston raised a statue to his memory. Perhaps no better estimate of him has ever been made than that of John A. Andrew, war governor of Massachusetts:
"The generation which preceded ours regarded him only as a wild enthusiast, a fanatic, or a public enemy. The present generation sees in him the bold and honest reformer, the man of original, self-poised, heroic will, inspired by a vision of universal justice, made actual in the practice of nations; who, daring to attack without reserve the worst and most powerful oppression of his country and his time, has outlived the giant wrong he assailed, and has triumphed over the sophistries by which it was maintained."
Closely second to Garrison in the awakening of the public conscience to the enormities of slavery was Theodore Parker, one of the purest, most self-sacrificing and interesting of personalities. He came of good stock. His grandfather, John Parker, commanded the little company of minute-men who held the bridge at Lexington on that fateful nineteenth of April, 1775; his father a farmer, and Theodore himself the youngest of eleven children. The family was poor and the boy was brought up to hard labor, with short intervals of schooling now and then. But his thirst for knowledge seems to have been insatiable, and he read everything he could lay his hands on, even to translations of Homer and Plutarch and Rollin's "Ancient History." A century ago, a book was a far greater treasure than it is to-day, when their very number has made us in a way contemptuous of them; and the few which young Parker could secure were read and re-read and learned through and through. His memory was amazing, and at the age of twenty he walked from his home in Lexington to Cambridge, took the entrance examination for Harvard College, passed with honors, and, walking home again, told his unsuspecting father, then in bed, of his success. He could not be spared from the farm, however, nor was there any money to pay for his maintenance at Cambridge, so he continued working on the farm, keeping up with his class by studying in the evenings and going to Cambridge only to take the examinations.
He undertook teaching after that, and gradually worked his way toward the ministry, to which he was admitted in 1837. He was soon called to Boston, to a congregation independent of sectarian bonds, and here he reached the culmination of his fame, attracting the most cultured people of the city by his breadth of knowledge, warmth of feeling and intensity of conviction. His interest in slavery began early, and by 1845, his share in the anti-slavery struggle had become engrossing. He threw himself into it heart and soul, and no one did more to awaken the conscience of the north. His speeches, letters, sermons, tracts and lectures had an immense influence; he took an active part in aiding runaway slaves to get to Canada, and his labors were incessant and prodigious. His health at last gave way, and the end came in 1860, at Florence, Italy, where he lies buried.
Parker's immense influence was due to the brain rather than to the heart. He possessed no grace of person, music of voice, or charm of manner, none of that fascination which is a part of the great orator. He was a white-hot flame which scorched and seared, an intellect pure and piercing, a self-made instrument to expose the shams of society.
Closely associated with Garrison and Parker in the fight against slavery, and in some ways more famous than either, was Wendell Phillips. The very opposite of Parker, handsome in person, cultivated in manner, with a charm of personality seldom equalled,--the two yet worked hand in hand for a common cause, the one, as it were, supplementing the other.
Wendell Phillips was the son of John Phillips, the first mayor of Boston, and was a year younger than Theodore Parker. He went the way of all well-to-do Boston youth through Harvard, graduating there in 1831, without distinguishing himself particularly, except by his skill in debate and his finished elocution. During one of the revivals of religion which followed the settlement of Dr. Lyman Beecher at Boston, he became a convert, and this marked the beginning of his interest in the great moral question of the day, slavery. It soon became overwhelming, and was given point and passion by a spectacle which he witnessed on October 21, 1835.
He had studied for the law, been admitted to the bar, and opened an office, and looking from his office window on that October day, he saw a mob break up an anti-slavery meeting on the street below, pull William Lloyd Garrison off the platform, tear his clothes from his back, throw a rope around him and drag him through the streets, ready to hang him, and prevented from doing so only by a ruse of the mayor, who got Garrison into the jail and locked him up for safety. That spectacle moved the young lawyer through and through, and from that moment he was an avowed Abolitionist.
"If clients do not come," he had said to a friend a short time before, "I will throw myself heart and soul into some good cause and devote my life to it."
Clients would have come, no doubt, but the good cause came first. His opportunity came in 1837, when Elijah Lovejoy was murdered by a mob at Alton, Illinois, for publishing an anti-slavery paper. Phillips, stirred with indignation, arranged for a public meeting at Faneuil Hall, and was of course present, but with no expectation of speaking. Dr. Channing made an impressive address, and one or two others followed, when James T. Austin, attorney-general of the state, and bitterly opposed to the anti-slavery agitation, arose. He eulogized the Alton murderers, comparing them with the patriots of the Revolution, and declared that Lovejoy had "died as the fool dieth." Some instinct led the chair to call upon Wendell Phillips to reply. He consented, and as he stepped upon the platform won instant admiration by his dignity, his self-possession, and his manly beauty.
"Mr. Chairman," he began, "when I heard the gentleman who has just spoken lay down principles which placed the rioters, incendiaries, and murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips [pointing to the portraits in the hall] would have broken into voice, to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead. Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up."
The effect of the whole speech was tremendous. At last the abolitionists had found a champion equal to the best, and from that hour to the end of the anti-slavery conflict, he was foremost in the fight. He accepted without reservation the doctrines which Garrison had formulated: that slavery was under all circumstances a sin and that immediate emancipation was a fundamental right and duty. Up and down the land, obeying every call so far as his strength would permit, he travelled, lecturing against slavery, asking no pecuniary reward. He was soon a great popular favorite--the greatest, perhaps, who ever mounted a lecture platform in America,--and gained a hearing in quarters where, before, abolitionists had been hated and derided. His tact in winning over a turbulent audience was extraordinary; the strongest opponents of the anti-slavery cause felt the spell of his power, and often confessed the justice of his arguments.
When that fight was won and the negro had gained his freedom, Wendell Phillips remained the foremost critic of public men and measures in America, and year after year, he devoted his great gifts to guiding popular opinion. A champion of temperance, of the rights of labor, of the Indians, of equal suffrage, he stood forth until his death an inspiring and august figure--a man who devoted his life wholly to the welfare of his country.
One of the reforms which Wendell Phillips advocated was that of woman suffrage, but this movement has come to be particularly associated with the name of Susan B. Anthony. Like her great predecessor in that cause, Lucretia Mott, Miss Anthony was a Quaker, and the Quakers, it should be remembered, made no distinction of sex when it came to speaking in their meeting-houses. Her father was well-to-do, and she received a careful education, and in 1847, first spoke in public. The temperance movement absorbed her energies at first; then the Abolitionist cause; and finally the work of securing equal civil rights for women. During the winter of 1854, she held woman suffrage meetings in every county in New York State, and the remainder of her life was devoted to this cause.
Her most prominent co-worker was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose inspiration came directly from Lucretia Mott, whom she met in 1840, and with whom she joined, eight years later, in issuing a call for the first woman's suffrage convention. The convention was held at Mrs. Stanton's home at Seneca Falls, New York, and from that time forward, she devoted herself entirely to lecturing and writing upon the subject. That the cause of woman suffrage has made so little headway is certainly not because of a lack of devoted and accomplished advocates; it seems rather to be due to the fact that it has not yet succeeded in winning over the great body of women, who have held aloof and viewed the movement with indifference, if not with suspicion.
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We cannot close this consideration of the anti-slavery movement without some reference to that strange fanatic, John Brown, who headed a forlorn hope and gave up his life for an idea. It was the custom at one time to consider John Brown a saint, at the north, and a very emissary of Satan, at the south. One estimate was as untrue as the other. He was merely a misguided old man, grown a little mad, perhaps, from long brooding over one subject.
He was born at Torrington, Connecticut, in 1800, his father being a shoemaker and tanner, who, five years later, moved to Hudson, Ohio, then a mere outpost in the wilderness. He was soon expert in woodcraft, and he relates how, when he was six years old, an Indian boy gave him a yellow marble, the first he had ever seen, and which he treasured for a long time. He had little or no schooling, and a project to educate him for the ministry was cut short by an inflammation of the eyes. He grew up into a tall, handsome man, headstrong, but humane and kind, and easily moved to tears. He married young and had many children, for some of whom a tragic fate was waiting.
He soon became interested in the anti-slavery movement, and, by 1837, was so absorbed by it that he made his family take a solemn oath of active opposition to slavery. Ten years later, he unfolded to Frederick Douglass a plan for a negro insurrection in the Virginia mountains, but nothing came of it. From that time forward, the project seems to have slumbered at the back of his mind, and he grew more and more certain that the only way to end slavery was to arm the blacks and encourage them to fight for freedom. In 1854, his sons emigrated to Kansas, then in the throes of civil war over the slavery question, and their father busied himself raising money to send arms and ammunition into the troubled state. Finally, in September, 1855, he himself removed to Kansas, became the captain of a band of Free State Rangers, took part in the fight at Lawrence, and in some other affairs, and then, proceeding to the shores of Pottawatomie creek, where several pro-slavery men lived, seized five of them and put them to death.
For this deed he never experienced any compunction; he believed that he was directed by Providence in these "executions," as he called them, and after they were over, he held divine services. His fearful deed sent a thrill of horror through the country, and Brown and his sons became marked men. Their houses were burned, and one of the sons went insane from brooding over the father's deed. Brown himself was charged with murder, treason and conspiracy, and a price put on his head, but no one attempted to arrest him. Another of his sons was soon afterwards shot and killed by pro-slavery men and Brown, hastily collecting a small force, attacked the marauders, and killed or wounded many of them, himself being injured by a spent rifle ball. The fight was known as "the battle of Osawatomie," and Brown was thereafterwards known as "Osawatomie" Brown.
But the fight in Kansas was about won, and Brown again took up the idea of a slave insurrection. He went to Boston to raise the necessary money, and succeeded in getting it without much trouble, though most of the people who gave it to him had only the haziest kind of an idea of what it was he proposed to do. He bought rifles and ammunition, and also had a thousand pikes made with which to arm the negroes, who, of course, would not know how to use the rifle. Then he got together a band of young men, secured a military instructor; and on July 3, 1859, he appeared at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, hired a small farm near there, and quietly assembled his men and munitions.
Harper's Ferry had been selected because there was a well-equipped arsenal there which would furnish the arms and munitions which he had been unable to buy, and would also serve as a base of operations. Brown intended to proceed to the mountains, gathering up the slaves as he went, and establish headquarters in some strong position, where he could drill his forces and prepare for a raid on the rest of the state. He believed the slaves would flock to him, and that he would soon be at the head of a great army. He tried to get Frederick Douglass to join him, but Douglass refused, and, at last, on the night of Sunday, October 16, 1859, at the head of a little band of twenty-two men, whites and negroes, he moved on the arsenal. They reached the covered bridge over the Potomac without adventure, crossed until they were near the Virginia side, seized the solitary sentinel who challenged them, broke down the armory gate with a sledge hammer, seized the remainder of the guard, and a few citizens, who attempted to interfere, and were soon firmly in possession of not only the arsenal, but also the little town.
Meanwhile, the country round about was arming, and by noon, of Monday, Brown was so surrounded that he could not escape. Why he had not got away to the mountains in the morning, as he had intended doing, no one knows. The Virginia militia gathered, and in the early evening, a company of United States marines arrived from Washington, under command of Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart. They soon found out how small Brown's force was, carried the arsenal by assault, and took Brown and the survivors of his little band prisoners. Brown's two sons were dead, as were seven others of his followers, and seven more had succeeded in escaping, though two were afterwards captured.
The rest is soon told. Brown was swiftly tried and convicted of "treason and conspiring and advising with slaves and others to rebel, and of murder in the first degree," was sentenced to death, and was hanged on December 2, 1859. The affair made the South wild with rage and apprehension, for a slave insurrection was a thing to be trembled at, and Brown's execution similarly affected his friends at the North. He had once remarked, "I am worth a good deal more to hang than for any other purpose," and this was, in a sense, true, for in the words of the great marching song of the Northern armies during the war which followed, "his soul was marching on."
Another branch of philanthropy with which the name of a woman is closely identified is that of caring for the wounded and destitute in time of war or disaster, and the woman is Clara Barton. Born in Massachusetts about 1830, she started in life as a school-teacher, but in 1854 secured a position in the patent office at Washington, where she remained until the opening of the Civil War. The sight of the suffering in the Washington hospitals revealed to her her real vocation, and she determined to devote herself to the care of wounded soldiers on the battlefield. This work of mercy was one that carried with it a wide appeal, and she soon secured influential backing and support.
Her work was so effective that in 1864, she was appointed "lady in charge" of the hospitals at the front of the Army of the James, and in the following year was sent to Andersonville, Georgia, to identify and mark the graves of the Union soldiers buried there. Soon afterwards she was placed by President Lincoln in charge of the search for missing men of the Union armies--a work of the first importance, to which she devoted all her energies, and which she carried on for some years after the war closed, raising the necessary money by lectures and appeals for donations. Thousands of families at the North have reason to thank her for definite knowledge as to the fate of their loved ones.
Her health broke down under the strain, at last, and she went for a rest to Switzerland, but the outbreak of the Franco-German war, in 1870, called her again to duty, assisting the grand duchess of Baden in the preparation of military hospitals, and giving the Red Cross Society the benefit of her experience. In 1871, at the request of the German authorities, she superintended the supplying of work to the poor of Strasburg, after that city had been reduced by siege; and after the fall of Paris, she was placed in charge of the distribution of supplies to the destitute of that great city. At the close of the war, she was decorated with the golden cross of Baden and the iron cross of Germany.
Although the Red Cross societies in Europe had been established as early as 1863, and an international organization completed six years later, the society was not officially recognized by the United States until 1882. The American Association of the Red Cross was at once organized, and Miss Barton chosen its president, a position which she held without opposition for many years. Its object as stated by its constitution is "to organize a system of national relief and apply the same in mitigating suffering caused by war, pestilence, famine and other calamities." Since then, every such occasion has found the society in the forefront of relief work, and it has distributed many millions in assuaging human suffering.
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Still another great reform, ridiculed at first, but now recognized as one of the most beneficent movements of the age is associated with a single name. The reform is the protection of dumb animals, and the name is that of Henry Bergh.
Born in New York City in 1823, the son of a wealthy ship-builder and inheriting his father's fortune at the age of twenty, Henry Bergh, after spending some years in Europe, a portion of them in the diplomatic service of the United States, returned to this country, determined to devote the remainder of his life to the interests of animals.
It was a new idea which he presented to the public, met at first with indifference, then with ridicule and opposition. But as a bold worker in the streets of New York, by a relentless activity in carrying cases of ill-treatment of animals to the courts, and an eloquent advocacy of his cause on the floor of the legislature, he soon won friends and support, as every great cause is bound to do, and finally succeeded in so winning over public sentiment that, in 1866, the legislature passed the laws which he had prepared, creating the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, with himself as president. He gave not only his time, but his property to the work, and soon had the society in a prosperous condition, with branches forming in other cities. Indeed, the idea which he fostered has spread to the whole country, and nowhere may animals be mistreated with impunity. The idea that man is responsible not only for the happiness of his fellows, but for the well-being of his beasts marks a long stride forward in ethics.
Bergh's influence, indeed, extended beyond this country. Not only did practically every state in the Union enact the laws for the protection of animals which he had procured from the state of New York, but Brazil, the Argentine Republic, and many other foreign countries did likewise. In 1874, Bergh rescued a little girl from inhuman treatment, and this led to the formation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which has also done a great work.
No doubt before Bergh's time, there were many people who were pained to see either children or animals mistreated and who passed by with averted eyes. Bergh did not pass by. He made it his business, in the first place, to secure adequate laws for the punishment of cruelty, and in the second place, to provide means for the enforcement of those laws.
There are many of us to-day who are shocked at the injustice and suffering in the world, and who would welcome its regeneration. But wishing for a thing never got it. Nor does philanthropy consist merely in wishing men well. It means labor and self-sacrifice, and frequently obloquy and misunderstanding. The reward of the reformer is usually a stone and a sneer, if nothing worse. But when a man's heart is in the work, stones and sneers seem only to spur him on. They are like wind to a flame, fanning it white-hot. And it is a wonderful commentary on the essential goodness of human nature that never yet, in the history of mankind, has a real and needed reform failed, in the end, of success.
Among latter-day clergymen in America, none has achieved a wider reputation or a greater personal popularity than Phillips Brooks. Born in Boston in 1835, a graduate of Harvard, ordained to the Episcopal ministry at the age of twenty-four, and ten years later called to the rectorship of Trinity church, Boston, it was in this latter field, which he would never leave, that he showed himself to be one of the strongest personalities and noblest preachers of his age. No more striking figure ever appeared in a pulpit. Of magnificent physique, with a striking and massive head and handsome countenance, breathing the very spirit of youth, in spite of his grey hair, he had the interest and attention of any audience before he opened his lips.
Phillips Brooks has been compared to Henry Ward Beecher, and in many things they were alike. But the former's culture, while perhaps less varied than Beecher's, was deeper and richer, his sermons were less brilliant but cast in better form, his appeal was narrower but to a far more influential class. He was, in a word, the preacher of the intellectual. No one who heard him preach ever failed to be startled at first by his tremendous rapidity of delivery--averaging two hundred words a minute--or failed to find himself, at first, lagging behind the equal rapidity of thought. But once accustomed to these--once realizing that, in listening to him there could be no inattention or wandering of wits--his sermon became a source of keenest intellectual delight and noblest spiritual inspiration.
Phillips Brooks often said that he had to preach rapidly, or not at all. In youth he had suffered from something resembling an impediment in his speech, and more measured utterance gave it a chance to recur. Certainly, no one who ever listened to his fluent and limpid utterance would have suspected it. But he was far more than a great preacher. By his broad tolerance, his lofty character and immense personal influence, he became, in a way, a national figure, the common property of the nation which felt itself the richer for possessing him. A gracious and courtly figure, with a heart as wide as the human race, he lives, somehow, as the true type of clergyman, whose concern is humanity and whose field the world.
Which brings us to the life of the last man we shall consider in this chapter, a man the opposite in many ways of the great clergyman whose career we have just noted, and yet, like him, of broadest sympathies and most sincere convictions; a man whose life was more picturesque, whose battle against fate was harder, and whose achievement was even more remarkable--the greatest evangelist the modern world has ever produced, Dwight L. Moody. If ever a man labored for his fellow-men, he did, and the story of his life reads almost like a romance.
He was born at Northfield, Massachusetts, in 1837, the son of a stone-mason, who, disheartened and worn out by business reverses, died when the boy was only four years old. There were nine children, the oldest only fifteen, and when the father's creditors came and took every possession they had in the world, the future looked dark indeed. The mother was urged to place the children in various homes, but she managed to keep them together by doing housework for the neighbors and tilling a little garden.
As soon as he was old enough, Dwight was put to work on a farm, but his earnings were small, and finally, when he was seventeen, he started for Boston to look for something better. He managed to get a position in a shoe-store, and there came under the influence of Edward Kimball, who persuaded him to become a Christian and to join a church. But he was not admitted to membership for nearly a year; so poor was his command of language and so awkward his sentences that it was doubted if he understood Christianity at all, and even when he was admitted, the committee stated that they thought him "very unlikely ever to become a Christian of clear and decided views of gospel truth; still less to fill any extended sphere of public usefulness." How blind, indeed, we often are to the possibilities in human nature!
At the age of nineteen, Dwight removed to Chicago, secured another position as shoe-salesman, and offered his services to a mission school as a teacher. His appearance made anything but a favorable impression, but finally he was told that he might teach provided he brought his own scholars. The next Sunday he walked in at the head of a score of ragamuffins he had gathered up along the wharves. The divine fire seems to have been working in him; he was finding words with which to express himself, and burning for a wider field. So he rented a room in the slum districts which had been used as a saloon and opened a Sunday school there. It was an immense success, soon outgrew the little room, and was removed to a large hall, where, every Sunday, a thousand boys and girls attended. For six years, Moody conducted that school, sweeping it out and doing the janitor work himself, attending to his business as salesman throughout the week. But in 1860, at the age of twenty-three, he decided to devote all his time to Christian work.
He had no income, and to keep his expenses as low as possible, he slept at night on a bench in his school, and cooked his own food. Then the Civil War began, and he erected a tent at the camp near Chicago where the recruits were gathered, and labored there all day, sometimes holding eight or ten meetings. He went with the men to the front, and was at the desperate battles of Shiloh, Murfreesboro, and Chattanooga. The war over, he took up again his work in Chicago. The great fire of 1871 swept away his church, but he soon had a temporary structure erected, and labored on.
By this time, his fame had got abroad, and finally in 1873, his great opportunity came. Accompanied by Ira D. Sankey, the famous singer of hymns, he started on an evangelist tour of Great Britain. At his first meeting only four people were present; at his last, thirty thousand crowded to hear him. In Ireland, the crowds sometimes covered six acres, and during the four months he spent in London, over two million people heard him preach. Great Britain had never before experienced such a religious awakening; but it was as nothing to the reception given him when he returned to America two years later. There are many people still living who remember those wonderful revivals in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, with their great choirs, and Ira Sankey's singing, and Moody's soul-stirring talks. From that time forward he was easily the first evangelist in the world--perhaps the greatest the world had ever seen.
It is doubtful if any man ever faced and preached to so many people. He spoke to thousands night after night, week in and week out. In his themes he kept close to life, and few men were his equal in making scriptural biography vivid and realistic; in reconstructing scriptural scenes and setting them, as it were, bodily before his audience. He was not a cultured man, as we understand the word--not a man of broad learning; perhaps such learning would only have weakened him--nor did he have the presence and voice which go so far toward the equipment of the orator. But he burned with an intense conviction, and his sermons were so free from art, so direct, so persuasive, that they were perfectly adapted to the end he sought--the conversion of human beings.
SUMMARY
GIRARD, STEPHEN. Born near Bordeaux, France, May 24, 1750; sailed as cabin-boy to West Indies, and then to America; established in Philadelphia, 1769; financial mainstay of government in war of 1812; died at Philadelphia, December 26, 1831.
SMITHSON, JAMES LEWIS MACIE. Born in France in 1765; matriculated from Pembroke College, Oxford, England, 1782; Fellow Royal Society, 1786; distinguished as student of mineralogy and chemistry; died at Genoa, Italy, June 27, 1829.
COOPER, PETER. Born at New York City, February 12, 1791; apprenticed to carriage-maker, 1808; engaged in various enterprises and established Canton Iron Works, Canton, Maryland, 1830; Greenback candidate for President, 1876; died at New York, April 4, 1883.
PEABODY, GEORGE. Born at Danvers, Massachusetts, February 18, 1795; settled in London as a banker, 1837; died there, November 4, 1869.
HOPKINS, JOHNS. Born at Waterbury, Connecticut, May 19, 1795; founded house of Hopkins & Brothers, 1822; chairman of finance committee Baltimore & Ohio railroad, 1855; died at Baltimore, December 24, 1873.
CORNELL, EZRA. Born at Westchester Landing, New York, January 11, 1807; mechanic and miller at Ithaca, New York, 1828-41; member of State Assembly, 1862-63; State Senator, 1864-67; died at Ithaca, New York, December 9, 1874.
SLATER, JOHN FOX. Born at Slatersville, Rhode Island, March 4, 1815; established Slater Fund, 1882; died at Norwich, Connecticut, May 7, 1884.
STANFORD, LELAND. Born at Watervliet, New York, March 9, 1824; Republican governor of California, 1861-63; United States Senator, 1885-93; died at Palo Alto, California, June 20, 1893.
ROCKEFELLER, JOHN DAVISON. Born at Richford, New York, July 8, 1839; partner of Clark & Rockefeller, 1858; built Standard Oil Works, Cleveland, Ohio, 1865; organized Standard Oil Company, 1870; Standard Oil Trust, 1882.
CARNEGIE, ANDREW. Born at Dunfermline, Fifeshire, Scotland, November 25, 1837; came to United States, 1848; telegraph messenger boy, 1851; introduced Bessemer steel process to America, 1868; formed Carnegie Steel Company, 1899; merged into United States Steel Corporation, 1901, when he retired from business.
BEECHER, LYMAN. Born at New Haven, Connecticut, October 12, 1775; pastor of various Congregational churches, 1799-1832; president Lane Theological Seminary, 1832-51; died at Brooklyn, New York, January 10, 1863.
BEECHER, HENRY WARD. Born at Litchfield, Connecticut, June 24, 1813; graduated at Amherst, 1834; pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church, Brooklyn, 1847-87; founder of the _Independent_ and the _Christian Union_; died at Brooklyn, March 8, 1887.
CHANNING, WILLIAM ELLERY. Born at Newport, Rhode Island, April 7, 1780; graduated at Harvard, 1798; pastor of Federal Street Church, Boston, 1803-42; died at Bennington, Vermont, October 2, 1842.
JUDSON, ADONIRAM. Born at Malden, Massachusetts, August 9, 1788; graduated at Brown, 1807; started as missionary to Burmah, 1812, and remained in far East until his death, April 12, 1850.
MOTT, LUCRETIA. Born at Nantucket, Massachusetts, January 3, 1793; entered ministry of Friends, 1818; assisted at formation of American anti-slavery society, 1833; called first woman suffrage convention, 1848; died near Philadelphia, November 11, 1880.
DIX, DOROTHEA LYNDE. Born at Worcester, Massachusetts, 1805; devoted her whole life to work for paupers, convicts, and insane persons; superintendent of hospital nurses during Civil War; died at Trenton, New Jersey, July 19, 1887.
CHILD, LYDIA MARIA. Born at Medford, Massachusetts, February 11, 1802; editor _National Anti-Slavery Standard_, 1840-43; published a number of novels; died at Wayland, Massachusetts, October 20, 1880.
GARRISON, WILLIAM LLOYD. Born at Newburyport, Massachusetts, December 10, 1805; began publication of the _Liberator_, 1831; president American Anti-Slavery Society, 1843-65; died at New York City, May 24, 1879.
PARKER, THEODORE. Born at Lexington, Massachusetts, August 24, 1810; studied at Cambridge Divinity School, 1834-36; Unitarian clergyman at Roxbury, 1837; head of an independent society at Music Hall, Boston, 1846; died at Florence, Italy, May 10, 1860.
PHILLIPS, WENDELL. Born at Boston, November 29, 1811; educated at Harvard; admitted to the bar, 1834; leading orator of the Abolitionists, 1837-61; president of the Anti-Slavery Society, 1865-70; Prohibitionist candidate for governor of Massachusetts, 1870; died at Boston, February 2, 1884.
ANTHONY, SUSAN BROWNELL. Born at South Adams, Massachusetts, February 15, 1820; became agitator in cause of woman suffrage, organized National American Woman Suffrage Association and was its president for many years; died March 13, 1906.
STANTON, ELIZABETH CADY. Born at Johnstown, New York, November 12, 1815; graduated at Willard Seminary, 1832; met Lucretia Mott, 1840; held first woman's suffrage convention, 1848; associated with Susan B. Anthony; died at New York City, October 26, 1902.
BROWN, JOHN. Born at Torrington, Connecticut, May 9, 1800; removed with parents to Ohio, 1805; emigrated to Kansas, 1855; won battle of Osawatomie, August, 1856; seized arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, October 16, 1859; captured, October 18; tried by Commonwealth of Virginia, October 27-31; hanged at Charlestown, Virginia, December 2, 1859.
BARTON, CLARA. Born at Oxford, Massachusetts, 1821; superintended relief work on battle-fields during Civil War; laid out grounds of national cemetery at Andersonville, 1865; worked through Franco-Prussian war, 1870; distributed relief in Strasburg, Belfort, Montpelier, Paris, 1871; secured adoption of Treaty of Geneva, 1882; president American Red Cross Society, 1881-1904.
BERGH, HENRY. Born at New York City, 1823; secretary of legation at St. Petersburg, 1862-64; organized American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 1866; founded Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1874; died at New York City, March 12, 1888.
BROOKS, PHILLIPS. Born at Boston, December 13, 1835; graduated at Harvard, 1855; graduated from Episcopal Seminary, Alexandria, Virginia, 1859; rector of Trinity Church, Boston, 1870-93; elected Bishop of Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, 1891; died at Boston, January 23, 1893.
MOODY, DWIGHT LYMAN. Born at Northfield, Massachusetts, February 5, 1837; started missionary work at Chicago, 1856; conducted revival meetings in Great Britain, 1873-75; and devoted the remainder of his life to this work; died at Northfield, December 22, 1899.
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American Men of MindChapter VIII: Philanthropists and Reformers (2)
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