Sketches of Successful New Hampshire Men
were framed, evidently, with the design, not so much of getting
information about the actual condition of the workingmen of the free
states as to draw from Mr. Wallingford some material that could be
turned to the disadvantage of the system of free labor. Mr. Wallingford
replied through the press, February 6, 1850, in a letter which at once
answered the impulsive and haughty "owner of men," and triumphantly
vindicated our system of free labor. For directness of reply, density,
and clearness of style, few published letters have equaled it. It must
have afforded Mr. Clemens material for reflection, and it is not known
that he afterwards assailed the workingmen of the nation.
From the formation of the Republican party, Mr. Wallingford has been one
of its active supporters. Though no man has been more decided in his
political convictions, or more frank in giving expression to them, no
one has been more tolerant of the opinions of others, or more scrupulous
in his methods of political warfare. Despising the tricks of the mere
partisan, and abhorring politics as a trade, he has always been content
to rest the success of his party on an open, free discussion of the
issues involved. Not deeming it consistent with his obligations to his
company to spend his time in the public service, he has refused to
accede to the repeated propositions of his political friends to support
him for important official positions; but he was a member of the
constitutional constitution of 1876, and presidential elector for 1876,
casting his vote for Hayes and Wheeler. He is and has been for years,
president of the Savings Bank for the County of Strafford, a director of
the Strafford National Bank, president of the Dover Library Association,
and a director in the Dover & Winnipesaukee Railroad. In his religious
belief Mr. Wallingford is a Unitarian, and an active member of the
Unitarian society in Dover.
GENERAL WALTER HARRIMAN.
BY REV. S. C. BEANE.
The name of no New Hampshire man of the present generation is more
broadly known than that of WALTER HARRIMAN. His distinguished services
to the state, both in the legislature and in the executive chair; his
honorable service as an officer of the Union army; the important trusts
he has held at the hands of one and another of our national
administrations; and, not least, his brilliant gifts as an orator, which
have made him always welcome to the lyceum platform and have caused him
to be widely and eagerly sought for in every important election campaign
for many years,--combine to make him one of the most conspicuous men in
our commonwealth.
The Harriman family is of English origin. Rev. Ezekiel Rogers, a man of
eminence in the church, was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1590. He
graduated at the University of Cambridge, in 1610. Becoming a dissenter
from the Church of England, after twenty-five years of faithful service,
his ministerial functions were suspended. He says of himself: "For
refusing to read that accursed book that allowed sports on God's holy
Sabbath, I was suspended, and by it and other sad signs driven, with
many of my hearers, into New England." This stanch Puritan arrived on
these shores in 1638. In his devoted flock there was an orphan lad,
sixteen years of age, named Leonard Harriman, and from this youthful
adventurer the subject of our sketch descended, being of the seventh
generation. Rogers selected for his colony an unoccupied tract of
country between Salem and Newburyport, Mass., to which he gave the name
of Rowley, that being the name of the parish in Yorkshire to which he
had long ministered.
The oldest son of Leonard Harriman was massacred, with ninety of his
comrades,--"the flower of Essex county,"--in King Philip's war,
September 18, 1675, at Bloody Brook. The great-grandfather of Walter
Harriman saw eight years of hard service in the French and Revolutionary
wars. His grandfather settled in the wilds of Warner, at the foot of the
Mink hills, but lost his life, by an accident, at the early age of
twenty-eight. His father, the late Benjamin E. Harriman, was a man of
character and influence through an honorable life. He reared a large
family at the ancestral home in Warner, where the subject of our sketch,
being the third son, was born April 8, 1817.
Muscle and intellect and the heroic virtues can have no better nursery
than the rugged farm-life of New England, and the Warner homestead was a
challenge and stimulus to the qualities that were needed in the future
man of affairs. This child of the third generation that had occupied the
same house and tilled the same soil, grew up with a stalwart physical
organization and a fine loyalty to his native town, a deep interest in
its rude history and traditions, and a sympathy with the common people,
which in turn made him a favorite with all. To this day there is to him
no spot, save his present home, to be compared with his birthplace, and
there are no people so interesting and endeared as his old neighbors in
the rugged hill-town. He has recently written a history of Warner, which
is regarded as "one of the most systematic, comprehensive, and generally
interesting works of the kind yet given to the public in the state." The
Harriman home still remains in the possession of the family, and, though
the ex-governor now resides in Concord, he spends many a day in every
year amidst the old familiar scenes. His "schooling" was obtained at the
Harriman district school, and at the academy in the adjoining town of
Hopkinton.
When hardly more than a boy, he made a successful trial of the excellent
self-discipline of school-teaching, and at different times taught in New
Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. While in the latter
state, at the age of twenty-two, he became deeply interested in the
principles of Liberal Christianity (the form of religious faith which he
has steadfastly held to this day), and occasionally wrote sermons, which
were well received from the pulpit, and some of which found their way
into print. It was certain from his early youth that nature designed him
for a public speaker, the rare oratorical gifts which afterwards
distinguished him having shown themselves gradually and prophetically in
the district school-house and the village academy. This tentative
experience in preaching, undertaken of his own motion and without
conferring with flesh and blood, resulted in his settlement, in 1841,
over the Universalist church in Harvard, Mass., where he remained in
active service four years. Returning now to Warner, and soon leaving the
pulpit altogether, he became the senior partner in trade with John S.
Pillsbury, late governor of Minnesota,--probably the only instance in
our history where two young business partners in a retired country town
have afterwards become the chief executives of different states.
In 1849, Mr. Harriman was elected by his townsmen to the New Hampshire
house of representatives, where he almost immediately became prominent
as a leader in debate on the Democratic side. Of his record as a party
man little need to be said, except that from first to last, and whatever
his affiliations, he has shown great independence in espousing measures
and principles which commended themselves to his judgment and
conscience, even when it put him in a minority with his political
associates. In his first legislative term, on the question of commuting
the death sentence of a woman who was sentenced to be hung for murder,
he not only advocated such commutation, but was a leader in the movement
for the abolition of capital punishment altogether, to which purpose he
has ever since stood committed. In the legislature of 1850, he was the
leading advocate of the homestead exemption law, at which time a
resolution was adopted, submitting the question to the people. The
voters of the state gave their approval at the next March election, and
in the following June the act was consummated. No legislature has dared
to repeal it, and the foresight and courage of its authors and earliest
advocates have been so approved by thirty years of experience that it is
doubtful if a single citizen can be found to-day who would desire to
undo their work.
It was no accident or trifling smartness that could give a man
prominence in those two legislatures of a third of a century ago. Among
the men of marked ability, now deceased, who held seats in those years,
were Horton D. Walker, Samuel H. Ayer, Lemuel N. Pattee, Edmund Parker,
Samuel Lee, John Preston, William Haile, Richard Jenness, William P.
Weeks, Thomas E. Sawyer, Wm. H. Y. Hackett, Nathaniel B. Baker, Charles
F. Gove, Thomas M. Edwards, Josiah Quincy, and scores of others, now
living, of equal merit. In this galaxy of brilliant minds, it is no
exaggeration to say that, young as he was, Mr. Harriman was an honored
peer in legislative duty and debate. Besides the two years named, he
represented Warner again in the house in 1858, when he was his party's
candidate for speaker. He also represented district No. 8 in the state
senate in 1859 and 1860. In 1853 and 1854 he held the responsible office
of state treasurer. Appointed in 1856, by the President of the United
States, on a board of commissioners (with ex-Congressman James H. Relfe
of Missouri, and Col. Wm. Spencer of Ohio), to classify and appraise
Indian lands in Kansas, he spent a year of official service in that
inviting territory, then turbulent with ruffianism. Border raids,
burnings, and murder were daily occurrences. But the duties of this
office were faithfully attended to, and no breath of complaint was
overheard against the delicate work of this board.
During the reign of that un-American political heresy, popularly called
Know-Nothingism, in 1854, 1855, and 1856, Mr. Harriman was its firm and
unyielding enemy. In a discussion of this question with Hon. Cyrus
Barton at Loudon Center, Mr. Harriman had closed his first speech, and
Mr. Barton had just begun a reply, when he dropped dead on the
platform,--a tragedy which lingers sadly in the memory of his friendly
antagonist of that day.
The outbreak of the civil war began an era in the life of every public
man in the nation. It projected issues which made party allegiance a
secondary affair. It sent many honest and earnest men across the party
lines, while some of our best citizens simply took their stand for the
time being outside all political folds, independent, and ready for
whatever calls the exigencies of the country might give forth. In that
fateful spring of 1861, Mr. Harriman became the editor and one of the
proprietors of the _Weekly Union_ at Manchester, which heartily espoused
the war policy of Mr. Lincoln's administration for the preservation of
the republic, and thus found himself the leader and spokesman of what
were known as the "War Democrats." He was placed in nomination as a
candidate for governor of the state, at a large mass convention of this
class of voters, held at Manchester in February, 1863, and this movement
resulted in defeating a choice by the people and throwing the election
into the legislature.
No man uttered braver or more eloquent words for the Union cause than
Mr. Harriman, and his tongue and pen were an important element in the
rousing of the citizens of New Hampshire to the graver duties of the
hour. In August, 1862, he was made colonel of the Eleventh New Hampshire
regiment of volunteers. He led this regiment to the field, and was at
its head most of the time until the close of the war, except the four
months, from May to September, 1864, when he was an inmate of
Confederate prisons. With some other captured Union officers, he was,
for seven weeks of this time, imprisoned in that part of Charleston, S.