The Life of Lyman Trumbull

CHAPTER I

ANCESTRY AND EARLY LIFE

The subject of this memoir was born in Colchester, Connecticut, October 12, 1813. The Trumbull family was the most illustrious in the state, embracing three governors and other distinguished men. All were descendants of John Trumbull (or rather "Trumble"7), a cooper by trade, and his wife, Ellenor Chandler, of Newcastle, England, who migrated to Massachusetts in 1639, and settled first in Roxbury and removed to Rowley in the following year. Two sons were born to them in Newcastle-on-Tyne: Beriah, 1637 (died in infancy), and John, 1639.

The latter at the age of thirty-one removed to Suffield, Connecticut. He married and had four sons: John, Joseph, Ammi, and Benoni.

Captain Benoni Trumbull, married to Sarah Drake and settled in Lebanon, Connecticut, had a son, Benjamin, born May 11, 1712.

This Benjamin, married to Mary Brown of Hebron, Connecticut, had a son, Benjamin, born December 19, 1735.

This son was graduated at Yale College in 1759, and studied for the ministry; he was ordained in 1760 at North Haven, Connecticut, where he officiated nearly sixty years, his preaching being interrupted only by the Revolutionary War, in which he served both as soldier and as chaplain. He was the author of the standard colonial history of Connecticut. He was married to Miss Martha Phelps in 1760. They had two sons and five daughters.

The elder son, Benjamin, born in North Haven, September 24, 1769, became a lawyer and married Elizabeth Mather, of Saybrook, Connecticut, March 15, 1800, and settled in Colchester, Connecticut. The wife was a descendant of Rev. Richard Mather, who migrated from Liverpool, England, to Massachusetts in 1635, and was the father of Increase Mather and grandfather of Cotton Mather, both celebrated in the church history of New England. Eleven children were born to these parents, of whom Lyman was the seventh. This Benjamin Trumbull was a graduate of Yale College, representative in the legislature, judge for the probate districts of East Haddam and Colchester, and died in Henrietta, Jackson County, Michigan, June 14, 1850, aged eighty-one. His wife died October 20, 1828, in her forty-seventh year. Lyman Trumbull was thus in the seventh generation of the Trumbulls in America.8

Five brothers and two sisters of Lyman reached maturity. A family of this size could not be supported by the fees earned by a country lawyer in the early part of the nineteenth century. The only other resource available was agriculture. Thus the Trumbull children began life on a farm and drew their nourishment from the soil cultivated by their own labor. It is recorded that, although the father and the grandfather of Lyman were graduates of Yale College, chill penury prevented him from having similar advantages of education. His schooling was obtained at Bacon Academy, in Colchester, which was of high grade, and second only to Yale among the educational institutions of the state. Here the boy Lyman took the lessons in mathematics that were customary in the academies of that period, and became conversant with Virgil and Cicero in Latin and with Xenophon, Homer, and the New Testament in Greek.

The opportunities to put an end to one's existence are so common to American youth that it is cause for wonder that so many of them reach mature years. Young Trumbull was not lacking in such facilities. The following incident is well authenticated, being narrated in part in his own handwriting:

When about thirteen years old he was playing ball one cold day in the family yard. The well had a low curbing around it and was covered by a round flat stone with a round hole in the top of it. He ran towards the well for the ball, which he picked up and threw quickly. As he did so his foot slipped on the ice and he went head first down the well. His recollection of the immediate details is vague, but he did not break his neck or stun himself on the rocky sides, but appears to have gone down like a diver, and somehow managed to turn in the narrow space and come up head first. The well had an old-fashioned sweep with a bucket on it, which his brothers promptly lowered and he was hoisted out, drenched and cold, but apparently not otherwise injured.

He attended school and worked on the farm until he was eighteen years of age when he earned some money by teaching the district school one year at Portland, Connecticut. At the age of nineteen he taught school one winter in New Jersey, returning to Colchester the following summer. He had established a character for rectitude, industry, modesty, sobriety, and good manners, so that when, in his twentieth year (1833), he decided to go to the state of Georgia to seek employment as a school-teacher, nearly all the people in the village assembled to wish him godspeed on that long journey, which was made by schooner, sailing from the Connecticut River to Charleston, South Carolina. The voyage was tempestuous but safe, and he arrived at Charleston with one hundred dollars in his pocket which his father had given him as a start in life. This money he speedily returned out of his earnings because he thought his father needed it more than himself.

A memorandum made by himself records that "on the evening of the day when he arrived at Charleston a nullification meeting was held in a large warehouse. The building was crowded, so he climbed up on a beam overhead and from that elevated position overlooked a Southern audience and heard two of the most noted orators in the South, Governor Hayne, and John C. Calhoun, then a United States Senator. He remembers little of the impression they made upon a youth of twenty, except that he thought Hayne an eloquent speaker."

From Charleston he went by railroad (the first one he had ever seen and one of the earliest put in operation in the United States) to a point on the Savannah River opposite Augusta, Georgia, and thence by stage to Milledgeville, which was then the capital of Georgia. From Milledgeville he walked seventy-five miles to Pike County, where he had some hope of finding employment. Being disappointed there he continued his journey on foot to Greenville, Meriwether County, where he had more success even than he had expected, for he obtained a position as principal of the Greenville Academy at a salary of two hundred dollars per year in addition to the fees paid by the pupils. This position he occupied for three years.

While at Greenville he employed his leisure hours reading law in the office of Hiram Warner, judge of the superior court of Georgia, afterwards judge of the supreme court of the state and member of Congress. In this way he acquired the rudiments of the profession. As soon as he had gained sufficient capital to make a start in life elsewhere, he bought a horse, and, in March, 1837, took the trail through the "Cherokee Tract" toward the Northwest. This trail was a pathway formed by driving cattle and swine through the forest from Kentucky and Tennessee to Georgia. Dr. Parks, of Greenville, accompanied Trumbull during a portion of the journey. They traveled unarmed but safely, although Trumbull carried a thousand dollars on his person, the surplus earnings of his three years in Georgia. For a young man of twenty-four years without a family this was affluence in those days.

Through Kentucky, Trumbull continued his journey without any companion and made his entrance into Illinois at Shawneetown, on the Ohio River, where he presented letters of introduction from his friends in Georgia and was cordially welcomed. After a brief stay at that place he continued his journey to Belleville, St. Clair County, bearing letters of introduction from his Shawneetown friends to Adam W. Snyder and Alfred Cowles, prominent members of the bar at Belleville. Both received him with kindness and encouraged him to make his home there. This he decided to do, but he first made a visit to his parental home in Colchester, going on horseback by way of Jackson, Michigan, near which town three of his older brothers, David, Erastus, and John, had settled as farmers.

Returning to Belleville in August, 1837, he entered the law office of Hon. John Reynolds, ex-governor of the state, who was then a Representative in Congress and was familiarly known as the "Old Ranger." Reynolds held, at one time and another, almost every office that the people of Illinois could bestow, but his fame rests on historical writings composed after he had withdrawn from public life.9

For how long a time Trumbull's connection with Governor Reynolds continued, our records do not say, but we know that he had an office of his own in Belleville three years later, and that his younger brother George had joined him as a student and subsequently became his partner.

The practice of the legal profession in those days was accomplished by "riding on the circuit," usually on horseback, from one county seat to another, following the circuit judge, and trying such cases as could be picked up by practitioners en route, or might be assigned to them by the judge. Court week always brought together a crowd of litigants and spectators, who came in from the surrounding country with their teams and provisions, and often with their wives and children, and who lived in their own covered wagons. The trial of causes was the principal excitement of the year, and the opposing lawyers were "sized up" by juries and audience with a pretty close approach to accuracy. After adjournment for the day, the lawyers, judges, plaintiffs, defendants, and leading citizens mingled together in the country tavern, talked politics, made speeches or listened to them, cracked jokes and told stories till bedtime, and took up the unfinished lawsuit, or a new one, the next day. In short, court week was circus, theatre, concert, and lyceum to the farming population, but still more was it a school of politics, where they formed opinions on public affairs and on the mental calibre of the principal actors therein.

Two letters written by Trumbull in 1837 to his father in Colchester have escaped the ravages of time. Neither envelopes nor stamps existed then. Each letter consisted of four pages folded in such a manner that the central part of the fourth page, which was left blank, received the address on one side and a wafer or a daub of sealing wax on the other. The rate of postage was twenty-five cents per letter, and the writers generally sought to get their money's worth by taking a large sheet of paper and filling all the available space. Prepayment of postage was optional, but the privilege of paying in advance was seldom availed of, the writers not incurring the risk of losing both letters and money. Irregularity in the mails is noted by Trumbull, who mentions that a letter from Colchester was fifteen days en route, while a newspaper made the same distance in ten.

In a letter dated October 9, 1837, he tells his father that he is already engaged in a law case involving the ownership of a house. If he finds that he can earn his living in the practice of law, he shall like Belleville very much. In the same missive he tells his sister Julia that balls and cotillions are frequent in Belleville, and that he had attended one, but did not dance. It was the first time he had attended a social gathering since he left home in 1833. He adds, "There are more girls here than I was aware of. At the private party I attended, there were about fifteen, all residing in town." The writer was then at the susceptible age of twenty-four.

The other letter gives an account of the Alton riot and the killing of Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy. This is one of the few contemporary accounts we have of that shocking event. Although he was not an eye-witness of the riot, the facts as stated are substantially correct, and the comments give us a view of the opinions of the writer at the age of twenty-four, touching a subject in which he was destined to play an important part. The letter is subjoined:

Belleville, Sunday, Nov. 12, 1837.

Dear Father: Since my last to you there has been a mob to put down Abolitionism, in Alton, thirty-five miles northwest of this place, in which two persons were killed and six or seven badly wounded. The immediate cause of the riot was the attempt by a Mr. Lovejoy to establish at Alton a religious newspaper in which the principles of slavery were sometimes discussed. Mr. Lovejoy was a Presbyterian minister and formerly edited a newspaper in St. Louis, but having published articles in his paper in relation to slavery which were offensive to the people of St. Louis, a mob collected, broke open his office, destroyed his press and type and scattered it through the streets. Immediately after this transaction, which was about a year since, Mr. Lovejoy left St. Louis, and removed to Alton, where he attempted to re-establish his press, but he had not been there long before a mob assembled there also, broke into his office and destroyed his press. In a short time Mr. Lovejoy ordered another press which, soon after its arrival in Alton, was taken from the warehouse (where it was deposited), by a mob, and in like manner destroyed. Again he ordered still another press, which arrived in Alton on the night of the 7th inst., and was safely deposited in a large stone warehouse four or five storeys high.

Previous to the arrival of this press, the citizens of Alton held several public meetings and requested Mr. L. to desist from attempting to establish his press there, but he refused to do so. Heretofore no resistance had ever been offered to the mob, but on the night of the 8th inst., as it was supposed that another attempt might possibly be made to destroy the press, Mr. L. and some 18 or 20 of his friends armed themselves and remained in the warehouse, where Mr. Gilman, one of the owners of the house, addressed the mob from a window, and urged them to desist, told them that there were several armed men in the house and that they were determined to defend their property. The mob demanded the press, which not being given them, they commenced throwing stones at the house and attempted to get into it. Those from within then fired and killed a man of the name of Bishop. The mob then procured arms, but were unable to get into the house. At last they determined on firing it, to which end, as it was stone, they had to get on the roof, which they did by means of a ladder. The firing during all this time, said to be about an hour, was continued on both sides. Mr. Lovejoy having made his appearance near one of the doors was instantly shot down, receiving four balls at the same moment. Those within agreed to surrender if their lives would be protected, and soon threw open the doors and fled. Several shots were afterward fired, but no one was seriously injured. The fire was then extinguished and the press taken and destroyed.

So ended this awful catastrophe which, as you may well suppose, has created great excitement through this section of the country. Mr. Lovejoy is said to have been a very worthy man, and both friends and foes bear testimony to the excellence of his private character. Here, the course of the mob is almost universally reprobated, for whatever may have been the sentiments of Mr. Lovejoy, they certainly did not justify the mob taking his life. It is understood here that Mr. L. was never in the habit of publishing articles of an insurrectionary character, but he reasoned against slavery as being sinful, as a moral and political evil.

His death and the manner in which he was slain will make thousands of Abolitionists, and far more than his writings would have made had he published his paper an hundred years. This transaction is looked on here, as not only a disgrace to Alton, but to the whole State. As much as I am opposed to the immediate emancipation of the slaves and to the doctrine of Abolitionism, yet I am more opposed to mob violence and outrage, and had I been in Alton, I would have cheerfully marched to the rescue of Mr. Lovejoy and his property.

Yours very affectionately,

Lyman Trumbull.

After three years of riding on the circuit, Trumbull was elected, in 1840, a member of the lower house of the state legislature from St. Clair County. In politics he was a Democrat as was his father before him. This was the twelfth general assembly of the state. Among his fellow members were Abraham Lincoln, E. D. Baker, William A. Richardson, John J. Hardin, John. A. McClernand, William H. Bissell, Thomas Drummond, and Joseph Gillespie, all of whom were destined to higher positions.

Trumbull was now twenty-seven years of age. He soon attracted notice as a debater. His style of speaking was devoid of ornament, but logical, clear-cut, and dignified, and it bore the stamp of sincerity. He had a well-furnished mind, and was never at loss for words. Nor was he ever intimidated by the number or the prestige of his opponents. He possessed calm intellectual courage, and he never declined a challenge to debate; but his manner toward his opponents was always that of a high-bred gentleman.

On the 27th of February, 1841, Stephen A. Douglas, who was Trumbull's senior by six months, resigned the office of secretary of state of Illinois to take a seat on the supreme bench, and Trumbull was appointed to the vacancy. There had been a great commotion in state politics over this office before Trumbull was appointed to it. Under the constitution of the state, the governor had the right to appoint the secretary, but nothing was said in that instrument about the power of removal. Alexander P. Field had been appointed secretary by Governor Edwards in 1828, and had remained in office under Governors Reynolds and Duncan. Originally a strong Jackson man, he was now a Whig. When Governor Carlin (Democrat) was elected in 1838 he decided to make a new appointment, but Field refused to resign and denied the governor's right to remove him. The State Senate sided with Field by refusing to confirm the new appointee, John A. McClernand. After the adjournment of the legislature, the governor reappointed McClernand, who sued out a writ of quo warranto to oust Field. The supreme court, consisting of four members, three of whom were Whigs, decided in favor of Field. The Democrats then determined to reform the judiciary. They passed a bill in the legislature adding five new judges to the supreme bench. "It was," says historian Ford, "confessedly a violent and somewhat revolutionary measure and could never have succeeded except in times of great party excitement." In the mean time Field had retired and the governor had appointed Douglas secretary of state, and Douglas was himself appointed one of the five new members of the supreme court. Accordingly he resigned, after holding the office only two months, and Trumbull was appointed to the vacancy without his own solicitation or desire.

Two letters written by Trumbull in 1842 acquaint us with the fact that his brother Benjamin had removed with his family from Colchester to Springfield and was performing routine duties in the office of the secretary of state, while Trumbull occupied his own time for the most part in the practice of law before the supreme court. He adds: "I make use of one of the committee rooms in the State House as a sleeping-room, so you see I almost live in the State House, and am the only person who sleeps in it. The court meets here and all the business I do is within the building." Not quite all, for in another letter (November 27, 1842) he confides to his sister Julia that a certain young lady in Springfield was as charming as ever, but that he had not offered her his hand in marriage, and that even if he should do so, it was not certain that she would accept it.

Trumbull had held the office of secretary of state two years when his resignation was requested by Governor Carlin's successor in office, Thomas Ford, author of a History of Illinois from 1814 to 1847. In his book Ford tells his reasons for asking Trumbull's resignation. They had formed different opinions respecting an important question of public policy, and Trumbull, although holding a subordinate office, had made a public speech in opposition to the governor's views.10 Of course he did this on his own responsibility as a citizen and a member of the same party as the governor. He acknowledged the governor's right to remove him, and he made no complaint against the exercise of it.

The question of public policy at issue between Ford and Trumbull related to the State Bank, which had failed in February, 1842, and whose circulating notes, amounting to nearly $3,000,000, had fallen to a discount of fifty cents on the dollar. Acts legalizing the bank's suspension had been passed from time to time and things had gone from bad to worse. At this juncture a new bill legalizing the suspension for six months longer was prepared by the governor and at his instance was reported favorably by the finance committee of the House. Trumbull opposed this measure, and made a public speech against it. He maintained that it was disgraceful and futile to prolong the life of this bankrupt concern. He demanded that the bank be put in liquidation without further delay.

When Trumbull's resignation as secretary became known, the Democratic party at the state capital was rent in twain. Thirty-two of its most prominent members, including Virgil Hickox, Samuel H. Treat, Ebenezer Peck, Mason Brayman, and Robert Allen, took this occasion to tender him a public dinner in a letter expressing their deep regret at his removal and their desire to show the respect in which they held him for his conduct of the office, and for his social and gentlemanly qualities. A copy of this invitation was sent to the State Register, the party organ, for publication. The publishers refused to insert it, on the ground that it "would lead to a controversy out of which no good could possibly arise, and probably much evil to the cause." Thereupon the signers of the invitation started a new paper under the watchword "Fiat Justitia, Ruat Cœlum," entitled the Independent Democrat, of which Number 1, Volume 1, was a broadside containing the correspondence between Trumbull and the intending diners, together with sarcastic reflections on the time-serving publishers of the State Register. Trumbull's reply to the invitation, however, expressed his sincere regret that he had made arrangements, which could not be changed, to depart from Springfield before the time fixed for the dinner. He returned to Belleville and resumed the practice of his profession.