michigan governors

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Election Day

November 1, 2010 in Uncategorized | No comments



Somewhere in the universe, the daredevil Stevens T. Mason is arrayed in his finest broadcloath suit, sharing an apertif and discussing Jeffersonian principles with the Free Soiler Kinsley Scott Bingham. Folk hero Hazen S. Pingree and war hero Russell A. Alger dine on quail. Henry Porter Baldwin lays plans for some celestial congregation and Epaphroditus Ransom spaces out to the sound of far-away howling wolves. G. Mennen Williams calls a square dance and the orphaned cheese magnate Frederick Maltby Warner romps along. Alpheus Felch pushes his glasses up his nose and creaky old William Woodbridge grumbles about the noise levels. And the good General Lewis Cass abides.

It’s a heavenly gubernatorial convention. And today one more name gets put on the waiting list.

Let’s do this. Go vote today. Visit publius.org to learn more.

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Scenes from Stevens T. Mason’s reburial

October 28, 2010 in Events, History | No comments

A small crowd gathered in Capitol Park yesterday to honor Stevens T. Mason, Michigan’s first and America’s youngest governor, who was reburied in a crypt there after his remains were temporarily removed during the Park’s restoration.

It was also Governor Mason’s 199th birthday.

A swoop of pigeons was circling, distracting the attention of several photographers.

Before the ceremony started, Eno (who told me earlier this week to keep an eye out for a guy that looked like Hazen Pingree) passed out “I Dig Boy Gov” shirts. They are fantastic. You will want one and I will let you know when they are on sale.

Don Faber, author of The Toledo War, gave a captivating speech about Young Hotspur (a name bestowed upon Mason, Faber said, by President Jackson. President Jackson, you’ll remember, had Governor Mason forcibly removed from office during the Toledo War). The “right man at the right time for Michigan,” Faber said, Mason was “like a comet.”

(You can hear a lengthy excerpt from Faber’s speech, edited over some footage from the internment ceremony, at The Detroit News website.)

Kerri Chartkoff, the Michigan Capitol historian, spoke about the first time Stevens T. Mason was buried in Michigan, in 1905 (he had originally been buried in New York when he died of pneumonia in 1843). Governor Fred Warner greeted the train. Thousands of people crowded the sidewalks along the processional and thronged the memorial ceremony in Capitol Park.

Dan Janssen of the Detroit Historical Society discussed Governor Mason’s far less grand disinterment in the 1950s, when Mason’s remains made way for a transit station. Whether Governor Mason should be kept in Detroit at all was a matter of debate, although he was ultimately restored to his crypt in Capitol Park.

Janssen described a Detroit that perceived its thundering march toward progress as somehow at odds with its past. In some ways, this seemed the timeliest lesson of the day: a community can stand on its history (300-odd years, Detroiters!) and use that momentum to move forward.

That’s why the Michigan Historical Society recruited a contingent of young Detroit leaders to serve as the Governor’s honorary pallbearers, including Sandra Yu of Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice and Phil Cooley of Slows Bar-B-Q, who was just profiled in The New York Times (to some chagrin from people who, although they love Phil, and of course Slows, wonder if NYT knows that there are restaurants in Detroit that are not Slows and interesting people who live here who are not Phil. Still, I found myself enjoying the gentle absurdity that one of Phil’s many town-trotting events included, on this day, being a pallbearer for Stevens T. Mason. OF COURSE).

An honor guard did the physical honors of delivering the Governor to rest.

Governor Mason’s metal coffin was placed in an above-ground crypt beneath a life-size bronze statue that had been spruced up for the park’s re-opening. One wonders if there was a problem removing the graffiti tags, however, on the concrete memorial slab.

But we trifle. It was a pitch-perfect ceremony on a clear October day, and the crowd was quiet and, if I may project, a little bit awed. I was.

Maybe I am just sentimental, but it felt wonderful to witness this peculiar occasion in city history first-hand. Even if Governor Mason is doomed to be disinterred and re-interred once a generation, but that’s still a rare moment in a lifetime.

So rest in peace, Governor Mason. And here’s hoping that you enjoy a longer stay where you are.

Thanks for everything,

The Night Train

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Stevens T. Mason to be reburied on Wednesday

October 24, 2010 in dreams, History | 4 comments

How many opportunities do you have in a lifetime to attend the solemn rite of governor’s burial?

How many of those opportunities involve a governor who died 167 years ago?

A governor that fought to found your state?

The youngest governor ever?

A governor whose nickname was Young Hotspur?

You see where we’re going with this. And yes, your answer to these hypothetical questions could reasonably be, “Pretty good, actually, but thanks,” considering how many times the Boy Governor Stevens T. Mason has been buried since his death in 1843 (we count four). Most recently, his remains were disinterred during the renovation of Capitol Park, and they’ll be put to rest yet again this Wednesday, October 27, at 1:00 pm.

Clearly, we would not miss this for the world. Feel free to take the afternoon off and join us.

More information available at boyguv.com.

We wrote about Stevens T. Mason and Capitol Park a few months ago, when it briefly looked like he was lost. Remember that?

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The ghost of Daniel Scotten

October 20, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History | 1 comment

We were going to write today about John Judson Bagley, Michigan’s Beardo Governor,

… but we got sidetracked by a historically illuminating Detroit ghost story we just couldn’t resist.

John Judson Bagley (Beardo Governor, 1873-1877) made his fortune as the man behind the Mayflower Tobacco Company. And while I was reading about big Detroit tobacco (if you’re thinking, “What?” — read more here!), I made the acquaintance of British-born Daniel Scotten, founder of Hiawatha Tobacco.

Mr. Scotten came to Detroit in 1853 from Palmyra, New York. That same year he established a partnership with Thomas C. Miller and co-founded the Thomas C. Miller & Co. Tobacco Company. Three years later, Scotten sold his share to Mr. Miller, bought out another tobacco firm, wrangled some partners and founded Scotten, Granger & Lovett. Years passed, partnerships shuffled, business boomed, and Daniel Scotten eventually built a huge factory on Fort Street to house the Scotten & Co. manufacturing operations. In 1891, James J. Mitchell wrote in Detroit in History and Commerce that Daniel Scotten’s wealth, “he being many times a millionaire, has been directed into channels by which the city has largely profited.”

Daniel Scotten was also easy to spot in a crowd: he liked to ride around town in a carriage drawn by white horses.

Oren Scotten, Daniel Scotten’s nephew, was born in New York in 1850 and came to Detroit when he was sixteen. Naturally, he asked magnate uncle for a job. Allegedly, Scotten said: “Take off your coat and work, then.” And Oren, not sure what else to do, picked up a broom and started sweeping the floor. Oren’s humble start at Hiawatha eventually led to a partnership with his uncle.

In 1898 — when Daniel Scotten was a spry 80 years old — Oren became an incorporating member of the Continental Tobacco Company, a holding company whose shares were mostly owned by American Tobacco. The Scotten Co. became the “Northwest Branch” of Continental Tobacco and Daniel Scotten retired (to the tune of $2.5 million).

In 1899, Daniel Scotten died of “extreme age” (according to his obituary in the New York Times).

But the old millionaire’s soul would not rest until his factory, which temporarily closed shortly after his death, was blazing again. Wrote Stephen Bromley McCracken in Detroit in 1900: A Chronological Record of Events:

At one time two servants employed at the former dwelling were passing through the roadway to Porter street, when the figure of a man, white and terrible, came out from behind the barn. To their excited imaginations it appeared to be the ghost of Daniel Scotten, but on his face was a scowl as he turned and gazed at the chimneys of the disused factory. With loud screams the servants made tracks for the street and notified patrolman Purcell, who examined the grounds, but could find no ghost. Since then it is claimed that the wraith appeared several times. It is even rumored that the has been heard to say, “Ever more must I walk until the smoke comes out of the chimneys of the old plant.” Superstitious neighbors remember that Mr Scotten used to make nocturnal trips about the house grounds with a lantern to see that all the doors were properly and the watchmen attending to their duties … Anyway, since the works have been reopened, it be said, as Hamlet said to his father’s ghost, “Rest, rest, perturbed spirit.”
I wonder where the ghost of Daniel Scotten is now.

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Michigan Governors: Hazen S. Pingree

October 6, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History | 5 comments

(You can get this and other vintage reproduction campaign buttons at the always marvelous City Bird.)

So much to say about Hazen Stuart Pingree, the Idol of the People, and one of Detroit’s most famous and beloved mayors. You probably know the basics of his legacy:

  • His “potato patch plan” to turn vacant lots into vegetable gardens to feed the depressed city’s hungry
  • Advocacy of public ownership of private utility monopolies, like gas and electricity
  • Public works projects to alleviate unemployment
  • Rooting out municipal corruption
  • Having the school board arrested
  • Fighting for 8-hour workdays and equitable wages
  • Shoemaker!
  • Friends with Teddy Roosevelt (who wore his Rough Riders uniform to Hazen’s turn-of-the-century party)
  • Eternally gazing northward from his massive perch in Grand Circus Park

Hazen was elected Governor in 1896 and had originally planned to hold his Mayorship and the Governor’s chair concurrently, that feisty so-and-so. But the State Supreme Court wouldn’t have it, so it was off with Ping to Lansing, where the adored Mayor found himself a struggling and obstructed Governor.

His final address after his second term is full of vinegar and vitriol. His indomitable spark leaps right off the page, but for a man so successful for most of his career, his frustration at this final stretch is kind of heart-yanking. It reminds me of some of our Presidents who really did not like being President or consider their Presidencies the high point of their professional lives. (Thomas Jefferson, anyone?)

Here’s how the speech begins:

I enlisted as a private at the commencement of the civil war and have two honorable discharges, which I prize. I have been a citizen and taxpayer of Detroit since 1865. My ancestors fought for their country in both the Revolution and the war of 1812. I mention these facts to show that there is nothing in my record to indicate that I should not be treated with proper respect as an individual.

The office which I have held for the last four years should have commanded the respect of every loyal citizen in the State, whatever the opinion of myself may have been. That it did not command the respect of the people of Lansing is proved by the fact that during the whole four years of my term as Governor I have only once been invited to the home of a single resident of the capital city of Michigan.

Awww. No one wanted to have Hazen over for dinner. That hurts!

The speech goes on to enumerate all of the reforms he attempted as Governor, with great expositions on tax equity for big corporations (famously, the railroads), direct election of Senators and protection of Michigan forests. But at every corner, he blames the obstruction of the Supreme Court and the Legislature (particularly the “Immortal Nineteen” in the Senate, his sworn enemies) for failing to make bigger, better reforms. On the subject of the Senate’s failure to ratify a  Constitutional amendment that had overwhelmingly passed by popular vote, for instance, he said:

The Senate, however, as it has always done in the past, defeated the bill without assigning any reason for its action. This action of the Senate is too idiotic and boyish to discuss.

By the end of his address, Hazen is jaded and sharp-tongued as to how he may have been more successful in the Governor’s office:

My experience during my political life, extending over a period of twelve years, has convinced me that in order to secure the full commendation of those who consider themselves the “better classes,” the Governor and other high officials must do nothing to antagonize the great corporations and the wealthy people. I am satisfied that I could have had the praise and support of our “best citizens” and our “best society,” and of the press of the State generally, if I had upheld those who have for years attempted to control legislation in their own interests, to the end that they might be relieved from sharing equally with the poor and lowly the burden of taxation. I would have been pronounced a good fellow and a great statesman.

Of course, Hazen Pingree was, and still is, considered a great statesman. But I think what makes him resonant with today’s Detroiters is not just his humane progressivism or the fact that, you know, we are totally into urban vegetable gardens right now.

Hazen Pingree did not suffer morons, hypocrites, evil people, cowards, or systemic dysfunction. He was a bully when he had to be and he could be rude. But he got. shit. done.

And the sweep of cynicism at the end of his career feels very contemporary to me.

Also bitter. Because he died a year later, in London. After an African safari. But long may he live, still idolized by the people of Detroit.

Pingree for Governor.

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Michigan Governors: Fred M. Warner

September 29, 2010 in Farmington Hills, History | 1 comment

With all the talk about Farmington this week, I figured we’d continue our series on Michigan Governors with a look at Fred W. Warner, Farmington’s one and only Governor. This piece is a re-run from early this year, from when I still lived in Farmington — in an apartment on a lot that may have once belonged to Fred Warner’s father-in-law, Samuel Davis.

Fred M. Warner was part of my childhood lore and teenage proms, but as it turns out, he was also a badass: an orphan turned bicycle champion, dairy magnate, pillar of the community and progressive Governor.

If you’ve been to a wedding, a prom or a senior picture photo shoot in Farmington, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve been to the Governor Warner Mansion, on Grand River. A grand white Italianate mansion surrounded by a sweeping wraparound porch and fabulous gardens, it’s the go-to picturesque location for every occasion of commemorative photography in the city.

I had three years of prom pictures taken there, and played in my high school string quartet at countless other porch lunches, receptions and events. But I didn’t really know anything about the Governor until, compelled to find out more about the historic house across the street from my apartment, I learned that I probably live on land that used to belong to Governor Warner’s father-in-law. After learning that the house’s greatest claim to fame is not its former owner, farmer Samuel G. Davis, but the man his daughter married, the instinct to learn more about the Governor was natural.

Fred M. Warner was born in England and given up for adoption by his impoverished, dying mother when he was seven years old. He was adopted by merchant, statesman and banker P.D. Warner (whose given name, Pascal De Angelis, was cause for great ridicule when he was a child).

Fred was precocious, curious and interested in everything. At some point in the 1880s, Fred invested in a high-wheel bicycle and began a local bicycle business, which enraged his father but became a lucrative pursuit, earning the young Warner $800 in his first year. Along with an interest in bikes came a penchant for competitive cycling;  not long after he started racing, he was a state champion.

When P.D. turned over management of the general store to his 21-year-old son, Fred broadened its offerings and turned it into one of Michigan’s most profitable mercantile enterprises. At 23, Fred Warner started the first of his 13 cheese factories, which eventually gained him respect and admiration as one of the most accomplished cheese makers in the nation; at its peak, the Fred M. Warner Cheese Company manufactured 2 million pounds of cheese a year.

warner general store

(Source)

Fred Warner served as Michigan’s secretary of state from 1901 to 1904 and held the Governor’s chair for three successive terms, from 1905 to 1911. As Governor, Warner led an era of progressive reform that reflected a wider spirit of change across the nation under President Theodore Roosevelt; he appointed a State Railroad Commission, regulated the insurance industry, and worked toward women’s suffrage, natural conservation and fair child labor laws. As politician, as he had been as neighbor and community activist, Warner was much loved. I would’ve loved him, too.

fred warner

Across the street from the apartment I live in now is an old Victorian home, painted a goldenrod hue with elaborate woodwork trim.

samuel davis house

(Source)

The house belonged to Samuel Davis, a farmer from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania whose 300 acres of farm and stock made him a wealthy man and a well-known figure in the Farmington community. Samuel Davis was born in New Orleans in 1831; a few weeks later, his father drowned while he was trying to cross a river.

The Davis house was built in 1872. Samuel’s daughter Martha married Fred Warner in 1888 and the couple was sure to have courted, as local historian Ruth Moehlman points out in her fascinating book Heritage Homes of Farmington, in Samuel Davis’s farmhouse.

From Samuel Davis’s obituary in the Farmington Herald in 1905:

During his long years of residence in this township, his life has been an open book for all to read: honest, of pleasing address, generous, social and warmly devoted to his friends, a general favorite with young and old, such a man was “Sammy” Davis. Not only will he be missed by his immediate family, but “Grandpa” was a favorite among his grand-children; for scarcely was he ever seen on our streets without one of more with him, and he enjoying their childish pranks as much as they. He was indeed a GRAND – father.

I don’t know for sure if my apartment is on land that Samuel Davis once stewarded, but I like to think so. And there’s something really enchanting about Fred Warner’s mansion as not only a center of community, but a center of ritual gravity, where once every spring, hundreds of sprightly young people put on rhinestones and satin and bow-ties and say hello to the Governor before they go out for the night.

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Michigan Governors, Michigan Also-Rans, and the Constitution: Cass and Chandler

September 17, 2010 in History | No comments

On September 17, 1787, the Constitution of the United States was signed in Philadelphia. Lewis Cass was five years old.

Cass, of course, would become one of the most influential politicians in Michigan history: Governor of the Northwest Territory from 1813 to 1831, Secretary of War under Andrew Jackson, U.S. Senator and unsuccessful candidate for President of the United States. (He lost to Zachary Taylor — namesake of Taylor, Michigan — in the election of 1848.)

His expansive career began during the War of 1812. He resigned his last political post in 1860 and lived to see the end of the Civil War. And it makes sense to think about Cass today, on the anniversary of the Constitution, since the good General dedicated much of his life to protecting the Constitution — and the Union it created.

It’s also a good day to talk about Michigan Also-Ran Zachariah Chandler. He was never Governor — he lost his only bid for the seat to Robert McClelland in 1852. But Chandler was in some ways the heir to Michigan’s national influence, which General Cass established. Born in New England in 1813 — the year President Madison appointed General Cass governor of the Territory — Chandler successfully established a few business enterprises and grew a small personal fortune before stepping into the political sphere to run for Mayor of Detroit in 1851.

Cass and Chandler were so different for so many reasons. In Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State, Willis F. Dunbar and George S. May sum it up like so:

Where Cass was a well-read, almost intellectual man, who made long, carefully thought-out, if often dull, statements of his views on issues, Chandler was a poorly-educated man, given to off-the-cuff, often crudely phrased statements. Rather than being a rational debater of the merits of an issue, his reactions were more those of a street fighter, and he sometimes resorted to physical tactics to clarify his points.

Zachariah Chandler was a self-described radical and an uncompromising anti-slavery activist who personally contributed to the Underground Railroad in Detroit. Lewis Cass was a moderate who believed in making every necessary compromise, even on the slavery question, to protect the integrity of the Union. Writes Willard Carl Klunder, author of the biography Lewis Cass and the Politics of Moderation:

Cass … in truth, was an accommodating constitutionalist, who evolved into a northern apologist for the peculiar institution. Slavery was a political question to him, not a moral one; disunion was a greater evil than the continuation of black bondage.

Chandler, too, was a stalwart defender of the Constitution. But the injustice of slavery, and the threat that injustice posed to the Constitution’s viability, preceded the importance of holding the Union together. In a speech in Kalamazoo in 1856, he said:

The Republicans of Michigan stand by the constitution, and when their defamers proclaim that they are a disunion party, as they do so often, they publish what they know to be a falsehood. We are determined to stand by the constitution in all its parts, and more than that, to make our adversaries stand by it in all and every part.

Our opponents have ignored this constitution with but a single exception. And what is that exception? It is the key to their character and their principles. In this whole instrument, they acknowledge but one clause, and that is the right to reclaim fugitive slaves from their hard-earned freedom.

We intend to make our opponents stand by this clause: The citizens of each State shall be entitled to the privileges of all the States. But how is this at present on the Missouri? The citizens of Massachusetts, of New Jersey, of Pennsylvania or of Michigan, if they but presume to enter Kansas, are sent back with a guard or murdered in cold blood, while the citizens of the South are aided on their way to plant in that beautiful territory the accursed blight of slavery. We will make them stand by the constitution in all its parts, or by the Eternal, we will have a different state of things here.

“I saw the Constitution born, and I fear I may see it die,” Cass wrote on the eve of the Civil War. Chandler saw things differently.

“Without a little blood-letting,” Chandler famously wrote in a letter to Abraham Lincoln, “this Union will not, in my estimation, be worth a rush.”

Let’s just say I’m a newcomer to the biographies of these remarkable men, both of whom command volumes. But I’ve thought about them a lot this week as Constitution Day approached. They were at odds intellectually, generationally, and in their perspective on the country, partisan politics, and the moral universe. How could two men so committed to protecting the Constitution so wildly disagree? And isn’t that what makes the Constitution so grand? Its vitality as a document, as law, and as our democratic legacy?

Again from Willard Klunder’s biography:

The attack on Fort Sumter galvanized the old warrior, and Cass enthusiastically addressed several recruitment rallies. On April 17, he and Zachariah Chandler appeared arm in arm at the Board of Trade in Detroit. They were “greeted by cheer after cheer,” demonstrating republican sentiment in Michigan transcended political partisanship. Cass fervently proclaimed: “I come to do honor to that beautiful flag … My only hope is that I may die under it, with its stars and stripes still unsullied.”

I think it’s something wonderful that the two sculptures representing Michigan in the U.S. Capitol Building are of General Lewis Cass and Zachariah Chandler. I hear they’re taking Chandler down soon and replacing him with Gerald Ford. The poetry totally dies with that decision, but I guess it’s Gerald Ford. What can you do about Gerald Ford?

Chandler and Cass are both buried in Elmwood. Pictures, you ask? Oh, okay:

The General.

Detail from the Cass monument — the state crest. Love those deer.

Doesn’t look like much, does it? Wait — look up.

OMG ZACHARIAH CHANDLER!

No, seriously. OMG.

More Michigan Governors coming soon!

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Michigan Governors: Epaphroditus Ransom

September 8, 2010 in History | 1 comment

Epaphroditus Ransom arrived in what is now Kalamazoo* in November, 1834, after an arduous journey from Vermont by “wagon, canal, steamboat and wagon again,” according to Willah Weddon, author of an adorable book called Michigan Governors: Their Life Stories. (She is also the author of another book that I can only presume is even more adorable, Michigan Governors Growing Up.)

Epaphroditus (“Epaphro” as he sometimes signed his name) was born in Massachussetts and made his livelihood as a lawyer until he heard from his siblings that life in the Michigan territory was really great.

“They lived in a log cabin that first winter,” Weddon writes, “with snow drifting through the roof and wolves howling beneath the windows.” One can only imagine that it wasn’t the easiest season, nor the most confidence-inspiring. But Ransom established a law practice and set to work at building a career as the city of Kalamzoo steadily grew. In 1837, Governor Mason appointed Ransom the first Circuit Court Judge of Western Michigan. In 1843, Governor John Barry appointed him Chief Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court. Epaphroditus was only 39 years old.

Epaphroditus ran for Governor in 1847 and, on January 3, 1848, was the first Governor to be inaugurated at the new State Capitol in Lansing. Major accomplishments of his term include the promotion of privately operated plank roads — which over the next decade or so connected growing communities like Grand Rapids, Lansing, Kalamazoo and, of course, big crazy Detroit — and a campaign to attract more German immigrants to Michigan, for which Epaphro sent Edward H. Thompson to New York City, bearing copies of a 47-page pamphlet called The Emmigrant’s Guide to Michigan in German and English. And he was Governor when the first Michigan State Fair (the nation’s second State Fair) was held in Detroit September 25-27, 1849.

Epaphro’s term ended in 1850, likely due to distaste within the Democratic party for his anti-slavery stance; Ransom supported the Wilmot Proviso and no one was really very happy with that. Epaphro lost a ton of money during the Panic of 1855, then James Buchanan sent him to Fort Scott, Kansas, where he died in 1859.  He’s buried at Mountain Home Cemetery in Kalamazoo.

In honor of gubernatorial season, we fondly remember the Michigan Governor with the best first name ever.

(*When Epaphroditus  moved there, the town was called Bronson, after the settler Titus Bronson, who built the first cabin within contemporary city limits and platted the land. Titus Bronson was not well-liked, and after he was tried and convicted of stealing a cherry tree, the name of the town was changed. Titus Bronson later lost his fortune in a land swindle in Iowa.)

Our occasional biographies of Michigan Governors now have their own tag and a little home under the “People” category on the left sidebar.

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Michigan Governors: Kinsley S. Bingham

August 11, 2010 in History | 1 comment

Meet this guy!

I love this guy. Mostly just his hair, but his bowtie is nice too. Oh, and also, his fiery and righteous indignation in re: slavery and the legacy of liberty left to all Americans by the framers of our founding documents.

Handsome Devil Kinsley Scott Bingham was born in New York in 1808. In 1833, his family moved to Michigan, where Kinsley started a law practice — pretty routine for soon-to-be politicians of the day. Head West, sit for the bar, open up shop. And that’s what Kinsley did. He held local offices in Livingston County (Postmaster! Justice of the Peace!) and was elected to the Michigan House of Representatives in 1837, as a Democrat.

Fast forward to July 6, 1854. Thousands of anti-slavery activists convene in Jackson, Michigan to mobilize opposition to slavery in the territories and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The convention hall couldn’t accommodate the huge crowd of people, so the assembly was moved to a nearby oak grove.

Then, after some patriotic fanfare from the Jackson Brass Band, there was some good, old-fashioned speech-makin’.

Zachariah Chandler (former Mayor of Detroit!)’s speech especially moved some witnesses:

Misfortunes make strange bedfellows. I see before me Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soilers, all mingling together to rebuke a great National wrong. I was born a Whig. I have always lived a Whig, and I hope to die fighting for some of the good Whig doctrines. But I do not stand here as a Whig. I have laid aside party to rebuke treachery. In 1849, McClelland, Stuart, and Bingham stumped the State advocating the doctrine of the Wilmot Proviso and pledging their lives, property, and sacred honor in the maintenance of those doctrines, but not one of our representatives has ever been honest enough to carry them out, except Kinsley S. Bingham.

This speech is transcribed in William Stocking’s Under the Oaks: Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Republican Party. Stocking writes of Chandler’s speech:

This reference to Mr. Bingham was received with thunders of applause, followed by three rousing cheers. It was taken as an indication that Mr. Chandler, one of the strongest of Whigs, was willing to support for Governor Mr. Bingham, an old Democrat and only recently training in Free Soil ranks.

By the way, please enjoy how awesome this cover of Under the Oaks is:

How many Michigan Republicans can YOU spot? Bonus points for finding the Detroiters!

Anyway. Lots of people consider that day in Jackson the true birthday of the Republican party. Others make a case for the schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, where an informal county convention was held in March 1854. (My years as a resident of the Badger State led me to believe the latter, but this story sweeps me away so much that I’m ready to switch sides. I have no party. Like Zachariah Chandler, I just want to believe what’s right.)

Kinsley Bingham was elected Governor of Michigan that fall — making him one of the country’s very first Republican Governors. As Governor, he established the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan (which would later become — you know it — Michigan State University), a move that earned him the nickname “The Farmer-Governor.”

Kinsley Bingham’s Governorship ushered in nearly 25 years of Michigan Republican Governors, many of whom were also organizers or attendees of the oak grove convention.

After his second term, in 1859, voters sent Kinsley to Washington to serve in the Senate. In 1860, he campaigned for your friend and mine, Abraham Lincoln.

He’ s buried in Brighton. FIELD TRIP!

(We’re celebrating gubernatorial season with occasional profiles of intriguing Michigan governors. We already talked about William Woodbridge. We haven’t decided who we want to spend time with next, so if you have a favorite, let me know.)

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Walking with Stevens T. Mason to Capitol Park

June 30, 2010 in Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, History | 3 comments

Yesterday, of course, the world was rocked by the announcement that Boy Governor Stevens T. Mason‘s remains, originally presumed to be — well, you know, in his grave — were MIA. The situation grew stranger by the hour as reports surfaced that no one even knew if they were looking for a coffin or an urn or what, despite the fact that Mason was disinterred (to make way for a bus station) and then laid back to rest in 1955. The same funeral home that is exhuming him now did that job and yesterday they were all like, “Oh, yeah, well, we don’t have any of those records. Who knows.”

To the collective relief of a frantic and confused nation, Mason’s crypt and casket were found a couple of hours later, about four feet away from where everyone thought they were. MY GOODNESS. This current disinterment is poor Governor Mason’s third — after his death from pneumonia in 1843, he was buried in New York, then dug up and sent back to Detroit with his 92-year-old (living) sister in 1905. So maybe the poor dude was just trying to make himself scarce.

As an expression of our great joy that this all turned out A-OKAY, your friends aboard the Night Train want to share this lovely work of prose with you about the dapper, darling Stevens T. Mason — Michigan’s first, and America’s youngest, governor — taking one of his first strolls around Detroit, happening ultimately upon what is now Capitol Park — his (sort of) final resting place. It’s probably imaginary, but we’re cool with that:

Arrayed in his skin-tight black broadcloth trousers and flowing cloak, jauntily gesturing with an ebony walking stick, Tom Mason sallied forth to explore the town. From the Mansion House he could see nothing on the downriver side but a spreading log citadel and an open farm. The Mansion House happened to be on the extreme western edge of town, at Jefferson Avenue and Cass Street. Sauntering down Jefferson Avenue and observing with satisfaction how people stared at him, he passed rows of cluttered store windows and presently arrived at Woodward Avenue. Three blocks. He saw a huge street, astonishingly wide, cutting the town in two and running straight back from the river toward the distant forest. To his right, still in the middle of lower Woodward, was the ignoble French Market and its rabble of gesticulating French habitants. He continued onward.

Three more blocks eastward on Jefferson, and he was staring at a tumble-down gate in an old pike-pole wall. This, then, was the eastern edge of town. It was just six blocks wide on the river, a compressed slice of city sandwiched between spreading farms … From the river the town marched solidly, row upon row of one- and two-story white frame stores and homes, as far as Congress — four blocks. There it stopped.

…  In 1828 the Council was seriously crticized for allowing the Territorial capitol building to be built so far out in the commons that it was far remote from the town and required a long, exhausting walk to get there. There was no road to it, nothing but a pathway continuing where Griswold Street gave up its wrestle with the mud at Congress. It was a good half-mile from downtown.

By the way: until reading this, I’d never made the connection that Capitol Park was where the capitol was. Whoa.

Writing about Capitol Park in 1947, the author continues:

… Hardly anyone in modern Detroit ever heard of such a place. It is a triangular little space at the head of Griswold, a block uptown from Michigan, crisscrossed with wide concrete sidewalks and boasting a couple of conspicuous comfort-station signs. Sunshine rarely reaches it; the towering cliffs of tremendous buildings hide it from all but historical researchers and people who are looking for parking places. How it could have been regarded, a century ago, as remote from the city of Detroit is utterly incomprehensible to today’s Detroiters. Those who can find it realize that the point is in the heart of the sprawling metropolis. Tom Mason and his father, John T., frequently waded in mud over their ankles and exhausted themselves trying to walk there from the town.

-Kent Sagendorph, from Stevens T. Mason: Misunderstood Patriot, 1947.

I’ve just started browsing it tonight, but gosh, I love this book. Here’s a bonus: Let’s study with Stevens T. Mason, just returning home from the general store where he apparently spent most of his time lifting heavy things and getting ripped:
He walked the two miles home, flung his homespun jacket across a chair, took a flickering tallow candle and sat down at a table. In the dim yellow light, wavering and dancing before his eyes, he studied. He kept us his classwork as carefully as if he had to recite all those lessons the next day. He wrote comments in the margins of his father’s and grandfather’s works on philosophy. They are preserved to this day, and readable. One says: “This is silly!” The passage, in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, is the famous dictum holding that any nation’s economic resources can be exceeded by the spending of tyrants.

Dear Adam Smith,

Whatever.

Yours,

Stevens T. Mason

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