DELAZON SMITH.*

T

HE progenitors of Delazon Smith were among the very earliest settlers of New England. Capt. Jonathan Smith, the grandfather of Delazon-as was his fatherwas born in the colony of Rhode Island. Capt. Smith was commissioned a captain in the war of the Revolution, and performed signal and important services from the inception of the war at Bunker's Hill until the final victory at Yorktown. From the memoir published of the late Rev. Stephen R. Smith, (who was the nephew of Capt. Smith) we make the following quotation:

My father's family, or rather that of my grandfather on my mother's side, was, by intermarriage and common ancestry, intimately connected with several of the prominent families of the State of Rhode Island. The Hopkinses, Wilkensons, and Harrises, and others in the vicinity of Providence, were near relations; among these the Stephen Hopkins whose name appears among the signers of the Declaration of Independence, I have always understood, was cousingerman of my grandfather. The children of my grandfather, John Smith, of Scituate, Rhode Island, were six sons and one daughter, namely, Richard, Joseph, Jonathan, Oziel, Thomas, Hope, and Sarah. The sons were in their several spheres distinguished for their devotion to the cause of national freedom. Richard, the eldest, was a subaltern in one of the New England regiments, during one or two of the campaigns of what was known as the French War, and which terminated in the capture of Quebec and the cession of Canada to Great Britain. Joseph, though never in the regular service, was one of those Green Mountain boys who stormed the breastworks at the battle of Bennington; while his son, a lad of only fifteen years, fought in the second battle on the same day. Jonathan, (the grandfather of Delazon) with a lieutenant's commission, on hearing of the * For explanatory note, see Preface.

battle of Lexington, marched immediately with his company to Cambridge; was several years in the Continental service, and lived till a very advanced age in the enjoyment of his country's bounty. Thomas declined a commission, and entered the service as a volunteer. He was killed at the bridge in Springfield, New Jersey. Captain Olney, of the Rhode Island line, has given in his own memoir, an interesting account of his feelings and fears when left to guard the bridge, where he lost his life. Oziel, though devoted to the cause of liberty, was emphatically a man of peace, and though occasionally called out for short periods of service, it is not known that he ever remained longer than immediate duty required.

The maternal grandfather of Delazon was Joseph Briggs, Esq., a native of Massachusetts, and at the time of the Revolution, a citizen of Vermont. He was also a captain in the War of Independence: he particularly distinguished himself in the battles of Bunker's Hill, Bennington, Saratoga, and Monmouth, and was present at the surrender of Burgoyne. On one occasion, in the midst of the battle, his superior officer, having deserted the American standard, and sought protection under the British banner, Captain Briggs moved gallantly forward to the command, rallied the dismayed and panic-stricken men, charged the enemy boldly and courageously and turned the tide of battle, achieving a victory at a moment when defeat seemed inevitable.

At the close of the war, he returned to his home and resumed the peaceful pursuits of private life, covered with honorable scars, and content with the consciousness of duties well performed, and rejoicing in an honorable peace with its blessings, and the unquestioned freedom of his country. Thus could the young Senator point with pride to his ancestry and to his country's record, which establishes the fact that he descended from "fighting stock:" indeed, every battle-field where a foreign foe has been met and resisted by American arms has been wet with the blood of his kindred. One brother offered himself and was sacrificed upon the altar of his country during the war with Mexico.

Delazon Smith was the fourth son of Archibald Smith, and was born in the village of New Berlin, in the county of Chenango, State of New York, on the 5th of October, 1816. His father was an humble mechanic, in moderate

circumstances. His mother was a woman of extraordinary intellectual powers, and of remarkable excellence of character and disposition, universally esteemed as a womanly perfection of nature's noblest handiwork. She died in the year 1825, leaving five surviving sons of tender age, to rely at the very commencement of their career mainly upon their own individual, native, inherent energy, for success in the great battle of life.

In the year 1831, when but fifteen years of age, Delazon, provided with but a small bundle of clothing which he carried under his arm, and almost penniless, started for the "West." After a temporary residence of two or three years in Western New York with an elder brother who had preceded him, and where he sought, and to a limited extent obtained, the facilities of an education, he renewed his journey westward. Having heard that there was a manual labor college in Ohio, where indigent young men could obtain an education and meet their current expenses by the daily labor of their hands, young Smith lost no time in making his way to that institution. He arrived at Oberlin in the spring of 1834, where he remained two years as a student of the "Collegiate Institute." Then he withdrew because of his refusal to acquiesce in the practice which then prevailed of enticing away, harboring, secreting, and running off North slaves from the Southern States.

On leaving Oberlin, the young student repaired to the city of Cleaveland, where he published a large edition of a small work entitled, "Oberlin Unmasked;" and it is a significant and somewhat remarkable fact, that even at that early period in the history of anti-slavery agitation, he actually depicted, as with the ken of a prophet, the state of things as they existed at a later period. Having arrived in Cleaveland, and resolved upon the study and practice of the law, Mr. Smith at once entered his name as a student in the office of a prominent attorney of that city. In the meantime, he contributed much to the columns of the newspaper press, and frequently became involved in controversies on the subject of religion and 'politics.

In the spring of 1838, Mr. Smith received a flattering invitation from an association of appreciative gentlemen to return to the city of Rochester, in his native State, for the purpose of establishing a newspaper, to be called the New York Watchman. This position he accepted, and edited the Watchman for a period of two years, in the meanwhile continuing the study of the law.

In the memorable campaign of 1840, Mr. Smith edited and published a very able, spirited, and influential Democratic paper, entitled the True Jeffersonian. His maiden political speeches, delivered to large and promiscuous audiences, were made in the Presidential contest of 1836; and though he had taken an active and prominent part in the New York State elections of 1838, yet it was not until the campaign of 1840 that his extraordinary abilities as a political or "stump" speaker became generally known. During that excited and bitter contest, under the banner of Van Buren and Johnson, he did more than a soldier's duty: he performed herculean labor. In addition to sustaining his True Jeffersonian with marked and acknowledged ability, he canvassed with great success the States of New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

After the close of the campaign of 1840, Mr. Smith established a daily paper called the Western World, but owing in part to the utter prostration of the Democratic. party, he discontinued it, and soon after, in the fall of 1841, returned to Ohio, and located in the city of Dayton, where he at once established a Democratic journal, which he named Western Empire, which came to be the leading Democratic paper in that section of the State.

When the then Chief Magistrate of the nation vetoed the Congressional bills re-chartering a national bank, etc., and after Mr. Tyler's policy had become essentially Democratic, Mr. Smith, as the editor of the Empire, and as a Democratic orator, gave to the executive and his administration a prompt, generous, and able support.

In 1843, a difference of opinion arose between Mr. Smith and some of his partisan friends and associates, in reference to the propriety and policy of his defence and support of certain measures of Mr. Tyler's administra