Page:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1900, volume 1).djvu/689

Rh the country ; and next performed the great service of his life at the battle of King's Mountain. He was a terror to the tories ; but once, in 1781, they got the better of him for a brief period, capturing and conveying him to the woods. They were soon overtaken, however, by Cleveland's friends, who routed the marauders and rescued their leader. He subsequently removed to the Ingals country, on the western border of South Carolina, where he became judge of the court. He grew to enormous proportions, reaching the weight of 450 pounds, and died in his chair. On 29 July, 1887, a monument to his memory was dedicated at Fort Madison, S. C.

CLEVELAND, Chauncey Fitch, lawyer and statesman, b. in Hampton, Conn., 16 Feb., 1799; d. there, 6 June, 1887. He received a common- school education, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1819. He was elected to the legis- lature in 1826, and served four terms, again elect- ed in 1832, and was state attorney the same year ; again sat in the legislature in l"835-'6, of which body he was twice chosen speaker. Pie was elected governor of Connecticut in 1842, and re-elected in 1843. He returned to the legislature for the eleventh time in 1847, and in 1849 was elected to congress as a democrat, and re-elected in 1851. He was a presidential elector on the republican ticket in 1860, and at two or three other elections, and was a member of the peace congress of 1861. — His brother. Mason, d. in 1855, was state sena- tor, comptroller, and commissioner of the school fund of Connecticut. — Edward Spicer, son of Mason, was the unsuccessful democratic candidate for governor of Connecticut in 1886.

CLEVELAND, Grover, twenty-second and twenty-fourth president of the United States, was born in Caldwell, Essex co., N. J., 18 March, 1837. On the paternal side he is of English origin. Moses Cleveland emigrated from Ipswich, county of Suffolk, England, in 1635, and settled at Woburn, Mass., where he died in 1701. His grandson was Aaron, whose son, Aaron, was great-great-grandfather of Grover. The second Aaron's grandson, William, was a silversmith and watchmaker at Norwich, Conn. His son, Richard Falley Cleveland, was graduated at Yale in 1824, was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 1829, and in the same year married Anne Neal, daughter of a Baltimore merchant of Irish birth. These two were the parents of Grover Cleveland. The Presbyterian parsonage at Caldwell, where Mr. Cleveland was born, was first occupied by the Rev. Stephen Grover, in whose honor the boy was named; but the first name was early dropped, and he has been known as Grover Cleveland. When he was four years old his father accepted a call to Fayetteville, near Syracuse, N. Y., where the son had an academy schooling, and afterward was a clerk in a country store. The removal of the family to Clinton, Oneida co., gave Grover additional educational advantages in the academy there. In his seventeenth year he became a clerk and an assistant teacher in the New York institution for the blind in New York city, in which his elder brother, William, an alumnus of Hamilton college, now a Presbyterian clergyman at Forest Port, N. Y., was then a teacher. In 1855 Grover left Holland Patent, in Oneida co., where his mother then resided, to go to the west in search of employment. On his way he stopped at Black Rock, now a part of Buffalo, where his uncle, Lewis F. Allen, induced him to remain and aid him in the compilation of a volume of the &ldquo;American Herd-Book,&rdquo; receiving for six weeks' service $60. He afterward assisted in the preparation of several other volumes of this

work, and the preface to the fifth volume (1861) acknowledges his services. In August, 1855, he secured a place as clerk and copyist for the law firm of Rogers, Bowen &amp; Rogers, in Buffalo, began to read Blackstone, and in the autumn of that year was receiving four dollars a week for his work. He was admitted to the bar in 1859, but for three years longer he remained with the firm that first employed him, acting as managing clerk at a salary of $600, soon advanced to $1,000, a part of which he devoted to the support of his widowed mother, who died in 1882. He was appointed assistant district-attorney of Erie co., 1 Jan., 1863, and held the office for three years. At this time strenuous efforts were being made to bring the civil war to a close. Two of Cleveland's brothers were in the army, and his mother and sisters were dependent largely upon him for support. Unable to enlist, he borrowed money to send a substitute, and it was not till long after the war that he was able to repay the loan. In 1865, at the age of twenty-eight, he was the democratic candidate for district attorney, but was defeated by the republican candidate, his intimate friend, Lyman K. Bass. He then became a law partner of Isaac V. Vanderpool, and in 1869 became a member of the firm of Lanning, Cleveland &amp; Folsom. He continued a successful practice till 1870, when he was elected sheriff of Erie co. At the expiration of his three years' term he formed a law partnership with his personal friend and political antagonist, Lyman K. Bass, the firm being Bass, Cleveland &amp; Bissell, and, after the forced retirement from failing health of Mr. Bass, Cleveland &amp; Bissell. The firm was prosperous, and Cleveland attained high rank as a lawyer, by the simplicity and directness of his logic and expression and thorough mastery of his cases.

In 1881 he was nominated as democratic candidate for mayor of Buffalo, and was elected by the largest majority ever given to a candidate in that city prior to that time. In the same election the republican state ticket was carried in Buffalo by an average majority of over 1,600; but Cleveland had a partial republican, independent, and &ldquo;reform&rdquo; movement support. He entered upon the office, 1 Jan., 1882. He soon became known as the &ldquo;veto mayor,&rdquo; using that prerogative fearlessly in checking unwise, illegal, or extravagant expenditure of the public money, and enforcing strict compliance with the requirements of the state constitution and the city charter. By vetoing extravagant appropriations he saved the city nearly $1,000,000 in the first six months of his administration. He opposed giving $500 of the taxpayers' money to the firemen's benevolent society, on the ground that such appropriation was not permissible under the terms of the state constitution and the charter of the city. He vetoed a resolution diverting $500 from the Fourth of July appropriation to the observance of Memorial day for the same reason, and immediately subscribed one tenth of the sum wanted for the purpose. His admirable, impartial, and courageous administration won tributes to his integrity and ability from the press and the people irrespective of party.

On the second day of the democratic state convention at Syracuse, 22 Sept., 1882, on the third ballot, by a vote of 211 out of 382, Grover Cleveland was nominated for governor, in opposition to Charles J. Folger, then secretary of the U. S. treasury, nominated for the same office three days before by the republican state convention at Saratoga. In his letter accepting this nomination Mr. Cleveland wrote: &ldquo;Public officers are the servants and agents of the people, to execute the laws which