Page:Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (1900, volume 4).djvu/188

156 Maulmain, and. without a companion of her own race or sex, labored among the adjoining tribes. In less than a year she had established a small school at Dong-Yahn, and formed a church of twenty natives. Her death was the result of a jungle fever that she contracted while she was on a mission to a distant tribe.

MACON, Nathaniel, statesman, b. in Warren county, N. C, 17 Dec, 1757; d. there, 29 June, 1837. He was a student at Princeton at the begin- ning of the Revolution, but left in 1777 to serve as a private in a company of volunteers. On his re- turn to North Cai'olina he began the study of law, but soon re-enlisted as a volunteer, and, although several offices were urged on him, continued a pri- vate under his brother. Col. John Macon, until the provisional treaty of 1783, serving at the surrender of Fort Moultrie, the fall of Charleston, the rout at Camden, and with Gen. Nathaniel Greene in his retreat across Carolina. During this campaign he was elected without his knowledge to the North Carolina senate, but at first declined, alleging that he " had seen the faces of the British many times, but never their backs, and he intended to stay in the army until he did." But being urged by Gen. Greene to accept, as the country needed legislators at that time more than private soldiers, he left the army, refusing a pension and all pay for his mili- tary service. He continued in the state senate till 1785, was employed on the most important com- mittees, and advocated pledging the state to re- deem her paper issues. During this period he set- tled on a plantation on the Roanoke river, in War- ren county, which remained his home throughout his life. When the U. S. constitution was first submitted to the vote of North Carolina, he op- posed it as conferring too much power on the new government. He was elected to the 2d congress as a Democrat, and was successively re-elected without opposition, serving from 1791 till 1815, when he became U. S. senator, and continued in that office till 1828. From 1801 till 1806 he was speaker of the house, and twice during the admin- istration of Jefferson declined the office of post- master-general. Tn congress he voted for the em- bargo and for the declaration of war against Great Britain, but held that the war should be defensive only, and refused to enlarge the naval force beyond what was necessary to guard the coast, also op- posing fortification and privateering. He voted against all schemes of internal improvement, spoke in 1795 against a grant of lands to Count de Grasse, and in 1824 against that to Lafayette in recog- nition of his services during the Revolution. Al- though he was frequently offered high executive office, he refused whatever was not the gift of the people or their immediate representatives in the legislature. Pie received the twenty-four electoral votes of Virginia in 1824 for the vice-presidency, and from 1825 till 1827 was president pro tempor'e of the senate. During his political career of fifty- seven years he never recommended any of his fam- ily to public office. His speeches were short and to the point, and Thomas H. Benton says of him that he "'spoke more good sense while getting in his chair and getting out of it than many delivered in long and elaborate speeches." He was a " strict, severe, and stringent " Democrat of the Jeffersonian school. His two last public services were in the Constitutional convention of North Carolina in 1835 and as presidential elector on the Van Buren and Johnson ticket in 1837. In the former he op- posed giving the ballot to free negroes, a land qualification for voters, state control of works of internal improvement, and all religious tests as a condition of holding office, and was in favor of voting viva voce at all elections. He believed that a state could not nullify and remain in the Union, but that a state could secede. He was the inti- mate friend of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Randolph of Roanoke. Randolph said of him in his will : " He is the wisest, the purest, and the best man that I ever knew." Mr. Macon died after a few hours' illness, but had already given directions to a neighbor to make for him a plain coffin, to be paid for before his interment, had selected for his grave a barren ridge where the plough would never come, and ordered the spot to be marked by a pile of loose stones from an ad- joining field. His death-bed is described by Ben- ton as that " of Socrates, all but the hemlock." He was a student of few books but the Bible, and. though suspicious of reform and prejudiced against all innovations, was of singularly pure character and life. A sketch of him was published by Edr ward R. Cotton (Baltimore, 1840).

McPHEETERS, William Mareellus, physician, b. in Raleigh, N. C, 3 Dec, 1815. He was educated at the University of North Carolina, and in the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was graduated in 1840. He settled in St. Louis, Mo., in 1842, was professor of therapeutics and materia medica in the medical college there in 1848-'62, was surgeon to the U. S. marine hospital from 1856 till 1861, and for six- teen years was physician to the St. Louis hospital of the Sisters of Charity. In 1852 he was presi- dent of the Medical association of Missouri. He served for three years in the Confederate army as chief surgeon to Gen. Thomas L. Churehell's di- vision, and was also medical director on the staff' of Gen. Sterling Price. Since the war he has prac- tised his profession in St. Louis, and he resumed his professorship in St. Louis medical college in 1867. He was vice-president of the American medical association in 1873. He edited the "St. Louis Medical and Surgical Journal " in 1843-61. and, besides numerous professional papers, has published a "History of the Cholera Epidemic in St. Louis, Mo., in 1849" (St. Louis, 1850).

MACPHERSON, Sir David Lewis, Canadian statesman, b. in Inverness, Scotland, 12 Sept., 1818: d. in Canada, 16 Aug., 1896. He was educated at In- verness royal acad- emy, and came to Canada as a youth. In 1842 he became a partner in the forwarding firm of Macpherson. Crane and Co., Montreal, in which his elder brother was the chief member ; and in 1851, together with Sir Alexander Gait and others, he secured a char- ter for a railway from Montreal to Kingston, which was the nucleus of the Grand Trunk railway. After the incorporation of the latter company Mr. Macpherson was associated in the construction of various railways, in the Toronto rolling-mills, and the International bridge company. In 1868 he was arbitrator for the province of Ontario, under the British North American act. for the division and adjustment of the debts and