Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 7.djvu/23

 HON. JOHN CHANDLER.

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��appointment. He was then seventy-five years of age, and feeling that his pub- lic life should end, he declined it, and recommended his warm ])ersonai and political friend, Hon. John Anderson, to be his successor, and he \\'as ap- pointed.

Thus closed a public life covering a period of ft)rty-seven years. In the following July he removed to Augusta, where four years later, Sept. 26, 1S41, he entered the other life. His wife survived him nearly five years. She was born in Nottingham, N. H., Feb- ruary 16, 1766, married the general August 27, 1783, and died in Batii, Sept. 16, 1846. One who knew her well, says " she was a noble specimen of a New England woman, one of many who have sent out from our country firesides men and women who have made our land bloom with piety, intelligence and patriotism."

Gen. Chandler was a man of com- manding presence and uncommon manly beauty. His courage, like that of all his race, was undaunted. When on his way to enter the senate of the United States, a rhymster said of him :

'* John Chandler will he hove Tough as steel and bold as Hector. "

He was a member of the Masonic fraternity, and was present in the Grand Lodge June 2, 1820, when Gov. William King was installed its first Grand Master. He was a Unita- rian in his religious views, and wor- shiped, when in Portland, at the First Parish church. He left four children at his death, two sons and two daugh- ters. His sons were John Alfonzo and Anson Gonsalo Chandler. His daughters were Caroline and Clarissa .■\ugusta. John A. married Delia West, of Hallowell Maine. He was for several years clerk of the courts in Kennebec county. Anson (i. settled in Calais, Maine, and served in both branches of the legislature. He was for some years a judge of the court of common pleas, being an active Democrat and a leader of his party in Washington county. Prior to his

��death, in 1862, he was L'nited States consul to Lahaina, Sandwich Islands. His firs: wife was Elizabeth Pike, of Calais, a hilf sister to Hon. Frederick A., and to the late Hon. James S. Pike of that i)lace. After her decease he married Annie Eliza, daughter of the late Hon. Jeremiah Bradbury, of Calais, who formerly resided in York county, and was clerk of its courts for several years. She was sister of Hon. Bion Bradbury, of Portland, and Em- ily, the deceased wife of PVancis K. Swan, Esq., of the same place. Car- oline married Dr. Benjamin Prescott, of Dresden, Maine. Clarissa x\ugusta married Dr. Amos Nourse, ot Hal- lowell, who moved to Bath, where he died a (cw years since. He was an eminent physician and was prominent in our politics.

The children of General Chandler, together with those they married, have been gathered to their fathers. Mrs. Stratton and Mrs. Ladd, of Augusta, Maine, daughters of Hon. John A. Chandler, are living. Of the Epping branch of the family the only one in Maine bearing the name is the ven- erable Marcellus A. Chandler, of Au- gusta. He was a son of the late Gen. Joseph Chandler, of that city, who was a nephew of the general. To him, together with the Hon. George B. Chandler, of Manchester, N. H., and Dr. George Chandler, of Worces- ter, Mass., I am under great obligations for many of the facts contained in this sketch.

In conclusion, I will say that a care- ful perusal of the papers in the early part of this century discloses the fact that no man held a warmer place in the people's heart than Gen. Chandler. He came from their ranks and never forgot it. He wasted no time in hunting up titled ancestry, or money to hire some skillful engraver to in- vent a fictitious coat of arms. To him his honest, patriotic ancestry was a patent of nobility enough. For more than forty years he was to our politics what Hannibal Hamlin has been to the politics of a later generation. He

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