Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 7.djvu/301

 THE

��GRANITE MONTHLY.

A NEW HAMPSHIRE MAGAZINE. Devoted to Literature, Biography, History, and State Progress.

VOL. VII. SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER, 1884. Nos. 9 AND 10.

CHESTER ALAN ARTHUR.

By Ben : Perley Poore.

Chester Alan Arthur was born which it was his good fortune to at Fairfield, Vermont, October 5, 1830. witness, as his life was spared until the His father, the Reverend Doctor William twenty-seventh of October, 1875, when Arthur, was a Baptist clergyman, who he died at Newtonville, near Albany, emigrated from county Antrim, Ireland, He was a personal friend of Gerrit when only eighteen years of age. He Smith, and they had participated in had received a thorough classical educa- the organization of the New York State tion, and was graduated from Belfast Anti- Slavery Society, which was dis- University, one of the foremost institu- persed by a mob during its first meeting tions of learning in Ireland. Marrying at Utica, on the twenty-first of October, an American, Miss Malvina Stone, soon 1835 (the day on which William Lloyd after his arrival, he became the father Garrison was mobbed in Boston, and of several children. Chester was the was lodged in jail for his own pro- eldest of two sons, having four sisters tection). A friend of the slave from older and two younger than himself, conscience and from conviction. Dr. While fulfilling his clerical duties as the Arthur was never backward in express- pastor, successively, of a number of ing his convictions, and his children Baptist churches in New York State, imbibed his teachings. Dr. Arthur edited for several years When a lad, young Arthur enjoyed at The Antiquarian, and wrote a work on home the tutelage of his father, whose Family Names, which is highly prized by thorough knowledge of the classics genealogists. Of Scotch-Irish descent, enabled him to lay the foundation of he was a man of great force of character, his son's future education broad and impatient of restraint, at home in a con- deep. He entered Union College in troversy, and frank in the expression of 1845, when only fifteen years of age. his opinions. He was a pronounced His collegiate course was full of promise, emancipationist, although he never ex- and every successive year he was pected to see the overthrow of slavery, declared to be one of those who had

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