The Wentworth Genealogy: English and American; Volume 1
(
This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
John Wentworth (nicknamed "Long John") was the editor, congressman, and mayor of Chicago.
Background
John Wentworth was born at Sandwich, N. H. , son of Paul and Lydia (Cogswell) Wentworth, grandson of John Wentworth of the Continental Congress and of Col. Amos Cogswell of the Continental Army. He was descended from William Wentworth who was in Exeter, N. H. , in 1639.
Education
John attended public schools and various private academies. He taught school one winter, entered Dartmouth College in 1832, and was graduated in 1836.
Career
He went to Michigan and, finding no place as a schoolteacher in response to his advertisements in the Detroit Free Press, he walked to Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, and still finding no school, walked back to Detroit, sent his trunk to Chicago by the brig Manhattan, took a stage to Michigan City, and walked the lake beach to Chicago, arriving with only thirty dollars. He ate his first meal at the boarding-house of Mrs. Harriet Austin Murphy at Lake and Wells streets on Oct. 25, 1836, and thereafter for forty-nine years, unless absent from Chicago, he celebrated his advent into that city by taking dinner with Mrs. Murphy. Within a month he was in editorial charge of the weekly Chicago Democrat, denouncing "wildcat" currency, and entering on activities that resulted in a city charter for Chicago, the election of its first mayor, William B. Ogden, and the designation of Wentworth as its first official printer. Within three years, at a cost of $2, 800, he owned the Chicago Democrat. In 1840 he started the Daily Democrat and made it for years the leading newspaper of the Northwest. During 1841 he spent some six months in Cambridge, Massachussets, attending law lectures at Harvard, returned to Chicago, and was soon admitted to the bar. In 1843, when twenty-eight years of age, he was elected to the House of Representatives of the Twenty-eighth Congress, the youngest member of that body. During his congressional service of 1843-51 and 1853-55 he furthered free homestead legislation, helped to initiate and pass bills for Western railway land grants, a national bonded-warehouse system, harbor construction and improvement, and lighthouse erection, and was the unpaid agent of a number of Mexican War veterans claiming bounties, back pay, and pensions. He was an instigator of the notable National River and Harbor Convention of 1847 in Chicago. An original stockholder of the Chicago & Galena Railroad, he headed its committee which arranged consolidation with the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad. On repeal of the Missouri Compromise he left the Democratic party and joined with those of moderate anti-slavery views who founded the Republican party. He was elected mayor of Chicago in 1857 on a "Republican Fusion" ticket, and announced he would take no salary. He introduced the first steam fire engine and the first paid fire department of the city. He served one year, declined another term, but in 1860 was again elected. During the Civil War he aggressively supported the Lincoln administration, and as police commissioner threw protection around Clement L. Vallandigham for an anti-war speech and then replied in a blunt argument hailed as effective; as police commissioner he frustrated a threatened raid aimed at a wholesale release of Confederate prisoners in Camp Douglas. His knowledge of law and politics was in play as a delegate to the 1861 convention to revise the Illinois state constitution, while his long-sustained journalistic advocacy of a well-equipped common-school system made suitable his appointment to the state board of education for the terms of 1861-64 and 1868-72. His final term in Congress in 1865-67 saw him on the ways and means committee and among the foremost to urge immediate resumption of specie payments. Year by year he had acquired lots and land in Chicago and Cook County to an extent that brought him the reputation of holding title to more real estate than any other man in Chicago. A stock farm of about five thousand acres at Summit in Cook County was planned by him as a resource and place of heart's ease for his later years, but this vision was never realized: comment ran that during life "he changed his stopping place as often as he did his shirt"; he had the hotel habit, the noise of the city was melodious to him, and the turmoils of politics and affairs more attractive than farming. He was active in behalf of state and local historical societies, read reminiscent addresses before them, wrote a three-volume Wentworth Genealogy (1878), and grieved over his loss in the Chicago fire of his most cherished manuscripts and papers, including a diary in which nearly every day during many years he had made entries "somewhat in the style of John Quincy Adams. " He presented Dartmouth College with $10, 000, and served as president of the Dartmouth Alumni Association in 1883. The anecdote was widely told, published, and believed that once when running for mayor he walked out on the courthouse steps and faced a waiting crowd that let out a tumultuous yell of greeting. He gazed in calm scorn at them, not taking his hat off, and then delivered the shortest and most terrifying stump speech ever heard in Illinois: "You damn fools, you can either vote for me for mayor or you can go to hell. " His death called forth a remarkable series of commentaries and reminiscences on a figure that had striven with the generations who found Chicago a swamp mudhole and saw it made into an audacious metropolis.
(
This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
Views
Quotations:
When asked for his rules of life he said: "I get up in the morning when I'm ready, sometimes at six, sometimes at eight, and sometimes I don't get up at all. Eat when you're hungry, drink when you're thirsty, sleep when you're sleepy, and get up when you're ready. "
Personality
While his discourses at educational institutions were bland and urbane, he was as a stump speaker sarcastic and "blunt as a meat ax" as often as he was argumentative. His quick replies, positive attitudes, and gruff manners had added support from a deep-chested, three-hundred-pound body, a height of six feet six inches, the nickname of "Long John, " and a varied anger and drollery. He had personal warmth and forthright utterance, once telling a Congressional colleague, Abraham Lincoln, he "needed somebody to run him" as Senator William H. Seward in New York was managed by Thurlow Weed, Lincoln replying that only events could make a President.
Connections
John Wentworth was married in Troy, N. Y. , Nov. 13, 1844, to Roxanna Marie, daughter of Riley Loomis. Of their five children, only one survived him.