congressman Industrialist Soldier
Adoniram J. Warner was a descendant of John Warner, who came to America on board the Increase in 1635, soon afterward settled in Hartford, Connecticut, and later moved to Farmington. Adoniram was born in Wales, Erie County, N. Y. , the son of Levi and Hepsibah (Dickinson) Warner. When he was eleven the family went west, settling at Lake Geneva, Wis. Both parents died before he was sixteen.
He attended Beloit College for a term, and in 1853 entered New York Central College, at McGrawville.
After teaching and serving as superintendent of schools in Mifflin County, Pa. , he took charge of a school at Mercer. At the outbreak of the Civil War he was instrumental in organizing the Mercer Rifles, which became Company G of the 10th Pennsylvania Reserves, of which he was made captain. He served in the Army of the Potomac until wounded at Antietam, rising to the rank of colonel. Declared unfit for active service, he was transferred to the Veteran Reserve Corps late in 1863, and stationed at Camp Morton, Indianapolis, being brevetted brigadier-general, March 13, 1865, for gallant and meritorious service during the war. He read law while still in service, and was admitted to the bar of Marion County, Ind. , October 2, 1865, but never practised. He resigned from the army November 17, 1865, and soon thereafter went to Marietta, Ohio. He became a member of the firm of Gates, Skinner & Company, operating in the oil fields of southeastern Ohio and West Virginia, and also bought and developed coal lands. To facilitate the marketing of the coal he built two railroads, the Marietta & Cleveland, running from Marietta to Canal Dover, and, some twenty years later, the Walhonding road, serving the district around Cambridge, Ohio. A still later project of his was the U Street trolley line in Washington, D. C. Soon after the "demonetization" of silver in 1873, convinced of the injustice and folly of the action, Warner placed himself in the forefront of the denunciators. In 1877 he published a tract of ninety-three pages, The Appreciation of Money: Its Effects on Debts, Industry, and National Wealth. The following year, after a hotly contested campaign, he won a seat as a Democrat in the Forty-sixth Congress. In each of the three sessions of this Congress he guided a free-coinage bill through the House, but it was as regularly defeated in the Senate. He failed of reëlection to the Forty-seventh Congress, but was elected to the Forty-eighth and the Forty-ninth. The silver agitation had by this time spent its force, and he was not prominent in his second and third terms. While the silver question was in abeyance, he appears to have carried on correspondence with economists at home and abroad. He attended the First National Silver Convention held in St. Louis in November 1889, and was made its permanent chairman and chairman of a national silver committee. In the latter capacity he called the Second National Silver Convention in 1892, and he became the president of the American Bimetallic League which was there organized. He was now unquestionably the leading figure in the organized silver movement. He supervised the general activity of the League, made speeches, wrote tracts, and conducted three national conventions in 1893 and one in 1894. During the summer of 1895 he made an extended speaking tour with Joseph Sibley, potential candidate for the presidency of the American Bimetallic Party, which the League was trying to launch. Late in 1895 he acted as the agent for the League in negotiations which led to its consolidation with the National Bimetallic Union and the formation of the American Bimetallic Union, of which he assumed the presidency. Throughout the spring of 1896 the Union, under Warner's supervision, continued its propaganda unabated, and tried to influence the Democrats to nominate Henry Teller for the presidency. It gave its full endorsement to Bryan's candidacy, however, and Warner and his associates took an active part in the campaign. In 1899 he delivered an address at a bimetallic conference in Chicago, still maintaining that the only permanent solution to the monetary question lay in bimetallism. His last years were spent in industrial activities, for the most part in Georgia. He organized the Gainesville Railway Company, which provided the city with a trolley line, and the North Georgia Power Company, which built fifty-three miles of steel towers from Gainesville to Atlanta, the first in the South. The panic of 1907 seriously undermined his companies and he sold out, retiring early in 1910 to Marietta, where he died.
(Excerpt from Silver in New York: A Mass Meeting in Cooper...)
(Excerpt from Silver in New York: A Mass Meeting in Cooper...)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
Warner was well over six feet tall and of commanding appearance. As an orator he was not at his best, but he could hold the attention of an audience by his logical, convincing manner. He was essentially a pioneer in spirit, enjoying nothing better than to break ground, but losing interest in a project once it was well launched. His vision was boundless, and he had many ideas which he was unable to carry through. There is no evidence to show that he received any remuneration for his services to the Bimetallic League or Union, other than expenses. He enjoyed an uphill fight, and, convinced of the logic and justice of an enterprise, he was willing to give his whole energy to promoting it.
On April 5, 1856, he married a classmate, Susan Elizabeth Butts, by whom he had nine children.
