Charles Gam Age Eastman was born on June 1, 1816 in Fryeburg, Maine, United States. He was the son of Benjamin Clement and Mary Rebecca (Gamage) Eastman. His father was a watchmaker who through accident or temperament never settled in a town large enough to give him steady work.
He got a little schooling at Windsor, Vermont, when he was thirteen, taught school himself for a while, attended the academy at Meriden, New Hampshire, and then wrent to the diminutive University of Vermont, where he founded the Lambda lota literary society.
To support himself he wrote for the Burlington Sentinel; soon journalism engrossed his entire time, and his formal education broke off.
His first independent venture, the Lamoille River Express (1838), at Johnson in Lamoille County, brought him commendation but no money, and did not last long.
At Woodstock in 1840 he started the Spirit of the Age as an organ of Jacksonian Democracy. Its editor was young, handsome, and likable, and his terse, racy editorials got themselves read.
In 1845 he sold out at an advantage and on January 1, 1846, became editor and part-proprietor of the Montpelier Vermont Patriot, a four-page weekly that under his management became the leading Democratic paper in the state.
In 1851 he became sole owner of the Patriot, which he continued to edit until his death.
In 1848 he published a volume of Poems, of which 2, 000 copies were sold or at any rate distributed, and which brought him many favorable notices and a local reputation as a bard. A volume of selected Poems was published, long after his death, in 1880.
Generous praise may be given quite honestly to the tense, restrained lines of the “Dirge” and to several others.
Eastman was elected a state senator from Washington County in 1852 and again in 1853, was several times an unsuccessful candidate for Congress, and, on President Pierce’s appointment, was for six years postmaster at Montpelier. He attended the national Democratic conventions regularly from 1844 on, and was in his later years a member of the Democratic National Committee.
Stricken by a fatal disease in the spring of 1860, he nevertheless journeyed to the Democratic conventions at Charleston and Baltimore, took nis part in the work, and, in line with his Jacksonian principles, supported Stephen A. Douglas, himself a native Vermonter, against Abolitionists on the one side and Secessionists on the other. He died peacefully at home in the midst of the campaign.
He attended the national Democratic conventions regularly from 1844 on, and was in his later years a member of the Democratic National Committee.
He married Mrs. Susan S. Havens, a widow, daughter of Dr. John Powers of Woodstock.
