Background
Finch, Francis Miles was born on June 9, 1827 in Ithaca, New York, United States. Son of Miles Finch.
Finch, Francis Miles was born on June 9, 1827 in Ithaca, New York, United States. Son of Miles Finch.
Preparatory education at Ithaca Academy. Graduated from Yale, 1849 (Doctor of Laws, Hamilton, 1880, Yale, 1889). Studied law at Ithaca.
One of his poems, "The Blue and the Gray", is frequently reprinted to this day. He soon became as a speaker in the political campaigns which preceded and followed the Civil War. As Secretary of the Board of Trustees, Finch was left in charge when both Cornell and White were travelling out of town.
He also lent the university his literary skills, as a contemporary relates: "His indignation at the attacks upon Mr.
Cornell by the enemies of the university aroused him to fight strenuously and successfully in the courts, in the press, and in public meetings, while the music of the university chime, heard at dawn, noon, and nightfall above the ripple or roar of the adjacent waters, inspired him to write songs which have been sung by Cornell students from their first arrival forty years ago until the present hour."
Early in Ulysses South. Grant"s first presidential term (circa 1870) he was appointed collector of internal revenue for the Twenty-sixth District, New York, which office he resigned after holding it for four years. In May 1880, he was appointed a judge of the New York Court of Appeals to fill the vacancy caused by the appointment of Charles J. Folger as Chief Judge.
In January 1881, he was re-appointed to fill the vacancy that continued after Folger"s election as Chief Judge in November 1880. In November 1881, Finch was elected to a full fourteen-year term, and remained in office until December 31, 1895.
He lectured at the Cornell"s School of Law from 1887 onwards, and on the death of Honorary
Douglass Boardman in the year 1891, was unanimously elected as dean of the Law School. Finch wrote poetry throughout his life, but declined a chair in rhetoric literature at Cornell, thinking his poetry was "only incidents along the line of a busy and laborious life." Perhaps his best known poem, "The Blue and the Gray", written in remembrance of the dead of the American Civil War, was inspired by a women"s memorial association in Columbus, Mississippi, who on April 25, 1866 tended the graves of Confederate and Union soldiers, treating the dead as equals despite the lingering rancor of the war. Francis Finch was married May 25, 1853 to Elizabeth A. Brook, who died on March 28, 1892.
He died in 1907, and a collection of his poems, The Blue and the Gray, and other verses, was published by friends two years posthumously in 1909.
Member Army of Potomac, 1879.
Married Elizabeth A. Brooke, May 25, 1853 (died 1892).