Background
Samuel Medary was born on February 25, 1801 of Quaker parentage in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where he spent his youth.
Samuel Medary was born on February 25, 1801 of Quaker parentage in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, where he spent his youth.
Medary attended the academy at Norristown, though he never graduated, and taught school in Montgomery County to earn money to pay for his education.
At the age of sixteen, Medary was contributing prose and poetry to the Norristown Herald and Weekly Advertiser. In 1820 he went with his father and mother to Montgomery County, Maryland, in 1823 to Georgetown, D. C. , and in 1825 he moved to Batavia, Ohio, where he became a co-worker with Thomas Morris in the Democratic party. Two years later he was a school trustee, county surveyor, and soon afterward, auditor of Clermont County. A born agitator, he with Morris established the Ohio Sun at Bethel in 1828 to support Andrew Jackson for president. The people of Clermont County sent him three times to the state legislature and in 1837 his party elected him supervisor of public printing, a post which he held for a decade while he ran the Democratic organ entitled the Ohio Statesman. In 1844 he was chairman of the Ohio Democratic delegation to the Baltimore convention. It was in the capacity of editor of a party paper that he became almost a party dictator in Ohio. He ardently supported the movement for the annexation of Texas, the reoccupation of Oregon, and the Mexican War. He also supported the popular cry of "Fifty-four Forty or Fight, " but the generally accepted belief that he originated it is without substantiation.
His interests were not limited to politics of a local and national character. He advocated sanitation, helped to organize and promote the Ohio Horticultural Society, became an incorporator and director of four railroads, aided Louis Kossuth in his attempt to raise money in America, sympathized with the Cuban revolutionists in 1851, and did more than any other man to cause the adoption of the new constitution of Ohio in 1851. Believing that a constitution should be changed when the people willed it, he devoted his time and energy in 1849 to the publication of a newspaper which he headed with the caption, The New Constitution. Medary supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act and at the National Democratic Convention of 1856, where he served as temporary chairman, he worked for the nomination of Douglas. President Buchanan appointed him to serve as governor of the Minnesota Territory (1857 - 58), and of the Kansas Territory (1858 - 60), and he held a brief appointment as deputy postmaster of Columbus, Ohio, from February to December 1858. He assisted in the formation of the state constitution of Minnesota, and he favored the Lecompton Constitution for Kansas. While in Kansas he made a futile attempt to capture John Brown, begged the citizens of Kansas to be peaceable, contributed to the National Democrat of Lecompton, Kansas, and vetoed a bill to prohibit slavery. He returned to Columbus in 1860 where he founded and edited the Crisis. He died on November 7, 1864 in Columbus, Ohio.
As a "Peace Democrat, " a supporter of Clement Laird Vallandigham, and of General George B. McClellan for president in 1864, Medary was one of the most hated men in Ohio by the loyal supporters of the Lincoln administration. He opposed the war from the beginning because he believed it might cause the dissolution of the Union and leave the people in debt and misery. He believed that influential editors could have prevented the war and that no power outside of the individual states of the united confederacy could legally abolish slavery. He made himself so obnoxious to the Unionists that his paper was officially denied circulation in some places, and his press was wrecked by an infuriated mob in 1863.
Medary's wife was Eliza Scott, a Quakeress; they had twelve children.