WILLIAM ELDER

Background

William Elder was born in Somerset, Pennsylvania, the son of William Gore and Magdalen (Armstrong) Elder.

Education

He spent his boyhood in Somerset and on his father’s farm and attended the country schools.

He attended lectures at Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia, and in 1833 established himself in practise at Oakland Mills in Juniata County.

He studied law, was admitted to the bar at Bedford, Pennsylvania, on August 24, 1842, and in the same year commenced a legal practise in Pittsburgh, in partnership with John F. Beaver.

Career

In 1838 he settled in Pittsburgh and the following year was elected recorder of deeds of Allegheny County on the Whig-Anti-Masonic ticket. He studied law, was admitted to the bar at Bedford, Pennsylvania, on August 24, 1842, and in the same year commenced a legal practise in Pittsburgh, in partnership with John F. Beaver. After the Pittsburgh fire of 1845 he moved to Philadelphia, where for a number of years he was occupied with lecturing and writing, first on abolition, then on questions of finance, commerce, taxation, and public wealth. He was in charge of the Liberty Herald in 1847 and in 1848 wrote much for The Republic, a Free-Soil campaign paper. During this period he also contributed papers, signed “Senior, ” on political science and finance, to the National Era of Washington, and a series, “Familiar Life in Pennsylvania, ” to the Philadelphia Press. His first books were Periscopics (1854)—a volume of familiar essays, sometimes not more than a paragraph in length, dealing in an intimate way with matters of religion, politics, economics, philosophy, and literature, gathered from the periodicals for which he had been writing for several years past—and The Enchanted Beauty (1855), chiefly a reprint of Periscopics. In response to the request of the family of the explorer, he brought out a laudatory but somewhat lifeless Biography of Elisha Kent Kane in 1857. Henceforth his work was confined to questions of economic interest. From 1861 to 1866 he was a statistician in the Treasury Department at Washington. In 1863 his Debts and Resources of the United States was distributed as one of the pamphlet publications of the Union League of Philadelphia; in 1863 his paper, How our National Debt can be Paid, was issued by Jay Cooke as part of his campaign to sell government securities. After the war Elder returned to Philadelphia, where he resided from 1866 to 1873. His most important work, Questions of the Day: Economic and Social (Philadelphia, 1871), was intended as “political economy for popular perusal. ” From it extracts were republished the same year, as A Short History of a Long Fight: Free Trade and Protection. The burden of the work is to disprove the tenets of the classical economists of rent, international trade, and population. He was a faithful disciple of Henry C. Carey, as well as a devoted personal friend. In 1880 he read before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania a Memoir of Henry Carey, which not only sketched the facts of Carey’s life, but surveyed economic writing to that time, in order to determine Carey’s place in the hierarchy of economists. Elder was thoroughly imbued with the protectionist doctrines prevalent in Pennsylvania at the time and his later pamphlets practically all relate to that subject. The last twelve years of his life were spent in Washington, as a clerk in the Comptroller’s Office in the Treasury Department, where he worked until a short time before his death.

Achievements

• William Elder has been listed as a noteworthy journalist by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Short History of a Long Fight: Free Trade and Protection

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

  • A Memoir of Henry C. Carey: Read Before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Phiadelphia, January 5, 1880

    ( About the Book Titles about politicians relate to peopl...)

  • Biography of Elisha Kent Kane (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Biography of Elisha Kent Kane Letters to th...)

  • Periscopics: Or, Current Subjects Extemporaneously Treated...

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Questions of the Day: Economic and Social (Classic Reprint)

Politics

In 1863 his Debts and Resources of the United States was distributed as one of the pamphlet publications of the Union League of Philadelphia; in 1863 his paper, How our National Debt can be Paid, was issued by Jay Cooke as part of his campaign to sell government securities.

Views

He acquired a reputation as a speaker on antiMasonry and Colonization and on subjects in the field of “mental and moral philosophy. ”

Membership

recorder of deeds of Allegheny County on the Whig-Anti-Masonic ticket

bar at Bedford, Pa.

Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Personality

The Philadelphia Public Ledger (April 6, 1885) contained the following characterization: “A man of brilliant talents, which were veiled from the public eye in his later days by his employment as a statistician in the Treasury Department at Washington, . .. he flourished in the days of the antislavery agitation, being a fervid friend of free soil, free speech, and free men. ”

Connections

Father:

William Gore Elder

Mother:

Magdalen (Armstrong) Elder

Wife:

Sara Maclean

colleague:

Dr. Deane

colleague:

Dr. Whiteside

Friend:

Henry C. Carey

References

• Elisha Kent Kane: Physician and Arctic Explorer