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Page 2
The first of the Blaine family of whom much is known was Colonel Ephraim
Blaine, who lived at Chester, and in the Revolution was purveyor-general
of the Pennsylvania troops, and incidentally of the whole Revolutionary
array. He married Rebekah Galbraith in 1765. Elaine is a well-known
Scotch name. Galbraith and Gillespie are Scotch-Irish; in fact, the
ancestors of James G. Blaine were nearly all Scotch and Irish. It is a
circumstance worthy of comment that Blaine comes from a stock which has
furnished the United States with many of her ablest public men, notably
among them being Andrew Jackson and Horace Greeley.
Colonel Ephraim Blaine had two sons named Robert and James, and each of
these sons named his son for Colonel Ephraim Blaine. Old Ephraim Blaine
did not leave his property to his sons, but to these two grandsons, (1)
Ephraim, who remained in Carlisle, and (2) Ephraim Lyon Blaine, who grew
up in western Pennsylvania. Ephraim Lyon Blaine was named for his
mother, Miss Lyon, the daughter of Samuel Lyon from about Carlisle.
Ephraim Lyon Blaine married Miss Gillespie, a devout member of the Roman
Catholic Church, but most of their seven children--five boys and two
girls--adhered to the traditional faith of the Blaines. The second of
these sons, James Gillespie Blaine, is the subject of this sketch. He
would have inherited large blended fortunes, had not his father, like
his grandfather, been a spendthrift. Therefore, soon after James G.
Blaine was born his parents had to move out of the big house which they
could no longer keep up, and occupy a frame-house called the Pringle
dwelling, also in West Brownsville, about a quarter of a mile distant.
Here young Elaine lived and went to school both in Brownsville and in
West Brownsville, until his father was elected prothonotary of the
county, in 1843, when the whole family removed to Little Washington,
twenty-four miles distant.
James G. entered Washington College in 1843, being then thirteen years
of age, and became at once prominent as a scholar among the two or three
hundred other lads from all parts of the country. He was also a leader
in athletic sports. He was not a bookworm, but he was a close student
and possessed the happy faculty of assimilating knowledge from books and
tutors far more easily and quickly than most of his fellows. In
debating-societies he held his own well, and was conspicuous by his
ability to control and direct others.
After leaving college young Blaine started for Kentucky to carve out his
own fortune. He went to Blue Lick Springs and became a professor in the
Western Military Institute, in which there were about four hundred and
fifty boys. A retired officer who was a student there at the time
relates that Professor Blaine was a thin, handsome, earnest young man,
with the same fascinating manners he has now. He was popular with the
boys, who trusted him and made friends with him from the first. He knew
the given name of every one, and he knew his shortcomings and his strong
points. He was a man of great personal courage, and during a fight
between the faculty of the school and the owners of the springs,
involving some questions about the removal of the school, he behaved in
the bravest manner, fighting hard but keeping cool. Revolvers and knives
were freely used, but Blaine only used his well-disciplined muscle.
Colonel Thornton F. Johnson was the principal of the school, and his
wife had a young ladies' school at Millersburg, twenty miles distant.
There Blaine met Miss Harriet Stanwood, who subsequently became his
wife. She was a Maine girl of excellent family sent to Kentucky to be
educated.
After teaching for a while Blaine left Kentucky and went to Philadelphia
to study law. While there he taught for a short time at the blind asylum
and also wrote for the newspapers. He soon, however, was irresistibly
attracted to the State of Maine, and left his native State for a home in
the community with which his name is now indissolubly connected. It is
somewhat remarkable that this ambitious young man should have gone East
instead of West, choosing a State which the young men were fast
leaving--one whose population in the last forty years has increased very
little. He is, indeed, almost the only man who has gone East in the last
half-century and risen to any prominence.
Mr. Blaine went to Maine in 1853, and soon afterward married Miss
Stanwood, whose family are well known in New England. Through their
influence he soon found an occupation in journalism, and until 1860 was
actively engaged in editing at different times the Kennebec Journal and
the Portland Daily Advertiser. He retained a part ownership in the
Kennebec Journal until it began to hamper him in his political career,
and then he sold out. A friend has said of him as a journalist: "I have
often thought that a great editor, as great perhaps as Horace Greeley,
was lost when Mr. Blaine went into politics. He possesses all the
qualities of a great journalist: he has a phenomenal memory; he
remembers circumstances, dates, names, and places more readily than any
other man I ever met."
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