Area’s Grow once presided over Congress

BY ROBERT L. BAKER

Wyoming County Press Examiner

When Galusha Grow was made the grand marshal of last year’s July 4^th parade in Montrose, Susquehanna County Historical Society curator Betty Smith said almost no one knew who he was.

That would not be the case 150 years ago Monday, when Grow was elected by his congressional colleagues to be Speaker of the House.

Elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1850, Galusha  Grow, easily became its most recognizable Republican on July 4, 1861.

The only man from northeastern Pennsylvania to serve as Speaker did so at the time of the nation’s greatest crisis – the Civil War.

Just days after President Abraham Lincoln asked for $400 million and 400,000 men to fight for the Union, Grow, a resident of Glenwood, about five miles north of Nicholson, stood before Congress, letting his colleagues know he had no interest in shrinking away from a tragic fight.

On the day of his inauguration Grow uttered these almost prophetic words about a war whose length he then had no idea: “A government that cannot command the loyalty of its own citizens is unworthy the respect of the world; a government that will not protect its loyal citizens deserves the contempt of the world. No flag alien to the sources of the Mississippi will ever float permanently over its mouths till its waters are crimsoned with human gore; and not one foot of soil can ever be wrenched from the jurisdiction of the Constitution of the United States until it is baptised in fire and blood.”

YOUTH

The native of Connecticut arrived in 1837 in Susquehanna County at the age of 11, with his widowed mother and three siblings.

He was educated at the Franklin Academy in Harford and went on to Amherst College in Massachusetts where he became acclimated to many of the issues that would serve him well during two stints in Congress (1851-1863 and 1894-1903).

He was first elected to that body as a Democrat in 1850, when he was the hand-picked successor to a seat held by his law partner David Wilmot.

Barely age-eligible to run for Congress, Grow had some catchy epithets thrown his way during the campaign against Whig candidate John C. Adams, biographer Robert Ilisevich, noted.

Those related to his youth and lack of seasoning could be found in Montrose and Towanda newspapers, including “the school-boy Grow,” ‘Lenox Greenhorn” and “Tunkhannock Creek Parrot.”

They apparently didn’t stick, however, as Grow became Congress’ youngest member at age 28 when the 32nd Congress convened on Dec. 1, 1851.

As a freshman congressman, Ilisevich noted that Grow was a quick study to the rigors of legislative debate and worked hard as a reformer calling for an overhaul of the nation’s land policies and a free-soiller who saw slavery in the territories as a deterrent to liberty and the natural development of the country.

They were positions he felt he could hold as a “good Democrat.”

That was until the Kansas-Nebraska Act emerged in 1854.

The legislation designed by Democratic U.S. Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois proposed that settlers could vote to decide whether to allow slavery or not and Douglas had hoped it would ease tensions between the North and the South.

Opposition to any expansion of slavery emerged and so did today’s Republican Party.

Although Grow did not play a role in the formation of the Republican Party in Pennsylvania, few doubted where his allegiances lay.

Invective in the halls of Congress was not uncommon and during a debate over popular sovereignty on the night of February 4. 1858, South Carolina Congressman Laurence Keitt declared to Grow, “Sir, I will let you know you are a Black Republican puppy.”

Grow responded, “Never mind. No negro driver shall ever crack his whip over me.”

And then to punctuate the moment Grow flattened Keitt with a single blow to the jaw, and a brawl involving several dozen congressmen ensued.

Although there was some criticism about the incivility of grown men, much of the northern press turned Grow into an instant hero.

Ilisevich said the free-state people of Kansas presented Grow with a gold medal  inscribed, “The first blow struck for freedom in Congress.”

SPEAKERSHIP

Grow was in the running for Speaker of the House in 1860, along with John Sherman of Ohio but a compromise candidate William Pennington of New Jersey was finally elected.

With the House organized, Grow pushed vigorously for a homestead bill that was actually passed by Congress but vetoed by President James Buchanan.

With Lincoln’s election in 1860, however, greater issues than homesteading emerged, including the secession of Southern states, and with the bombing of Fort Sumter just a month after Lincoln’s inauguration, bold action was called for.

On April 15, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to fight and for Congresss to convene in special session on July 4.

Ilisevich said last week that with nearly three months intervening, there was some concern that had the South been better organized that Washington could have been overrun with Rebel forces.

But southern troops were nowhere to be seen in the nation’s capital, and with former southern congressmen also removed from Congress, much of the opposition to Grow being speaker in the previous year had dissipated as well.

When Congress convened on July 4, 150 years ago, Grow received 71 votes on the first ballot, nine short of victory, and second place contender Frank Blair of Missouri withdrew, urging his supporters to switch their votes.

Grow was then easily elected on the second ballot.

Although not particularly close to Lincoln, the president knew that Grow’s role as speaker would be critical to the early conduct of the Civil War.

Lincoln once remarked to Grow in 1861, “My boys are green at the fighting business, but wait till they get licked enough to raise their dander! then the cry will be, ‘On to Richmond,’ and no ‘Stonewall’ will stop them!”

In the 21 months that Grow served as Speaker, the 37th Congress passed a dizzying amount of legislation by today’s standards.

With much of the opposition removed because most southern states had seceded from the Union, Congress:

*passed a conscription or draft law with teeth;

*created the Internal Revenue Service at the U.S. Treasury Department which instituted the nation’s first federal income tax;

*enacted a legal tender bill which created paper money known as ‘greenbacks;’

*passed the Morrill Act providing for public land to be set aside for what would become known as land-grant colleges (like Penn State); and

*approved the Pacific Railroad Act which made construction of the transcontinental railroad possible in the next decade.

In the middle of all that, Grow pushed through legislation for the conduct of the first two years of the Civil War and shepherded the Homestead Act of 1862.

It was a volume of legislation that biographer Ilisevich, said was not really seen again until possibly the ‘New Deal’ Congress that came to power with President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.

Contemporary journalist Ben Perley Poore said of Grow, “He was a thorough politician and a good presiding officer, possessing the tact, the quickness of perception, and the decision acquired by editorial perception.”

Although Ilisevich is quick to point out that Grow was not the “true” architect of the Homestead bill, at least three historical markers in Susquehanna County put up by Pennsylvania’s Historical and Museum Commission call him the “Father of the Homestead Act.”

“It is true that he shepherded the legislation through Congress when the two previous Congresses rejected it, and so I guess you could say there is some fathering going on,” Ilisevich, now 81, said.

The former Alliance College and Mercyhurst University history professor said he first became acquainted with Grow when in the mid-1950s at age 26, he wrote his University of Pittsburgh master’s thesis about the “Sage of Glenwood.”

Ilisevich said he became enamored with the populist who promoted legislation that promised acres of public land largely in the West to settlers who agreed to reside on the property for five years or more.

More than 80 million acres would be so claimed, according to the Library of Congress, suggesting that his influence was considerable.

However, modern-day historians also have suggested that the Depression wiped out a lot of the gains by those 19th Century squatters taking advantage of the Homestead Act.

As far reaching as all of the 37th Congress’ legislation was by contemporary standards, Grow was defeated back home in his 1862 reelection bid.

Ilisevich said the Republican controlled Pennsylvania General Assembly had a lot to do with that.

Faced with redistricting issues following an 1860 Census that had Pennsylvania losing a congressional district, Grow was made vulnerable  because he was not a favorite of the Republican machine that dominated state politics.

His safe Republican District had Bradford and Tioga counties stripped away, and he suddenly found himself in a district that now included Wyoming and Luzerne counties with a very popular Democrat from Wilkes-Barre, Charles Dennison, appealing to a war-weary electorate.

Grow lost the race by fewer than 1,800 votes out of more than 20,000 cast.

He retreated from active political life, but re-emerged as a candidate for Congress in 1894 when an at-large congressional seat for the entire state of Pennsylvania opened up, and he served for four more terms, but made the decision not to run again in 1902.

Ilisevich said that Grow was a man of high ideals and did not care for much of the rough-and-tumble politics that Republican dealmakers like Matthew Quay wanted in his Republican candidates.

“He was a popular candidate with the Republican rank-and-file but was constantly at odds with the party bosses,” Ilisevich said, “because he had principles.”

“Perhaps if he had cared more for political life, he would have been speaker for a generation, and the tragedy that was Reconstruction might have turned out differently,” Ilisevich said.

Former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson who wrote a doctoral dissertation on Congressional Government in 1883 said of Grow in his 1918 ‘History of the American People,’ that Grow “was a man cast for the role of leader, quick, aggressive, confident alike in opinion and purpose, a thorough partisan, and yet honest and ready for responsibility.”

Ilisevich said, “Grow had integrity, and he had a vision of what a ‘New America’ might become in the best sense.”

He added, “When you stop and think that before the time of the Civil War, when a lot of social issues like slavery and women’s rights were far from being resolved, your area produced a clear thinker who knew right where America needed to be.”