of his great
worth." Grant wrote to McPherson's aged grandmother: "The nation had
more to expect from him than from almost any one living." He wished to
express the grief of personal love for the departed, and he testified to
"his zeal, his great, almost unequaled ability, his amiability, and all
the manly virtues that can adorn a commander."

Such were the greatest of the great Ohio soldiers. To say that they
were, each in his different way, the first soldiers of the war, is to
keep well within the modest truth. They believed in one another, they
trusted one another, for they knew one another. The love between
them, impassioned in Sherman, frank and hearty in Sheridan, tender in
McPherson, deep and constant in Grant, is one of the most beautiful
facts of our history, or of any history, a feeling without one
ungenerous quality. It was indeed,

"A goodly fellowship of noble knights,"

such as has not been since that of King Arthur's Table Round.

XXIV. OHIO STATESMEN

The men who have given distinction to our state in politics could hardly
be more than named in a record like this; and I shall not try to speak
of them all or try to keep any order in my mention of them except the
alphabetical order of the counties where they were born, or where they
lived.

From Ashtabula County, the names that will come at once to the reader's
mind are those of Joshua R. Giddings and Benjamin F. Wade, both of a
national fame inseparable from the history of the struggle with slavery.
Giddings was first to cast his lot with the almost hopeless cause of
freedom, but the fiery nature of Wade served to keep it warm in the
hearts of its later adherents and to spread its light. Neither of
these great Ohioans were Ohioans by birth. Giddings was born in Athens,
Pennsylvania, in 1795, and came to Ashtabula County in 1806, where
he dwelt until within a few years of his death, which took place at
Montreal in 1864, while he was Consul General for Canada. He studied
law, and succeeded at the bar before he entered political life. He
was then twenty years in Congress as representative from the Ashtabula
district, which promptly returned him when he was expelled from the
House of Representatives for presenting a petition against slavery. His
courage was so unconscious that he seemed never to assert it in his
long career of defiance at Washington, but it never failed him in the
presence of the dangers that often beset him there. In early life