Read an Excerpt
The Boy Governor
Stevens T. Mason and the Birth of Michigan Politics
By Don Faber The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2012 University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-07158-6
CHAPTER 1
The Early Years
When it came to colonial pedigree, the Masons of Virginia stood second to none. Masons served Virginia and the new nation in a variety of ways that brought honor on the family name. By the time Stevens Thomson Mason — or Tom, as he was familiarly called — was born in 1811, the family enjoyed an immense popularity in the Old Dominion. They were, in short, of patrician stock in what was still a frontier society.
George Mason wrote the first constitution of Virginia, and it was to his colonial home of Gunston Hall on the Potomac River that liberty-minded men came to exchange radical ideas. Another Mason served as a member of the first Supreme Court of his state. In later years, Masons served in presidential cabinets and in the highest military positions. Stevens T. Mason's grandfather, for whom he had been named, died in 1803, but not before he had served as a colonel in the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. He ably assisted General George Washington on his staff and established an atmosphere of learning and culture at Raspberry Plain, the family estate, in Loudoun County, Virginia, near Leesburg. The elder Stevens T. Mason packed a lot into his brief life of forty-two years; he also was a member of the Virginia state legislature and a U.S. senator from Virginia from 1794 until his death. A lawyer, he was a member of the Democratic-Republican Party.
So the younger Stevens T. Mason, the future governor of Michigan, was born on October 27, 1811, into a family of social prominence. The Masons counted Andrew Jackson among their family friends, and that hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 paid a visit to the Mason home when Tom was just a lad. As the fates would have it, Old Hickory was destined to play an outsized role in the life and career of Stevens T. Mason.
John Thomson Mason (1787–1850) was the eldest child of the elder Stevens Thomson Mason and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Armistead. Born at Raspberry Plain, John T. Mason was educated at Charlotte Hall Military Academy in St. Mary's County, Maryland, and at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia. Episcopalian by religious preference, he married Elizabeth Moir, a native of Williamsburg, on February 9, 1809, in Williamsburg and settled down to practice law.
What John T. Mason lacked in his ancestors' leadership skills and dedication to public service was counterbalanced by his imagination and improvisation. He had a nose for business and a desire to get ahead. Virginia, where he normally would have been a man of influence, couldn't contain him, however, when the West beckoned. Here money was to be made, opportunities might be cashed in, and a solid future could be staked out.
The new country, not yet forty years old, was already looking to expand. Created in 1787, the Northwest Territory, an immense tract of land northwest of the Ohio River, was attracting settlers. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the nation. Native Americans, pushed off their seaboard lands and then across the Appalachians, were forced westward.
But before the West could be settled, another war with Great Britain had to be fought; on the home front, the War of 1812 was turning out disastrously. The British pillaged Washington and put the White House to flames. Only eleventh-hour victories at New Orleans by Andrew Jackson and in western Lake Erie by Oliver Hazard Perry saved the day for the Americans, with the result that the war ended in a kind of stalemate, with neither side able to claim outright victory. Still, the Americans had rallied to defend their new country, and the result was a newfound feeling of confidence.
That spirit of confidence took expression in two significant ways. First, on the Fourth of July in 1817, construction began on the Erie Canal in New York State. One of the greatest engineering projects ever undertaken, the 360-mile artificial waterway linked Albany on the Hudson River with Buffalo on Lake Erie. As one historian notes, "Americans perceived the canal as an expression of faith in the potentials of a free society, a message of hope for a great young nation on the move." The Erie Canal transformed America and greatly facilitated the Industrial Revolution. Goods, supplies, produce, and building materials of every kind were transported on this highway of water. Then, of course, the people came — thousands of them from New York, Yankees from New England, and immigrants, all seeking better lives in whatever lay in those beckoning lands west of Buffalo. The human traffic on the Erie Canal would forever change Stevens T. Mason's Michigan as well, increasing the territory's numbers in such a short period as to accelerate the timetable for statehood.
The second great expression of confidence was President James Monroe's establishment of the Monroe Doctrine. More of a paper pronouncement than anything else, it was probably regarded in European capitals as an outstanding example of American bravado. But Monroe's articulation of a policy in 1823, declaring the Americas off-limits to European interference, showed the post-Napoleonic world that the United States had some swagger, even if it lacked the gunboats to back it up. Manifest Destiny would soon follow, and the westward-looking country never glanced back.
John Thomson Mason was twenty-five years old in 1812, when he decided his fortunes lay in the West. Always a restless soul, Mason moved his wife, Elizabeth, his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Mary, and his infant son, Stevens Thomson, to Lexington, Kentucky, a four-hundred-mile trip that took seven weeks. Social relationships were begun with the leading families of the region. With a large home library and a strong inclination to make his way in the world, it wasn't long before Mason made enough money to buy a large estate, which he named Serenity Hall.
But by 1819, serenity for John T. Mason and his growing family was proving elusive. Although he practiced law with some success, his business ventures, apparently of the speculative nature, turned sour. Entries in old family records fail to indicate just why John T. Mason thought he could make still more money with his investments. It wasn't long before he lost most of the family fortune. Still holding his political connections, however, he accepted an appointment by President Monroe as a U.S. marshal.
It is possible that far-off Michigan imprinted itself on Stevens T. Mason at an early age. In Lexington, he may have witnessed the funeral processions of the brave Kentuckians who were killed in the River Raisin Massacre in Frenchtown (now Monroe), Michigan, in the winter of 1813. He may have associated the name Michigan with violent death in a wilderness where there existed only frontier settlements. During the War of 1812, the state he would eventually serve as its first elected governor was a hardship post as far as the territorial capital of Detroit was concerned.
In October 1815, Stevens T. Mason gained a sister, Emily Virginia, who would live into her nineties and establish the closest of relationships with "Thomson." Emily would still be alive in 1905, when Governor Mason's remains were reinterred in Detroit on the site of the territorial capitol. In 1818, Catherine joined the family, followed a year later by yet another daughter, Laura.
Young Tom Mason seems to have been an intellectually curious child, perhaps even precocious. A family friend and educator who took Tom under his wing schooled him in rote learning, but as noted by biographer Kent Sagendorph, parroting what the teacher demanded to hear did the pupil no service: "All his life this habit clung to him and caused him endless trouble. His mind would grapple with a situation by deciding what sort of an answer the teacher wanted and blithely skip to it across a yawning chasm of intermediate details."
In 1819, the occasion of a visit to Lexington by President Monroe, accompanied by Senator Andrew Jackson, made a great impression on the seven-year-old Mason. The Hero of New Orleans, as Jackson was still being called, paid a visit to Serenity Hall, where the future president was quite taken with the boy's powers of argument. For his part, young Tom Mason formed an attachment to the charismatic Jackson resembling that of son to father. In later years, Jackson would remember this chance encounter with John T. Mason's eldest boy.
John Thomson Mason's business schemes caught up with him in 1819. Unscrupulous friends wiped him out in a mining venture; a distillery in which he invested didn't pay off. He carelessly signed off on a short-term note for a large amount of money, and when the cosigner defaulted, Mason was stuck. He was forced to sell Serenity Hall and moved the family a short distance away to Mount Sterling. His Lexington properties lost value, forcing him to return to the practice of law, albeit with fewer clients. By 1827, barely earning enough to keep his family in food and clothing, he was practically penniless. Kentucky didn't seem so hospitable after all. Virginia might have taken him back as a prodigal son, but John T. Mason had too much pride to admit failure back home. He was on the frontier to stay.
In 1827, nearly sixteen, Stevens T. Mason enrolled at Lexington's Transylvania University, the oldest educational institution west of the Alleghenies. There he studied classical languages and philosophy. But as Patricia Baker reports, the family's hard times continued: "The whole family was disrupted by John's financial disasters, particularly so, young Stevens T. Because of his father's financial plight, he was forced to quit his studies at Transylvania, trading his books for a grocer's apron." Tom got a job at a grocery store in Mount Sterling, where he opened up each morning, stocked goods, and waited on customers. It must have been quite a comedown for Tom Mason — born of a well-bred family and possessed of greater than average intellect — to take orders from the locals and to bear up under the strain of manual labor. In his body of writings, Mason never makes mention of his days as a stock clerk.
At sixteen, Mason was tall — about six feet — and slender. He carried himself well and was conscious of himself as a heartthrob to the girls. Not given to slouching, he walked proudly, with a style that suggested culture and good breeding. He dressed the part; later portraits show tight-fitting broadcloth trousers and a high silk hat. With a strong chin and an aristocratic bearing, he would have stood out in any crowd. We have a description of his persona from a Major W. C. Ransom: "He was tall and handsome. His eyes, bright and beaming with intelligence, seemed to mirror the restless spirit that animated his being. Dark, wavy hair fell in rich clusters over his intellectual forehead, while his commanding presence and polished manners at once challenged the admiration of those who were so fortunate as to have his acquaintance."
Mason was versed in the politics of the day and was, of course, well read. Biographer Lawton Hemans reports, "His father had collected a choice and for that day a moderately extensive library of both legal and general literature, and from the latter both Tom and his sister read with keen avidity." Sagendorph confidently says, "This experience left him with a profound reverence for universal free education." So when he became governor, a model school system became one of his primary goals.
He found Transylvania much to his liking. Scholarship at the small college was taken seriously, and Tom Mason felt at home in the classes he attended. He worked hard, with little time left over for frivolity; study came first, because there was no assurance he would be in college long. Letters from his father, when they were forthcoming, didn't give any cause for hope that family finances were improving.
In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected to the presidency. It was a watershed election by any standard, as the young nation was wrenched from the familiar meritocracy of the East to a representative democracy of the people. Whatever his faults, and some were considerable, Jackson was a man of the people. His was a magnetic personality, capable of the strongest emotions, and his presidency was marked by bitter political conflicts. But he was a strong supporter of the Union, and he promised to die, if need be, to preserve a strong central government. He opposed the "monopolistic" Bank of the United States, squelched the nullification dispute led by John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, and increased presidential powers. "The America of Andrew Jackson," writes Jon Meacham, "was a country that professed a love of democracy but was willing to live with inequality, that aimed for social justice but was prone to racism and intolerance, that believed itself one nation but was narrowly divided and fought close elections, and that occasionally acted arrogantly toward other countries while craving respect from them at the same time." These contradictions were often exacerbated by Jackson's own divide-and-conquer policies.
His election led former president John Quincy Adams to grump that the Republic's days were numbered, or words to that effect. Adams had won the presidency in a highly disputed election in 1825; he served one term before being defeated by Jackson. At Old Hickory's inaugural on the fourth of March 1829, Adams absented himself from any part in the activities. The two would maintain an icy relationship throughout their public lives.
The Jackson White House quickly let it be known that things would be different for appointed officeholders accustomed to the perks of high office. People such as Henry Clay of Kentucky viewed the replacement of federal officials as dangerous to the future of the country, whereas Jackson saw it as his right and privilege to replace the standing guard. As Meacham explains,
That a president would have wide power to reward loyalists with offices, both to thank them for their steadfastness and to ensure that he had a cadre of people at hand who would presumably execute his policies with energy and enthusiasm, is now a given, but Jackson was the first president to remake the federal establishment on such a large scale. Jackson's vision was elementary yet expansive in the context of the early Republic. He wanted a political culture in which a majority of voters chose a president, and a president chose his administration.
Into this milieu stepped John T. Mason of Kentucky, desirous of recouping his flagging family fortunes. His family was growing, and he wanted to leave behind those associations that reminded him of his failures. These reasons and perhaps others equally as compelling resulted in Mason's name being thrown into the spoils system of politics. He knew President Jackson and, just as important, he had friends who knew the president. When Jackson began cleaning house in Washington, the door swung wide open for those office seekers who espoused Jackson's policies.
William T. Barry, a former congressman from Kentucky and friend of the Mason family, had accepted an appointment to Jackson's cabinet as postmaster general. It may have been Barry who went to bat for John T. Mason and who interceded with Jackson. According to Sagendorph, "Barry began dickering for a job for John T. Mason in June, 1829, and kept at it until the following spring." Hemans says that John T. "either sought or had tendered to him" a political job at that time. It must have come as a great relief to Mason to see his political connections pay off.
Still, the real political plums had already been passed out, and Mason would have to do with a post of secondary importance. Was that acceptable to a Mason of Virginia who harbored grandiose plans of conquering the American West? A Whig, James Witherell of Detroit, held the post of secretary of the Michigan Territory, and as a Whig, he was destined for removal. The job paid twelve hundred dollars a year, in addition to what the individual who took it could earn on his own. That was the plus side; the downside was that the job was in a frontier town, and the territory was ruled by the formidable Lewis Cass, longtime governor and distinguished veteran of the War of 1812.
The duties of territorial secretary were administrative in nature. The secretary served as acting governor in the absence of the governor — a fact that was to have great bearing on Stevens T. Mason's meteoric rise. Cass was frequently out of the office, exploring the interior of Michigan and on lengthy trips of one kind or another. In those cases, his official duties devolved on the secretary.
John T. Mason must have sensed early on that he was swimming in deep waters if he took the Michigan job. To begin with, the Michigan Territory was vast: by the 1830s, it stretched from the Detroit River to the Missouri River, taking in all or part of what today comprises Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. The territory embraced numerous tribes of indigenous Americans, and what did John T. Mason know of Indian treaties and Indian warfare? He had no knowledge whatsoever of Detroit and Whig politics. And then there were the lakes — the Great Lakes — awesome repositories of freshwater that promised to become inland waterways of great commerce. Geography on such as scale was not in Mason's scope of experience.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Boy Governor by Don Faber. Copyright © 2012 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
