Charles Augustus Wheaton
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Charles Augustus Wheaton (??-1882) was a major figure in the central New York state abolitionist movement and Underground Railroad. Later, he moved to Northfield, Minnesota, where he became one of two men responsible for the gift of land that began the Carleton College campus.
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[edit] Early life
Wheaton was the son of Augustus Wheaton, a respectable farmer and drover. The elder Wheaton purchased a 410 acres farm in Pompey, New York, in 1807 and settled there with his family in 1810. Three of Augustus' sisters, Lydia, Sylvia and Loraine, had preceded him. Wheaton's eldest brother, Orlin J. Wheaton, engaged in agriculture and droving. Another brother, Horace Wheaton, served in Congress and became the fourth mayor of Syracuse.
As a young man, Charles clerked in the general store owned by his brother-in-law, Moses Seymour Marsh.
Growing up, one of his neighbors was Ellen Douglas Birdseye (March 13, 1816 - December 17, 1858), the daughter of Electa (nee Beebee) and Victory Birdseye. She was the second of twelve children and a member of a prominent New York family that would later produce the creator of Birds Eye Frozen Foods. Ellen's father was one of Onondaga County's most prominent politicians. Birdseye practiced law and served two terms in Congress. He was postmaster of Pompey Hill for 22 years, district attorney of Onondaga County for 14 years, and held numerous other political offices. The original Birdseye House is now part of the Onondaga County Freedom Trail.
Ellen was no great beauty, as her own relatives admitted, but she was smart and well educated for a woman of her time. The Birdseyes sent Ellen to a seminary in Cortland and then to music school in Albany. She is reported to have owned the first piano in Pompey.
Wheaton and Ellen married on June 24, 1834, at the First Presbyterian Church in Syracuse, New York. He was 25 and she was 18. The Wheatons eventually had twelve children, including Cornelia (b. 1835), Lucia, Henry Birdseye Wheaton and Charles A. Wheaton (b. 1853).
Progressive views and activities, particularly those relating to abolition and women's rights, were an important part of their relationship and family life. Some of the children were sent to a school in New Jersey run by Theodore Weld and Angelina Weld Grimke, abolitionists and woman’s rights advocates.
[edit] Life in Syracuse
Four months after the birth of their first child in 1835, the family moved to Syracuse, New York, where Wheaton went into the hardware business. Their first home was at the intersection of Railroad and Clinton streets. Over the course of 20 years, they lived in seven houses, moving to larger homes as family and fortune grew. None of the Wheaton homes in Syracuse are believed to still exist.
In 1839, Wheaton built a home on South Salina Street near East Jefferson Street. At that time, it was on the outskirts of town. Wheaton could walk to his store, near the Erie Canal, and his wife, Ellen, could walk to shops, churches and the homes of her many friends. Syracuse was booming, although it was small by modern standards, and Wheaton was a busy man. He and a variety of partners, including his brother, Horace, built a prosperous hardware businesses.
In 1849, the Wheaton's close friends and fellow abolitionists, John North and Anna Loomis North, left Syracuse to move to Minnesota. Ellen's diary recalls their departure, "[John] thinks very highly of the climate and resources in Minnesota, and says it is rapidly filling up with an Eastern population." The Norths were to play an important role in Wheaton's life after Ellen's death.
When his hardware store burned in 1851, Wheaton built C.A. Wheaton & Co.—housed in the city's grandest mercantile block, a four-story building overlooking the Erie Canal and Clinton Square. In 1852, the Wheatons were at the peak of their wealth and Wheaton decided the family should move from East Genesee Street, near where it now intersects Crouse Avenue, to Fayette Park, one of the city's most fashionable neighborhoods.
Not content with his success, Wheaton sold his share of the hardware business in 1853. He also sold the Wheaton Block for USD$112,000, the largest sale to that date in Syracuse. He invested heavily in a printing press foundry and a project to build a railroad from South Carolina to Tennessee. For a short time, the future looked bright. In 1854, a banking crisis and an economic depression struck New York. By 1855, the family would be broke.
Ellen Birdseye Wheaton is best-known for a diary she kept from 1850 to 1858, detailing her life as a wife and mother of twelve children. The Wheaton family privately published The Diary of Ellen Birdeye Wheaton in 1923. Selections from the diary were reprinted in the Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper in March 2002.
Ellen died suddently at age 42 on December 17, 1858, the day after the wedding of her eldest daughter, Cornelia. Her funeral was a Swedenborgian service and she was buried in Hilltop Cemetery in Pompey, New York.
[edit] Abolitionist and political work
The Wheatons were outspoken in Syracuse, where they were at the center of a large network of radical abolitionists. They knew John Brown personally. Their anti-slavery activities began as early as 1838, when Wheaton helped found First Congregational Church, a congregation based on abolitionist principles and counted many of city's most radical abolitionists as members.
Between 1839 and 1847, the Wheatons' house was a station on Underground Railroad, helping escaped slaves escape to Canada. In 1839, local abolitionists helped a slave named Harriet Powell escape from her masters, Mississippians who were staying at local hotel. Suspicion immediately fell upon Charles Wheaton and local law enforcement officers searched the Wheaton's home without success. Powell had been spirited away, eventually arriving in Canada. It is not clear that Wheaton was directly involved. Their active involvement was such that when census workers visited the Wheaton household (perhaps in 1840 or 1850), their seamstress, a Mrs. MacManus, apparently stated that Wheaton was "president of the Underground Railroad".
Wheaton was one of 600 people in Syracuse who signed a call for a meeting to be held in the Syracuse City Hall on May 16, 1850, to discuss the proposed Compromise of 1850. Participants unequivocally supported the admission of California as a free state, opposed territorial governments for New Mexico and Utah that did not prohibit slavery, opposed any fugitive slave law, and declared that “we should rejoice to witness the removal of this stain [slavery in Washington, D.C.] upon the national character.” (Petition to the House of Representatives, HR31A-G23.1, National Archives) Most of these provisions were upheld in the Compromise, but the Fugitive Slave Law was included.
The Law, which required that all escaped slaves be detained and returned to their masters, brought the anti-slavery movement in Syracuse to a fevered pitch. On October 4, 1850, a biracial group met at the Syracuse City Hall (site of the current City Hall). Called by European Americans, it was chaired by A. H. Hovey, mayor of Syracuse. This meeting appointed a Vigilance Committee of thirteen men including Wheaton, Lyman Clary, Vivus W. Smith, Charles B. Sedgwick, Hiram Putnam, E.W. Leavenworth, Abner Bates, George Barnes, P.H. Agan, J.W. Loguen, John Wilkinson, R.R. Raymond, and John Thomas. The committee was charged with organizing resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law. They also sent a copies of the minutes of this meeting to various places, including Congress. The handwritten copy still remains in the United States National Archives.
On October 15, Wheaton was one of the speakers at “a large and respectable meeting of citizens” held at the Congregational Church to make “common cause, in view of various arrests rumored to have been made, or to be made under the Fugitive Slave act, and on charges of Treason.” Enoch Marks, European American, chaired the meeting, and George B. Vashon, African American, was secretary. This meeting emphasized a commitment to nonviolent action, as they pledged "our fortunes and our sacred honor, to stand by those individuals on whom this hand of government may fall; that we will help to bear with them any pecuniary losses to which they may be subjected, and manifest in every way we can, our sympathy for them, and show that we suffer as those who are bound with them."(Syracuse Standard, October 16, 1851) Other speakers at this meeting included the Reverend R.R. Raymond, the Rev. Samuel J. May, William H. Burleigh, Lyman Clary and George Barnes.
Five months later, on October 1, 1851, Wheaton and other Syracuse citizens—both African American and European American—successfully carried out the rescue of William “Jerry” Henry, an escaped slave apprehended in Syracuse. Henry tried to escape, but was overtaken. That evening, a crowd of two to three thousand people gathered outside the jail, and some began to throw stones at the jail windows and the crowd eventually rescued and freed Henry. When the rescue occurred, Wheaton was in fellow abolitionist Judge Charles Sedgwick's office preparing a kidnapping complaint against the agent sent to catch Henry and return him to his master. The file used to cut Henry's iron fetters was traced to the Wheaton home and the federal government tried to find witnesses against the Wheatons and others.
Writing in her diary, Ellen Birdseye Wheaton estimated that perhaps half of Syracuse residents supported the rescue. She was silent about her husband's involvement, but wrote, "Charles confidently expected to be arrested, but has not been as yet. The proceedings of the U.S. District Attorney are as secret as possible--and everything wears the appearance of injustice and knavery."
Newspapers across the state denounced the civil disobedience and 677 Syracuse area residents signed a petition protesting it, but storming of the jail sent a clear message to the White House and the Southern slave states that Syracusans were not going to abide by the Fugitive Slave Act. After four days of hiding Henry, abolitionists dressed him in women's clothing and spirited him by cart to Mexico, New York, on to Oswego, where he boarded a ship to Kingston, Ontario. Wheaton was among thirteen men--nine European Americans and four African Americans—indicted by a federal grand jury in Henry's escape, but he was never arrested or tried. The event became known as the "Jerry Rescue." Henry valued Wheaton’s assistance so much that he sent him a carved hickory cane with a deer horn handle as a thank-you present. Henry died two years later, 41 and free, in Kingston.
In 1852, the New York State Liberty Party convention, nominated Wheaton for Canal Commissioner. He also ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Syracuse on the Temperance Party ticket in 1852.
[edit] Life in Minnesota
Wheaton's life changed in 1858 with the death of his wife.
In 1859, Wheaton's friends, John North and Anne Loomis North, wrote to Wheaton and urged him to start a new life in the new town they had founded--Northfield, Minnesota. The citizens of Northfield were intent on building "an intelligent, temperate, religious society." In 1860, Charles Wheaton gave up on Syracuse and moved to Minnesota with many of his 12 children, joining other Syracuse families who had migrated earlier to join the North family.
When John North suffered financial failure in the Panic of 1857, Wheaton purchased North's interests in the local flour mill and other properties—an act that may have economically saved the town. For a while, Wheaton's Northfield Mills produced "choice family flour."
In 1861, Wheaton married the widowed Mary Archibald Wagner (d. 1912), who had moved to Minnesota from central New York with her parents after losing her husband and three sons to illness. The Archibalds owned flour mills in Dundas, Minnesota that won national recognition at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition as the best flour in the country. Charles and Mary had five children together, including Frederick (1862-1881), Robert (1863-1898), Allan (1867-1943), Edith (1868-1950) and Annabel (1870-1946). This was in addition to raising some of Wheaton's 12 children from his previous marriage.
The Wheaton's first home was the entire second floor of the American House hotel, built by John North in 1857 and later the first building of Northfield (later Carleton) College. A new Wheaton house, a Greek Revival design, was built at 405 Washington Street and the family moved there in 1868. The house, which appears on many maps of Northfield, was subdivided and moved in 1938. Both portions of the original house still stand in Northfield. The main house is about five blocks south of its original location and the "L" portion is on 9th Street West.
In 1864, he sold to the flour mill to members of the Jesse Ames family. The flour milling processes perfected by Ames and the Archibalds lead to the best flour in the nation and higher yields. The Ames Mill later became the founding mill of the Malt-O-Meal company.
In 1867, Wheaton was elected to the Minnesota legislature. That same year, Wheaton and Charles M. Goodsell each gave a 10 acre plot of land to the fledgling Northfield (later Carleton) College for the purpose of establishing the college campus just north of the main part of town.
Wheaton became editor of the Northfield Standard newspaper and later the Rice County Journal, long considered one of the first and finest weekly newspapers published in the Midwest in the 1800s. He regularly wrote a column, "Sunday's Doings," that reviewed not only the Sunday sermons of local ministers, but also reported on their congregations, including noting the absence of prominent church members. Wheaton was known to have visited up to three local churches on any given Sunday.
On September 7, 1876, Wheaton and his youngest daughter from his second marriage, Annabel, witnessed the famous Northfield bank robbery by the James-Younger Gang.
When Wheaton died in 1882 at the age of 72, the entire town of Northfield closed for his funeral as a sign of respect, a singular act for a man who arguably could be considered a greater, long-term influence on Northfield than its founder. A tribute of the time read, "In Northfield his editorial pen was ever at the disposal of any good cause, and he was a leader in all progressive causes."
