Ancestors (27 page)

My great-grandfather wanted my Grandfather Blinn to go into the cattle business with him and was very angry when my grandfather told him he wanted to be a lawyer, instead. My grandfather left home at the age of eighteen, and got a job as a bookkeeper in a pump factory in Cincinnati. The
Logan County History
says that two years after he came there he began to read law in the office of Kebler & Whitman, and in 1866 was admitted to the bar. That would mean he was twenty-two. Annette says that he was admitted to the bar before he was twenty-one, and that when he was asked how this happened he said, “I worked awfully hard, and didn’t have much to eat, and I looked older than I
was, so they didn’t ask me how old I was and I didn’t tell them.”

I don’t know what the connection was that brought him to Lincoln, in the fall of 1866. He started in the office of one of the two leading lawyers, and two years later went into partnership with the other. This statement is perhaps misleading in that it suggests that everything fell into his lap when actually there wasn’t a great deal to fall into anybody’s lap. The
Logan County History
says, “In the early days of the courts of this county most of the business was done by lawyers from other places. Logan County was regarded as an outpost of Springfield and Bloomington lawyers, who claimed it as a part of their bailiwick and gobbled up all the paying practise; but a time came when the lawyers here were not only able to sustain themselves and hold their practise at home against all comers but were able to retaliate upon the enemy by carrying the war into their own camps and foraging upon them. For many years past, all the business in the courts, at least all of any importance and having any pay in it, has been done by the members of the local bar.” That my Grandfather Blinn had something to do with this reversal, I see no reason to doubt.

Speaking at my grandfather’s funeral, one of the lawyers of his generation said, “I have practised law with Mr. Blinn and against Mr. Blinn for over forty years, and I learned early, very early, in my practise that if Mr. Blinn was on the other side of a lawsuit I had to thoroughly understand every feature of the case, for if you made a blunder, you were out of the Court House. If he was on your side of the lawsuit he was a constant inspiration and strength, by reason of his wonderful grasp of all the minutiae of the facts, as well as the law in the case under consideration. And whether he was on the same side of a case with you or against you, he commanded not only your respect but your admiration by reason of his wonderful, wonderful intellectuality.
He was perhaps the best all round advocate and lawyer combined that I ever had the pleasure of knowing or ever had the pleasure of hearing, and that is saying a great deal.”

The schoolboy who followed the Gillett trial with such a precocious interest became a lawyer when he grew up, and he once said “In matters pertaining to the law, your Grandfather Blinn was highly intelligent, a lawyer’s lawyer, and during the years when he sat on the bench, an impartial judge. When he was trying a case before the jury and it suited his purposes, he could act the fire-eater.” Since this doesn’t appear to fit very well with the statement that he was a lawyer’s lawyer, I assume it must be true; opinions that are all of a kind have usually been tampered with.

I do not think my grandfather discussed his cases at home, and his children tended to think of the courtroom as a kind of empyrean quite beyond their understanding. Annette says that my grandfather had a license to practice in the District of Columbia (from which I infer that he argued cases that were being tried before the Supreme Court) and that some of his opinions made law. But she doesn’t know what this statement means; it is only something she heard said.

While my grandfather practiced law with one partner or another he also dabbled in politics. In the 1870’s, at which time he was a young man in his early thirties, he ran for Congress and was defeated. Later, when the nomination would have been equivalent to election, he refused it. He had found that he preferred practicing law. Perhaps also he preferred being behind the scenes. In 1880 he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention at Chicago, and in 1884 he was one the Presidential electors for the State of Illinois. From 1888–92 he was a member of the Court of Claims, from which he resigned when John P. Altgeld was elected governor. Apparently he was too much of a radical for my grandfather to serve under. Altgeld was a
German immigrant. He wrote a book
^*
contending that American judicial methods were weighted against the poor, which nobody in his right mind would deny now, but a great many people refused to believe then. As governor, Altgeld was the champion of labor, reform, and liberal thought, and I wish that my Grandfather Blinn had been among those who fought at his side, but you have to take your ancestors as you find them.

My grandfather’s obituary notice says that he was “modest in all his actions, never seeming to recognize his own greatness,” that he often asked advice from other lawyers, even the most lowly in the profession; that he headed the bar of Logan County; and that he died “with a legal fame extending to other states and with a standing for probity and honor so high that it was never tarnished by idle report or by the jealousy of his opponents or his competitors in whatever walk of life he choosed to walk.” I have never heard anything that would cast doubt on the truth of these statements, and small-town people like nothing better than whittling somebody down to size.

The paragraph on my grandfather in the
Logan County History
concludes: “January 1, 1869, Mr. Blinn was married at Cold Spring, Kentucky, to Nettie L., daughter of John C. Youtsey, a prominent citizen of that place.”

You don’t begin by being a prominent citizen, you arrive there in the fullness of time, after quite a lot of agricultural or commercial activity. The first Youtsey I know anything about floated down the Ohio River on a flatboat loaded with whiskey and molasses, shortly after the year 1800. His name was John, he was my great-great-great-grandfather, and Annette says he started from Knight’s Ferry, Virginia, which I have yet to find on any map. According to a statement by an unnamed person born about 1820 and probably a second cousin of my Grandmother Youtsey, John Youtsey first settled in Maryland, then moved on to Pennsylvania, and “made some money there and bought a little flatboat, and floated down the river to Cincinnati. Didn’t have a brick house in it—so I have been told. Old Dick Southgate was a young lawyer at that time, and he noticed my grandfather’s little boat lying there at the water’s edge, and it was called the
Pennsylvania German.
”

For a moment the telescope is in perfect focus.

My mother’s cousin Hugh Davis said that Nicholas Long-worth, the grandfather of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, was with him. Nicholas Longworth was the third son of a well-to-do Tory family in Newark, New Jersey, who, because of fines and confiscations, were in reduced
circumstances. I have been slow to accept this connection, but on the other hand it seems rather an odd thing to invent. It is a fact that Nicholas Longworth came west on a flatboat at this time. He was nineteen years old. He had a leather chest with him, and history has preserved an inventory of its contents: “Six coats, black and blue; one dozen plain and fancy waistcoats; four pairs of silk and eight of woolen breeches; six dozen plain and ruffled shirts; a like number of hose and handkerchiefs, with cravats and other et ceteras.” In short his mother sent him forth prepared for every social emergency. I somehow doubt if John Youtsey had much more than the clothes on his back.

If Nicholas Longworth was an amiable young man, and probably he was, he invited my great-great-great-grandfather to sit on the trunk with him, and together they came floating down the Ohio all the way from Pittsburgh, between two solid walls of timber.

This suggests Jim and Huckleberry Finn on the raft, though it was the Ohio, not the Mississippi, and the flatboat no doubt was considerably bigger. But they were subject to the same alternation of blue sky, white clouds, grey clouds, stormy weather. Sun burning through the fog. The sound of waves lapping on the shore of an island. A hawk wheeling, herons wading. The sad colors of daybreak. The excitement of smoke rising from the trees. Voices coming across the water. The Big Dipper and the Little Dipper, the Pleiades, and Cassiopeia’s Chair.

There is a legend in the family—my family, I mean—that John Youtsey was offered the land Cincinnati now stands on in exchange for his whiskey and molasses, and turned it down, on the grounds that it was a hog wallow, and went up the Licking River and raised strawberries. Something like that happened, if not exactly that. Nicholas Longworth settled in Cincinnati, and became a lawyer. Unlike other men of that profession he was willing to take land in
settlement of fees, and, since Cincinnati was rapidly changing from a village into a city, it wasn’t long before he was immensely wealthy. He also became a horticulturist of some importance. One of his discoveries was that in order to raise strawberries profitably the farmer had to use both male and female plants. So perhaps he was a friend of my great-great-great-grandfather and really did come down the Ohio with him on a flatboat, only my great-great-great-grandfather must have waited quite some time, until Nicholas Longworth made that discovery, before he started raising strawberries for the market in Cincinnati.

In 1844, his grandson, John C. Youtsey, bought a farm of 106 acres, at Cold Spring, in Campbell County. And at some point he took his family and went north into Illinois, in a covered wagon. He arrived in Postville on a Saturday night, and was so appalled by the drunkenness and the fistfights that he started back to Kentucky early the next morning. In 1855, still living on the farm at Cold Spring, he started to build a new house, of brick fired on the place. It was not finished when the war broke out.

My great-grandfather would not own slaves, Annette said, but his brother did, and went bankrupt because of this. At different times, both Union and Confederate troops camped in the grove in front of my great-grandfather’s house. He was a United States marshal, and my grandmother’s sister remembered their father being shot at twice, from ambush. Once when they were expecting a detachment of Southern forces, somebody sent a Negro servant out to bury the family silver. He didn’t return, and the silver was never found, though they dug and searched the place over, with a singular lack of suspicion, for years.

John C. Youtsey had four sons and three daughters. Three of the boys fought in the war, on the side of the North. Among the letters that have come down in the family
is one from my grandmother’s brother John, written in a fine copperplate hand, on lined notepaper.

Though she never saw him, my Aunt Annette remembers her mother’s saying that he was very handsome, with dark, reddish hair and a mustache.

He was the last of the brothers to get home, and when he walked up the drive in the middle of the night, the house was dark. A dog that had been a puppy when he left was now full grown and a fierce watchdog. It knew him and didn’t make a sound. He shinnied up a post and got into his room by way of the porch roof. But he had arrived in the midst of spring housecleaning, and his mother had emptied an upstairs bookcase and dumped the books on his bed. So when he started to get in between the covers, a pile of books he didn’t know was there fell on the floor and woke the entire household.

John C. Youtsey’s mother lived with them. She was Scottish—“a small but mighty person.” The same thing was said of John C. Youtsey’s wife, my great-grandmother. She was also a great reader. “Grandfather and the man would come in from the fields,” Annette said, “and she’d be sitting
with a book and the stove would be cold. When Mother was fourteen she took over the cooking, and her father never came in to a cold stove after that time. She was so beautiful that, when she took the ferry, the men who had just crossed over would cross again with her so they could look at her. She had black hair and big brown eyes, like your mother. When she looked at you with those eyes, you’d do anything in the world she asked.”

As bookkeeper of the pump factory, my grandfather made routine visits to the bank, and there he struck up an acquaintance with one of my grandmother’s brothers, who was a teller. He invited my grandfather home for the weekend, and after that, he came often. My Great-grandfather Youtsey was very strict in his observance of the Sabbath. The horses were turned out to pasture and the family walked to church. What they ate on Sunday was all cooked the day before. One Saturday, my great-uncle and my grandfather wolfed every scrap of food that had been prepared for the day of rest. I think it is likely that young Edward Blinn and Nettie Youtsey had an understanding before he left Cincinnati to practice law in Lincoln. It was several years before he was in a position to marry. My great-grandfather was distressed to learn that his daughter was being carried off to the very place where he had been so offended by rowdy and drunken behavior, but he did not forbid the marriage.