Thomas Ewing Jr.: Frontier Lawyer and Civil War General

13. Sweaty Old Coins and Last Hurrahs

uring the early s, in addition to his progression from moderate Republican to greenback Democrat, Tom Ewing tried to find his stride as an investor. Doing well in business had several advantages other than just making money. He had built a modest fortune from a collage of mining properties in New Mexico and Alabama along with farms in Kansas, Iowa, and Illinois. He purchased a bank in New Orleans, and he still owned an interest in the cotton farm in Arkansas. Behind his New York banker and investor Hamilton Fant and with a former Confederate staff officer and postwar power in West Virginia politics, R. H. Catlett, Ewing acquired coal and iron reserves near Anthony Creek in the Kanawha River valley and began all-out promotion of the area as he had done in Leavenworth before the war. There were rumors that Cornelius Vanderbilt and the Pennsylvania Central Railroad were interested in developing the region. The Ewing group would link their properties with the Penn Central. With his share of the family saltworks in Lancaster Tom’s private fortune was nearly $,.1 To the nineteenth-century American male, success in political endeavors usually first required success in a trade or business. The Gilded Age embodied the epitome of avarice, but it was from such materialism that leaders were molded.  13 SWEATY OLD COINS AND LAST HURRAHS D . Ewing’s holdings from Taylor, “Business and Political Career,” ; Catlett to TEJr., October , , EFP/LC.  THOMAS EWING JR. The s did not spawn political candidates from the lower classes. It was the ethos of the times that a tested business leader would gravitate to politics and public service. With the exception of men such as James Blaine and John Sherman, whom the presidential bug had bitten hard, few men considered holding public office to be a career. Candidates in the middle class might campaign for office just for the paycheck, but men of substance never thought that way. Obviously there were exceptions, but the Gilded Age ethos was that some gentlemen were to give public service, leave the country better than when they took office, then devote their years of wealth to their doting families and grandchildren. Tom Ewing wanted these things, too. The recession of  turned into a mini depression, however, and all of Ewingville was affected. Western states labeled the panic “the Crime of ’.” For two years the country stagnated. Iron prices dropped sharply, furnaces closed, and thousands lost their jobs. Coal lands valued at $ million in  deflated to $ million in . Cash was so rare that state scrip reemerged. While Ewing, Fant, and Catlett were each clairvoyant in the importance of the Kanawha to their fortunes, the recession limited the area’s growth until later in the century, after Ewing and Fant had been forced to sell their interests . By the political summer of  the railroad that Ewing controlled—the Atlantic & Lake Erie, later the Ohio Central—was on the verge of failure. He sought help abroad for the railroad, but new investors were scarce. On June , , he resigned as head of the railroad, deeply in debt. The family was hoarding funds, too, riding out the Panic of .2 Tom Ewing reached the summit of his career as a politician in the late s in the Congress. He found ready allies for greenback politics in Preston Plumb in the Senate and a fellow congressman from Kansas, former governor Sam Crawford . They advocated that the  Congress use the money earmarked for repayment of war bonds to build the transportation system in the West, so that immigration would expand the total economy, end the lingering recession, and more than repay the government’s investment. Congressman Tom Ewing served on the banking and currency committee during his first term, the “soft-money” committee of the Congress at that time. Additionally, Ewing felt it only proper that Eastern banking interests, steeped in hard-money policies of debt repayment, bear the burden of paying for the war through inflated money, since these same East- . Effect of the  Panic and his resignation from the railroad from David G. Taylor, “Hocking Valley Railroad Promotion in the s: The Atlantic and Lake Erie Railway,” , .  SWEATY OLD COINS AND LAST HURRAHS ern banks had also fueled the slave economy in the South that had brought on the war. Monetary fights in Congress were watched also by the Supreme Court. Salmon Chase had argued in the legal tender cases earlier...