The other Trump in history
The 45th chief executive of the United States isn’t the only historic politician who can lay claim to the name of Trump — at least in whole or as part of his last name. In the 19th century, Philadelph Van Trump (1810-1874) was an important politician from Ohio, his first name one of the most unusual in American political history.
To be sure, some records suggest that his given name was Philadelphus or Philadelphia, but his official account in the nation’s government archives reads Philadelph. Born in Lancaster, Ohio, Van Trump was the son of a tavern keeper who struggled in his trade, forcing Philadelph to drive even ox teams to raise funds for the family.
He eventually became a printer, then editor of a local paper. He read the law and was admitted to the bar in 1838. He married and became the father of eight children, including a son who became an environmentalist, one of the first to scale Mount Rainier in Washington state in 1870.
Van Trump had a difficult time deciding on a political party. At first, he was a Democrat, then a Whig (even a delegate to its convention in Baltimore in 1852) and also a member of the American Party that was anti-immigrant in its focus. In 1856, his American Party bid for the governor of Ohio resulted in only 10,000 votes in his favor, but because it was a close election, his candidacy took enough votes from the Democratic candidate so as to allow the first Republican to be elected to the post.
In 1862 Van Trump was elected a judge in his Ohio home county, and in the midst of the Civil War, was inundated with cases involving controversies of political officials trying to implicate one another in misdeeds. And he tried unsuccessfully to gain a seat on the Ohio Supreme Court in 1863, 1864 and 1865. But in 1867 he was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives where he served three consecutive terms, attracting little notice in his opposition to railroad subsidies. He did, however, make a speech against the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat who succeeded the assassinated Abraham Lincoln. He declined a fourth term because of failing health.
Van Trump’s claim to fame, however, was in his home area of Ohio where he was noted for his political oratory. For instance, on Aug. 12, 1867, he was the featured speaker of what was called “The Democratic [Party] Mass Meeting at Logan, Hocking County, Ohio.” His speech was entitled “The Great Duty of the Hour” and consumed more than an hour of the meeting’s agenda — probably a couple as it encompassed 15 double-column, small-type pages.
And it was filled with emotion. “Fellow citizens,” it began, “once more you are assembled to deliberate about the great questions of government which you and the friends of civil liberty throughout the world had too fondly hoped had been settled forever by your wise and patriotic forefathers.” Never before in the history of the nation, he went on, have there been “great and more momentous questions than now.” And what followed was a mindboggling analysis of the issues of the day against the backdrop of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
Van Trump’s obituary in major newspapers was described in uneventful terms, but the one near his home district, the Stark County Democrat, was expansive in its praise but incomplete in details about a specific law case:
“His career as a Judge was a marked one, and perhaps no jurist ever more completely commanded the respect of the bar. He was profoundly learned in the law, possessed iron firmness and the greatest suavity. The celebrated kidnapping case of Dr. [E. B.] Olds came before him, but he fearlessly enforced the law, although surrounded with bayonets and himself threatened with military arrest and imprisonment. But for the hasty intervention of the Supreme Court, he would have imprisoned Gov. [David] Tod under the kidnapping act.”
As for the obit’s final assessment — of Van Trump’s net worth — it concluded that “he died comparatively poor because he was too generous to accumulate wealth.”