Samuel Medary was a man of rugged personality

It’s often been asserted that Ohio was an extraordinarily loyal state during the Civil War.

Ohio sent more young men per capita to the Union Army than any other state, prompting President Abraham Lincoln to say, “Ohio has saved the Union.”

Yet, the war also had vigorous opposition. Many of the well-established families in Ohio had forebears who had come rom the South, and these people still had friends and relatives in the newly formed Confederacy. During the election of 1864, as the Civil War continued, many Ohioans had no use for Lincoln and his Republicans and voted for peace-seeking Democrats.

Much of the opposition to the war centered on the publication of newspapers against the war and the public addresses of their owners. Men like Clement Vallandigham ran for public office, saw his newspaper – The Dayton Journal – burned to the ground and he was imprisoned and eventually exiled to the Confederacy.

But even more hostile to the Union cause was the fiery and articulate Samuel Medary of Columbus. He was owner and operator of the Democratically inclined Ohio Statesman newspaper. As the war continued, Medary had sparked the outrage of Gen. Ambrose Burnside and his Department of Ohio by leaving the Statesman and publishing a new anti-war newspaper called The Crisis.

The Crisis was adamant in its opposition to the Civil War and unsparing in its criticism of Lincoln and the Republican Party.

But then being controversial was nothing new for Medary.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1801, he had come to Clermont County in Ohio in 1825. For a time, he rented a room in the home of the Simpson family, whose daughter married Jesse Grant and became the mother of the man who would become General Ulysses S. Grant, then a child of about 3 years old. Medary often remarked, “This boy will someday be president.”

With some friends, he began editing a newspaper called the Ohio Sun in Clermont County in 1828. The paper was openly Democratic in view and a strong supporter of Andrew Jackson. At the top of page one was its motto: “Unawed by the influence of the rich, the great or the noble, the people must be heard and their rights protected.”

Medary served three terms in the Ohio General Assembly, first as a representative and then two terms as a senator from the Clermont District. Coming to Columbus, he left the Ohio Sun behind, acquired a small paper called The Hemisphere and changed its name to the Ohio Statesman. Medary also became state printer, an affluent supporter of the Democratic Party, and with his wife and growing family, the owner of a fashionable country estate. It was called Northwood and was immediately north and east of the farm of William Neil, which would one day become the campus of Ohio State University.

Prominent in Ohio politics, Medary was offered the governorship of the Minnesota Territory in 1857. He accepted and served two years. He then served two years as the governor of the Kansas Territory. Returning to Columbus in 1860, he soon founded and was outspoken editor of The Crisis newspaper. His paper had many readers, but it also had many enemies. It soon became what one later account called “the most conspicuous Columbus publication of that period.”

“On the night of March 5, 1863, the office of The Crisis was mobbed by enraged citizens and soldiers. Numbering about 200 men, and evidently well-organized, the mob moved noiselessly through the heavily falling snow, late in the evening, to the corner of Gay and High streets, where the office of the offensive publication was located.

“Mr. Medary had gone to Cincinnati, on the afternoon train, and there was no one in the office to resist. … Doors were forced open, and windows were smashed. Books, furniture and fixtures were destroyed, and copies of The Crisis were scattered by the thousands in the streets. Eyewitnesses reported, though no published account so states, that Mrs. Henry Wilson, the daughter of Mr. Medary, forced her way through a line of guards to secure her father’s private papers, in which dangerous undertaking she was successful.

“Mr. Medary was not a man to be swerved from his purpose by a mob, and the tone of The Crisis continued as before. The feeling against the paper remained intense, but there was no further violence. … Upon his return to Columbus after the violence of March 5, he was met by his friends at the station and given an ovation.”

His health failing and the Union winning the war did not stop Medary or The Crisis. The fiery editor died Nov. 7, 1864, the night before Abraham Lincoln would be re-elected as president. He was buried in Green Lawn Cemetery. Over his grave is what a later account called “a costly and beautiful monument erected in 1869 by the Democracy of Ohio.”

That same account said Medary was a “sturdy partisan, a clear thinker, a vigorous and fearless writer, and a man of rugged personality.”

Local historian and author Ed Lentz writes the As It Were column for Thisweek Community News and The Columbus Dispatch.