EDWIN CHANNING LARNED
1820 - 1884
by
Francis Even
Delivered to The Chicago Literary Club
April 17, 2000
© F.A. Even 1999
The man who is the subject of this paper was the eighth president of the Chicago Literary Club, serving for the Club year 1881-82. While not the least of the many reasons for remembering him, it is only incidental to his outstanding career at the bar of Chicago and in public service to our city in its formative years, and to the nation throughout the Civil War.
My motivation to examine the life and times of Edwin C. Larned stems from the further incidental fact that he was a founding member of my law firm, which has existed as a continuous law partnership in Chicago since its formation by Larned and the Messrs. Goodwin in 1859. The investigation of its history necessarily called up Edwin Channing Larned.
Lest it concern this audience that this paper might be the unappreciated vehicle of self-aggrandizement of our law firm, let me assure you that my subject is Edwin C. Larned to the exclusion of his legal successorship other than his son, Walter C. Larned, with whom he practiced in his twilight years, but only after severing connection with the firm he had co-founded in 1859. Walter C. Larned, it turns out, was also a most active member of this Club, serving as Chairman of Arrangements and Exercises in 1884-85, and of Rooms and Finance in 1882-83 and 1885-86, and contributing more than most to its archival collection of member papers.
That disclaimer made, and that assurance given, I proceed to Edwin Channing Larned, pictured on the easel before you in an etching showing the man in his mature years. His oil portrait, painted by Lawrence C. Earle, of Chicago, was donated to the Club by his son Walter, presented on the occasion of the Club's Second Ladies Night, March 23, 1885, in a presentation address by Gen. Alexander C. McClurg. (1) While I have not verified its continued presence in the Club archives, I should like very much to find it, and to try to arrange to have it copied photographically for the benefit of my law firm, which shall continue to remain nameless.
Edwin Channing Larned was born on July 14, 1820 in Providence, Rhode Island, into the family of John S. and Lucinda Martin Larned, the seventh of eleven children ultimately born to that couple. His father was a respected merchant of Providence, and his mother a woman of letters who authored several published books. Like his brothers before him, he received his preparatory education at private schools in Providence, and was Phi Beta Kappa at Brown University from which he was graduated in 1840. (2)
Having been engaged as a professor of mathematics by Kemper College, an Episcopal school near St. Louis, young E. C. Larned promptly set off for the West. (3) As he had not seen Chicago until his return from Missouri in the following year, his probable route to St. Louis was by rail and stage through New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, to Wheeling, Virginia and then via the Ohio River to the Mississippi, and up to St. Louis. That, in any event, was the route followed three years later by former Massachusetts Governor "Honest John" Davis for his 1843 inspection of the abandoned, partially dug Illinois-Michigan Canal. (4)
Returning to Providence in 1841 after the school term in Missouri, Larned traveled to Chicago by stagecoach on the first leg of his trip and for his first visit to the city, (5) which then numbered 5,752 people. (6) With the lakes then open, he presumably continued homeward bound by lake vessel as far as Buffalo, by rail to Albany, continuing by water to New York City and home.
Chicago had no rail connection eastward in 1841.
His brother-in-law, Joseph T. Ryerson, who had arrived in Chicago from Philadelphia in 1842, described that route in detail in his reminiscences: (7)
"Our usual route at that time between Chicago and the East, during the season of lake navigation, used to be, back and forth, steam-boat around the lakes to Buffalo, rail to Albany and river steamer to New York, occupying from six to eight days, according to the weather on the lakes and the necessary stoppages of the boats at the ports along the lakes to land and take on passengers and freight.
"The run from Chicago to Buffalo usually occupied three and a half to four days. The journey from Buffalo to Albany was tedious and wearisome. The railroad was a single track, strap-rail road, and the rate of speed, being many stopping places, about twenty miles an hour. There were some five distinct corporations or roads between Albany and Buffalo, each road terminating at some one of the principal towns--disconnected, at some points the termini being on opposite sides of the town, involving a change of cars and baggage, and there being no system of checking, each passenger was obliged to go to the depot, look out for his trunks and direct where they were to be sent--to the next road running towards Buffalo or to a hotel, then getting into an omnibus, or walking, he reached the next train of cars, and thus, repeating the changes as he came to another terminus, finally reached Albany, where he took a Hudson river steamer for New York."
As young Larned's impressions of Chicago on his arrival in 1841, if ever transcribed, have not survived, those of Ex-Governor John Davis of Massachusetts, recorded in his diary at the conclusion of his canal inspection two and a half years later, (8) may suffice:
"Jany 11th (1844, Ed.) Thursday.
* * * * * "This city shewed itself some six or seven miles distant across a low level prairie of one uniform surface apparently as level as the lake. Its spires rose like an oasis to relieve the eye from the blank uniformity of the surrounding scenery. The distance from Summit is twelve miles. The town is new, laid out in parallel streets and stands upon the bank of the lake elevated a few feet above it. Behind it is this vast outstretched level prairie, terminated at the west by the valley of the Des Plaines from which the blue tops of the trees appear in the horizon, about twelve miles distant.
"The little river passes through the city and constitutes the only harbor and safe anchorage for vessels. The streets are broad and uniform looking out either upon the expanse of prairie or of water and are filled with adhesive mud. The pavements and flaggings are of plank which in the more business portions enable pedestrians to get about with some share of convenience.
"The navigation of the lakes appears to be chiefly suspended in winter, making business comparatively dull, though when the roads permit, large quantities of wheat and other products are brought in for shipment.
"The trade of this place is considerable and increasing as it is a principal depot on this lake.
"The canal will also have a tendency to aid its prosperity."
While his seasoned fellow New Englander was engaged in assessing the remaining construction cost and commercial prospects of the Illinois Michigan Canal for European financiers who had earlier bought State of Illinois bonds for the construction of the canal, then in default, Larned was back in Providence studying law in the office of, and under the tutelage of, Albert Collins Greene, then and since 1825 the Attorney General of the State of Rhode Island. (9) Greene was elected its U.S. Senator in 1844, shortly after his protégé was admitted to the bar. (10)
It may be assumed that this privileged connection derived from a pre-existing mutual regard of the families, for Larned's uncle, Samuel M. Larned, in the foreign service of the United States in Spain and South America, had married A. C. Greene's oldest daughter, Katharine Celia, on October 1, 1837, (11) and Larned's older brother, Russell M. Larned, born in 1817, had married A. C. Greene's next older daughter, Mary Elizabeth, on October 16, 1837. (12) It could not have been a surprise to anyone, therefore, when, on September 4, 1849, Edwin Channing Larned married Ann Frances Greene, A. C. Greene's youngest daughter, (13) and brought his bride back to Chicago, where he had established himself, his widowed mother, and his younger sister Ellen, two years earlier.
It may be noted, as an aside, that Larned's sister, Ellen Griffin Larned, was wooed and wed in Chicago in 1848 by successful iron merchant Joseph T. Ryerson, earlier of Philadelphia and then 35 years old, to begin the noted Chicago family dynasty of that name. (14)
However, in the interim before he removed from Providence to Chicago in 1847, Larned had been enrolled as an attorney at law by the Supreme Court of Rhode Island in the September Term of 1843. (15) He promptly entered the office of Attorney Richard Ward Greene, of Providence. (16) Richard Greene was a cousin of Larned's mentor Albert C. Greene, and U.S. Attorney for the District of Rhode Island, a post he had held for nineteen years before becoming Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Rhode Island in 1848. (17)
While in that early employ, Edwin C. Larned assisted Richard Greene and Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts, in preparing the Lexington case, (18) a case in admiralty dismissed by the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, reversed by the Circuit Court for that district, whom the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, The New Jersey Steam Navigation Company, Respondents and appellants, v. The Merchants' Bank of Boston, Libellants, 6 Howard 344; 16 U.S. 722 (December Term 1847). The case involved the loss by fire of the coastal steamer Lexington off Huntington Light in Long Island Sound on January 13, 1840, some fifty miles out of New York City bound for Providence. Larned's interest in the case was no doubt heightened by the loss at sea on that occasion of William Albert Greene, the only son of his mentor and future father-in-law, Albert C. Greene. (19)
Larned's excellent connections may also have accounted for his clerkship of the Rhode Island House of Representatives in its October, 1846, and January and May, 1847 sessions, (20) one of the bodies that had elected his mentor, Albert C. Greene, to the U.S. Senate in October 1844.
In a memorial to Larned addressed to a meeting of the Chicago Historical Society three months after his death in 1884, his former partner, Daniel Goodwin, Jr., gave this description of the young Larned when he arrived in Chicago in September 1847: (21)
"He was at that time very tall and slender, but enjoyed good health; had a voice of great volume and power, and exceedingly rich and mellow in tone; and was possessed of an exuberant imagination and great command of language."
Shortly after arriving in Chicago, Larned joined in partnership with Cyrus Bentley, a fellow alumnus of Brown, as Larned & Bentley, with offices at 117 Lake Street, which placed them at the southwest corner of Lake and Dearborn Streets.
Their advertisement in the Advertisers Directory section of Norris' Chicago Directory for 1848-49 (inset), proclaiming them Commissioners of Deeds for numerous states of the country's northern tier, reflects the fact that Chicago was settled initially by influx from the Northeast, with which the new Chicago residents nevertheless retained legal ties.
The 1841 population of 5,752 persons had quintupled by 1850 (28,269) (22) and was rising exponentially, bringing ample legal work to these two enterprising, capable young Eastern lawyers.
Their earliest recorded appearance in a litigated matter was in the Illinois Supreme Court in The President and Manager of the New Hope Delaware Bridge Company v. Theodore Perry and Boville Shumway, 11 Ill. 357, in the June 1850 term of court at Ottawa, Illinois. In this appeal, they successfully defended a judgment they had obtained below in Cook County Circuit Court in the previous year.
Their opponents were Arnold & Lay, namely Hon. Isaac N. Arnold, former Illinois legislator, and George W. Lay, two gentlemen with whom Larned would later become associated.
In the latter part of 1850, Larned launched himself on the public scene of Chicago by a remarkable speech challenging the Fugitive Slave Law, enacted by Congress that year at the urging of Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, as part of a North/South compromise on the status of slavery in the territory wrested by the United States from Mexico in the Mexican War. The Law was bitterly opposed by Abolitionists, well numbered among the Eastern emigrants to Chicago, whose Common Council courageously declared the federal law null and void, and unenforceable in the City of Chicago. Senator Douglas, on a visit to the City in October, 1850, gave a well-attended speech in support of the Law aimed at quieting persisting objection to it. His speech was delivered at the City Hall and Market, also known as "Metropolitan Hall" or "Market Hall", then the important gathering place in Chicago. The brick structure actually stood in the middle of State Street, at Randolph, and housed a large hall from which it took its name. Two days later, on October 25, 1850, Edwin C. Larned delivered his impassioned denunciation of the Fugitive Slave Act from the same podium, refuting Sen. Douglas point by point, and showing the audience that a freed slave was denied even the semblance of due process to prove his freed status against anyone prepared to swear out a claim of ownership before a United States Commissioner.
In the emotional atmosphere of that day in Chicago, Larned's speech attracted the attention of a group of prominent men of the City who requested that Larned transcribe his speech that they might publish it. They numbered among them two well-known lawyers, Hon. Isaac N. Arnold, a former member of the Legislature, and George Manierre, both prominent in the Free Soil movement and shortly to become moving forces in the birth of the Republican Party. Ironically, perhaps, Larned's speech was printed on the "steam presses" of The Democrat, (23) the Chicago newspaper edited, owned, and published at 45 LaSalle Street by the legendary "Long John" Wentworth, prominent Jacksonian Democrat later elected Chicago's mayor in March 1857. Wentworth, who had named his newspaper building "Jackson Hall", broke with Senator Douglas over the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and later realigned himself as a Republican for a second successful run for Mayor of Chicago in 1860.
In three short years after his move to Chicago, Larned thus became known to an important segment of the public life of the City.
His partnership with Cyrus Bentley ended shortly thereafter, from undetermined causes. After the break-up with Cyrus Bentley, Larned first entered into an equally short-lived partnership with John Woodbridge Jr. in 1852, with offices at the corner of Randolph and Dearborn. (24)
In 1855, Larned was invited into partnership with Isaac Arnold in Arnold, Larned & Lay, at 10 Dearborn Street, (25) the attorneys he and Bentley had bested in their first appearance in the Illinois Supreme Court.
In the same year, George Manierre associated Larned with him for the defense of a black man to whom a claim of ownership was made in Chicago before U.S. Commissioner George W. Meeker, alleging that the man was a fugitive slave. Manierre, the senior lawyer, delegated Larned to handle the hearing. It was held in the third floor salon of the so-called Saloon Building, on the southeast corner of Lake and Clark Streets, then serving as the courtroom of the Hon. Thomas Drummond, U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Illinois, newly-formed when Congress divided the State into two federal judicial districts on February 13, 1855. The room also served the Circuit Justice, Associate Supreme Court Justice John McLean of Cincinnati, when he was in Chicago to hear Circuit Court cases, and was used for all federal judicially related functions of the District.
Larned's well attended argument on behalf of the alleged fugitive slave resulted in his discharge by the Commissioner. An eye-witness described the scene:
"The hall was densely packed when the decision was made, the crowd extending, in solid mass, from the court-room, in the third story, which was filled, through the halls and stairways to the street below.
"The Commissioner's decision was received with the wildest cheers and excitement, and the colored man was passed at once over the heads of the crowd out of the court-room and down the stairways to the street, and in an incredibly short space of time was on his way to Canada, out of reach of process or pursuit by the claimant." (26)
In that very courtroom, in December, 1855, Larned and Grant Goodrich, a prominent early Chicago lawyer and judge (and, incidentally, a co-founder of Northwestern University), successfully defended the first ever patent infringement action tried in Chicago, Pitts v. Wemple, 19 Fed. Cases 762 (Cir. Ct., N. Dist. of Ill., Dec. 1855). The patent, No. 542, had been issued on December 29, 1837, to Hiram A. and John A. Pitts, and was granted for a stationary threshing machine, operated by a so-called "horsepower", namely, a horse-operated treadmill. The case was tried in Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois before Judge Drummond and a jury. The final report of the case consists in large part of Judge Drummond's charge to the jury, which returned for the defendant, and shows how little the basic principles of U.S. Patent Law have changed in a century-and-a-half.
In the following year, in the October 1856 term of the Circuit Court for the Northern District, and while Larned continued in the Arnold, Larned & Lay partnership, his name became linked for the first time with that of Stephen A. Goodwin, then of Detroit, who engaged Larned as co-counsel for the plaintiff in Foss et al. v. Herbert, 9 Fed. Cases 503. Grant Goodrich, Larned's co-counsel the previous year in the defense of Pitts v. Wemple, defended Herbert. Goodwin and Larned prevailed on the infringement issue, tried to Judge Drummond and a jury as a special jury-triable issue segregated from the principal action in chancery to enjoin the defendant's infringement of the patent.
Arnold withdrew from the Arnold Larned & Lay partnership in 1858 to resume his political career, this time as a Republican, and made an unsuccessful run for Congress. The traditional Democrats of Chicago were too strong for the fledgling Republican and retained the incumbent Democrat. Arnold's turn would come two years later, on Abraham Lincoln's coattails.
The goodwill of Isaac Arnold, as we shall see, was an important asset to Larned's career. The residual partnership of Larned & Lay was dissolved shortly after Arnold's withdrawal, and Larned joined forces in 1859 with Stephen A. Goodwin and his nephew, Daniel Goodwin, Jr., both newly arrived from Detroit, styling their law partnership Goodwin Larned & Goodwin. (27) It was probably an outgrowth of their earlier successful joint appearance for the plaintiff in the 1857 Chicago patent case of Foss v. Herbert, involving a planing mill patent of 1828.
Apparently acquiring a reputation for skill in patent matters, Goodwin and Larned were retained by Cyrus H. McCormick in 1859 to defend a charge by one Obed Hussey that McCormick infringed the patent on his vibrating sickle-bar improvement of reapers, Hussey v. McCormick et al., 12 Fed. Cases 1063. They lost. McCormick was enjoined, and ordered by Judge McLean, Circuit Justice, to account before a special master to determine damages.
As Chicago was the terminal of the underground railroad which ran from west to east across northern Illinois, it was perhaps inevitable that Larned, known for his outspoken opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law, should become involved in the defense of Abolitionist John Hossack of Ottawa, Illinois, indicted with seven other men of Ottawa for rescuing a fugitive slave from the custody of a deputy U.S. Marshal at the LaSalle County Courthouse in Ottawa.
The fugitive slave, Jim Gray, had escaped from the Missouri farm of his master near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and fled into southern Illinois, where he was fairly promptly captured by a couple of slave catchers, and wound up in the county jail of Union County, at Jonesboro, while the slave catchers advertised for his owner. A sympathetic schoolmaster, thwarted in his attempt to arrange locally for the release of the slave, traveled to Ottawa and obtained from Chief Justice John Caton a writ of habeas corpus to the sheriff of Union County to produce the slave at Ottawa for a hearing on the validity of his detention.
By circumstances too complicated to relate in detail, the deputy sheriff charged with bringing the slave up to Ottawa for the hearing was further deputized a U.S. Marshal while en route. At the hearing, Judge Caton discharged the slave from state custody but remanded him to the custody of the deputy sheriff for return to Springfield for hearing under the federal Fugitive Slave Law, and the kiss of death to his freedom.
When the principals left the hearing room at the courthouse in Ottawa, the milling crowd separated the deputy sheriff cum deputy marshal from the slave, who had been unshackled for the hearing. The slave was spirited out the back door of the courthouse to a waiting carriage which was driven off at a gallop to a relay a few miles distant, from which the slave was eventually passed to Chicago and ultimately to Canada.
This affront to the majesty of Federal law could not be ignored by U.S. Attorney Henry Fitch, the young (24) son of Indiana democratic Senator Graham Fitch, of Logansport, a staunch supporter of President Buchanan's policy of appeasing the southern states away from their threatened secession. Mr. Fitch duly obtained indictments which were brought to trial before Judge Drummond in Chicago on Leap Year Day, 1860. (28)
Appearing for the defense were Hon. Burton C. Cook of Ottawa, Hon. Isaac Arnold of Chicago, Hon. Joseph Knox of Rock Island, and Stephen Goodwin and Edwin Larned of Chicago. This array of legal talent prompted young Mr. Fitch to appeal to President Buchanan's Attorney General, Jeremiah S. Black, for authority to hire some legal horsepower of his own, on the grounds that he was confronting a phalanx of "four of the most distinguished Republican Lawyers of the State...with the full determination to employ all their legal ingenuity and disingenuousness, learned quibble, and ad captandum harangue, in shielding (the defendants) from the penalty of their acts." The Attorney General bucked the request to President Buchanan, shortly after which the Attorney General telegraphed Mr. Fitch that he was "authorized to employ counsel as you proposed." (29)
Mr. Fitch needn't have been concerned, however, as Judge Drummond's instructions on the law after the five-day trial left little room for flexibility, and those of the defendants who were tried were convicted. Larned's speech to the jury in defense of the second defendant tried endeared him to the Abolitionist cause, which preserved the speech for posterity by publishing it along with the Hossack trial transcript, which otherwise should have burned with the Federal Courthouse in the Great Fire of 1871.
Two months after the Fugitive Slave Law prosecutions in Chicago, Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president by the Republican Convention in Chicago, and elected that November. He carried Isaac Arnold into office as Chicago's U.S. Representative and Arnold promptly backed Edwin C. Larned for U.S. District Attorney of the Northern District of Illinois, with the widespread support of the Chicago bar, in derogation of Hon. Joseph Knox of Rock Island, favored by Arnold's Congressional colleagues Owen Lovejoy, Elihu Washburne, and Representative Kellogg. (30)
Larned was appointed U.S. Attorney on March 28, 1861. On receipt of his commission, his first act was to request leave to defer his oath of office to allow U.S. Attorney Fitch to complete a grand jury hearing in progress (Larned's letter to Attorney General Bates, April 9, 1861). On Friday, April 12, 1861, Fort Sumter was fired on and on Monday, April 15th, Larned, then age 40, swore his oath of office as U.S. Attorney before Judge Drummond, and forwarded it that day to Attorney General Edward Bates. (31)
As U.S. Attorney during this period, Larned was much concerned with matters arising from the War. The legal matters ranged from carrying on an injunction proceeding against the Chicago and Moline Water Power Co. to remove a dam on the Mississippi that was claimed by the Army to be interfering with operation of the Rock Island Arsenal; confiscation of rebel-owned property in the Northern District of Illinois; defense of an army captain who had shot and killed an interloper who resisted effort to expel him from a troop train; advising the federal tax collector in matters arising under the new income tax law passed as a wartime revenue measure; and the prosecution of evaders of the 1863 draft. (32)
In addition to his duties as U.S. Attorney, whose war-related activities required travel to Washington and St. Louis, among other places, Larned was also heavily involved, along with U.S. District Judge Thomas Drummond and others, in the ad hoc Union Defense Committee, stumping the area for enlistments, raising and equipping military units for federal service, and visiting Chicago area troops in their training encampments in the Chicago area and Downstate. (33)
The constancy of his official and unofficial activity ultimately took its toll on his health, and he was advised by his physicians to retire fully from his feverish activity for an extended period of travel out of the country. (34) He therefore sought leave of absence, which was granted him early in 1863, after his partner, Stephen A. Goodwin, was appointed acting U.S. Attorney on Larned's recommendation. The post of U.S. Attorney in those earlier days well before the creation of the Department of Justice in 1870, was a fee-for-service office, with neither salary nor staff nor quarters provided by the Government. Larned had worked out of his own office and recommended his partner Goodwin as acting U.S. Attorney not only as a seasoned trial lawyer, but also because of his intimate acquaintance with Larned's exercise of his official duties. Goodwin was endorsed by Hon. Thomas Drummond to be Acting U.S. Attorney in Larned's absence. (35)
It was at about the time when Larned sought leave of absence for health reasons that President Lincoln nominated him for a judgeship on the commission in Sierra Leone established by the treaty of April, 1862, with Her Britannic Majesty to contain the African Slave Trade. Larned declined, for the same health reasons. (36)
His partner, Stephen Goodwin, became quickly involved as acting U.S. Attorney, assisting the command at Camp Douglas on the South Side, then used as a Prisoner of War Camp, in preparing to deal with an expected rescue attempt by Confederate forces invading out of Canada; (37) and also with a short-lived constitutional crisis when Major General Ambrose Burnside, then commanding the Military District of the Ohio, headquartered at Cincinnati, and encompassing the Military District of Illinois, ordered the closing of the Chicago Times for its seditious activities against the Union, and sent troops into the newspaper to execute the order. (38)
That one was short-lived, as President Lincoln, urged by a delegation of highly-placed Chicagoans, had General Burnside rescind his order.
Larned appears to have returned to his post in the early part of 1864, but his declining health prompted him to submit his resignation in the latter part of the year. Given the tension in the Federal government in the waning months of that election year, it is perhaps not surprising that his resignation should have been sidetracked. Therefore, when Stephen Goodwin was in Washington to argue in the Supreme Court on January 17, 1865, he called upon the President to request his attention to Larned's resignation. After looking into it, the President wrote Goodwin on January 18, 1865, at the Supreme Court Room of the Capitol, saying: (39)
"Since talking with you I have concluded to appoint a successor to Mr. Larned at once. This is not because of any change of feeling for, or estimate of, Mr. Larned."Yours truly,
"A. Lincoln"
The foregoing account of chronological highlights of the legal career of Edwin C. Larned from his early days in Chicago to and through the Civil War has not touched his many public-spirited efforts for the improvement of life and living conditions in the City of Chicago, beginning as early as 1850.
In that year, he worked in association with Hon. John M. Wilson to draft legislation incorporating the "Chicago City Hydraulic Company," approved February 14, 1851, under which the Chicago Water Works were constructed. (40)
In 1854, after a second outbreak of cholera in the city, Larned brought public attention to the defective condition of the city's sewerage. He procured a call for a public meeting, at which he was appointed chairman of a committee to prepare a bill to remedy the evil. Larned drafted the bill, which became law and governed the creation of a system of sewerage which served the city for many years. Larned served as attorney to the Board of Sewerage Commissioners organized under that act, and served in that capacity until that Board was merged into a broader-based Board of Public Works created under subsequent legislation. (41)
In those same early years, while serving as one of the Inspectors of Public Schools, he became impressed with the need for a Superintendent of Public Schools, and in the fall of 1853, drew up an ordinance creating that office. He and the other inspectors urged its adoption by the Common Council, which passed the ordnance and gave the power of appointment to the Board of Inspectors. The duty of finding a suitable person for the post fell upon Larned and resulted in the appointment of John C. Dore as the first superintendent, who served ably and did much to improve the public schools. (42)
Larned's faith in the schools was demonstrated by educating his own children there and justified by the later success of his Harvard-educated lawyer son Walter, earlier mentioned, who was graduated from the Chicago High School in 1867. (43)
Maintaining his interest in the public works of the city, particularly its sanitation, he devoted much time and effort during 1864 and '65 to call attention to the need to improve the condition of the Chicago River. In this effort, he wrote articles for the public press and addressed a meeting called to consider the subject, which resulted in the creation of a committee of leading citizens of which Larned was one. The vigorous efforts of that group resulted in modification of the City Charter appointing Special Commissioners to complete the connection between Lake Michigan and the Illinois River and to reverse the flow of the Chicago River to cleanse and purify its unsanitary condition. It was a small beginning, indeed, and it took a typhoid epidemic in the 1870's, with many thousands of deaths, to persuade the Congress of the need to respond. An incessant rain of several days had carried the pollution of the river out to the intake crib of the city's proud water works to contaminate the water supply. The solution lay in the gigantic public works project started in the 1890's, which gave us the Sanitary and Ship Canal and the system of locks that reversed the Chicago River under the control of the Corps of Engineers, supervised by the United States Supreme Court for the protection of our sister States which border Lake Michigan, and are affected by the withdrawal of Lake Michigan's water to flush Chicago's sewage effluent down the Illinois River.
Larned was no less active on the side of charity, serving as a founder and trustee of Dearborn Seminary, a trustee and supporter alike of St. Luke's Hospital and the Eye and Ear Infirmary, and a founder and first incorporator of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society in 1857. (44) The same spirit prompted him, in 1856, together with his brother-in-law, Joseph T. Ryerson, to organize a mechanical bakery to supply bread at low cost to the less fortunate of the city, and which became a supplier of bread and hard tack to the Union Army of the West in the first year of the Civil War. (45)
The very scope of Larned's civic and charitable activity bespeaks a man of conscience and of religious conviction. In his case, he was active in the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, a vestryman in the Church of the Holy Communion, started as a missionary church in the heart of the city by his friend, the Rev. Henry B. Whipple, who later became a most eminent bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church.
A remarkable aspect of Larned's life, as active as he was in public and civic affairs up to the time of his health setback during the War, is that although frequently urged to stand for election to public office, he consistently declined. It was only at Isaac Arnold' strong urging, backed by the endorsement of a long list of Chicago lawyers and judges, that he allowed Arnold to propose his nomination to Lincoln as United States Attorney. He preferred to maintain an active interest in public affairs as a private citizen, although he exerted himself extensively in canvassing for the election of his friend Arnold to Congress in 1858, 1860, and 1862.
His public life diminished after the Civil War, when Larned returned East to live when his son entered Harvard College. He returned to the city in the wake of the Great Fire of 1871, and promptly turned himself to the work of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society which he had earlier helped to organize. In 1872, he spoke publicly for the passage of the Chicago Relief Bill pending before Congress to prevent the price-gouging on the cost of construction material that threatened to slow the reconstruction of the devastated city.
In time, as his son completed his legal education, Edwin C. Larned resumed professional life in Chicago, where father and son practiced together as E.C. and W.C. Larned, with offices in the post-Fire McCormick Building at Randolph and Dearborn.
Larned had earlier built his home on Rush Street and Indiana Street, later renamed Grand Avenue. It stood on the northwest corner of that intersection and was apparently comfortably in keeping with the man's circumstances of modest wealth derived from his practice and his early investment in Chicago real estate. Of his home life, his former partner, Daniel Goodwin, Jr. (also a member of this Club), was moved to effuse, in his memorial address to a meeting of the Chicago Historical Society in December, 1881, with the Hon. Elihu Washburne presiding:
"Of his domestic life I dare not trust myself to speak, even in this place, within a stone's-throw of his home for twenty-five years, and in the presence of none but his neighbors and friends. Shall we any of us ever forget that ideal home, where absolute purity and religion were made attractive by liberal hospitality, the heartiest humor, the tenderest courtesy, and the highest range of poetical thought and culture?" (46)
Hardly was a man more productive for the common good of the people of Chicago than E.C. Larned, but even as he assigned himself these heavy responsibilities, it was said of him that:
"To meet him on the street on the darkest or gloomiest day was like a sudden burst of sunshine. His beaming cordiality not only lighted up his own countenance, but called out all latent warmth from the hearts of his friends. Those who remember him as president of the Anonymous Club or the Literary Club will recall his hearty and sympathetic laugh, always the first and the loudest, never laughing at anyone, but always with one, in joyous sympathy." (47)
Edwin Channing Larned succumbed to his heart ailment on September 18, 1884, while visiting the home of his son in Lake Forest. Interment was in Graceland Cemetery.
His productive life of sixty-four years is well worth our remembering.
1. "The Chicago Literary Club; The First Hundred Years," p. 64 (1974). "In Memory of Edwin C. Larned," McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1886, p. 67 et seq.; Special Collections, Chicago Public Library.
2. "Biographical Sketches of the Leading Men of Chicago," Wilson & St. Clair, Chicago, 1868, p. 537 et seq. (Chicago Historical Society).
3. Id.
4. Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society, 1943, p. 41.
5. Supra, Note 2.
6. Fergus' Directory of the City of Chicago (published 1876), p. 3.
7. "On the Way to Our Second 125 Years," Jos. T. Ryerson & Son, Inc., 1967, p. 14.
8. Supra, Note 4, pp. 68-69.
9. Supra, Note 2; "The Greenes of Rhode Island," L. B. Clarke, New York, 1903, p. 338 (The Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, Rhode Island).
10. Id. "The Greenes of Rhode Island (etc.)."
11. Id. at p. 509.
12. Id.
13. Id.
14. "In Memoriam: Joseph T. and Ellen Griffin (Larned) Ryerson" (Chicago Historical Society).
15. Roll of Attorneys, Supreme Court of Rhode Island, Book 14, p. 489.
16. Supra, Note 2, p. 538.
17. Supra, Note 9, "The Greenes of Rhode Island (etc.)," p. 335.
18. "Industrial Chicago," Vol. VI, "The Bench and Bar," Goodspeed Publishing Co., Chicago, 1896, pp. 62 et seq. (Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield).
19. Supra, Note 9, "The Greenes of Rhode Island (etc.)," p. 339.
20. Rhode Island Schedules, October 1846, May 1847, October 1847.
21. Supra, Note 1, "In Memory of Edwin C. Larned (etc.)," p. 15.
22. Supra, Note 6.
23. "Speech of Edwin C. Larned, Esq. (etc.)," October 25, 1850 (Chicago Historical Society).
24. Udall & Hopkins' Chicago City Directory for 1852 & '53, published 1852, Chicago (Chicago Historical Society).
25. "1855-56, The Chicago City Director and Business Advertiser" (Chicago Historical Society).
26. Supra, Note 2, pp. 539-540.
27. "D. B. Cooke & Co.'s City Directory for the Year 1859-60" (Chicago Historical Society).
28. "Trial of John Hossack," U.S. Dist. Ct., N.D. Ill., February 28, 1860, Press & Tribune, Chicago, 1860. Transcript of trial, by R. R. Hitt, Reporter.
29. Letter, Henry S. Fitch to Jeremiah S. Black, Attorney General, Jan. 9, 1860; Telegran, Feb. 11, 1860, Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black to U.S. District Attorney Henry S. Fitch; National Archives, Record Group 60, Letters received by Attorney General; same, telegrams from Attorney General.
30. Letters: Arnold to Lincoln, March 7, 1861; same, March 9; same, March 18; same, March 25, National Archives, R.G. ___, Letters to A. Lincoln re appointment of District Attorney, N.D. Illinois.
31. Letter, Larned to Bates, April 9, 1861; same, April 15, 1861; National Archives, Letters Received by the Attorney General, 1809-70, R.G. 60, Box 2, Folder "N.D. Illinois."
32. Letters, Larned to Edward Bates, Attorney General, 1861-63, National Archives, RG-60, Letters Received by Attorney General 1801-1870.
33. Supra, Note 1, "In Memory of Edwin C. Larned (etc.)," pp. 24-27.
34. Id., p. 32.
35. Letters: Larned to Bates, Attorney General, January 28, 1863; Drummond to Bates, Attorney General, February 4, 1863, National Archives, RG 60, Letters received by the Attorney General.
36. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Basler, 1963, Vol. ____, p. ___.
37. Telegram, Attorney General to District Attorneys at Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee, November 12, 1863.
38. War of the Rebellion; Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Chapter XXXV, pp. 252, 385, 386.
39. Supra, Note 37, Vol. VIII, p. 221.
40. Supra, Note 1, "In Memory of Edwin C. Larned (etc.)," p. 15.
41. Id., p. 16.
42. Id.
43. Id.
44. Id.
45. Id., p. 17.
46. Id., p. 34.