From "HISTORY OF THE UPPER OHIO VALLEY,"  Vol. I, pages 241-246.
Brant & Fuller, 1890.


A. W. CAMPBELL

(*By Hon. George W. Atkinson) 

Hon. A. W. Campbell,* the subject of this sketch, is the son of of 
the late Dr. A. W. Campbell, of Bethany, Brooke Co., W.Va., and is 
was born in Jefferson county, Ohio, April 4, 1833. He removed to 
Bethany in his boyhood days and was educated at the well-known 
college there, graduating in 1852, when nineteen  years of age. He 
afterwards studied law, attended lectures at Hamilton College Law 
school, New York, and graduated from that institution in 1855.  He 
removed to Wheeling in the spring of 1856 as an attache of the DAILY 
INTELLIGENCER, then owned by Pendleton & Beatty, and in the fall of 
that year bought out that paper in partnership with John F. McDermot 
and became its editor.  At once the paper took ground in favor of 
liberal political principles, and soon allied itself with the then 
young but rapidly growing republican party. These were not the days 
of free speech on the slavery question on the soil of Virginia.  The 
influence of the eastern part of the state was predominant here in 
the west, albeit so many of the western counties had so few slaves, 
and to be a republican was but little better than being an out and 
out abolitionist, and to be an abolitionist was but little better 
socially and politically than to be tainted with crime.  All classes 
of society felt the despotic influence of slavery over their status.  
It made preachers timid in the pulpit, merchants and tradesmen timid 
in their business, and politicians timid and time-serving in there 
utterances. To be in accord with Richmond, with the pro-slavery press 
there, with the growing demands of the south in general for more 
slave territory, was the correct thing in politics and social life, 
and ambitious lawyers, editors and public men bowed their heads and 
knees at this shrine.  Wheeling and Ohio counties had then not more 
than 100 slaves.  This is the number given by the census of 1860.  
And yet the governing tone in politics and in society was but an echo 
of Richmond and old Virginia.  In the year in which the INTELLIGENCER 
began its career as the advocate of the right of all men to express 
and vote their political sentiments, the circuit judge of the 
Wheeling district charged a grand jury (in effect) that republicans 
were suspicious persons and obnoxious to the laws and institutions of 
Virginia.  Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York TRIBUNE, was 
deterred from delivering a conservative lecture in Wheeling on the 
issues of the day, because simply of incidental references in his 
address to the slavery question.  A Baptist minister of culture and 
high character left the city under the ban of this proscriptive 
opinion, because he taught colored children to read his Sunday-
school.  The circuit court of Harrison county issued a menacing edict 
against the reading of the NEW YORK TRIBUNE, and the club agent of 
that paper fled the state to escape indictment and imprisonment.  
Partisan postmasters, subservient to the Richmond despotism, withheld 
such papers as the New York CHRISTIAN ADVOCATE from their subscribers 
and were not rebuked by their superiors at Washington.  A valuable 
statistical book written by a natve of North Carolina, which 
discussed the economic phases of slavery, had to be read by stealth 
in Wheeling, and news-dealers were afraid to keep it on their 
shelves. They were threatened with indictment in the courts.  
Republican meetings were broken up by mobs and their processions 
stoned in the streets.  The had no adequate police protection.  
Cassius M. Clay, of Kentucky, was threatened with personal violence 
for coming to deliver an address in Wheeling that he had delivered in 
the heart of his own state, and the directors of the hall in which he 
was to speak deliberated whether it would be safe to open their doors 
to this eminent citizen.

These were the days and these the auspices under which Mr. Campbell 
began his career as the editor of the only republican daily paper in 
all the then vast area of Virginia.  A stout heart might well have 
quailed over the prospect.  Almost from the start the INTELLIGENCER 
was the constant target of the pro-slavery press of the state.  The 
Richmond press reproached Wheeling because such a publication was 
permitted to exist in her midst, and between these reproaches and the 
objurgations of influential persons and papers at home, it looked as 
if the fate of the enterprise was uncertain indeed.  But the paper 
lived, although in a precarious way for a time, and pursued such a 
fair, firm and conservative course that it gradually gained in 
influence and circulation, and when the great and exciting 
presidential canvass of 1860 opened it was fairly able to stand 
alone.  Mr. Campbell went as a delegate from Virginia, to the 
convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln for president, and 
returning home gave his candidacy an enthusiastic support.  Wheeling 
was the scene of many excitements that year.  There was no telling 
what a day would bring forth in the way of violence.  Eight hundred 
republican votes were polled in the county - mostly in the city of 
course - and these among the workmen in the iron mills.  About 3,000 
votes were polled in the state.  These were the nucleus of the Union 
organization that at a later day rallied to the defense of the 
nation, and the salvation of West Virginia from secession.  The local 
republican speakers of that day were Mr. Campbell, Alfred Caldwell 
and E. M. Norton.  They discussed the discriminations in favor of 
slavery, in the matter of taxation and the basis of representation in 
the legislature, and these were strong points that arrested public 
attention and made a decided popular impression.  Gov. Pierpont, 
although a Bell and Everett elector, discussed these issues from the 
same standpoint, and virtually made republican speeches. Public 
documents were issued and sent out among the peole showing how West 
Virginia was subordinated and injured in all her interests by eastern 
Virginia, and gradually the way was prepared for the new state 
movement that assumed practical shape at the very outset of the war - 
just as Daniel Webster predicted in 1851 would be the case in the 
event that Virginia ever allied herself with secession.  The history 
of the INTELLIGENCER during the war is the history of the Union and 
the new state cause.  They will all remain one and inseparable in the 
annals of West Virginia.  In all those years no one threw himself 
more earnestly, ably and untiringly into the support of both than Mr. 
Campbell.  Pres. Lincoln told Gov. Pierpont that it was a dispatch 
penned by Mr. Campbell that determined him to sign the bill (against 
the wishes of a part of his cabinet) that admitted West Virginia into 
the Union as a state.  The INTELLIGENCER was the right arm of the 
"Restored Government" of Virginia, and Mr. Campbell was the trusted 
counsellor and supporter of the Union authorities both in civil and 
military matters.  When the new state constitution was being framed 
he protested against the clause recognizing slavery, and predicted 
that congress would never consent to the formation of a second slave 
state out of the territory of Virginia, a prediction that was 
verified to the letter.  The constitution had to come back for 
amendment, and West Virginia was finally admitted as a free state.  
After the war the great problem of the political rehabilitation of 
the state had to be met.  There was an intense feeling among the rank 
and file of the Union element in favor of restricting the sufferage.  
All who had aided or abetted the rebellion were regarded as public 
enemies, dangerous to the results of the war and the public peace of 
society, and therefore not to be trusted with the ballot.  Mr. 
Campbell was forced to dissent from this view of many Union men.  He 
believed that such a policy would make an Ireland out of the state, 
produce endless discord and work to the infinite injury of all the 
material interests of the commonwealth.  He, therefore, prepared the 
celebrated "let up" address (as it was called) to the Union people of 
West Virginia, which was influentially signed, in these views were 
strongly discussed, and although there was wide-spread dissent on the 
part of many leading Union people, and some bitter criticisms at the 
moment, yet the sober second thought of the people endorsed the 
position thus taken, and at a later day it became, in substance, an 
amendment to our state constitution and as such was adopted by the 
people.

Mr. Campbell, although an original and unswerving republican, has not 
hesitated when the occasion arose to thus differ fromhis party.  He 
differed from them on the policy of the Greenback alliance and held 
that sound ideas on the currency of the government was a matter of 
such vital moment to the public welfare that the party could not 
afford to temporize for the sake of any campaign advantages.  He 
differed from a large and influential element of the party on the 
issue of the third term in the Grant movement of 1880, a difference 
that resulted in the memorable denouement in the Chicago convention 
of that year that is supposed to have paved the way to Garfield's 
nomination for president.  In that convention Senator Roscoe 
Conkling, who was the leader of the third term movement, sought by 
introduction of a resolution before the balloting begun, to commit 
the delegates in advance to a support of the nominee, whoever he 
might be.  Mr. Campbell, in an able and vigorous speech, opposed such 
unprecedented action.  Senator Conkling promptly offered a resolution 
proposing to expel Mr. Campbell from his position as a delegate in 
the convention.  Mr. Campbell obtained the floor and most ably 
defended the position he had conscientiously taken, and among other 
things gave utterance to the remark, which gave him a national 
reputation as a man of unusual courage and ability, viz.: "Whether in 
or out of this convention, I carry my sovereignty under my own hat."  
Mr. Conkling's resolution did not prevail.  "Upon Mr. Campbell's 
return to Wheeling a public mass meeting was held in the opera house, 
elaborate addresses indorsing his conduct in the convention were 
made, and he was publicly presented with a large oil painting 
representing the scene alluded to in the Chicago conventiion.  Mr. 
Campbell with all his prominence in the public affairs of West 
Virginia for a generation has never been a politician.  He has left 
the manipulaton of conventions and nominations to others.  He had no 
taste whatever in that direction, preferring to discuss public 
measures in his paper and on the hustings.  He has been largely voted 
for time and again for the United States senate, and there is no 
doubt had he so chosen he could have effected his own election.  But 
this he always declined to do, and because he did not no one ever 
heard him repine over the result, or saw him falter in his usual 
political course.  His name was urged by his friends for a position 
in President Garfield's 
cabinet.  His endorements were extensive, and came from the leading 
republicans from nearly every portion of the Republic.

Of late years he has given more attention to business interests than 
to politics.  He has been connected for many years with iron and 
steel manufacture, as president and director of one of the large 
works, but has always been ready to take up his pen or go before the 
people in advocacy of republican principles.  He was one of the three 
commissioners on the part of West Virginia to adjust the debt 
question with Virginia, and was charged with the duty of preparing a 
large part of the able report upon that question. He has from time to 
time delivered addresses on various subjects of public interest, and 
in 1887 prepared an interesting historical resume of the events, 
civil and political, that led to the formation of the state, and at 
the request of the Society of the Army  of West Virginia.

His familiarity with all matters relative to the tariff caused him to 
be sent to Washington as the representative of the Ohio Valley Steel 
association before the Ways and Means committee of congress.  But few 
Americans have studied the varied phrases of political economy as 
deeply and with the same amount of care and research that Mr. 
Campbell has given to them.  He seems to know the history of the 
great tariff question from A to Z. The writer has heard him make a 
large number of speeches upon that subject, and it was a rare thing 
for him to repeat himself.  Each address seemed to be a presentation 
of some new feature of the matter that he had not formerly 
considered.  He appeared to have stored away in his mamory a fund of 
information that was illimitable, and like a great spool, unraveled 
at his will.  It was said of his uncle, the great Bishop Alexander 
Campbell, that his mind was like a sponge - it absorbed everything 
with which it came in contact.  This is true to a very great extent 
of the subject of this sketch.  He is an industrious student, and 
possesses the power to retain what he reads.  His thorough knowledge 
of the great economic questions of the country, and his well-known 
fitness for the place, caused his friends to present his name to 
President Harrison for the vacancy on the Inter-state Commerce 
commission.  The most prominent men in the nation, representing 
upwards of three-fourths of the states of the Union, and embracing 
both of the leading political parties, urged the president to appoint 
him a member of that commission.  The president admitted Mr. 
Campbell's general qualifications for the position, but was of the 
opinion that some active and experienced jurist should be chosen, and 
accordingly appointed Judge Veasy, of Vermont.  The numerous 
testimonials forwarded to the president in Mr. Campbell's behalf, 
show the high esteem in which he is held by the leading men of the 
country.  Mr. Campbell's individuality is impressed upon almost every 
page of West Virginia's first twenty years of history.  With voice 
and pen he was heard and felt, and largely followed, during the years 
of our statehood.  Scholarly, and at the same time possessed of a 
deliberate judgment rarely found in men, he was heard and heeded by 
his less endowed fellow citizens.  No man in all our borders is 
better known; and no man is abler and none more highly respected.  
Mr. Campbell was for a number of years chairman of the state 
republican committee, and the West Virginia member of the republican 
national committee, and in 1868 and again in 1880 he was the 
republican nominee for elector-at-large.  For several years past he 
has been an extensive traveler, and has visited almost every part of 
the United States, and written extensively for the press upon the 
vast resources of our country.      
             

(Linda Fluharty)