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Shelby County |
Home 1915 History Index |
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Shelby County |
Home 1915 History Index |
CHAPTER XXVIII - POLITICS (CONT'D)The vote for President and Vice-President in Shelby county, beginning at the election of November 2, 1856, to date, is as follows:
Among the men who have served the Democratic party as county chair men have been: Thomas McDonald, G. W. Cullison, Dr. E. A. Cobb, C. F. Swift, W. F. Cleveland, O. P. Wyland, S. B. Morrissey and perhaps others. Among the Republican chairmen have been R. W. Robins, W. J. Davis (repeatedly at intervals over a very long period of years), W. Gammon, L. H. Pickard, L. C. Lewis, Dr. F. A. Bayer, A. F. Holcomb, and others. In 1866, Hon. G. Smith Stanton, a son of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was in Harlan during the progress of a political campaign then on in Shelby county. In his book, "When the Wildwood Was in Flower," he gives his recollections as follows: "In the fall following my arrival in the Hawkeye state there was a hot political contest going on, and I attended one of the meetings at Harlan, the county seat of Shelby county. Speaking of Harlan, I will never forget the way they distributed the mail. The postoffice was in the hotel where I stopped. The 'postoffice' consisted of two dry goods boxes, one where you deposited the mail and the other where you got it. When the mail carrier arrived, he would hand the pouch to the postmaster, who was the proprietor of the hotel, also hostler and waiter combined. The combination postmaster proprietor, hostler and waiter would dump the mail into one of the boxes, and whenever a citizen called for his mail he would dig into the dry goods box, look over its contents and take what mail belonged to him, and thus the mail in the early sixties was distributed in the shire-town of Shelby county. "I naturally have heard in my life many political issued discussed, but I never heard of a nightshirt being an issue until that night in Harlan. There was a joint debate between the two opposing candidates for representative in the Legislature. The district generally went Republican. The Democratic candidate was a farmer, the Republican a lawyer. The majority of voters were farmers. Many of them had never heard of a nightshirt, let alone owning one. In the heat of a former debate the Democratic candidate had charged his opponent with being an aristocrat, in that he wore a nightshirt. The Republican candidate at first denied it, but at the Harlan meeting the Democratic candidate produced the necessary proof, and from that moment the Republican candidate's chances were doomed; in fact, if I recollect rightly, he withdrew from the contest."
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