Grover Cleveland

The Reverend Richard Cleveland seemed always on the move in the effort to escape poverty. Yet he never succeeded. There were always more offspring to feed and clothe; and the lovable preacher, although educated at Yale, was too prosaically dull in the pulpit to graduate beyond village charges.

Grover Cleveland, fifth of his nine children, was born on June 18, 1837. The family then happened to be in Caldwell, New Jersey, but four years later it moved to Fayetteville, in western New York. There, and in nearby Clinton, the future President spent his early boyhood. Grover then gave no one any particular reason to prophesy that he was destined for great things. He was just another one of the boys of the town - healthy, rambunctiously energetic and wholesome. Intellectual and cultural pursuits failed to attract him, and he showed no special ability in the schoolroom.

Except for the one very positive influence of Presbyterian religious training within the family circle, Grover Cleveland drifted through early boyhood. The daily prayers and the strict environment of a preacher's home provided him with a code that was to guide him during his entire life. This was good training as far as it went, and had the family plans for a college education materialized, Grover might well have acquired genuine intellectual and cultural depth and breadth.

Shortly after moving to Holland Patent, New York, the ailing Richard Cleveland died. Grover, then in his sixteenth year, was on his own, with no further hope of being sent to college. He faced the added responsibility of sharing the family expenses.

After spending a bleak year in New York City, where he and an older brother taught in the New York Institute for the Blind, Grover Cleveland half-heartedly decided to seek his fortune in the West. En route, he visited his prosperous uncle, Lewis P. Allen, who lived near Buffalo. That ended the westward trek. It required but slight effort on his uncle's part to persuade the innately nonadventurous Grover to accept employment with him. There was a prospect then of admission to a Buffalo law firm where Grover Cleveland could prepare himself for a legal career. Grover joined the Allen household on a farm where his uncle raised pedigreed cattle on a scale that made him nationally prominent. Allen had accumulated considerable wealth and prominence through real estate, banking and insurance ventures in and around Buffalo, where he had connections that made it possible for Grover Cleveland, after a few months of keeping herd records on the farm, to enter a highly reputable Buffalo law firm as a clerk. Four years later he became a full-fledged attorney.

For twenty-six years, between 1855 and 1882, Grover Cleveland remained in Buffalo, not venturing far outside the area for business or for pleasure. Twenty-five of those years constituted a continuation of his unconscious and unnoticed preparation for later conspicuous public service.

The boy was ambitious and hard working; Buffalo was ambitious and hard working. This gateway to the West, with its docks on the lake shore that hummed with activity, with its throbbing factories, with its bustling terminals serving four railroad lines, provided opportunity that fostered ambition. Measured by any standards, Grover Cleveland could more than hold his own as a hard worker. He possessed phenomenal physical energy and power of concentration, at times working continuously for twenty-four hours without feeling tired.

Judges often appointed Grover Cleveland to serve as a referee or arbitrator in cases that showed a likelihood of settlement through agreement, knowing that he was both willing and able to wade through masses of material and apply a strictly letter-ofthe-law interpretation. His own clientele consisted largely of companies requiring legal counsel in the Buffalo area.