The whole community against him

Nobody wrote down where he came from.

Not his birthplace, not the year he was born, not his parents, not where he read law, not the day he arrived. Three books cover this county in his lifetime and not one of them gives him a biography. The two county histories run to some two thousand pages between them and carry sketches of men who cleared eighty acres and kept a good barn. The county's own 1893 atlas, published while he was alive and three years before he died, carries a hundred and sixty of them.

What can be established is thin and comes out of other men's entries. He was here by 1844, because in 1882 he is listed as one of three men still living in LaGrange who had been heads of families in the town that year. He said at a public meeting in 1878 that he had been a member of this county's bar for thirty-six years, which puts his admission around 1842, and that is his own word rather than a court record.

He married Elizabeth Sanburn, who had taught the school begun in 1843 in the Taylor Schoolhouse.

The county elected him and appointed him, over and over.

County commissioner from 1851 to 1853. Town marshal of LaGrange in the first slate the board chose after incorporation, at its first meeting in December of 1855. An addition on the south of town laid out in his name in 1861. A public hall carrying it. A house on the strip west of the courthouse, which the county eventually bought and removed to enlarge the square.

By the time the 1882 history was printed he was the senior member of the county bar.

And then there is the paragraph about him.

It is one paragraph, in the bench and bar chapter, and it is the only sustained thing either book says about his character. It starts well. He is ranked next after John B. Howe in local repute. He became distinguished for the pertinacity and energy with which he fought his cases, never yielding while he thought he had any footing.

Then it gets to the Regulators.

During the Regulator period, when the courts had their greatest flood of business, he was employed as the attorney for several of the indicted horse-thieves and counterfeiters, and with the whole community against him, he, with his characteristic persistence and defiance of public sentiment, fought the cases through, and got most of his clients either acquitted or released upon some technicality after conviction.

Three phrases in that sentence are doing work. Defiance of public sentiment is a charge rather than a description. Some technicality is dismissive of the law he was practising. And with the whole community against him records, flatly and without comment, that this county was against a man for defending people at trial.

Then comes the sentence.

The bitterness engendered during these exciting times lasted many years and marred the happiness of many.

Read the grammar and the bitterness belongs to the times. Read the placement and it belongs to him.

Nothing else in the paragraph is a candidate. The vigilance companies are not in it. The men who hanged somebody in the next county are not in it. The accused are not in it. There is one person in that paragraph and the harm arrives immediately after his acquittals.

Battey names no agent, and a reader takes the meaning from where the sentence sits. The companies that made the arrests get a chapter of their own, and the bitterness is not in it.

Then the paragraph puts him back together in its last line: he enjoyed for many years the honorable position of senior member of the bar, and retired to the quieter pursuit of banking.

Quieter is the book's judgement of what he had been doing before.

Here is what that paragraph does not mention, and it is in the same chapter.

In September of 1870 the county tried Stephen Jenks for shooting a merchant at Ontario. It was the most famous trial in this county's history, it ran fourteen days, and the court room was densely crowded.

The State was represented by the prosecuting attorney, assisted by Andrew Ellison.

Twelve years after the whole community was against him, the county's own prosecution retained him for the case it cared about most.

And nine years after that, the courthouse.

The county had contracted to build it and pay cash, and in March of 1879 the contractors said they were losing money and becoming financially embarrassed. Somebody had to hold the money and pay it out on their behalf, with the commissioners controlling the labour and the materials.

They appointed Andrew Ellison.

The bitterness sentence and both of those appointments are in the same chapter of the same book, eighty pages apart, and the historian never sets them beside each other. A county that had not forgiven a man does not hire him to prosecute its worst murder, and does not hand him the money when its courthouse job goes wrong.

There is one other moment where he is out of step with the room, and it is the best-known thing about him.

Before it, the join. Everything above and everything below is one man in this piece, and the book never says so. The Regulator lawyer, the commissioner, the marshal, the speaker at the war meeting, the man at the cornerstone and the banker are joined here by an identical name, one town, one profession, and a line saying Andrew Ellison was one of three men living in 1882 who had been heads of families in LaGrange in 1844. There is no second Andrew Ellison anywhere in either volume. That is near certain and it is not documented, and it is all one book.

In April of 1861, at the courthouse in LaGrange, the county held its first war meeting. Two men made patriotic speeches. One of them said that about once in thirty years the tree of liberty must be watered with human blood and that the time was at hand.

Then they called on Ellison.

Mr. Andrew Ellison was called upon, who, speaking in a candid manner, said his sentiments were not wholly in accord with the previous speakers, but that he was a citizen of the Republic, and acknowledged his allegiance to it, and proposed to stand by its laws under all circumstances and contingencies.

Twelve days later there was a second meeting, to hold a council of war. The crowd gathered in the court yard and was addressed by three men, and one of them was Ellison.

And in February of 1863 he sat on the resolutions committee of a Democratic mass meeting in this county, which denounced the heresy of secession and, in the same document, condemned arrests without warrant, the suspension of habeas corpus, martial law over states not in rebellion, and the abridging of the freedom of speech and of the press.

The longest thing he ever says in either book is about a building.

At the laying of the courthouse cornerstone in 1878, Battey preserves four hundred and seventy words of it, which is more than any other individual speaks anywhere in that chapter. His subject was the court house, what it had been, was then, and would be.

The court house, the military, or the mob must rule.

He called it the poor man's fortress. He told the crowd that the Pittsburgh riots of the previous year had cost more in one hour than running every court in the United States for a year.

The man the county history says defied public sentiment stood at the cornerstone of the county's building and argued that the alternative to courts is the mob.

The 1893 atlas gives him one line, and it is a list of property.

Its sketches run to a hundred and sixty. It sketches John B. Nichols of Milford Township, and among the things it finds worth recording about him is that he was one of the active regulators.

What it gives Andrew Ellison is his name in a column headed Resident Freeholders, set as the atlas sets them, surname first.

Ellison, Rollin. Ellison, Sarah E. Ellison, Andrew.

His son, his son's wife, and him. The only other time the atlas prints the name is in another man's sketch, where a jeweller's shop is described as located in the Ellison bank building.

The bank had his name on it. The atlas found room for the building and not for the man.

Thirty-eight years later, Ira Ford wrote him up again, and took all of it out.

No bitterness. No technicality. No defiance. No community against him.

He made enemies and also friends, both of whom recognized his strength and ability in court.

Ford also promotes him. Where the 1882 book ranks him next after Howe, Ford calls him possibly the best exponent of law and justice in the county. And the four hundred and seventy words at the cornerstone become five: he really made the set speech of the day.

Ford is also the only source for how it ended.

He began banking in 1873, a year after the county's first bank opened, and ran it privately with his son. He died in November of 1896.

His son Rollin took it over, and in 1903 the bank went into bankruptcy.

That is the whole of what three books preserve about a man who was here from 1844, held four public trusts, argued the county's most famous murder for the State, and stood at the cornerstone of its courthouse. Not one of them gives him a sketch. What there is instead is one paragraph about the year he was least popular.