Cole family

Biography

Cornelius Cole was born in Lodi, Seneca County, New York, September 17, 1822; graduated Wesleyan University, 1847; studied law and was admitted to the bar in Auburn, New York, 1848; moved to California, 1849; after working a year in the gold mines, began the practice of law in San Francisco, 1850; moved to Sacramento, 1851; served as district attorney of Sacramento City and County, 1859-62; moved to Santa Cruz in 1862; commissioned as a captain in the Union Army during the Civil War, 1863; elected Union Republican to the thirty-eighth Congress (1863-65); elected as a Republican to the U.S. Senate (1867-73); chairman, Committee on Appropriations (Forty-second Congress); resumed his law practice; moved to Colegrove, Los Angeles County, California, and retired from active practice, 1880; member Pioneer Society of California; died in Hollywood, California, November 3, 1924.

Biographical Narrative

It is not unusual for the papers of a man in public life to stand as a substantial piece of the history of his nation. But it is a rare thing for a collection of such papers to sweep across more than a century of that history and to illustrate and elucidate the varied events and personalities which come to life in the papers of Cornelius Cole and his family. They begin with the noise and emotions of political battles in New York State in the 1840s, and the clashing ambitions at the diggings in California. For Cole, the papers close with the anxiety and despair of the years just after the first World War; but the family papers continue the story into the midst of the world struggle that arose out of those years. During the greater part of this span of time, Cole was busily participating in, and for a decade, helping to mold the history of the United States.

A sense of immediacy permeates the papers. In the 1850s he sails via Panama to the lure of the California mines, edits a newspaper in Sacramento, consults with Collis P. Huntington and Leland Stanford there, and assists in the crystallization of the new Republican party in northern California. Elected to Congress in 1862, he exchanges the friendships of his home and family in Santa Cruz for the fevered excitement of Washington, D.C. in the midst of Civil War. There he talks with Grant and Lincoln, and hears the President speak at Gettysburg. His energy and ability secure his election as Senator from California in 1867. He witnesses the expulsion of Andrew Johnson and his followers, and the subsequent triumph of Grant and Radical Reconstruction. The Senator is a frequent visitor to the White House, not only for the brilliant receptions, but in the morning hours when the business of the administration is decided upon. He is a member of the inner circle not only because of his friendship with the President and his advisors. Cole is the Senator from California, now for the first time, a state of primary political importance in the councils of the nation. There is more to its name than the clink of gold. For the nation and therefore for the party and men who run the nation, it means mounting population, shipping, agriculture, and the network of railroads that pervades the political as well as the physical structure of the state. It is a time when Californians are seriously considered for places in the Cabinets of several Presidents; Cole's name is mentioned several times in this connection. When political pressures from the forces which control the state prevent the renomination of Cole, he does not withdraw from the public scene. His legal ability and useful political contacts make him a good choice for the litigants involved in the settlement of the Alabama claims. And while he stays on in Washington, D.C. in the late 1870s, he continues his friendships with men whose names bear the history of those years.

Even when he returns to his new home near Los Angeles in the 1880s, his experienced and critical mind keeps his name prominent in his community and his state. In California old friends call on him: the Grants, General Sherman and his wife, and the John A. Logans. Traveling to Washington, D.C., he meets President Arthur. In the 1890s, he again returns to the Capital which is now so different from what it was when he first saw it, and he meets President Cleveland there. Outside the halls of Congress, Cole assists in the legislation for the Los Angeles Harbor project, noting well the pressures applied by the supporters of the Santa Monica and San Pedro sites.

When many of his old friends and relatives pass from the scene during these years, Cole momentarily despairs and turns to his memories. His recollections of a busy life are given to the public in a volume of memoirs published in 1908. But the busy life is far from over. The anxiety and uncertainty of the first World War stimulate his old interests and energies, until his busy pen takes the place of his presence in public forums. The writing of these years is neither erratic nor meaningless. Men whose voices are respected by a great part of the nation write serious thoughts to Cole and welcome his opinions. The self-assurance and sometimes bitter partisanship through which he observed and then dismissed Andrew Johnson, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt, is now turned against Woodrow Wilson. Like many of his countrymen, he finds in the calm presence of Warren G. Harding a source of hope and domestic stability which the past years had so disturbed. In these last years, he continues to gather the honor of his neighbors, as a California Pioneer, and of his fellow countrymen, as the last survivor of the government of Abraham Lincoln. In 1922, he receives an ovation in the House of Representatives. Having cast his first vote for James K. Polk, he casts his last one for Calvin Coolidge.

Magnificent as it is, the story of the Cole papers does not confine itself to the Senator's letters and papers. Almost every day that Cornelius and his wife, Olive, were apart, which was a large portion of their lives, they wrote to each other. Their letters came from San Francisco and Los Angeles, from Washington, D.C. and towns in upstate New York. But Olive's letters and writings are not just the warm sentiments of a devoted wife and mother. They tell of California politics, of ambitions in the Grant Cabinet, of visits to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 and the Yosemite Valley. She served on the state committee representing California at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and was the delegate-at-large from the state at the Republican National Convention of 1916. Moreover, the writing habit of Cornelius and his wife is reflected in the extensive correspondence of their eight children and dozens of relatives, even to the third and fourth generation. Cole's brother, George, writes from the battle front during the campaigns in Virginia in the Civil War. Cole's son, Willoughby, tells of life at Cornell University in the 1870s and of his long friendship with Grant's son, Jesse. Another son, George R., writes from Vienna during the 1890s. Several members of the family describe life in the territories of the Southwest when that region was still a frontier. Together, the family papers constitute a partial pattern of American life.

The general sense of the significance of these papers secured their physical preservation, even when the writer cautioned: destroy this. They were brought out of the packing trunks years later, most of them still resealed in their original envelopes. Some of them were used by Catherine C. Phillips for a biography of Cole, privately printed in 1929. But numerous volumes of history and biography remain to be written with reference to them. Through the perceptive efforts of Lindley Bynum, the papers were given to the Library of the University of California, Los Angeles, by Cole's daughter, Lucretia Waring, in 1952. Now the grand pageant of a century is opened for the appreciation and use of students of California and American history...the history which Cornelius Cole and his family lived.

E.R.R.

From the guide to the Cole Family Papers, 1833-1943, (University of California, Los Angeles. Library. Department of Special Collections.)