I am leery of ancestor worship, but the more I research the history of my great-great grandfather, Asa Fowler, the more I find admirable about him.
He was born the youngest of a dozen children on a farm in Pembroke, N.H. in the year 1811. A sickly boy, he was only able to do light farm work, and it was determined early on that he should become a teacher. So, he was sent to the local academy in Pembroke, where he turned out to be an excellent student.
After leaving the academy, Asa went to Dartmouth College, and although he worked for a time as a school master, he soon became apprenticed to an attorney and took the bar in 1837. The following year, he established a partnership with an attorney and former congressman named Franklin Pierce. This partnership lasted until 1845 when it was amicably dissolved, after which Pierce joined the military and fought in the Mexican War, and in 1852, Pierce was elected president of the United States. (He is probably saved from being the worst or most ineffectual president of the nineteenth century only by his immediate successor, James Buchanan.)
Asa married a formidable woman with a formidable string of names: Mary Dole Cilley Knox. Each name tells a story of its own. Dole, because she was remotely related to the Doles who would go to Hawaii and found the pineapple company, Cilley because she was a direct descendant of General Joseph Cilley who fought in the American Revolution, and Knox because her father was the son of a former governor of New Hampshire. She was also heir to more money than Asa’s family had when he was growing up. Nevertheless, Asa was a catch, being a lawyer who, as it turned out, eventually became a judge.
What makes Asa admirable to me is that many of his actions suggest that he possessed what would be considered today a social conscience, one that led him to take stands that might have been risky. Although he seems to have picked the winning side, at least sometimes, he obviously did not know that at the time. For one, though he was evidently a member of the Democratic Party in his youth, he left the party over the issue of slavery in the mid-1840s. For the next decade, he belonged to the Free Soil Party (also called the New Democratic Party) and ran for Congress and later for the governorship of New Hampshire on that party’s ticket. Then he joined the fledgling Republican Party and stayed for about two decades. Finally, in the late 1870s, he returned to the Democratic Party. Clearly Asa wrestled with the issues of the day and took difficult stands more than once.
As a justice of the New Hampshire supreme court, he had to bring careful thought to the decisions that he made, but he was equally principled when it came to business. At one point, he became president of the First National Bank of Concord, New Hampshire, but he determined that the head cashier was cheating the customers and embezzling money from the bank. When he addressed the issue before the board of trustees, they were insufficiently concerned and did not fire the head cashier, leading Asa to resign. (Subsequently, the bank went out of business.)
In the last few years of his life, Asa traveled to Europe, at first with his wife and some of his children (there were four boys and a girl), but after his wife’s passing, he traveled by himself. For years I thought that he made his first and only trip to California just to see the country, but it turns out that his late wife’s sister lived in San Francisco. (In his will, Asa left this sister-in-law one hundred dollars.)
It is perhaps Asa’s will that most impressed me. In it he established a perpetual scholarship fund for needy students who wanted to attend the same academy he had attended in Pembroke. The school was co-educational and, so, the fund was intended to pay the tuition for, “worthy youth of either sex, resident in Pembroke, without regard to race, parentage, political or religious convictions or associations, as might not otherwise be able to secure the advantages of said institution in their education.”
Asa was evidently more than merely respectful of women in his private life, recognizing his wife’s judgement in both private and financial matters. Perhaps, significantly, he appointed his daughter Clara and his son William as joint executors of his will, leaving the two of them the bulk of his estate to divide equally between them. For whatever reasons, he left flat amounts of a few thousand dollars each to his other children.
It is difficult to evaluate the virtues of someone who lived a century and a half ago, and I do not imagine that either the good or the bad that Asa Fowler might have done reflects on me. But I think I can look back and see that this was a man who took his actions seriously and took them in public more conscientiously than his society would have required of him. At the end of the day, I wish that I could do as well.
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