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About Cottage Grove sentinel. (Cottage Grove, Or.) 1909-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 23, 2020)
COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL | THURSDAY, JANUARY 23, 2020 | 7A Offbeat Oregon: With friends like A.C. Edmunds, early suffragists didn’t need enemies By Finn J.D. John Special to The Sentinel Part One — O ne of the most dra- matic things that can happen in a soc- cer game is an “own-goal.” Not the kind where a player on offense bounces a shot off a defender and into the net, but the full-on kind in which a defender gets excit- ed and confused and blasts a barn-burner straight past the goalie, scoring a point for the other team. If Oregon history were a soccer club, and kept stats on such things, there is one par- ticular man who would stand head and shoulders above all the others in the “own-goals” category. Abraham Coryell “A.C.” Edmunds, throughout his several careers in Oregon and California, was almost like a cartoon — a larger-than-life loser in the vein of Wile E. Coyote, with a little Carrie Nation mixed in along with a whole lot of Don Quixote. Nor were his “own-goals” minor affairs. A.C. Edmunds was almost singlehandedly responsible for the demise of the early Universalist Church in California, the temporary collapse of the Universalist congregation in Portland, and for the sudden death of the temperance and women’s suffrage movements in Ore- gon in 1874. Before he got involved, Or- egon was on track to become the first state in which wom- en could vote. His efforts to help make that happen set the process back almost 40 years. All in all, A.C. Edmunds was an especially important historical character — but for all the wrong reasons. “His impact was in fact sometimes significant,” histo- rian George Belknap writes, in his 1983 Oregon Histori- cal Quarterly article. “But his impact was usually the ruin of sometimes worthy and promising causes through his unfailing skill in antagoniz- n The Northwest’s Finest Gardening Seed n Flowers, Herbs, & Shrubs n Vegetable Transplants n Fruit Trees 20 Palmer Ave. n Cottage Grove n (541) 942-0510 HOME PRIDE Painting and Repair LLC ing his publics.” Abraham Coryell Ed- munds was born in 1827 in the Toronto area, and grew up in the Northeast — New York and later Ohio. In 1846 he joined the Army to fight in the Mexican-American war, but apparently by the time his Ohio regiment got to the scene, the war was over. On his return, he later re- called, he and his comrades collected an assortment of well-shaped sticks from along the banks of the Missis- sippi, which they sold to new recruits as walking canes cap- tured from Mexican officers. When the Gold Rush broke out, Edmunds headed for California to join the throng, but didn’t get there until 1850. This may be because he walked the entire way, on foot, from his then-home in Michigan. This would be- come something A.C. would be known for, in his youth: he walked everywhere. He later claimed to have logged 34,000 miles on foot. What Edmunds did upon arriving in California is un- known. He probably started out, as so many did, mining for gold. Whatever it was, it left him with a nice cash bal- ance that he seems to have been very good at steward- ing — because he would spend the rest of his life, for the most part, starting and abandoning money-losing ventures of various sorts. Whatever it was, he was done with it by 1857, because we know that year Edmunds was working as an itinerant preacher spreading the gos- pel of Universalism among the mining camps of the West. Universalism, in the 1840s, was a strain of evan- gelical Protestantism that argued that every human soul would be saved — that there was no “elect,” and that Hell was a temporary posting to which souls were sent to square their accounts before admission to Heaven. Edmunds would set out in the early morning, walk 20 or 25 miles to another min- ing camp, preach a harsh but rousing sermon, and do it again the next day; he com- posed and refined his ser- mons as he walked. Edmunds’ combination of boundless energy and en- thusiasm, plus his passion for righteousness, smoothed his climb into prominence in the growing Universalist church. He moved to Marysville, founded a Universalist Soci- ety, and launched the first of what would become a long string of short-lived publica- tions: The Star of the Pacific. It was in this magazine that the reading public got its first taste of Edmunds’ rhetorical style. It was cocky, self-righteous, savage, and Manichean — there were no shades of gray in it. One was either in full agreement with Edmunds and right, or irre- deemably evil. Nor did he reserve such invective only for import- ant topics. A.C. Edmunds seemed ready, willing, and able to die upon every hill. A pious newspaper writer’s reference to a group of ladies supposedly saved from a tor- nado by the power of prayer drew this little gem: “We are surprised that a man, claiming a decent respect for intelligence … should send forth, before an enlightened world, such non- sensical trash …. If prayer had such a magical, mirac- ulous influence over the el- ements, it would be wisdom in our city fathers to employ their services, thereby sav- ing the enormous expense of organized fire companies … If our gill of brains could Over 30 years of experience Sweetheart’s Special! 10% off labor on interior paint jobs scheduled for February! Now scheduling spring and summer 2020 interior and exterior repaints. Serving Lane & North Douglas Counties 541-735-0089 ccb# 217560 W in with YOUR FAMILY HAPPY O regon W est RV OUR HAPPY FAMILY will make COME EXPERIENCE OUR NEW LASER Dentistry without anesthesia not father a more noble sen- timent, we would blow them out, and fill the vaccum with cabbage seeds.” This kind of style, of course, had the effect of turn- ing every potential ally into an implacable enemy. And this was especially true as he started increasingly mixing religion and politics in the runup to the Civil War — tak- ing up the hatchet against the pro-slavery “Copperheads” with a ferocity and savagery that made most of his read- ers uncomfortable, whatever their political leanings were. Still, it was a rough era, and Edmunds’ style worked well enough in the mining and logging camps where he con- tinued to travel and preach. Historian Belknap suggests that his constant motion was actually a mechanism he em- ployed to cope with the inev- itable eventual failure of his enterprises — that before the pigeons could come home to roost, he’d have moved to greener pastures — and there may be something in that; but, anyone with more than a smattering of the AD/HD cognitive style will under- stand that the “outrunning failure” theory isn’t the only possibility here. Then, in 1860, Edmunds organized the first statewide Universalist Convention in 1860. He drew up an ambi- tious and exciting plan for the event, including the es- tablishment of a Universal- ist college. Edmunds was, it seemed, on the cusp of becoming a very important person indeed. But before the convention members could meet to get things started, the American Civil War broke out. Ed- munds dropped everything, ran to the recruiting office, enlisted in the California militia, learned that his com- pany wasn’t going to go and fight, quit in disgust, and moved to Portland. The Universalist Conven- tion, abruptly deprived of its leader, vanished. M Brent Bitner, DDS Dentistry with Family in Mind C ALL U S T ODAY ! eanwhile, that leader was diving headlong into the rhetorical battle over slavery and the secession of the South. Edmunds plugged back into the Universalist circle, of course; but by mid- 1962, barely nine months af- ter his arrival, the Portland Universalists were already wishing he would go away. He leaped back into jour- nalism by founding the Port- land Daily Plaindealer as a stridently pro-Union paper, and for a while it looked like a winner; but Edmunds even- tually got around to insulting enough people that his inves- tors pulled out, and he was forced to close up shop. He then moved to Eugene and did it all over again, launching the Herald of Re- form, renaming it the Union Crusader, and then — in case anyone thought that was too subtle — subtitling it “Cop- perhead Killer.” This was very inconvenient for the Eugene Republicans, who really wanted to reach out the olive branch to the less strident “Copperheads,” the Douglas Democrats, who opposed slavery and were pro-Union but were not ide- alogically pure enough for Edmunds. So the city fathers in Eugene got together with Edmunds’ print-shop fore- man, Harrison Kincaid, and bought Edmunds out — re- naming the paper the Oregon State Journal. The Journal went on to a prosperous 50-year run in Eugene, and was on at least one occasion “borrowed” by Edmunds as a success story (he called himself a “co-founder”). But now, at last, it was 1864, and Edmunds decid- ed it was time to volunteer for war service for real. He went back east to do it, and finished the war as an Army hospital administrator. E dmunds stayed back east for a few years after that, settling in Iowa and Nebraska and engaging in more pub- lishing ventures. Paying customers soon grew loath to be associat- ed with his enterprise, and it petered out. By the early 1870s, he was back to seek- ing out unburned turf where he might have another go … and that’s what brought him back to Portland, where his biggest and most histo- ry-shaping own-goal waited to be scored... (Part II next week) 541.942.7934 350 E. W ASHINGTON A VENUE • C OTTAGE G ROVE WWW.CGSMILES.COM Winter Heating Tune-Up Only $119* We’ll make sure your system is running eff ectively and effi ciently. 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