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-
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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
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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.
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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)
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