General Arthur Jr. McARTHUR

  General Notes:

Arthur McArthur, born in Glasgow on January 26, 1817, considered himself a "double-distilled McArthur": Both his mother and father had the surname McArthur. Unfortunately, Arthur never knew his father, who had died ten days before the birth of his son. Born and reared in the lowlands of Scotland, this double-distilled McArthur convinced himself that the McArthurs had once been a clan in their own right, and a Highland clan too. There wasn't a scintilla of evidence to prove his case, but little romance clung to the Lowlands around dull, industrializing Glasgow. The romance, much improved on and sold to an enthralled nineteenth-century readership in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, was all in the Highlands. And that, he felt, was where his forebears must really have come from, the land of purple braes, rocky crags, deep forests, fast-flowing salmon streams, picturesque castles and rousing tales of such warrior kings as Robert the Bruce and romantic figures like Bonnie Prince Charlie. Baby Douglas could count on being fed legends of heroic ancestors along with his mother's milk.

When he was seven years old, Arthur McArthur's mother remarried. In 1828, at the age of eleven, Arthur, his mother and stepfather emigrated to the United States, landing in New York. They soon moved to Uxbridge, Massachusetts. Ambitious, bright and interested in politics, young Arthur later returned to New York, became an ardent Democrat and, "by my own almost unaided efforts," gained the rudiments of a college education and went on to study law.(2) In 1841 he was admitted to the New York bar.

While studying in New York, he met, fell in love with and married a dark-eyed young woman from Springfield, Massachusetts, named Aurelia Belcher. She persuaded him to move to Springfield, where, in June 1845, their first child, a son, Arthur McArthur, Jr., was born. Four years later Arthur moved to Milwaukee, and there Aurelia bore him a second son, Frank.

Getting involved in the Democratic party, Arthur saw his career take wing. He became city attorney, and in November 1855 Arthur McArthur was elected lieutenant governor of Wisconsin. The next year the Democratic governor was briefly ousted while the state supreme court looked into allegations of ballot rigging in his election. For four days, while the court made up its collective mind, Arthur McArthur served as governor. The elected governor was eventually allowed to resume his post (although he turned out, once restored to office, to have palms that required periodic greasing), and Arthur returned to the lieutenant governorship.(3)

In 1857 McArthur was elected to a circuit judgeship, a position he held for twelve years. In the meantime the Republican party arose from the wreckage of normal political life, and the hapless, bitterly divided Democrats looked on like bemused spectators as Abraham Lincoln became President and the South seceded. In April 1861, a month after Lincoln's first inauguration, Confederate artillery opened fire on Fort Sumter, guarding the sea entrance to Charleston, South Carolina. The fort surrendered after two days of fierce bombardment. Lincoln called on the states to provide 75,000 militia. On May 3 he issued a second call. He wanted 42,000 volunteers to come to the aid of the Union and serve for three years. What he got instead was 230,000 men. Throughout the North there was a stampede to the colors. Men young and old, men who had never dreamed of giving up their lives as farmers, clerks and mechanics, were seized with a desire for soldiering and suppressing "the Rebellion." Adolescent students too, like Arthur McArthur, Jr., could think of nothing else; certainly of nothing more urgent, more interesting or more patriotic. When the 6th Volunteer Infantry Regiment paraded through Milwaukee in July 1861 on its way to the railroad station, Arthur, Jr., less than a month past his sixteenth birthday, went to every company commander--all ten of them--begging to be allowed to enlist in his company. "No, my boy," one of them told him bluntly. "You are not old enough and strong enough for a soldier. You would not last a month." Another, more sympathetic, said, "You would better be a scholar than a soldier, anyway."

"I propose to do both, sir," said Arthur, Jr.(4)
SOURCE: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/oldsoldi.h tm

Arthur married Aurelia BELCHER, daughter of Benjamin Barney BELCHER and Olive KEEP. (Aurelia BELCHER was born on 2 Jan 1819 and died in 1864.)