CLEVELAND, GROVER. Among the presidents of the United States Grover Cleveland holds a singular and interesting position. First, from the extraordinary rapidity with which he rose from the rank of an inconspicuous lawyer to the exalted position of an American president; second, from the fact that he is the only president elected by the Democratic party during nearly half a century; third, from his having the entirely unique experience of returning to the presidential office after the lapse of four years; fourth, from his being the only man who has been three times nominated for the presidency. That his striking progress was the legitimate outcome of unusual traits of character this brief story of his life will go far to show.
Descended from the sturdy Puritan stock of Massachusetts, to which colony his ancestors emigrated from Sussex county, England, in 1635, Grover Cleveland was born in Caldwell, Essex county, New Jersey, March 18, 1837, the son of Richard Falley Cleveland, a Presbyterian clergyman of that place. His mother, Anne Neal, was the daughter of a Baltimore merchant, of Irish birth, and their son was named after Stephen Grover, a Presbyterian minister of Caldwell. When he was four years of age the family moved to Fayetteville, New York, and later on to Clinton, in that state, his education being obtained in common schools supplemented by scant academic advantages. That he was a diligent and capable scholar appears from the fact that he entered the academy at an unusually early age, and while there he made it his ambition to be at the head of his class. His actual school life ended at fourteen, when he entered the store of one of his father's parishioners in Fayetteville, expecting to enter college two later years. The death of his father in 1853 prevented this, and in October of that year he became a teacher in the New York Institution for the Blind. Eager to make his way in the world more rapidly he left this institution in 1854 and set out for the West, his purpose being to settle at Cleveland, Ohio (perhaps attracted by the community in name), to undertake any respectable
