ARTHUR PUE GORMAN
GORMAN, ARTHUR PUE, legislator, political leader, and United States senator, has been a life-long resident of the state of Maryland. His career, in many respects is unique, due to the possession of remarkable qualities, as well as to exceptional circumstances.
Of mixed Irish and Scotch lineage, Senator Gorman was born in Howard county, Maryland, March 11, 1839. His father was a man of active temperament, a stone contractor by occupation; and about 1845 he took up his residence at Laurel, Maryland, where he continued the business of supplying building materials for various structural operations in the city of Washington. While in Richmond, Virginia, in 1860, the elder Gorman was arbitrarily seized and thrown into prison for his utterance against secession; and this imprisonment cost him his life. From his father, the Senator is said to have inherited suavity of manner together with rigid inflexibility; while gentleness and kindliness are a heritage from his mother, whom he is said greatly to resemble. When he was nominated a second time for senator, he paid her the beautiful tribute of saying, "All that I am and all that I hope to be is due to my mother, and to the people of Maryland."
Whatever formal education he obtained was in the public schools of the county in which he was born; but his school days were cut short by his appointment as a page in the United States house of representatives. He was soon transferred to the senate, at the instance of Stephen A. Douglas. Into that great school, which in those days was a representative body of intellectual, forensic and political giants, he was literally thrown, and proved a most apt pupil. Webster, the expounder of the constitution; Clay, the pacificator; Calhoun, the champion of state's rights, and many others of almost equal renown, were his preceptors in the principles of statesmanship. In such an environment, he absorbed that knowledge of the senate's traditions and drank in that knowledge of the constitution so ably analyzed and debated in the senate of those days, which have placed
