AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PENNSYLVANIAN
“unparalleled fraud” and “graft,” though this suggestion in connection with a sum of $22.60 was supremely silly. It concocted an interview with a member of the Commission, which he denied, in which he was made to say that not a leaf of Pennsylvania tobacco was in the exhibit, although our display of tobacco received the highest award at the Fair. Indignant at the baseness of the scheme and the way in which it was carried out, I did what I could at the moment and telegraphed to the Ledger branding the publication as a malicious falsehood, intended to harm the state. There is an honor among the members of this fraternity, as in another, which bands them together, and the Ledger suppressed the dispatch and endeavored to excuse the North American.
On the 17th of September thirteen monuments to the soldiers of Pennsylvania regiments who fought in the Battle of Antietam were dedicated and handed over to the custody of the United States Government. I was present with my staff and made an address.
During this month there occurred two events of a personal nature which made an impression on me. A boy in a junk store in a Maryland town came across, amid the old iron, a stove plate with the name Pennybacker on it and he wrote to me about it. I bought it—a rather elaborate piece, with the inscription “D. Pennybacker. His Redwell Furnace, Sept. 24th, 1787.” He was an iron master and the grandfather of the late Judge Isaac S. Pennybacker, United States Senator from Virginia, of whom President Polk, in his journal, speaks in terms of the warmest friendship. A day or two later I received a letter from Thomas Gatewood, a messenger in the public buildings in Pittsburgh, who had been a slave in the family of Senator Pennybacker, and I had some correspondence with him.
On the 3d of October I presided at a meeting in the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, tendered by the United Irish League to John E. Redmond, the Irish Parliamentary
