George C. Hazelton Biography - Grant County Wisconsin ***************************************************************************** USGENWEB ARCHIVES NOTICE: These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or presentation by any other organization or persons. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material, must obtain the written consent of the contributor, or the legal representative of the submitter, and contact the listed USGenWeb archivist with proof of this consent. ***************************************************************************** Submitted by David W. Taft, dtaft@cowtown.net History of Grant County Wisconsin By Castello N. Holford The Teller Print, Lancaster, 1900 Pages 185-187 Chapter 3, Political History GEORGE C. HAZELTON A political history of Grant County would be very incomplete without a mention of one of its most prominent and one of its few professional politicians. George C. Hazelton came to Boscobel from Schenectady, N. Y., in September, 1863. The war was then raging and Grant County was pretty well drained of its able- bodied young men, such as Mr. Hazelton then was. But, though he made eloquent war speeches, he preferred Mercury to Mars as a steady god. He immediately went into politics, and in 1864, when he had been in the State barely long enough to be a voter, he was elected District Attorney. While holding this office he was nominated for State Senator, much to the astonishment and disgust of many of the old "wheel-horses" of his party. When his aspirations for the Senatorship were first known, they appeared no less presumptuous than hopeless. John H. Rountree, one of the 'fathers of his county," a resident for thirty years, held the office and sought a reelection. Besides his own solidity, he had behind him every newspaper in the county, the great political weight of Platteville in the convention, and the aid and sympathy of the prominent lawyers and politicians of Lancaster, who little relished the pretensions of the young adventurer to political leadership in the county. But Hazelton brought to bear against this apparently overwhelming opposition the knowledge gained in the hard-fought political fields of New York. He knew how to make a "machine" and how to run it. The political "machine" was then unknown to the politicians of Grant County. Packed and snap caucuses, the trading of delegates, the "pooling of issues" by several candidates, lavish promises of patronage - these were tactics as strange to the old war-chiefs of Grant as Napoleon's tactics were to the Austrian and Prussian generals. Hazelton's victory in the convention at Lancaster came like a thunder-clap. The Platteville Witness and the Boscobel Appeal rebelled. The Herald threatened while the nomination was pending, but after some expressions of disgust, assumed after the nomination an attitude of "armed neutrality" toward the victor which it retained until the elder Cover gave up its management, when it went over to Hazelton. But the opposition within the party that hardly dared to bolt Hazelton openly found an object upon which to vent their wrath. Hazelton had procured the nomination of T. J. Brooks, principal of the Boscobel schools, for County Superintendent, and the anti-Hazelton men and newspapers (except the Appeal) ferociously attacked Brooks. D. Gray Furman, who held the office, and who had the support of the Rountree men for a renomination, but was defeated, came out as an independent candidate. The result was that the vote of the county was divided nearly equally between the three candidates, but the Democrat, J. P. Hubbard, received a plurality of 139 votes over Purman. Hazelton early made himself "solid" with the managers of the State Republican machine, and especially with that able and eloquent, but unscrupulous, Senator, Matt Carpenter. He was thus enabled to strengthen himself by distributing considerable patronage and promising a great deal more with a show of fulfilling his promises. As a part of the anti-Hazleton movement came the bolt in the legislature of 1875. The Republican caucus had nominated Carpenter, but eighteen members, headed by B. M. Coates, of Boscobel, bolted the nomination. J. C. Holloway, of Lancaster, was, I believe, the only Senator to bolt. The firmness of the bolters rendered the election of Carpenter impossible, and the Democrats and bolters united and elected Angus Cameron, a Republican. While thus holding the office of State Senator, Hazelton laid his plans for the nomination as Congressman, and made the attempt in 1868; but the veteran Amasa Cobb, of Iowa County, was too strongly in trenched to be driven out. In 1870 J. Allen Barber was a candidate for the nomination against Hazelton and won only after one of the hardest and bitterest fights ever had in the county. In 1872 the custom of a second term was too strong to give Hazelton a show; but in 1874 he entered the field with a formidable and well trained force against two other Lancaster opponents, Col. John G. Clark and J. C. Holloway. But the First and Second Assembly Districts were carried by Col. Clark, and in the Congressional Convention Hazelton had 16 votes, Clark 8, and Richard H. Magoon, of Lafayette County, 12. Hazelton's sixteen men stood by him until the 129th ballot, when Clark's men went to Magoon and gave him the nomination. In 1876, in spite of the fight of the opposing faction in Grant County, he carried the county and obtained the long-sought nomination. The Republican majority in the district was too large to be overcome by the few disaffected Republicans who dared carry their opposition to the extent of bolting a party nomination. And thus Hazelton enjoyed three terms in Congress. But at last, in 1882, when the opposition in Grant County had become tired of the hopeless fight, defeat came from another quarter. Till then Grant County had been in a district with the "Granger" counties, and was far the heaviest of them all, but now she was in a district with the much stronger county of Dane. E. W. Keyes, of Madison, the Republican "boss," wanted the nomination, and failing to get it in the convention, he became an independent candidate. The Democratic candidate, Burr W. Jones, was also from Madison, and thus a large part of the overwhelming political force of Dane County was turned against Hazelton, and he was defeated at the polls. He immediately used the remains of his political influence to obtain an administrative appointment at Washington, and ceased to be a factor in the politics of Grant County.