Francis Smith Findlay, known universally and in some official records as "Frank," was born in Abingdon, in Washington County, Virginia on June 9, 1834. He was the son of a moderately wealthy Irish immigrant farmer named Alexander Findlay and his Virginian born wife, Catherine Ann Spiller Findlay. He was schooled locally, worked as a clerk for a merchant in Abingdon and then prepared for college at the Abingdon Academy. He entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in the fall of 1853 with the class of 1857.

HELM, Benjamin Hardin, soldier, was born in Elizabethtown, Ky., in 1830; son of John Larue and Lucinda Barbour (Hardin) Helm, and grandson of George B.  Helm and of Benjamin Hardin. He was graduated at the U.S. military academy in 1851, was assigned to the dragoon service at the U.S. cavalry school, Carlisle, Pa., and was afterward on frontier duty at Fort Lincoln, Texas.

[John Wilkes] Booth grew increasingly obsessed with the subjects of slavery and the Confederacy. He recruited two boyhood friends, Michael O'Laughlin and Samuel Arnold, to assist him in kidnapping [President Abraham] Lincoln, which they planned for 20 March [1865]. Lincoln did not appear as expected; the conspirators panicked and fled. Later Booth added David Herold and George Atzerodt to his band, completing it with Lewis Powell, known also as Lewis Payne.

Thayer achieved a national reputation as a champion of private enterprise in the fight against the expansion of slavery. In Senator Stephen Douglas's proposal to extend the principle of "popular sovereignty" to the Kansas-Nebraska Territory, Thayer saw an opportunity to demonstrate that the North's entrepreneurial energy could be utilized to defeat the politically belligerent but socially and economically obsolescent slaveholding interest, the "slave power" in the rhetoric of antislavery reform. Before the U.S.

In March of the following year [1863], she was playing in The Seven Sisters at Wood’s Theatre in Louisville. At a certain point in the performance she was called on to drink a toast and was urged by certain Southern sympathizers to toast the Southern cause. Making this public avowal of sympathy on the advice of the provost-marshal, she was dismissed from the theatre. She then took an oath of allegiance to the Federal government and was commissioned as secret agent.

The Utah War ended in 1858 without the loss of life, but friction continued between Colonel Johnston, who distrusted Young and his associates, and the settlers, virtually all of whom were loyal to Young. With the outbreak of the Civil War, the army abandoned the territory, some to fight for the North and some for the South. Young contracted on behalf of the church to erect the hurriedly built transcontinental telegraph within Utah borders and then constructed a church-owned telegraph system to connect each settlement with Salt Lake City and the nation.

…Washington had made him a much-sought-after attorney for those with cases pending before the government. He argued many times before the Supreme Court and in his most celebrated trial won an award of $242,000 for the Menominee Indians of Wisconsin. Thompson by this point had also become one of the most influential Whigs in the Northwest, and party leaders considered his support vital to winning over conservative Whig voters in the lower portion of that region.

Riley, Theodore Myers, clergyman, author, was born June 9, 1842, in Carlisle, Pa. Since 1803 he has been engaged in the ministry; and in 1894-1902 was adjunct professor of pastoral theology in the General theological seminary of New York City. He is the author of Charles George Gordon; and a biography of Eugene Augustus Hoffman.