Herman Merrills Johnson was born on November 25, 1815 in Butternut Township, New York, near Albany.  He attended Casenovia Seminary and then went to Wesleyan University, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with an A.B. degree in 1839.  Following graduation, he became a professor of ancient languages at St.

By nominating John C. Frémont - whose father was a Catholic and who had himself been married by a Catholic priest – the Republicans dismayed some of their nativist supporters. But Frémont’s nomination was a calculated gamble to attract ex-Democrats. The established Republican leaders, Seward and Chase, were radicals whose notoriety might offend timid voters. The dashing young Frémont, by contrast, had little political experience but had won popularity by his explorations in the West and his role in the California Bear Flag Revolt against Mexican rule.

The Republican nominating convention revealed the strictly sectional nature of the new party. Only a handful of the delegates from the slave states attended, and all of these were from the upper South. The platform called for liberation of Kansas from the slave power and for congressional prohibition of slavery in all territories. The nominee was John C. Frémont, explorer of the West and participant in the conquest of California during the Mexican-American War.  

In 1848, about one hundred “living energetic beings,” led by reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, gathered at Seneca Falls, New York, for the first women’s rights convention in the United States. The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments proclaimed that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.”

When the Civil War began, McDowell was a brevet major and again served on General Scott's staff. McDowell was a man of physical energy, wide interests, and strong opinions with no obvious vices and practically no personal charm or ordinary good manners. He had powerful patrons, especially Salmon P. Chase, but no observable qualifications for high command. In late May 1861 he was given the command of the Union forces in the Department of Northeastern Virginia with expectations of an early offensive.

At Washington in 1861, he soon won the high regard of Lincoln, becoming the almoner of federal patronage in his state and helping to prepare a bill to carry out Lincoln’s plan of gradual emancipation in Delaware. The project failed, but Fisher’s efforts so impressed Lincoln that, on the abolition of the old courts and the creation of a supreme court for the District of Columbia, he appointed Fisher as one of the four justices, on Mar. 11, 1863, eight days after his congressional term had expired.