George Meade, The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, Major-General United States Army
George Gordon Meade, Ed.

[9] country, especially the South. There were there representatives of the Biddles, Willings, Ingersolls, Coxes, Hewsons, and Bories of Philadelphia; of the Middletons, Andrewses, Herberts, Draytons, Duvals, and others, from various States. Some of these he was destined to meet again as fellow-students at West Point, and some, as Edmund Schriver, Henry DuPont, Percival Drayton, and James S. Biddle, in the army or the navy.

Young Meade was still attending this school when intelligence of his father's serious illness was brought to him. Although hastening to Washington as rapidly as the means of travel in those days admitted, he failed to arrive before his father's death, on the 25th of June, 1828.

Mr. Meade's bitter and constant disappointment in the prosecution of his claim under the Treaty of Florida had had much to do with the termination of his career at the comparatively early age of fifty. He had had to contemplate, year after year, the injustice through which the property which he as a private citizen of the United States had accumulated by honest industry, in a life of voluntary exile, had gone into the coffers of the state, never to be recovered, by means of a treaty of which his country had reaped the full benefit in the acquisition of territory. He had had to strive, year after year, unavailingly to obtain the justice never received, and at last, reduced in fortune to what may justly be called poverty, considering the affluence in which he had lived, broken in health and spirits, he succumbed, his death his silent protest against the injustice of his country!

George's mother, thus suddenly deprived of her natural support, and without those means with which she had lived in the greatest luxury for many years, and with several young children, too, for whose support and education it became necessary to provide, was obliged, under the very altered circumstances under which she found herself, to retrench and conform her daily life to stern necessity. As one means of economizing she deemed it prudent to remove George from the academy at Mount Airy at the end of the year already provided for. After accompanying his father's remains to Philadelphia for burial in the family vault at Saint Mary's Church, he resumed his place in the school. At the end of the academic year he returned to Washington and was for a short time a pupil of Salmon P. Chase, the distinguished secretary of the treasury under Mr. Lincoln's administration, who, at the time, was the head