This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[171]
their places.
Frank Bird was furious with honest indignation.
He said: “I will go to Washington and have that man turned out if I have to see Grant himself for it” ; and so he did.
One evening at Walpole a poor woman came to him in distress, because her only son had been induced to enlist in the Navy, and was already on board a man-of-war at the Boston Navy-yard. Mr. Bird knew the youth, and was aware that he was very slightly feeble-minded.
The vessel would sail in three days, and there was no time to be lost.
He telegraphed the facts as briefly as possible to Senator Wilson, and in twenty-four hours received an order to have the widow's son discharged.
Then he would not trust the order to the commandant, who might have delayed its execution, but sent it to an agent of his own in the Navy-yard, who saw that the thing was done.
Frank Bird's most distinguished achievement in politics was the nomination of Andrew for Governor in 1860. Governor Banks was not favorable to Andrew and his friends, and used what influence he possessed for the benefit of Henry L. Dawes.
An organization for the nomination of Dawes had already been secretly formed before Frank Bird was acquainted with Banks's retirement from the field.
Bird and Henry L. Pierce were at Plymouth when they first heard of it, about the middle of July, and
1905. E. P. DUtton and Co. Boston,.
Tufts University. provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.