Donn Piatt of Castle Mac-a-Chee

The Piatt Castles are classic Ohio tourist attractions. They are out in the middle of nowhere — really nowhere, now that the Girl Scouts’ Camp Mac-a-Chee is gone. (Although the suburbs are beginning to encroach, which is probably why and how the Girl Scout council got rid of Mac-a-Chee. Developer money.)

(Okay, maybe West Liberty isn’t the middle of nowhere, but it sure is a long drive from anywhere!)

Anyway, they’re pretty interesting houses. But when I went, all I remember hearing about is the houses. Suddenly I’m finding out that the people who built them and lived in them were much more interesting.

Donn Piatt particularly is of interest. He was a child prodigy of sorts, and apparently first became nationally known for editing a local newspaper (the Mac-o-Chee Press) that was both interesting about literature and fiery about Democratic politics, at the age of 15. (He went to school in Cincinnati at the Athenaeum until he threw the math teacher out the window. Then he read law at home, so he had plenty of time to edit and get in fistfights with local Whigs.) Later, he practiced law in Cincinnati, got married, campaigned for Franklin Pierce, was a diplomat in Paris, got Horace Greeley out of jail in Paris, and then came back to Ohio and practiced more law.

As a Democrat, Piatt’s politics were much more like those of the yet-unfounded Republican Party than those of Democrats of a decade later. He was for abolition; he issued a passport once to an Italian revolutionary; and he defended a bunch of Irish “filibusterers”, who were either recruiting anti-slavery Irish guys to go live in Kansas and vote it into an anti-slavery state, or (as charged by the prosecution) planning to invade Ireland. (Heh. No such luck.)

So it’s no surprise that Piatt was one of the first anti-slavery Democrats to break off and join the new Republican Party, and that he campaigned hard for Lincoln. He was hoping for a job in DC, but apparently managed to annoy Lincoln into not giving him one. When the Civil War started, Piatt joined up as a private and then was invited onto the staff of a friend who was a brigadier general. Piatt was apparently one of the few to stand firm at First Bull Run. He told a friend that he tried to pray when the bullets started flying, but could only think of, “O Lord, for these and all thy other mercies, we desire to be thankful.”

In 1863, Piatt’s general was put in charge of governing Maryland’s military district and recruiting folks from there. (Maryland was a slave state, but hadn’t seceded.) General Schenck was told to start recruiting blacks. Piatt waited until his friend had gone on a trip, ordered that only slave blacks should be recruited, and was pleased by the ensuing escapes of blacks from their masters into the Union Army. Lincoln wasn’t pleased, because he was trying to keep Maryland in the Union. Piatt was encouraged to resign his commission instead of being made a general as he’d been previously slated to become, and he went home to Ohio in 1864.

His wife passed away that fall, and he married her little sister!

He joined the staff of the Cincinnati Commercial (the biggest newspaper west of the Alleghenies!) and went back to DC in 1868 to act as their Washington correspondent. In 1871, he left this job and founded The Capital, a weekly political and literary journal out of Washington. Once again, Piatt’s fiery style got him into trouble. He also did a lot of investigatory journalism about stuff like the Credit Mobilier scandal (which brought armed assassins to his door! Woohoo!) However, Piatt’s enormous hatred for his fellow Ohioan, President Grant, as a person, seems to have led him to spread very unfair stories about the man. (To be fair, the bribery and corruption under Grant’s administration was huuuuuuuge. But it mostly seemed to be Grant being passive about disciplining his friends.) Piatt also joined the breakaway “Liberal Republican” movement that nominated Greeley as president. Greeley soon would pass away, and the movement came to nothing.

Piatt continued his fiery newspaper rhetoric when another fellow Ohioan, Rutherford B. Hayes, was elected president in a severely contested race, full of machine politics, which came down to the electoral votes. Piatt mouthed off a little too much in advocating popular resistance to Hayes’ inauguration, and Grant threw his butt in jail for advocating riot and rebellion. He was released before the matter came to trial, because the inauguration came off without violence. Piatt soon became reconciled to Hayes, and invited him to Mac-a-Cheek.

After a little more dabbling in diplomacy, by unofficially assisting normalization of relations between the US and the Porfirio Diaz government of Mexico, Piatt retired in 1880. Eight years later, he un-retired and became editor of Belford’s Magazine in New York. He died in 1891, aged 72.

However, Donn Piatt was also a famous Catholic revert. His mother had converted and he had apparently been baptized a Catholic in babyhood, but he’d never really done much about it until the latter part of his life. Apparently he did write a book which included some Catholic musings: Sunday Meditations and Select Prose Writings, and archive.org has a copy.

It’s rough going. The old man was apparently tired of fighting. So he belligerently declares that reason has absolutely nothing to do with religion, and that it’s not just useless but harmful for Catholics to argue with the village atheist, who will invariably convince them with his evil logic. (Benedict XVI starts beating his forehead against a Vatican wall….) For him, science both knows nothing and reveals only existential horror, not wonder. (Obviously meant to be a Lovecraft fan.) He also declares that education is worse than useless (okay, I can see that Athenaeum incident still rankled), and that public education produces poverty and insanity in the public! (This in one of the Northwest Ordinance states.) Oh, yeah, and he comes up with that favorite peeve of linguists — English is a simpler language than all others, inherently easier to learn and understand.

OTOH, his thoughts on cheerfulness and courage as components of religion are pretty good, and highlight one of the strengths of his generation.

Probably the book by him that would be most interesting to today’s readers is Memories of the Men Who Saved the Union. It’s his memoirs of Lincoln and his cabinet, basically. I think it’s truthful, but boy howdy, is it weird.

First of all, the man was a friend of Stanton from back when they were both young, and Stanton was fun. Mindboggling.

Second, Piatt was a Republican who seemed to like Lincoln okay, but was basically a very different breed of cat. Both men seemed to have been guarded in their relations with each other, and Piatt admits that this led him to act pretty stupidly in the Maryland affair. OTOH, Piatt as a wordsmith couldn’t help but see that Lincoln was skilled and wanted to learn from him, even as he was fooled into thinking that Lincoln didn’t care much for reading or poetry. He admits to writing down many of the things Lincoln said around him, up to and including Lincoln’s blistering rebuke of Piatt’s conduct in Maryland.

Piatt sees Lincoln as basically less sensitive and emotional than anybody else in the cabinet, and feels that this hard shell and lack of heart is what got him through the Civil War. He was also horribly offended by Lincoln’s love for jokes that his time saw as tasteless, and claims that Lincoln called for a “comic song” at Gettysburg, proceeded to sing this “ribald song”, and then went and made the speech which Piatt readily admits to be one of the greatest ever. (But Piatt doesn’t say that he actually saw this happen, and there’s a similar story that went around about Abe visiting the Antietam battlefield. So this might be Piatt drinking the Kool-Aid.)

(I’m not going to deny that Lincoln was a shrewd, cunning politician; you don’t get to be president without some kind of shrewdness, and Lincoln wasn’t dumb. And yes, he was tough. But Piatt pretty clearly didn’t read Lincoln right on this one; and frankly, I would have kept my guard up with Piatt, too.)

However, this different perspective really does include a lot of insight, if added together to other stuff you’ve read. So I truly recommend it, to buffs of the Civil War, politics, and history.

Btw, folks used to say that “Mac-o-Chee/k” meant “Laughing Valley” or some such. But apparently it’s really derived from the Shawnee sept called Mecoche/Maykujay. (Which makes a lot more sense, as the Shawnee tended to call villages over the sept most in evidence there. Hence all the Chillicothes (Tshilikotha) and Piqua/Pickaway (Pekowi) placenames.)