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Among all these Ohioans of celebrity we must not forget Johnnie Clem, the Drummer Boy of Shiloh. He ran away from his home in Newark, his native city, in 1861, when he was not yet ten years old, and joined the 24th Ohio as drummer; but he was afraid to be seen and sent home by an uncle who was in that regiment, and he cast his lot with the 22d Michigan. He was not only at Shiloh, but the battles of Perryville, Murfreesboro, Chattanooga, Chickamauga, Nashville, and Kenesaw. He was taken prisoner in Georgia, and when his captors stripped him of his clothes he grieved for the loss of nothing except his cap, which had three bullet holes in it. After his release, he came home to get well, and then returned to the army, where General Thomas attached him to his staff. Later he was sent to West Point, where he could not be regularly entered because he was too small; but he made his studies, and Grant commissioned him as lieutenant, and he rose to be captain of infantry. He won the love and respect of all his generals, and while they lived they wrote him letters of affectionate friendship. He was once wounded by a shell, and once he lost his drum by the fragment of a bursting bomb.

J. J. Platt, who is first among Ohio poets, was born in Indiana; but his boyhood was passed mostly in Ohio, where he grew up on his father’s farm, amidst the scenes which he has loved to depict in his verse, until he became a printer’s apprentice. Since then he has dwelt in cities, both at home and abroad; but he is always happiest in dealing with the traits and aspects of country life, especially in the earlier times. He was for many years consul at different points in Ireland; and he has found in England even greater recognition for the distinctively mid-western quality of his poems than he has enjoyed among ourselves. So far as he is of Ohio, he is of Logan County, which has been the seat of his family from the settlement of the country; as his name suggests, he is of French descent.

Of Toledo, and therefore of Lucas County, was David R. Locke, who was born in New York state, but lived in Ohio from his fifth year onward. He was a printer and an editor, and after the war, he suddenly won national fame as the author of the Petroleum V. Naseby letters. These were satires of the old proslavery spirit which retarded the reconstruction of the South and harried the freedmen by mobs and lynchings. Their humor gave Locke a place in our literature which no history of it can ignore.

Another literary man who must be taken account of in the summing up of American literature was S. S. Cox, who made himself known early in the fifties when Ohio was far less heard of than now, by his lively book of travels, “A Buckeye Abroad.” He was a journalist and a politician; he was three times elected to Congress from Columbus, and when he went to live in New York, he was three times sent to the House of Representatives from that city, where he is commemorated by a statue. He was a native of Muskingum County, and was born in 1824 at Zanesville.

The latest and most brilliant contribution of Ohio to the scholarship of the East is Professor W. M. Sloane, now of Princeton University, but by birth of Jefferson County. He must rank by his “Life of Napoleon” among the American historians of the first class. He is of Scotch Calvinistic ancestry, and the son of a Presbyterian minister.

In this list of Ohioans who have done honor to our state, Mr. James Ford Rhodes happens to be last, though chance might well have placed him among the first He is the author of “A History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850,” which has a peculiar value in the field of American history, and which has given Mr. Rhodes prominent standing, with a constantly growing reputation. He is of the New England race of the Western Reserve; until within a few years his home was in Cleveland, but he now lives in Boston.