Norton Parker Chipman (March 7, 1834 – February 1, 1924) was an American Civil War army officer, military prosecutor, politician, author, and judge.
Biography
Early years
Born in Milford Center, Ohio, to Vermont-natives Norman and Sarah Wilson (Parker) Chipman, Norton Chipman's family moved to Iowa when he was young. Chipman did, in fact, survive and, upon recovery, was promoted to the rank of colonel in 1862. Chipman and fellow Ohioan Ulysses S. Grant fought together in the Battle of Fort Donelson, which became Grant's first major victory. For his cruelties to prisoners of war and eleven homicides, Wirz was hanged in 1865.
After the Civil War, Chipman was appointed Secretary of the District of Columbia by President Ulysses S. Grant, and was later elected to Congress as a delegate from the District of Columbia, serving two terms.
While adjutant general of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), he received a note from a friend in Cincinnati. It is one of many hoaxes deemed apocryphal by Bellware and Gardiner in The Genesis of the Memorial Day Holiday in America. In their book, Bellware and Gardiner note that Logan spoke to a group of veterans on July 4, 1866, mentioning the various Southern tributes that occurred that Spring. However, Logan never credited Chipman or any of the others with originating the idea. Bellware and Gardiner credit Mary Ann Williams and the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus, Georgia as the true originators of the holiday as abundant contemporaneous evidence from across the nation exists to substantiate the claim.
When Grant was elected president in 1868, Chipman was asked to be on the presidential inaugural committee. After Congress passed the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1871, Chipman was appointed Secretary of the District of Columbia, effectively the second highest local official after the Governor of the District of Columbia. The statement was drawn out of Chipman after persistent questioning from someone in the crowd, and it caused quite a stir, considering that Republicans generally avoided committing on the subject of school integration in order to not alienate moderate white Republicans. This argument backfired when it was revealed that Chipman had sold his home and was living at a hotel, while Merrick actually did own real estate in the District. Republicans won fifteen of the twenty-two members of the District's House of Delegates as well. a bill to appropriate $200,000 to complete construction of the Washington Monument, and a bill to build a new bridge over the Anacostia River, a bill to improve the Washington harbor. When Congressman Robert Roosevelt sharply criticized the District's board of public works, calling it rife with fraud and corruption, Chipman fiercely defended the board, saying Roosevelt's charges were based on willful misinformation and false accounts.
Running for reelection in 1873, he defeated Democrat L.G. Hine, formerly of the District's Board of Aldermen, receiving 12,443 votes to Hine's 7,042. He also tried to require the federal government to pay the District government property tax for the federal buildings located in the District.
In 1875, Congress disestablished the District's territorial government including Chipman's position of delegate. Finally, he was appointed by California's governor George Pardee as the first presiding justice of the newly created California Third District Court of Appeal, a position he held from 1906 until 1921,