U.S. Senator Carl Levin is supposed to make some remarks, as are a host of other dignitaries. The governor won’t be able to hear them, of course, but I’d bet he would be amazed and gratified.
His life didn’t turn out the way he had hoped. His administration, which started so well, ended badly, with a financial panic, a banking crisis, and Michigan on the rocks.
His father had told him that a “poor broken-down politician was the most miserable of society’s creatures,“ adding that “even one honorably retiring is soon forgotten.”
Those are words Stevens T. Mason, Michigan’s first governor, came to appreciate too well. After two terms as Michigan’s first governor, his popularity was gone, and he was depressed and broke. He didn’t even try to run for re-election.
Instead, he fled the state, going to his wife’s native New York. He tried to build a law practice, but soon caught scarlet fever, or pneumonia, and died.
When he was buried in 1843, the boy governor was a mere thirty-one years old. As his father predicted, he was soon forgotten.
But not forever. Eventually, historians began to realize how much he had done. As a territorial governor barely out of his teens, he cleverly faced down fellow Democrat Andrew Jackson.
Mason did much to win statehood for Michigan. He caused the University of Michigan to be in Ann Arbor and the first state prison in Jackson; he pushed for development of a network of roads and canals and the newfangled railroads.
Eventually, in 1905, they disinterred his bones from a New York cemetery and brought them to Detroit, to tiny Capitol Park. They moved him again half a century later when a bus station was built.
This summer, they had to dig poor Stevens T. up again, when the park was completely renovated. To everyone‘s embarrassment, they couldn‘t find him for a couple days. They thought they might be looking for an urn with ashes. But in the end, they found a remarkably preserved steel casket. I had a glimpse inside.
Someone had lovingly stitched each bone to a mattress. He was tall for his day, the funeral director told me; a little over six feet in height. There was also a copper plate inside: Stevens Thomson Mason; first governor of Michigan. Removed from New York to Detroit, June 4, 1905.
Donald Faber, a newspaper editor turned historian, is working on a new biography of Mason. He told me he was one of the best governors we’ve ever had. Michigan became a state because the young Mason fought the Toledo War and stood up to President Jackson, the most powerful figure of his age.
Next October will mark Governor Mason’s two hundredth birthday. My guess is that if he came back to life, he wouldn’t be at all surprised that his Democrats were in political trouble and his state in financial trouble again. I think he would also be astounded by today’s ceremony, and gratified that he is still remembered.
For a politician, that might just be the best immortality of all.
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