Early Life and Career
Atkins was born in Horseheads, New York, in 1836. He moved to Illinois in 1845 and later entered the Rock River Seminary in Mount Morris. He also became editor of the town's Gazette and began practicing law. He was a supporter of and canvasser for Abraham Lincoln for President of the United States. He was elected Prosecuting Attorney in 1860. He was the first man to enlist as a volunteer private soldier in Stephenson County, Illinois upon the outbreak of the Civil War.
Read more about this topic: Smith D. Atkins
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and organize.”
—Albert Gore, Jr. (b. 1948)
“The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers’ hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.”
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)