Early Life and Career
Benjamin Potts was born on a farm in Fox Township, Carroll County, Ohio, to James and Jane (Mapel) Potts. He attended the common schools. When he was seventeen, he began working as a clerk in a dry goods store in nearby Wattsville. He attended Westminster College in 1854–55, until he ran out of funding and returned to Ohio. He taught school and read law starting in September 1857 under Ephraim R. Eckley, later a U.S. Congressman. An active supporter of President James Buchanan, Potts was interested in local and national politics and joined the Democratic Party.
In May 1859, he passed his bar exam in Canton, Ohio, and established a successful practice in Carrollton. He was a member of the Ohio delegation to the 1860 Democratic National Convention in Charleston, South Carolina, and supported the candidacy of Stephen A. Douglas.
Read more about this topic: Benjamin F. Potts
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)