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leadership in the 1861 national peace conference that attempted to forestall the Civil War by achieving a compromise between the North and South before Lincoln's inauguration. Yet, as the editorial observed, Stockton was also a “war-maker.” He offered to personally underwrite a war between Texas and Mexico in 1845, and, as the first naval officer of rank to be elected to the Senate,6 he advocated U.S. military intervention worldwide to support indigenous wars of liberation.
In his life outside the military, Stockton was most successful in creating one the nation's most profitable and politically powerful corporations in 1832, the Joint Companies of New Jersey. “Block the game in railroad stocks” refers to how Stockton maintained the monopoly status of his Joint Companies from the 1830s to the 1860s against all upstart railroad companies, investigative journalists, political rivals, and even the national government.
As a naval officer, the editorial continued, he would “speak with a trumpet” (a speaking trumpet) to his crews on any one of his naval commands: the sloop of war USS Erie (1819), the schooner USS Alligator (1822), the first steam-powered, propeller-driven warship USS Princeton (1843), and the frigate USS Congress (1845). Stockton could also “speak with tongues” since he edited his own newspaper, the New Jersey Patriot (1822–1826), gave many speeches, and wrote a dozen privately printed pamphlets. One speech, his U.S. Senate speech of January 1852 celebrating the American sailor and opposing flogging, was reprinted in oratorical compilations every decade for the next fifty years.7
As governor, general in chief, and naval commodore in California from 1846 to 1847, “he proclaimed laws” and then, with his sailors, he would “enforce these laws.” He governed “armies and fleets” by transforming his sailors and marines into infantry to help quell nativist riots in Philadelphia in 1844, and later used such transformed soldiers and marines to conquer California in 1846–1847. He did indeed, as the editorial notes, preach a “Christian discourse in the Sandwich [Hawaiian] Islands” before the king of Hawaii (1846), helped found Trinity Episcopal Church in Princeton, New Jersey, and publicly argued in the newspapers with the leader of the Presbyterian Church in 1855 over the moral