Ezra Cornell was deeply interested and involved in politics. As early as 1837, he was chosen as a delegate to the Tompkins County convention of the Whig party, and he backed William Henry Harrison and John Tyler in the 1840 election. His anti-slavery feelings led him to support Henry Clay in 1844 and to bitterly oppose the war with Mexico in 1846.

Exhibition opens
The library exhibition, "I Would Found an Institution": The Ezra Cornell Bicentennial, will open March 8 with a public reception from 4:30 to 6:30 pm in the Hirshland Exhibition Gallery, Carl A. Kroch Library. For more information, see http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/Ezra/.

On Dec. 20, 1846, he wrote this letter to his son, Alonzo.

"I am so thurorly [sic] disgusted with the whole of this miserable Mexican War that I have no patience even to consider the good qualities of some of our best and bravest men.

"This war I firmly believe was provoked by our rulers to gratify a lust for conquest and extend the curse of human slavery.

"I don't believe that our constitution authorises the waging [of] a war of invasion and it only authorises a defensive war through the sanction of the peoples representatives in Congress.

"This is not such a war as any man in my opinion can justify by the sacred document the Constitution of the United States."

Meanwhile, Cornell's interest in agriculture was evident in this Dec. 20, 1846, advice to Alonzo, who was deciding whether to go into the telegraph business or into another line of commerce:

"... I should prefer that you would choose a rural occupation, and become an intelligent scientific farmer. The time is not distant when such farmers will be more respected and they will be more useful than Kings or Princes."

Adapted by Susan S. Lang from the Web site, "Invention and Enterprise: Ezra Cornell, a Nineteenth-Century Life."