Abraham Jefferson Seay (Kingfisher, OK)
Abraham Jefferson Seay (Nov. 28, 1832 – Dec. 12, 1915)
Biography
- Name: Abraham Jefferson Seay
- Birth: Nov. 28, 1832 Amherst, Virginia
- Death: Dec. 12, 1915 Long Beach, California
- Was ex-Territorial Governor of Oklahoma
Abraham Jefferson Seay (1832-1915) was a lawyer, jurist, Republican politician, and public figure active in both Missouri and Oklahoma. After a substantial legal career in Missouri, A. J. Seay secured an appointment from the Harrison Administration in 1890 to the Supreme Court of Oklahoma Territory. Upon the early resignation of George W. Steele, Oklahoma’s first Territorial Governor, Seay was selected to replace the second, interim Governor Robert Martin to complete the balance of the original term, serving between February 1892 and May 1893 before the incoming Democratic Cleveland Administration in turn replaced Seay with William Cary Renfrow. Seay’s brief tenure as the second Territorial Governor of Oklahoma saw the opening up of additional lands for white settlement, and the creation of the administrative machinery for the future state.
After leaving public office in 1893, A. J. Seay remained a resident of Kingfisher, Oklahoma, pursuing there a number of business ventures that made him a wealthy man. His banking affiliations included Presidencies of the National Bank of Rolla (Missouri), the First National Bank of Kingfisher, and the First National Bank of Arapaho.
Early Years and Civil War Service
Though born in Virginia, A. J. Seay relocated with his family to Gasconade County in south-central Missouri when he was three years old. The oldest son of ten children, Seay attended what schools were available before becoming a teacher himself. In 1855, shortly after he began attending the Academy of Steelville (Missouri) his father died, causing him to cut short his education in order to support his family. During these years he began to study the law and was admitted to the Missouri bar just before the outbreak of the Civil War. Despite his own Virginia origins and the local secessionist sentiment, Seay came out as a forceful advocate for the Union side. He joined the Union army as a private and mustered out four years later as a lieutenant colonel, seeing extensive service in the Vicksburg, Atlanta, Savannah, and Carolinas Campaigns. After the war Seay became active in the Grand Army of the Republic for the rest of his life.
While Seay never married and had no children, he was constantly tending to and looking after his large family of siblings, nieces, and nephews, some of whom later moved with "Uncle Jeff" from Missouri to Kingfisher, Oklahoma.
Legal and Political Career in Missouri
At war's end A. J. Seay settled in Union, Missouri where he began practicing law and plotting a political career. In 1865 he was appointed county attorney of Crawford County, and later became a circuit attorney. As a public prosecutor, Seay acquired a reputation for toughness that followed him into his later judicial career. Otherwise, Seay’s ambitions for elected office were somewhat frustrated by national developments within the Republican Party. Carl Schurz, at that time Senator from Missouri, had engineered the Liberal Republican split from the Grant Administration in 1870. Seay, who counted himself among the radicals, opposed Schurz on the grounds that this division would ensure a Democratic takeover of Missouri politics.
After 1870 Seay returned to private practice, but then ran three times as the Republican candidate for a House seat against the redoubtable inflationist Richard “Silver Dick” Bland. A hard money man who defended the principle that the United State should pay its debts with gold and not with depreciated greenbacks, Seay was resigned to the fact that his views were not popular among rural Missourians still recovering from the war. Bland trounced him in three successive elections.
Seay's electoral fortunes improved in 1876, when he won as a judge for Missouri’s ninth judicial district, a position he held for two six-year terms. In the meantime, he sought, without luck, a number of federal appointments from successive Republican administrations, including judicial posts in Washington State and Utah. Seay’s electoral dilemma at home was underscored by his actions as judge during the Great Southwest Strike of 1886. Quick to issue injunctions to quell labor violence, Seay’s strikebreaking was lauded by Missouri’s governor but proved unpopular among local voters. The Knights of Labor retaliated by successfully opposing his run for the Missouri state legislature. Following this setback, Seay also lost a race for a seat on the Court of Appeals in 1888.
Supreme Court Justice and Territorial Governor of Oklahoma
A. J. Seay’s political future brightened considerably in April 1890, when the Harrison Administration finally gave him the federal appointment he had long craved, making him an associate judge on the supreme court of the newly-organized Oklahoma Territory. Under the Organic Act of May 2, 1890, Oklahoma Territory was divided up into three judicial districts. Seay’s was the third district, comprising what were then designated Kingfisher, Canadian, and Beaver counties. Relocating from Missouri, Seay settled in the town of Kingfisher, which became his home for most of the rest of his life.
As a judge, Seay gained favorable regard in Oklahoma for his peremptory, but fair, dispensation of justice for an area that had lacked a reliable legal system. Ironically, despite Seay's reputation for toughness, the city in which he himself resided, Kingfisher, was notorious for being a center for vice: one inventory from 1900 listed fifteen saloons in operation, as well as five gambling halls and houses of ill-repute. The early resignation of Oklahoma’s first Territorial Governor, George W. Steele, in November 1891 resulted in the appointment of a caretaker in the position pending a formal replacement. By then, Seay was considered a sufficiently ‘local’ candidate and thus preferable to having another, carpetbagger from the outside imposed on the territory. Accordingly, he was elevated to the gubernatorial post in February 1892.
Seay’s stint as Territorial Governor lasted only 14 months; as a result, there were few policy achievements associated with his tenure. In April 1892, Oklahoma Territory expanded with the opening of Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation lands to white settlement. For Governor Seay, this entailed the tedious work of organizing county governments and appointing the appropriate officials. Seay also lobbied the Congress to pass legislation making possible a second session of the territorial legislature, which duly convened in January 1893. Among his priorities, Seay worked to shore up common school funding, as well as advocating for greater educational resources for African-Americans. Seay also called for tightening of the minimal bank regulation that currently existed, by giving the Governor’s office the basic power to inquire into the status of banks. Following Missouri’s example, Seay further sought to regulate how county funds were deposited in approved banks. Despite objections of extravagance, Seay secured from the legislature funding for an Oklahoma exhibit at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
As a token of his commitment to his new home, Seay commissioned the construction of a substantial residence in Kingfisher, "Horizon Hill" , completed in March 1892, which he hoped would one day serve as the state governor's mansion. Between 1890 and 1910, Oklahoma experienced chronic struggles over which city would enjoy the honor of becoming the state capital. At the time of Seay's appointment, Kingfisher was one of the contenders. After returning to private life, Seay and members of his extended family continued to reside for a time in what is now called the A. J. Seay Mansion.
Grover Cleveland’s election in November 1892 put the Democrats back in the White House, thus ensuring Seay’s tenure as chief executive of the Oklahoma Territory would be brief. Cleveland chose William Cary Renfrow to replace Seay, who relinquished his post with considerable grace and good humor in a ceremony on May 10, 1893.
Business and Banking Interests
Once out of office, Seay never again took up a governmental or elective position, or even practiced law. Instead, he devoted himself to getting wealthy through a number of business and financial ventures. All the same, he did remain a prominent figure in territorial (and later, state) Republican politics. Even among his political adversaries he was regarded as a figure of respect and affection. A vigorous advocate for statehood, Seay nonetheless opposed merging Oklahoma with Indian Territories on that grounds that the latter was not yet ready for the transition (it also happened to be a Democratic Party stronghold). As a single statehood for the twin Territories became inevitable, Seay strongly criticized the proposed constitution, arguing against its populist and anti-corporate elements. These were both characteristically Republican sentiments for the time.
Seay’s earliest involvement in banking dated back to 1870, when he worked as a lawyer for the National Bank of Rolla, Missouri (#1865). Gradually he accumulated enough stock in the bank to become one of its directors by 1878. During the early 1880s Seay developed a lucrative interest in iron ore deposits in Stanton, Missouri, the royalties providing him the capital for further investments. After his last electoral defeat in Missouri politics, Seay organized his own state institution, the Bank of Union, which was chartered in October 1887. This he headed only until his appointment to the Oklahoma judiciary, at which point his Cashier, Fred W. Reinhard, took control.
Despite his relocation to Oklahoma, Seay remained associated with the Rolla bank. In 1896 he was elected its Vice President. With the death of D.W. Malcolm in 1898 Seay then became President, a position he occupied until his death. As with his other banking interests, Seay seemed unengaged with their operational details, contenting himself instead with broader strategic decisions as they related to his investment portfolio.
After exiting the Governor’s office in 1893 Seay devoted himself to business and financial ventures in Oklahoma. His first steps took place in the mid-1890s when he became associated with the Guthrie National Bank (#4348), whose President, Joseph W. McNeal, was a major early figure in Oklahoma banking. In 1910 Seay was elected Vice President of a second McNeal-run institution, the National Bank of Commerce in Guthrie (#7299). Seay also broadened his interests in his new home city of Kingfisher. In 1892 he was one of the builders of the Hotel Kingfisher and would later become its sole owner. Seay’s own hotel mirrored Kingfisher’s bawdy reputation: not only did it house a well-known saloon off the lobby, but a gambling den occupied the hotel’s basement. Seay later owned a second hotel (possibly the Central) in Kingfisher. He also was an investor in, and Vice President of, the Kingfisher Ice Plant. As if to atone for Kingfisher’s excesses and his own complicity in them, in 1908 Seay donated funds to Kingfisher College, a now-defunct Congregationalist institution, for the construction of a building that was duly named Seay Hall. At around this time Seay also presided over the Seay Salt and Cement Company of Watonga, Kingfisher, and Ferguson.
Seay also developed banking interests in a broad area to the west and north of Oklahoma City, typically by investing in smaller, state banks at the point when they converted to national charters. The Peoples Bank of Kingfisher, established by George Newer in 1892, became the Peoples National Bank (#5790) in 1901, with Seay as a stockholder and director. To the north, in Pond Creek, Walton’s Bank (also founded 1892) became the National Bank of Pond Creek (#7103) in 1904, again with Seay as a director. In addition, at one time Seay was at least a stockholder in the First National Bank of Cashion (#6161).
Seay was President of two other Oklahoma banks, both of which began as state institutions before converting to national charters. In November 1899 Seay organized the Central State Bank of Kingfisher, which rechartered the following year as the First National Bank (#5328). Seay’s other investors were J. E. Tincher, J. A. Overstreet, George Newer, and Guy Condit. Later, in 1904, this bank absorbed a sister institution, the Kingfisher National Bank (#5740). In a similar pattern, Seay assumed the Presidency of the Arapaho State Bank in 1901, with Joseph W. McNeal as Vice President and Charles Brewer as Cashier. The next year this bank also took out a national charter as the First National Bank of Arapaho (#6257). Seay remained at the head of both institutions until the end of his life.
One common thread emerging from Seay’s Oklahoma investments was his avoidance of state banks. This aversion became explicit with the advent of Oklahoma’s deposit guaranty law in 1908. Rather than rush to take advantage of its provisions by converting his institutions to state charters, Seay only saw deposit guaranty as a competitive threat to national banks. Indeed, beginning in January 1908 he worked with a committee of other national bankers affiliated with the OBA on a plan to create a separate, private insurance company, owned by the national banks, that would provide them with an equivalent form of deposit insurance. The plan was later scuttled by opposition from the U.S. Attorney General. Oklahoma’s deposit guaranty law thus fostered a split between the interests of state and national banks. Seay’s own views of this split hardened over time. In his correspondence with other bankers, Seay accused Oklahoma’s first state governor, Nathaniel Haskell, of actively trying to drain national banks of their deposit base to benefit state institutions.
Later Years and Death
Over six feet tall and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, A. J. Seay was always an imposing physical presence for other people. His health took a permanent turn for the worse in 1903 when he broke his hip in an accident at the Kingfisher Hotel, leaving him dependent on a wheelchair. On the advice of his doctor, Seay retired from active business in 1909 and changed his residence to Long Beach, California, although he continued to spend considerable time in Oklahoma. After suffering a stroke in 1913 he was unable to recover and died in Long Beach in December 1915,
Bank Officer Summary
During his banking career, A. J. Seay was involved with the following bank(s):
- National Bank, Rolla, MO (Charter 1865): President 1898-1915
- First National Bank, Kingfisher, OK (Charter 5328): President 1900-1915
- First NB Arapaho/Farmers NB Clinton, Arapaho/Clinton, OK (Charter 6257): President 1902-1915
Sources
- Arapaho (OK) Bee, April 6, 1900.
- Brown, Clark, "Biography of Abraham Jefferson Seay" (1921). Typescript, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma.
- "Correspondence of Governor Abraham J. Seay, 1905-1909" Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma.
- Enid (OK) Daily Wave, January 25, 1908; Enid (OK) Weekly Eagle, October 1, 1905.
- Henslick, Harry E. "Abraham Jefferson Seay: Governor of Oklahoma Territory 1892-1893." In Oklahoma's Governors 1890-1907: The Territorial Years, edited by Leroy H. Fisher, 28-45. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Historical Society, 1975.
- Kane, Matthew J. "Recollection of the Judicial Career of Governor Seay" Harlow's Weekly (October 7, 1922): 6-7.
- Kingfisher (OK) Free Press, April 19, 1900; December 31, 1915; April 18, 1949; Kingfisher (OK) Times, February 12, 1903; May 2, 1963.
- Moody's Manual of Railroads and Corporation Securities, 1905.
- Oklahoma State Capitol (Guthrie, OK), February 11, 1896
- Peery, Dan W. "Autobiography of Governor A. J. Seay" Chronicles of Oklahoma 17 (March 1939): 35-47.
- Rolla (MO) Herald, January 13, 1898.
- Other Bio Info: https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=SE002
- Findagrave.com: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/9608279/abraham-jefferson-seay
- Banks & Bankers Historical Database (1782-1935), https://spmc.org/bank-note-history-project