The Abbeville press and banner. [volume] (Abbeville, S.C.) 1869-1924, 1907-08-07
Middle Names Are a Recent Fashion
Few Men in Country's Early History Had Then---
A Sort of Hero Worship :: :: ::


middle names. John Quincy Adams,
elected in 1924, a the first Presi-
dent with a middle name, and Will
liam Henry Harrison. elected fn.fS40,
was the second. The names Of early
statesmen like Alexander Hamilton,
Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Ran
dolph, Albert Gallatin and others of
that period, sound better without a
middle name. Andrew Jackson, Abb
raham Lincoln, William Mckinley
and Theodore Roosevelt belong to a
later period, but. they too, for
tunate in not having been loaded
down with a middle name that might
have proved an incumbrance.
So it seems quite clear that mid
die names were far less common in
this country during the Revolutionary
period and for many years afterward
than they. are now. So they were
in England. Up to comparatively re-
cent times few Of the great names in
English literature or history were
double, and it is fair to assume that
they were no common along
common people than they were
among the celebrated. Such names
as William Shakespeare, Oliver
Cromwell, John Milton, Isaac New
ton, Francis Bacon, William Wads-
worth, Charles Dickens, Robert
Browning. John Bunyan, Thomas
Carlyle, Daniel Defoe, William Pitt
and many others of renown, would
be handicapped in history by a mid
die name or initial.
What Does the Change Signify?
Abraham Lincoln has been dead a
little over forty years, and some of
his namesakes are in evidence, as
witness Abraham Lincoln Brick, of
this State. We have also George
Washington Cromer, and the present
Congress contains George Washing.
ton Taylor, of Alabama; George
Washington Prince and George
Washington Smith, of Illinois; James
Monroe Miller, of Kansas; Benjamin
Franklin Howell, Of New Jersey, and
Andrew Jackson Barchield, of Penn.
sylvania.
There has not been a Congress in
the last fifty years that did not con-
tain n or more members, some
times several, named after soldiers
or statesmen of the Revolutionary
period. Both armies during the Civil
War contained hundreds Of soldiers
bearing names of the Revolutionary
period.
There is nothing discreditable In
the kind of hero worship that leads
parents to name a child after a great
man whom they greatly admire,
though it sometimes happens that the
son, when he grows up, would prefer
a different name. Napoleon Bona
parte Taylor, formerly an honored
lawyer and judge of this city, and q
very rSodest man, used to regret the
name his parents had given him, and
Andrew Jackson Barchfield, a mem
Der of the present Congress from
Pennsylvania, is a red-hot Republi-
can.
But a large majority Of middle
names are given as a sort Of annex
or make-weight to the first name to
preserve family names and trad!-
tions. This also is a c~ommendable
motive, but why have middle names
at all? From a practical point OF
view they are s~uperfuous, and that
makes it all the stranger Why they
should have come into such general
use in this practical, unitarian and
commercial age when the tendency is
to shorten words and eliminate SUI
%perfuities.
Many a man who has had to write
his name several hundred times a
day has regretted the. necessity of
lifting his pen to write and dot the
initial letter Of a middle name. Prob
ably one reason why middle names
have become so much more common
in modern times than they once were,
is that for centuries the common law
assumed that the full legal name OF
a person consisted Of one Christian
name and surname. No legal impor.
lance attached to a middle name, and
If a person had one it was not a mis-.
homer, in legal parlance, to omit it
in an indictment or pleading.
This is no longer the rule Of the
law, but it was for a long time, and
during that period middle names
were almost unknown. Their gen.
eral use in this country is Of COM
naratively modern proWth-Indian.